Verify the age of adult websites users via their device operating system

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Verify the age of adult websites users via their device operating system

22 November 2025

A provider of adult video content — I’ll refrain from naming them, in the hope of stopping network content filters getting upset — is suggesting the age of their audience be verified through the operating system (OS) of their device. Note: the link is to a blog post by the provider, not to any NSFW content. I can’t speak for what happens if you start clicking other links on the page though.

More of these laws are coming, and the safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. However, the best and most effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to identify users at the source: by their device, or account on the device, and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. This means users would only get verified once, through their operating system, not on each age-restricted site. This dramatically reduces privacy risks and creates a very simple process for regulators to enforce.

The idea certainly makes sense, and would save having to go through a separate age verification process on every website, social network, and other online service that requires it.

To date though I don’t recall ever supplying any of the OS’s I use with my date of birth, let alone verifying that information. It seems to me to make age verification possible this way might require some OS suppliers to make changes to allow this.

Update: on checking, I see my date of birth details are entered into my smartphone’s OS, iOS. I expect those details were verified when I obtained my first iPhone, as I needed to present photo identification on signing up with my then phone company.

Assume then my age is verified as far as my smartphone goes. As for my computer OS, Linux Mint, I’m pretty sure I didn’t supply any such info. Couldn’t even be certain I entered my full name. This I will need to check on.

A train station comes to Woollahra NSW: there goes the neighbourhood

3 September 2025

Woollahra, a suburb in Sydney’s east, is soon to have a train station. At first pass that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But the story is as long as the rail line is winding. Proposals to build a station in the affluent suburb are over a century old.

Then, in the 1970’s, as the Eastern Suburbs train line, AKA the T4, was being constructed, foundations for a station were laid. But work came to an abrupt halt when residents, unhappy at the prospect of a train station in their backyard, succeeded in stopping construction.

The partly built station sits between the stations at Edgecliff, and Bondi Junction, where the T4 line presently* terminates, a kilometre or two from the beach at Bondi. But with the housing situation in Sydney reaching dire proportions, the NSW State Government has revived plans to build the station, and then construct much needed high-density residences in the vicinity.

News of the station, and apartment blocks, has no doubt come as a double blow to locals.

Woollahra is far from apartment building free — an array of beautiful art deco style medium-density residences span Edgecliff Road — and the prospect of high density blocks will be causing alarm to some. But the reality is Sydney needs more residences, and it is unreasonable to expect all of these be built “somewhere” in the west of the city.

Or “the western side of ANZAC Parade”, a quip sometimes uttered by those residing on the eastern side of ANZAC Parade. ANZAC Parade being a major roadway running from inner Sydney through to La Perouse, at the southern end of the eastern suburbs.

Some Woollahra residents will argue the presence of high-rise dwellings will be at odds with the “character” of the suburb. Woollahra is possessed of houses built in the nineteenth century, quiet tree-lined streets (one or two rather steep), boutique shops, and a village-like ambience. It is a place many people would like to call home. The building proposals will bring significant changes.

Bondi Junction street scene at dusk featuring modern buildings, traffic lights, and trees. Cars are seen on the road alongside pedestrians, with a pharmacy sign illuminated. The sky displays shades of blue as the sun sets.

Spring Street, Bondi Junction, NSW, at dusk. Photo taken June 2021. Note the construction crane in the top right hand corner.

But such is life in the big city. Change is constant. Bondi Junction — where we stay when not on the NSW Central Coast — situated right next to Woollahra, has undergone a tremendous transformation in the last decade, particularly along parts of Oxford Street. While always a mixed commercial/retail and residential precinct, numerous high-density apartment blocks now line Oxford street.

Of course Bondi Junction, being a retail centre, and public transport hub, with the aforementioned T4 train line, and numerous bus services, seems an ideal place to build residences. That’s not to say everyone in Bondi Junction is happy with the prospect. Many feel the suburb has been over-developed. But again, housing shortages in the region have compelled governments to act.

Yet the “residential-isation” of Oxford Street, and surrounds, has not always been a bad thing. Bondi Junction is at once a quiet residential suburb, after the shops close, in the midst of a bustling commercial centre. People walk their dogs along Oxford Street in the evenings, a sight that would not have been seen ten years ago.

Despite this metamorphosis, perceptions of Bondi Junction have not changed.

Either within the eastern suburbs, or elsewhere in Sydney. As far as other residents of the eastern suburbs are concerned, the junction is “ugly”. Meanwhile people outside the eastern suburbs think Bondi Junction is full of rich snobs. But nahsayers of the junction are looking at the wrong suburb when identifying ugly, or seeking to point out “rich snobs”.

But I digress. I’m not saying high-density residential blocks in Woollahra, full of dog owners, will bring about any sort of catharsis to existing residents who are going to be subject to possibly decades of disruptive construction work. They had all of that in Bondi Junction, and will probably continue to, but the world did not end.

Whether we like it or not, high-density accommodation is one of the solutions to the shortage of housing, and is something everyone in Sydney needs to get used to.

* there were proposals to extend the train line to Bondi Beach, but residents rallied to oppose the idea.

Mastodon might struggle to comply with social media age verification laws

1 September 2025

Sarah Perez, writing for Techcrunch:

The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users’ ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored. That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition.

Mastodon is a decentralised social network that allows anyone with the inclination, and access to a reasonably robust server, to establish their own instance, or chapter.

Mastodon is the sum of its many parts, and is not structured like X or Threads, whose operations are run from a single, centralised, point. I have no idea how many Mastodon instances there are, but the number would not be insignificant.

Compliance with age verification laws will be down to individual instance administrators. It’s not something the Mastodon head office could do, because there isn’t one, as such.

This doesn’t mean members of Mastodon instances operating in jurisdictions where age verification laws apply, will be able to forgo confirming their age. Indeed, age verification will be a necessity if the instance they belong to is to continue operating.

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.

Australians will soon need to verify their age to use search engines

12 July 2025

Ange Lavoipierre, writing for The Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography. But experts have warned the move could compromise Australians’ privacy online and may not do much to protect young people.

We’re all for protecting children going online, but this initiative, as it stands, may be way too easy to circumvent. For instance, search engine users could remain logged out of their account, or make use of a VPN, to trick search engines into believing they are outside the country.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if ways to shutdown these options are eventually introduced. In the same way, say, Netflix can make using VPNs difficult. In addition, anyone accessing a search engine in Australia may be forced to actually login to their (age verified) account before they can do searches.

The search engine companies, after all, surely will not want to be in contravention of Australian laws. It seems at some point then, Australian search engine users will need to verify their age. Privacy advocates however are rightly concerned. Certain of the search engines already know enough about our activity online; do we want them knowing our personal details as well?

A sensible solution would be to use a digital identity service. These are independent of search engines, and any other tech companies, who might be required to confirm the age of their users.

One such service I use to both verify my identity, and I imagine age, when dealing with Australian government departments online, is Digital iD, which was developed by Australia Post. (Don’t you be saying the post office is incapable of innovation…)

MyID, created by the Australian Tax Office (ATO), serves a similar purpose.

Of course, we’re having to tell someone our age, and supply a verifying document — an Australian passport, or drivers licence — to do so, but at least the process is handled by an Australian government agency. Perhaps you don’t particularly trust those entities either, but I think they’re a far safer option than an offshore tech company.

In short, identity services such as MyID, or Digital iD, are saying the user is aged eighteen or over. They are not divulging actual ages, or dates of birth.

If the Australian government is so insistent we verify our age to access search engines, and who knows what other apps in the future, then the least they can do is allow us to use an Australian digital identity service to do so.

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.

Australians favour early voting, time for politicians to take notice

24 April 2025

Shane Wright, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

A record 542,000 people, or 3 per cent of those on the electoral roll, cast a ballot on the first day of pre-poll voting on Tuesday. It was a 72 per cent increase on the 314,000 who cast a vote on the first day of pre-polling at the 2022 election.

According to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), there are a little over eighteen-million Australians registered to vote in the upcoming federal election (Saturday 3 May 2025). To expect all of these people to attend a polling booth on a single day, is absurd, especially in more populous regions. Could that many people possibly vote in one day? Despite the best efforts of polling booth staff, I think some people might miss out. This after having possibility waited hours in a queue.

Of course eighteen million people wouldn’t all descend on polling booths on election day. Some people would have sent in postal votes, while a supposedly small number would voted early, as they were unable to do so on election day because of work or travel commitments. But with up to half of Australians expected to cast their votes during the two weeks ahead of election day, it is clear not all of those people will be working or travelling on the day. When it comes to voting early, Australians are voting with their feet, by walking to into pre-polling booths in droves.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, as it should be, and all the more reason people be given — particularly in the absence of an online voting system — a reasonable amount time to vote. Naturally there are risks in voting early. The candidate a person votes early for might make a serious blunder in the lead up to election day. The party someone backs might announce a policy on the eve the election that is not popular. Parties typically do not release the costings of their policies and promises until the last minute. People who have voted early might find the proposed expenditure excessive.

Then again, policies can quickly be altered, or dropped completely, immediately after the election. An elected lawmaker can unforgivably err shortly after assuming office. There may be little a voter could do at that point, except wait for the next election. But nine million, maybe more, Australians cannot be wrong. The option to vote early, unconditionally, is something the people want, risks notwithstanding. It is time all politicians in Australia accepted early voting as an inherent part of the election process. I also wrote about early voting at the last federal election, three years ago.

Say what you will, this is a democracy after all, but I’m sold on it.

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Seeing Trump’s America through the eyes of a historian in 2100

18 April 2025

One way to make sense of the present upheaval in the United States might be to see it through the eyes of a historian writing about US history in the early twenty-second century. This perspective, envisaged by Peter Leyden, which doesn’t address every last (often heavy-handed) policy of the Trump administration, sees a system of government long overdue for reform:

The Pax Americana with America as the global policeman enforcing order in the international system was coming to an end. That system had a great long run of 80 years, starting at the end of World War II, but could not go on much longer.

The United States military budget in 2025 was $850 billion — more than the military spending of the next dozen countries combined — and America was saddled with chronic budget deficits that could not sustain that kind of spending.

The bureaucratic welfare state that had been the backbone of post-war society in America and throughout the West was also fiscally unsustainable and way past its prime in effectiveness. The large aging populations of these developed economies were putting mounting pressures on the budgets of entitlement programs, which were devised for the smaller numbers of elderly long ago.

Leyden’s article is completely speculative, but is a fascinating read nonetheless. The Democrats appear to have been firmly pushed aside at the moment, but in time will return to centre stage:

Trump, his MAGA administration, and the current crop of Republicans now in Congress are not going to come up with the new systems that will reinvent America in a way that allows it to thrive in the 21st century. The odds of that happening are miniscule.

However, they almost certainly are going to create the space for some other political force, some other movement, some other set of leaders to pull that off. I expect that will come out of Blue America, with new movements and a new generation of leaders looking forward with truly transformative ideas.

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America, current affairs, politics

Australian Electoral Commission posts new guidelines for influencers, content creators

11 April 2025

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has issued an updated set of guidelines clarifying the role of content creators and influencers.

The move comes in the wake of mild controversy surrounding a recent interview Sydney based podcaster Abbie Chatfield recorded with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Some listeners felt the interview constituted what is considered to be electoral material, something that requires an authorisation statement from the political entity issuing said material. These are usually adverts, that variously promote a party candidate, or policy, although they can take a number of forms.

The AEC however concluded the interview did not breach any regulations. The revised guidelines come in addition to a publicity campaign being run by the AEC, warning people to be cautious about material relating to the upcoming Australian Federal election, they may encounter on social media, and, no doubt, blogs and websites.

If IndieWeb took off, became mainstream, would it still be IndieWeb?

26 February 2025

The IndieWeb doesn’t need to “take off”, by Susam Pal.

It’d be great to imagine all those people who cling to social media — as if it were a life-support system — suddenly coming to their senses and launching personal websites. Owning their own content, on websites belonging only to them. And in the process, hastening the demise of the social networks, who would abruptly find themselves with no members, after the personal website exodus.

But as I wrote last May, such a groundswell would not be great at all. Because once the action returned to the website space, we’d see a repeat of what happened prior to the arrival of social media: websites monetised to within an inch of their life. And opportunists galore, looking for a channel to pedal their wares, and rocket the noise-to-signal ratio off the gauge.

Yet, such a cataclysm might have occurred in 2021, when now US President Donald Trump launched a blog, after being banned by Twitter and Facebook (how unimaginable such happenings would be today…). With his own blog though, Trump effectively became part of IndieWeb. But someone with Trump’s profile, going “IndieWeb”, could easily have opened the floodgates.

And it wouldn’t have just been the likes of Trump. Politicians of all stripes might have followed suit, if they decided IndieWeb was the place to be. When people talk of IndieWeb “taking off”, I somehow doubt that’s what they have in mind. But Trump’s sojourn into “IndieWeb” blogging was short lived. A few months later he launched his own social network, Truth Social.

On the other hand though, even if IndieWeb had, if you like, gone mainstream, IndieWeb would still be IndieWeb. It would have continued to thrive, right where it is now, in its own corner of the web. In a strange sort of way then, IndieWeb is all the richer for the existence of social media. Die-hard adherents can keep their algorithm chocked socials feeds, and declining engagement, leaving IndieWeb to flourish, and be what it is.

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