A new start after 60: I found my feet in midlife, became a park ranger at 85 – and retired happily at 100

What do young Australians think about the 'Social Media Ban'? Join young people and researchers online to find out what the upcoming changes mean for 12-15 year olds from around Australia. 🗓 Mon, 1 Dec 2025 ⏰ 9:00am Perth ⏰ 11:00am Bris ⏰ 12:00pm Syd/Melb 👉 www.eventbrite.com.au/e/webinar-am...

Who is the target audience for GenAI comics of law journal articles (in my case about a court case I worked on from 2009 - 2011)? Academia churning about AI slop ...

Who is the target audience for GenAI comics of law journal articles (in my case about a court case I worked on from 2009 - 2011)? Academia churning about AI slop ...

This is so good. A beautiful antidote for a f*cked up world.

If ever science journalism needs reviving, it's today. It once had a strong position in the MSM, but it's been buried under the diverting fluff that passes for commercial journalism today. My review of SouthWest's 'Best Australian Science Writing 2025': www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/book...

And yet our Prime Minister persists in using X while banning social media for under 16s ...

Sat in a room last week with human rights defenders from Gaza and Sudan saying how to get, transmit and verifiably archive video of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide People are risking their lives to report on drones wiping out families as GenAI destroys the ability to believe them.

"According to Forbes, no fewer than 28 billionaires donated at least $100,000 to stop Mamdani ...".

Note this is eSafety's current assessment & focus from a compliance perspective. Other platforms like Bluesky & Mastodon fit within the definition of age-restricted social media platform & could become a focus for enforcement.

Sora 2 is not being “misused” when people use it to produce racist, transphobic, misogynistic, & otherwise vile images—it exists to make it easier to put these images out into the world. Calling it a “misuse” is a grave misunderstanding of what these companies are up to, & lets OpenAI off the hook.

Reddit and Kick included in the list of platforms required to ban under 16s. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

My @altlj.bsky.social article providing an overview of Australia’s social media minimum age laws is now online: #auslaw

One month out from the under-16s ban and almost all of the users caught up in the Discord data breach caused by age assurance appeals were based in Australia, OAIC has finally confirmed. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Australia’s biggest problem isn’t the next crisis — it’s the growing gap between those who sail through it and those who drown in it. If we can afford inequity, we can afford to fix it. www.thespencerstreetend.com.au/p/built-for-...

Anglicare Australia says @tanyaplibersekmp.bsky.social's plan to give police powers to have Centrelink payments stopped for people accused of a serious crime is “completely at odds with the principles of fairness and justice”. Thank you @caitkelly.bsky.social for reporting.

We really need to have this debate in Australia too

My @altlj.bsky.social article providing an overview of Australia’s social media minimum age laws is now online: #auslaw

Wow, Services Australia spent three quarters of a million in legal fees fighting a losing FOI fight against @daedalus.eigenmagic.com

The ACCC has commenced proceedings against Microsoft for allegedly misleading approximately 2.7 million Australian customers when communicating subscription options & price increases, after it integrated its AI assistant, Copilot, into Microsoft 365 plans: #auslaw

Labor rules out giving tech giants free rein to mine copyright content to train AI #auslaw

Mid-spring at Parliament and the #bees are loving it! Great start to the season.

City of Melbourne is planning to expand its use of CCTV: have your say on the draft policy by Wednesday 29th October 2025 participate.melbourne.vic.gov.au/safe-city-ca...

"Maybe we try to become skeptical of the idea that the least powerful people are the most responsible for our problems. Maybe we punch up instead of punching the neighbor." ~ @bedoyausa.bsky.social (There's themes here also relevant to Australia.)

Do you know anyone interested in becoming the Irish Language Officer for Wikimedia Community Ireland? #Wikimedia #Wikipedia #Ireland #IrishLanguage #Irish #Gaeilge

<If> the AWS outage that brought down a chunk of the global cloud is a "DNS issue", let's all remember that DNS - the globally distributed domain name system - is remarkably simple and resilient. It was designed that way. But concentrating DNS <resolution> in a couple of chokepoints is fragile.

"Maybe we try to become skeptical of the idea that the least powerful people are the most responsible for our problems. Maybe we punch up instead of punching the neighbor." ~ @bedoyausa.bsky.social (There's themes here also relevant to Australia.)

And you can learn more about the campaign for a national Human Rights Act here #auslaw

Meet our Fellow @nidhalaigh.bsky.social, who is recognised as an international leader in the regulation & governance of data & digital technologies – including AI, the internet & 3D printing. Find out more about Angela and her work➡️ acss.org.uk/professor-an...

NEW NEWSLETTER: “The Weekly Cybers #89” Deloitte’s corrected report needed more corrections, discourse continued as Australia’s social media age restrictions loom, and much more. buttondown.com/stilgherrian...

Injecting some facts into the 'Victoria is the crime capital of Australia' debate - these are the latest (2023-24) offenders per 100,000 ppl figures from the ABS. Even if they've gone up by 16% in the last year, as reported, they're still the lowest of any state.

eSafety's new "hub" of resources on the social media minimum age restrictions. On the key question of what platforms are age-restricted, eSafety notes it "will have more to say about the platforms it considers must comply with the age restrictions over the coming weeks."

Glasgow City Council has a whole sovereign citizen FAQ whoever wrote this was so very tired glasgow.gov.uk/whyyouneedto...

Victorian agronomist, Tony Rinaudo, has been awarded an international peace prize for a farming technique that has revolutionised farms in Niger.

"Every age assumes the dislocations of its time are exceptional, but the present one seems particularly indifferent to earlier moments of technologically induced disequilibrium."

The Minister states the purpose of the law is clear - "so young Australians have three more years to build real world connections and online resilience." The legislation says the purpose of the law is "to reduce the risk of harm to age-restricted users from certain kinds of social media platforms."

OpenAI has also been asked to assess whether Sora 2 should be included in the social media ban by eSafety. Sora 2 isn't yet available in Australia.

Here's what she told them fwiw www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Props to Project Rockit for bringing an actual young person, Caitlin Blanch, to speak to the committee given the policies are about them but mostly excludes them.

As I wrote before the legislation even hit parliament www.theguardian.com/media/articl...

I love this piece and glad this part was noted: "The question of who wins or who loses in Triangle Posting Politics is divorced from material conditions, justice, or the common good."

"Tokenism dosesn’t cut it. We’re at a defining moment. Act accordingly."

Another useful overview of digital policy in Australia #auslaw

"Politicising" an event for politicians. I see. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

The full "Privacy Guidance on Part 4A (Social Media Minimum Age) of the Online Safety Act 2021" is here: www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/priv... #Privacy #Australia #SocialMediaBan [4/4]

On the vanquishing, for now, of chat control: "if we didn’t have to expend most our energies saying ‘No’ to this stupid, ghastly shit, and saying ‘No’ to the stupid, ghastly shit of the tech oligarchs, what might we have built instead? How productively and joyfully could we be spending our lives?

Seems like many are only now becoming aware that the law only requires platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under 16s from having an *account*: > if a site does not have accounts, then no action (under this law) is required > under 16s can still view content accessible without an account

What strikes me about this is how much more clearly incriminating chats with ChatGPT are going to be than Google searches in criminal investigations

Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said the next phase would be voting on whether to incorporate artificial intelligence video analysis into the monitoring system. "We are seeing the way that cities around the world are embracing these new technologies to keep people safe," the Lord Mayor said ...