Young Australians not banned from social media, just delayed using it

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Young Australians not banned from social media, just delayed using it

26 August 2025

Australians under the age of sixteen will not be banned from having social media accounts, when laws change later this year. Instead, as the Australian eSafety commission points out, they’ll merely have to wait until their sixteenth birthday before being able to sign up for social media access:

It’s not a ban, it’s a delay to having accounts.

The incoming social media age-restriction laws will make students of semantics out of us all.

Australians aged under sixteen banned from using YouTube

31 July 2025

The Australian government has decided YouTube will be made inaccessible to people under the age of sixteen. There had been thoughts the video platform might be spared, after the government decided to restrict access to the likes of TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram to younger Australians.

YouTube has recently been running a publicity campaign locally extolling their family-friendly credentials, in the hope they would not be effected.

I’m not in complete agreement with this decision. Obviously there’s all sorts of material on YouTube, but a certain amount has educational merit.

You might not be told you are the victim of identity theft

8 July 2025

An Australian woman, identified only as Sarah, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

No-one told me my identity had been stolen. No-one told me that my drivers licence and my passport, two of the most crucial personal documents, were compromised and had been for years. I only found out when I applied online for an eSIM.

This is something that has long concerned me.

If my identity were stolen, would I even know, or only find out when it was too late? A credit check is one tool available to Australians that could help ascertain if you have been a victim. Credit reporting companies in Australia are obliged to provide a free consumer credit report every three months.

Mine showed everything to be in order, and as expected.

If someone has been able to obtain some sort of line of credit in your name, without your knowledge or permission, a credit report will hopefully bring that to your attention. If you’re outside of Australia, you ought to look into anti identity theft tools available in your jurisdiction.

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Australia, crime, current affairs, law

Social media platforms, AI summaries, how we consume news in 2025

2 July 2025

Running since 2015, the Digital News Report, published annually by the University of Canberra, surveyed nearly one-hundred-thousand people globally, including about two-thousand Australians.

The key findings of the 2025 report are probably of no surprise to many of us. About twenty-five percent of people now source their news from social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok are the go-to platforms for news seekers aged eighteen to twenty-four.

AI is also making in-roads into the way people consume news, with nearly thirty-percent saying they like the idea of AI prepared news summaries.

When it comes to misinformation, seventy-five percent of Australians — the highest number in the world — expressed concerned about misinformation. Many are sceptical of influencers as a result.

Facebook and TikTok were identified as the biggest purveyors of misinformation. Encouragingly though, about forty-percent of people will turn to a “trusted news brand” should they be suspicious as to the veracity of a news story.

Here’s something else that’s interesting. Only about a quarter of Australians say they have received news literacy education. That is, being informed in how to use and understand news.

I have to say, it’s the first time I’ve heard the term. Is news literacy taught at school? Maybe I was absent the day that class was held.

Indigenous Australians report increased instances of racism

2 July 2025

Dana Morse, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Experiences of racism included verbal abuse, social media abuse, being refused entry or service, being prevented from renting a property, and physical violence, with younger First Nations people reporting higher levels of racism than other age groups. Racial discrimination was experienced at the hands of police, taxis and rideshare services, government services, hospitality and utility providers, and employers.

The Australian Reconciliation Barometer is a biennial study, and the only measure of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The most recent study has reported a significant rise in racist incidents in the last ten years. Reconciliation Australia CEO Karen Mundine also notes that while Indigenous Australians are experiencing more racism, many are also now more likely to report these incidents.

LibreOffice replaces Microsoft 365 at Denmark’s Ministry of Digitisation

12 June 2025

The ministry will swap the likes of Microsoft Word and Excel for LibreOffice applications instead, says Caroline Stage, Denmark’s Digitisation Minister. It is anticipated all Ministry staff will be using LibreOffice by the end of the year.

The switch to open source software is part of a move by the Danish Government to reduce their dependency on applications made in the United States. Comments by US President Donald Trump, expressing interest in buying Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, have also concerned and angered the Danish Government.

I’ve been using LibreOffice word processor and spreadsheet apps since migrating to Linux Mint last year. I’m hardly a power user of either, maybe tapping into, what, ten percent of the available functionality of each app, but they do exactly what Word and Excel did before. As I type the draft of this post in Writer, the LibreOffice word processor, I can barely discern any difference.

I dare say my computer is better off for the change though, by way of the absence of all manner of needless extraneous bits and pieces that come with non open source software.

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current affairs, technology, trends

AI 2027: an artificial intelligence future that’s only two years away?

28 May 2025

A speculative essay on the (perhaps) faster than anticipated rise of a superhuman, superintelligent AI, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. It’s a long, possibly unsettling read, but well worth it.

The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years. Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.” What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague, so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) mimics all the cognitive activities of the human brain, while AI can perform tasks that require human intelligence. I’m thinking HAL, the human-like computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey might be an example of AGI, while ChatGPT or Claude are AI bots.

There are some people who think AGI will never arrive, but an almost superintelligent AI could still be as menacing as some fear:

A week before release, OpenBrain gave Agent-3-mini to a set of external evaluators for safety testing. Preliminary results suggest that it’s extremely dangerous. A third-party evaluator finetunes it on publicly available biological weapons data and sets it to provide detailed instructions for human amateurs designing a bioweapon — it looks to be scarily effective at doing so. If the model weights fell into terrorist hands, the government believes there is a significant chance it could succeed at destroying civilization.

Doesn’t sound like much of a “glorious future” to me.

Australian political leaders who refuse TDA interviews lose elections

5 May 2025

Australian youth news outlet The Daily Aus (TDA), asked former Australian Liberal Party, and Opposition leader, Peter Dutton several times for a one-on-one interview, but he refused every time.

The same, apparently, went for former Liberal Party leader, and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Both leaders refused to speak to TDA, both leaders went on to lose elections they subsequently faced, Dutton over the weekend, and Morrison in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meanwhile sat down with Billi FitzSimons, TDA’s editor-in-chief, in early February. Angus Taylor, the Opposition’s shadow treasurer, did however speak with FitzSimons in April (Instagram link). He was, I believe, the most senior Liberal Party/Opposition member to be interviewed by TDA.

FitzSimons, and TDA co-founder Zara Seidler, recounted the experience (palaver?) of attempting to invite Dutton to speak with them, in a recent podcast. Spoiler: Dutton seemed pretty obstinate, an attitude in general that probably cost him the 2025 election.

Mark Zuckerberg says social media is no longer social media

30 April 2025

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of AI-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.

In other words, social media is no longer social. The Facebook co-founder, and CEO, states what many of us have known for at least a decade. Zuckerberg’s comment was made a few weeks ago, during anti-trust proceedings led by the United States Federal Trade Commission, against Meta.

If there is life on K2-18b the K2-18 red dwarf star will kill it off

25 April 2025

News that traces of chemicals possibly indicating the presence of life on a planet, known as K2-18b, some one-hundred-and-twenty-four light years from Earth, resulted in a flurry of headlines the other week. Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet. Scientists claim they’ve discovered most promising ‘hints’ of potential for life on distant planet. And: Scientists Find Promising Indication of Extraterrestrial Life — 124 Light-Years Away.

Sure, it’s exciting. This is news many of us have been waiting for. Even if it’s not quite the definitive announcement we would have preferred. The problem though is the media outlets writing about the discovery of chemical “fingerprints” in the atmosphere of K2-18b, have not looked at the whole story. In fact, it seems they’ve only looked at the first few words. After all, why allow the full facts of the matter to get in the way of a click-bait worthy headline? The biggest — literally — part of the story is K2-18, the star the would-be life-hosting planet K2-18b is orbiting.

I’ve written about this before, but let’s revisit the subject, since it’s topical.

K2-18 is a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs — as the name suggests — are small. Some might only be a little bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Red dwarfs are dimmer and cooler compared to a star like the Sun. They however have long lifespans, typically measured in trillions of years, rather than billions, as is the case for many other stars in the universe. At first glance, red dwarfs seem like ideal stars to host planets that might give rise to life. Their longevity gives lifeforms an eon to take hold and develop. But red dwarfs are not really life-friendly stars.

One problem lies in their size. Being so small, the habitable, or Goldilocks zone, the area of their solar system best suited for the fostering of life, that is neither too hot, nor too cool, is quite close to the star. Any planets in the habitable zone will be tidally locked. This means one side of the planet permanently faces the star, while the other is perpetually shrouded in darkness. In other words, the star facing side of a planet will be incredibly warm, while the dark side will be quite cold. Neither extreme may be particularly conducive to life, especially complex lifeforms.

But that’s not the worst of it. Red dwarfs also emit powerful flares that can render nearby planets lifeless. Some of these outbursts can be even more intense than those generated by the Sun. While one study of these flares found they might emanate from the polar regions of red dwarfs, rather than their equators, being the plane planets usually orbit a star along, the odds remain stacked against life here. None of this information is new, but has just about been completely overlooked in the recent news stories, about the possibility of life on K2-18b.

Here may be an unfortunate instance of a star that brings life into being, only to take it away later.

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