Some age verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.

U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.

“Children demonstrated a clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others,” the report says. 

“One technique brought up was children drawing facial hair on themselves so that the tools verifying them would think they were older, which was reported as working in multiple instances,” it added.

Age verification laws continue to roll out around the world, often under the guise of online child safety, but whereby adults are required to prove their age, typically by uploading a copy of their driver’s license or passport to a third-party company before being allowed into an adult website. Critics say these laws allow the creation of databases that can be hacked or leaked, and threaten the open and decentralized internet.

Half of all U.S. states have some form of age-checking law in place, as does the United Kingdom, which spurred much of the global effort. 

As such, companies like Apple have rolled out software updates to device owners to comply with the growing number of age-checking laws. Web companies like Reddit and Meta are using a mix of requiring users to upload their government-issued documents and creepy guesswork that involves algorithmically guessing a person’s age. Others, like Discord, have delayed their rollouts amid user backlash and security issues.

This is not the first known bypass that kids have figured out in recent months since the rise in rollouts of age verification checks. Some kids have found that pointing their webcam at adult-looking characters in video games also worked, or in other cases, simply pulling obscure or funny faces was enough to skirt the checks altogether.

Samsung reached a $1 trillion valuation on Wednesday as shares of the South Korean tech giant surged more than 10%, driven by the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy fueling demand for chips. The milestone makes Samsung only the second Asian company to cross the trillion-dollar threshold, after TSMC.

The news comes on the heels of a blockbuster earnings report last week, in which Samsung posted profits eight times higher than the same period a year ago.

Every company building AI right now needs chips, and Samsung makes the memory chips that power those AI systems. Demand is surging while supply struggles to keep up, pushing prices higher and boosting Samsung’s profits.

There’s another reason shares surged on Wednesday. Reports came out yesterday that Apple has been in talks with both Samsung and Intel to manufacture chips for Apple devices on U.S. soil. Apple has long relied almost exclusively on TSMC in Taiwan for its chip production. If Samsung lands the deal, it would mark a significant shift in the global semiconductor supply chain.

At the heart of Samsung’s profit boom is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a type of chip critical to running AI systems, which has dramatically improved the company’s margins. But the competition is intense. Rival SK Hynix, a South Korean semiconductor giant, is aggressively vying for the same market, keeping the pressure on Samsung to maintain its edge.

The AI boom is driving a chip shortage across the semiconductor industry, as the world’s three largest memory chip makers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, struggle to meet runaway demand from AI data centers. All three companies have pulled investment away from their consumer chip businesses to ramp up production of HBM, which carries substantially higher margins and has become essential to powering large-scale AI infrastructure.

Despite Wednesday’s historic surge, Samsung still faces headwinds. Workers are threatening an 18-day strike later this month, demanding a bigger slice of the AI-driven profits. Meanwhile, the company’s phone and TV divisions, which also need to buy those same memory chips to build their products, are paying a steep price for the same chips powering Samsung’s record profits.

Three days. That’s all that’s left to decide, not just whether you’ll be at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, but also who you’ll show up with from October 13 to 15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West — and how much credibility you gain from the opportunity.

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Gain visibility across every interactive session

Most founders don’t struggle to generate attention. There are more channels than ever to get in front of people, and more ways to create surface-level visibility. What’s harder, and far more important, is earning credibility.

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