Over here in Australia the government is being told that the equivalent that we are having foisted on us lacks key supporting measures (like an equivalent of GDPR, actual hard and fast laws to penalise the misuse or failure to adequately secure citizens data, etc).

In spite of this and genuine commentary from children’s advocacy groups saying the legislation is not fit for purpose it is being steamrolled through because “won’t somebody think of the children”.

It does make me wonder how many children are going to be cut off from their support networks and escape routes that this might harm, potentially fatally. How much blood of Australia’s youth is our government willing to have on its hands so that our intelligence community (and we are part of five eyes so it doesn’t stay on our shores) can have a shiny new toy?

Now simply provide ID to every website or app that has any social interaction component, after all the only way to protect our children is to submit to a massive invasion of privacy.

What do you mean this runs the risk of hurting marginalised and or abused children who lose an avenue to seek help and guidance to escape or ameliorate their situation?

Stop understanding nuance and prepare for the line our intelligence community wants you to swallow instead.

In all seriousness if social media is too corrosive for young people maybe its time it was banned entirely, the reason for these half measures has little to do with children and their safety and everything to do with removing all privacy and anonymity from online activities.

I’ve been seeing these things on the Google News feed on my phone I keep disabling that keeps getting re-enabled for some mysterious reason. It’s literally gotten to the point lately that if something is presented as a fact by google I automatically disbelieve it. What really concerns me is the people who don’t take that stance.

Anyone using a Version Control system to do 3d design work, if I was smart I would be using this for the stuff I design to 3d print. But I’m not so I just have directories full of STL and 3MF files with occasionally somewhat descriptive names. Oh or 3d artists working on games, videos etc. People who are doing architectural design? Just people with other random interests? I suck at staying organised but I gave Forgejo a go and as long as you follow the getting started guide and keep it on an internal network its pretty straightforward to get started, complexity goes up if you are wanting to use it externally or in more co.plicated scenarios I believe.

Wow thanks for your contribution scammer.

Wow does your offer include Premium Netflix and Amazon Prime? Because the other scammers who are offering me IPTV are bundling Netflix and prime thanks to their exclusive relationships and I wouldn’t want to blindly hand my credit card details over to someone who can’t build exclusive (and implausible) relationships!

Having worked with confidential data for a cohort that included people with Protection orders we had it drilled into us that any mistakes could (and had) cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to remediate and that was with super specific tailored contracts to cover every contingency that the company had encountered in the past. That was 20 years ago. I can’t imagine those costs have diminished since then… The companies willingness to do everything to stay out of court and out of the headlines may have though.

As if any of this is about protecting children. At best that will be a side effect of the ban. It’s mainly about linking an ID to as much online activity as possible.

Discussions with the office of my representative showed that they are treating all the issues that will arise from this as secondary. When I asked if tax payer money would be used to redress the absolutely inevitable data breaches when they happen I was told the eSafety Commissioner has the power to bring legal action against companies that don’t implement best practise with regards to data security.

I asked where best practise was codified in legal terms and was then told that the government has published guidelines that state data gathered should be limited in scope and secured in a safe manner. In other words we are putting the horse so far in front of the cart it’s as though the horse is still in the stable.

When I asked about penalties I was told that companies could be fined up to 850k per offense. However when I asked what was to stop a company that had just accidentally leaked say a million drivers licenses from simply closing shop and abandoning Australia to deal with the fallout rather than accept an multi trillion dollar fine I just got some limp hand-wavey statements about how companies would be compelled by the rules and regulations.

I think the biggest problem facing the welfare system is decades of the Australian public having the recipients demonized as dole bludgers by populist shitbags. Every time I point out to my father that we give far more money in corporate welfare than we invest into people who are down on their luck I get the same tired bootstraps rhetoric. Taking support for aged pensions and family tax supplements out of the equation the actual amount we offer as support to people who can’t get a job through disability or lack of opportunity is an insult. If we taxed corporate entities and people squatting on virtual dragon hordes of property correctly the landscape would change.

Amateurs… here in Tassie we would just build between 3 and 6 stadiums with that sort of money. The hardest part would be finding enough hideously inconvenient spots that have insufficient infrastructure and potentially contaminated soil to site them. We know how to piss money we don’t have away on White Elephants down here.

It’s a ritual that we have a whiskey when I go to pay my rent. Couldn’t be nicer. It’s just hard to reconcile with some of the more irrational beliefs. Honestly my dad is worse in some ways, my dad would have been much happier if he was born 40 years earlier. Australian Society in the 50s would have been a lot more his pace.

I don’t know anyone else’s inner world obviously, but reading between the lines of what he said it sounds like that era of German history disrupted his family enough that there is no romanticisation going on.

Plus he told me about an occasion where he confronted some stupid teenager who decided to go to a nearby shopping centre in a reproduction Waffen SS uniform and rather forcefully told him to leave when the police said it was distasteful but they couldn’t do anything about it (before the bans on publicly showing Nazi iconography).

I think he is a standard Lib Nats voter that has the usual amount of mindrot from watching a bit too much SkyNews (more than 15 seconds qualifies as far as I am concerned).

Oh I got him to agree that the NSN should be openly repudiated by any of the “reasonable” people who were just there for every day run of the mill racism. He is one of those people who is “just using common sense”. He unfortunately is a fan of the Gish gallop and one of the biggest frustrations for both of us is that I kept tackling his arguments in order starting from the first.

Look I get it, he has worked hard (and I know he has that’s not just hyperbole) and feels indignant that this means he has to pay a larger share of tax than people who are not as financially sound as he is, and so some wannabe populist talking head telling him “Oh it’s all the immigrants soaking up the prosperity of the nation!” is compelling. When I pointed out that if we just taxed big business and big finance correctly he started to come around, before haring off down some other tangent.

Ultimately I think I will just have to avoid politics, bit awkward to be arguing with the person who decides if your lease gets renewed when it expires. But if it does come up I might just start throwing out figures for Fuel Tax Credits paid to mining companies, or tax avoidance by tech giants, or multi-millionaires and billionaires funding political action against the best interests of voters.

I had a big difference of opinion with my landlord about this… He is convinced that the racists are just rocking up in good faith to express that they want immigration policy reviewed, I pointed out that the Nazi wannabes are the ones doing the planning and logistics but keeping the invites mild to draw numbers. He thinks that the Nazi wannabes are just a fringe group who turned up to try to recruit but they weren’t really involved.

We went round and round in circles for ages.

Funnily enough he broadly agrees with Labor policies and social stances, and agrees Dutton would have been disastrous for the country, but the taxes on his property and business have gone up under Albanese so he hates Labor now.

The kicker is that he is the child of German immigrants with a grandfather that was press ganged into the Nazi support apparatus as the Nazis were after competent photographers, you would think with that sort of family history he would be a bit wiser to the kinds of tactics fascists employ to foster a sense of acceptance and complacency in the general population for their batshit crazy movement.

Throw away email! Are you going something illegal online that you would want to bypass the government and big techs absolute right to spy on everything you do! That’s it people will henceforth only get one single email address assigned at birth that they will be forced to use for all online interactions henceforth. I hope you feel ashamed of yourself with all the children you put at risk with your thoughtless selfish behaviour. Now upload an image of your face certified by a government official and a copy of your birth certificate just to be sure that terrorists, uh criminals, uh child abusers don’t win.

*Please tell me this is the most superfluous /s of all time. *

I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.

I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn’t become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.

That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.

When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

Oh god, my brother started spouting this nonsense at the same time he went vegan (which I don’t have a problem with) and anti-vax (which I REALLY do). He was also really eager to tell me all about how iodised salt was a conspiracy by the government to lower the IQ of the population. Oh and don’t get me started on his take on 9/11.

I wound up telling him I wouldn’t discuss anything further with him unless he could bring receipts.

Nah it’ll be fine, our premier is going to push past commonsense and planning advice to get Hobart an eye sore white elephant stadium. That’ll be a valuable asset to house all the displaced people moving down here.

Honestly if we can’t build houses to match the current trickle of people moving here how do they think we will go when it becomes a flood, plus the government takes decades to do any infrastructure work so even if we throw up some housing you better not want a road capable of handling the traffic flowing to it.

No silly you need to upload your drivers license to some shady 3rd party age verification service to protect 16 year olds from accidentally using dating sites.

They even pinky promised to not store your data in some vibe coded system that will leak it all the first time a hacker so much as scans for api end points.

Now stop asking questions and grant front camera permissions so our AI that is maybe 75% accurate cab guess your age.