Discord trials face scanning to verify the age of members

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Discord trials face scanning to verify the age of members

23 April 2025

The scanning technology, which is said to gauge a person’s age to an accuracy of one to two years, is being trialled in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). Members of Discord — a popular communications and community building platform — can also choose to scan in a proof-of-age document, such as a drivers licence, if they don’t want to go through the face scanning process.

Is this the way things are going? Online safety laws in the UK will shortly require platforms to have stringent age-verification processes in place, while in Australia, people under the age of sixteen will soon not be able to access certain social media channels. As far as these platforms are concerned, face scanning may be the easiest way to verify a potential user’s age.

The suggestion here is face scanning will eventually be the only way to confirm a person’s age (and identity it seems), when it comes to signing up to an online platform. This is something all of us might be subject to one day.

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.

Cinemas are just so twentieth century

3 April 2025

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, says cinemas are dead. There’s a bold call. Certainly it can be argued there is no need for cinemas any more. No one needs to go to a cinema to see a movie nowadays. They can do that from the comfort of their own home.

Despite the ease and convenience of watching films at home, negating the need for the middle-person that is a movie theatre, I think cinemas will be with us for a while yet. Going to the movies is a social and entertainment experience. A night on the town, sort of thing. Patronage might be down, and we might see some closures, but I doubt cinemas will go away completely.

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film, movies, trends

Don’t blame Apple for the failure of Apple Intelligence, blame AI

31 March 2025

Allison Morrow, writing for CNN:

Apple is not the laggard in AI. AI is the laggard in AI.

Here is a technology that’s still in the early days of development, has been hyped to the hilt, and heaped with lofty expectations. We’d call it vapour-ware if it didn’t actually exist. There’s some very smart people working at Apple, but it seems surprising they’d go promising the earth without better understanding what they were dealing with.

AI scraper bots like your website content, you should feel grateful

28 March 2025

Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform:

Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago it certainly had an impact on performance.

I check my website stats every morning, and high hopes that something I wrote might have gone viral, wanes almost immediately when I realise AI scraper bots have been at it again.

I considered trying to block the data scrapers, but read that such methods are often ignored. I suppose I should feel faltered that developers of AI bots think the content published here is worthy of training one of their LLMs. There seems little else I can really do.

Man posts videos of himself propositioning Sydney women to his socials

26 March 2025

An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and later posting them to his social media accounts.

At least one woman asked him to take down a post she featured in, but he refused to comply. She also asked Instagram owner Meta to remove the footage, but the request was ignored. The women then spoke to NSW Police, who told her there was nothing they could do — even though NSW state surveillance laws were breached — as the man has since left Australia.

Here is another quagmire we’re walking into. Up until now it has been relatively apparent if a face-to-face interaction is being recorded in public. At the very least, a smartphone is being pointed at us.

But by way of a pair of glasses, with a camera that may not be easy to detect, is another matter. It might be against the law, in some states anyway, but if the wrong-doer is outside the country, it seems people out and about in public might have no legal recourse if the law has been broken.

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crime, social media, technology, trends

Apple Intelligence, merely smoke and mirrors?

15 March 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

This is heavy duty.

Apple’s AI offering, Apple Intelligence, isn’t even artificial, it is very much non-existent.

Social media is player versus player, IndieWeb is collaboration, support

12 March 2025

Santi Ruiz’s article 50 Thoughts on DOGE, being the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk in the United States, isn’t usually the sort of material I link to here, but his write-up offers this fascinating insight into social media:

All of the above means that Elon looks into problems that are largely driven by institutional capture, structural incentives, and overregulation, and sees them instead as problems of waste, corruption, and fraud. Again, I don’t think this is about Elon’s personality so much as it is about the way the information he receives is structured. The more time you spend on the PvP platform that is social media, the more you will be primed to see enemies everywhere.

PvP, meaning player versus player, is a term more commonly seen in the realm of interactive gaming, but isn’t a half bad way to summarise the sometimes competitive, cut throat, nature of social media. Not that I’m suggesting blogging is, or was, any better.

Certainly not in the early days, before social media was a thing. But social media did seem to follow a similar trajectory to blogging. In the earliest years, when blogs were still called personal websites, there was an abundance of collaboration and commeradie. While that never completely went away, as blogging matured, it became more of a case of us versus them, or me against you.

We stopped being friends, and became enemies.

Those around in the early days of Twitter, circa 2007, may have noticed the same thing. Much cooperation initially, which eventually gave way to competition. Not wholly, and not everywhere, but overwhelmingly player versus player.

This is not something we see too often in the more supportive IndieWeb/Small Web space, though there are certainly differences in opinion at times. But I’ll take that over a PvP game from which there seems no escape at times.

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IndieWeb, social media, trends

digg, once front page of the internet, slips on AI superpowers for a return

7 March 2025

News aggregator website digg — styled with a lower case d, just like disassociated — was once known as the front page of the internet, before falling on hard times in 2010.

Reddit went onto assume the front page of the internet mantle, but who knows, digg might be about to reclaim the crown. That’s if a comeback, masterminded by original founder Kevin Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, gains traction.

A splash page presently declares digg is “the front page of the internet, with superpowers.” The superpowers in question are likely the AI technologies that will play a part in curating content. This I look forward to seeing. A few of my posts made it to digg’s front page way back in the day, which meant traffic spikes for days, and of course, profile.

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technology, trends

Mirrors, not smartphones, driving students to distraction

7 March 2025

An English school principal has had all mirrors removed from school bathrooms, after students took to lingering in large groups in school toilets, to look at their reflections.

Anywhere else, it might be smartphones being blacklisted, but not at the William Farr Church of England Comprehensive School, a high school in the English county of Lincolnshire.

Students were frequently arriving late for classes because they were spending an excess of time gazing into the mirrors. They were also gathering in large numbers, which was making other of their classmates, who only wished to use toilets, uncomfortable.

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education, trends

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