Mastodon might struggle to comply with social media age verification laws

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Mastodon might struggle to comply with social media age verification laws

1 September 2025

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.

RSS is so awesome it made the front page of Hacker News

1 September 2025

Some Hacker News (HN) members were astonished that a relatively concise blog post, written by Evan Verma, spruiking the merits of RSS, reached the front page of the news aggregator recently.

There’s probably not too many people on HN who don’t use RSS, but more generally, uptake is not particularly high. On that basis, any publicity is helpful. Let’s keep encouraging the adoption of RSS.

What is RSS? Read all about it here.

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blogs, technology, trends

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.

Are fears of AI caused mass job losses founded or exaggerated?

22 August 2025

California based cybersecurity professional Daniel Miessler is concerned AI technologies might result in large scale job losses:

These are people who’ve been making over $100-200K in tech or tech-adjacent for over a decade. And they can’t find work. I mean they can barely get interviews. And when I say a ton, I mean multiple dozen that I either know or I’m one degree separated from. And again, these are not low-skill people. They’re legit professionals that have never in their life had trouble finding or maintaining work.

What Miessler reports is based on anecdotal evidence, but I’ve heard similar stories — likewise anecdata — locally (NSW, Australia).

On the flip side, Sheryl Estrada, writing for Yahoo Finance, citing recent MIT research, says only a handful of companies have been able to effectively integrate AI technologies into their operations:

But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows […].

Meanwhile Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) has paused recruiting for its super intelligence division. This after offering one new hire a one and a half billion dollar salary (over four years).

This might not of course mean anything other than perhaps Meta coming to the realisation it is spending money it doesn’t have. As to the wider question of the threat posed to jobs by AI, I think the jury is still out. No one is, as yet, exactly sure what the impact will be.

Microsoft sued over plans to discontinue Windows 10 support

16 August 2025

California based Lawrence Klein is attempting to sue Microsoft over its plan to discontinue support for the Windows 10 operating system (OS) come October.

The action is understandable from the point of view that a device apparently requires specific hardware for Windows 11 — the Windows 10 successor OS — to function. This hardware is not to be found on older devices, rendering them unusable if they can’t run Windows 10.

Klein says that the end of Windows 10 is part of Microsoft’s strategy to force customers to purchase new devices and to “monopolize the generative AI market.” Windows 11 comes with Microsoft’s suite of generative artificial intelligence software, including the chatbot Copilot. To run optimally, Microsoft’s AI needs a piece of hardware called a neural processing unit, which newer tablets, laptops and desktop computers have — and which the older devices do not.

Before I migrated to Linux Mint (LM) last year, I was regularly sent prompts by Microsoft urging me to install Windows 11. Evidently my device, which is three years old now, had the requisite hardware as I was told Windows 11 could operate on it.

While we’re talking of those nagging “upgrade” prompts, they’re one thing I certainly do not miss.

Of course Windows 10 will continue to work without the presently regular support updates, but I’d be reluctant in the extreme to use any Windows OS that was not supported. That would be putting any device at considerable risk.

While the switch to LM was quite the undertaking, and involved a few bumps early on, I’m pleased to be here, something I’ve said before. I’d encourage anyone still on Windows 10 to consider LM. It’s user-friendly, somewhat resembles Windows 10, and comes in several versions, meaning it’s possible to install on relatively old devices.

You’ll also escape the Windows hegemony, and have an OS that’s not half dependent on AI to work.

What if the dead do not want live in the eternal AI afterlife?

16 August 2025

Family members should have the ability to prevent the creation of AI generated likenesses of deceased relatives, says American legal scholar Victoria Haneman.

“Digital resurrection by or through AI requires the personal data of the deceased, and the amount of data that we are storing online is increasing exponentially with each passing year,” Haneman wrote.

Here’s something else to think about. I’m not sure if there are laws in any jurisdiction that cover this sort of situation.

The work of dredger boat operators is safe from AI technologies

12 August 2025

Writers, authors, proof readers, news analysts, reporters, journalists, and editors, are among occupations Microsoft sees as being vulnerable to AI technologies. A blogger, by the way, is each and every of those roles.

But that’s not all. Web designers, interpreters, historians, and political scientists, are in danger. Mathematicians even. The threat isn’t restricted to what might be called desk-bound occupations either. The roles of customer service reps, hosts, models, and telemarketers, are also on the line.

But there are some professions safe from AI (for now). These include hospital orderlies, motorboat operators, floor sanders, water treatment plant workers, and dredge operators.

Dredger boats often trawl through the waters of the lakes near where we stay on the NSW Central Coast. I was watching one such vessel earlier this year, and, ironically, speculated how the work could be carried out by an AI agent of some sort.

A sophisticated under water camera and sonar array, was part of what came to mind. Instead, it looks like the dredger boat crews will be with us for some time to come.

WI-FI systems capable of identifying people and tracking them

11 August 2025

The way our bodies interact with the radio waves of WI-FI systems can create a signature of sorts, that’s as unique as a person’s fingerprint, and capable of identifying specific individuals. This according to Michael Crider, writing for PCWorld:

At present, the WhoFi system is a proof of concept requiring some incredibly advanced software to implement. But it’s very real, and the hardware used to develop it wasn’t anything special. According to the dataset in the paper, these results were achieved using the Wi-Fi signals generated by two TP-Link N750 routers, which are pretty basic models that aren’t even using the latest, fastest Wi-Fi tech.

Surveillance state, here we come.

Presently the “fingerprinting” technology developed by researchers in Italy at La Sapienza University of Rome, can identify a person with ninety-five percent accuracy. While the tool might be useful for police investigating crimes, there is obviously all manner of capacity for misuse and abuse.

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crime, privacy, security, technology

Tiny Awards 2025 finalists announced, voting for winner open

8 August 2025

The nominees for the 2025 Tiny Awards have been announced.

Entry for the annual prize is open to personal or non-commercial websites that were no more than a year old in July, with their own unique URL (sorry, TikToks are ineligible).

Voting closes on Monday 1 September 2025, with the winner being named later in September.

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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology

Do not vibe code your apps, hire an expert Fiverr developer instead

4 August 2025

Online freelance marketplace Fiverr has released a video lampooning vibe coding.

Don’t leave your app development needs in the hands of a programmer who uses AI agents to produce software, hire one of our experts instead, seems to be the suggestion. One of course assumes the Fiverr expert you hire to build your app isn’t a vibe coder themselves.

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artificial intelligence, technology

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