Australian social media age verification laws: you might need to prove your age

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Australian social media age verification laws: you might need to prove your age

20 September 2025

The Australian government has issued guidelines regarding proposed age verification regulations that come into effect this December.

While social networks will be required to “detect and deactivate or remove” the accounts of members under the age of sixteen, they will not need to verify the age of every last user. This would no doubt apply to instances where someone has been a long-time user of a social media channel, or it is apparent they are over the age of sixteen.

It sounds reassuring, at least on the surface, but the devil will be in the detail. It will be down to individual platforms to decide how they go about ascertaining a member’s age, rather than there being a standard, universal, process they must adhere to. Expect to see some under-sixteens fall through cracks, while a few over-sixteens get caught in the net.

Death by a thousand cuts: the AI scraper indexing one blog post at a time

16 September 2025

Like many online-publishers/bloggers, I’ve experienced significant surges of traffic caused by AI bots indexing — or whatever they do — thousands of pages at a time on my website.

I’m in two minds as to whether or not to block this activity, but it seems pointless as many crawlers disregard disallow requests. Besides, I can’t stop other entities, human or otherwise, accessing the content here, and doing what they will with it.

Once, way back in 2000, someone in New Zealand copied the entirely of the then disassociated website, republished it under the name disenfranchised or something, and called it their own work. I didn’t discover the reproduction by chance though. The responsible party emailed to tell me about it.

I wrote back (effectively) saying they should design their own website. disenfranchised, or whatever it was, vanished a few weeks later. I think they hoped I would write ceaselessly about the “rip-off” of my work, but I when I said no more, they found something else to do.

I know there are ways to make copying the contents of a website difficult, but anyone sufficiently motivated will figure out how to bypass those mechanisms.

At least someone liked what I did enough to want to copy it. I highly doubt though any crawlers gathering data for AI agents care whether what I do here is likeable or not. But what annoys me is the way the activities of this scraper are distorting my web analytics (not Google) data.

Yes, you can help yourself to the content here, just don’t mess with my web stats.

Of course, I know web analytics are by no means an exacting science, but they do highlight trends. Somehow my morning online routine would not be the same if I decided to ditch analytics. Besides my stats app holds near on twenty-years worth of data, so there is also the history aspect.

To complicate matters, the scraper uses a different IP address on every single visit, meaning I can’t simply add an ignore tag to one IP, or a range, to keep visits off the analytics app data.

Subsequently, their visits appear to originate from a different town/city, but in the same country (a populous nation in east Asia). There is also no rhyme or reason to the maybe twenty to thirty pages they visit daily. One minute it is a years old post, the next something far more recent.

As the crawler did not snatch up several thousand post in one fell swoop, it will doubtless be active for sometime to come. In the meantime I’ll make the most of thinking my website is ever so slightly more popular than usual, since there’s not much else to do.

Smartphone ban sees NYC students talk, play cards, use Polaroid cameras, daydream

15 September 2025

New York City recently introduced a smartphone ban in public schools. While students are not barred from owning phones, they must store their devices away during school hours.

While it’s early days, students appear to be adjusting well to life without smartphones, even if it’s only for a few hours a day. School-goers have taken to playing cards, engaging in face-to-face conversation, using Polaroid cameras, and even daydreaming, a favourite activity of mine both during and outside classes, back in my school days.

Needless to say though, some students have figured out ways to circumvent the ban, with some using burner phones they have obtained. The school hours ban seems like a good idea, and being without a smartphone for a relatively short time daily is hardly the end of the world. Some enforced non-smartphone time, a small digital detox sort of thing, for everyone, doesn’t seem a half bad idea.

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smartphones, technology, trends

Bloggers might have been syndicating content with ICE not RSS

11 September 2025

Ryan Farley, writing at Buttondown:

Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS’s competing standards (Atom vs RSS 2.0) that they barely registered the rise and fall of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names.

Here’s a slice of web history I was unaware of until now: an alternative blog content syndication specification that was — for a short time — in competition with RSS.

That Microsoft, as one of the backers of Information and Content Exchange (ICE) syndication, quietly began using RSS, says a lot. A lot about RSS, and Microsoft.

Getting a Linux laptop to work with some help from Claude

10 September 2025

Vinay Keerth was able to sort out a range of problems after installing Linux Mint (LM) on his laptop, when he asked AI agent Claude for help. It makes me wonder why I didn’t think of using AI to fix some of the — admittedly minor — niggles I’ve experienced with LM since migrating last year.

For instance, I couldn’t get my laptop to suspend (sleep/hibernate) when I closed the lid, something the previous OS did without missing a beat. For a time though, in closing the lid, I assumed the laptop had gone into suspend mode, only to discover on opening it hours later that the battery was drained, and the laptop had shut off.

I worked around that problem by setting up a launcher, in the form of a desktop icon. To suspend my laptop I simply double click the launcher icon, then close the lid. The laptop usually runs for two to three weeks between reboots now.

The old OS could go for longer though. I don’t know what it is with LM, but after about three weeks maximum it just wants to reboot, and crashes, just as I open the laptop lid to resume a session. Maybe this is something I could get Claude’s help with.

But I don’t mind going through the crash/reboot sequence every few weeks anyway, as it gives me the chance to run system and software updates, some of which require a restart.

The only other niggle of note is setting time outs when the laptop is inactive. These can vary depending on whether the device is plugged into a power point, or running on battery. Despite setting the inactive period to thirty-minutes for either source, through the Power Management (PM) control, the screen locks after only ten minutes of inactivity.

Clearly some other setting somewhere is overriding the PM timeout values, so I’ll be seeing what suggestions Claude can make there.

Techtember, a time to scale down your tech stack… if applicable

9 September 2025

September is the month tech companies launch new products, and encourage consumers to buy up, giving rise to the portmanteau Techtember. You learn something new everyday. But instead of increasing our tech stack of stuff, Andreas at 82mhz suggests we shed excess paraphernalia.

I like the idea, and I would if I could, but my tech stack pretty much consists of a laptop, a smartphone, and some headphones. That’s it. No router (we tether), no printer, nor smartwatch even… who needs one when you can check the time on your phone or lappy?

I sit here churning out copy daily, and all I have to my name is a laptop. Go on, laugh, I don’t mind.

Happy Techtember then to all who celebrate it…

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technology, trends

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.

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, RSS, 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.

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