Most Australian children have evaded the government’s ban on social media for under-16s, a new survey has found.
Now that is just astonishing, isn’t it?
Most Australian children have evaded the government’s ban on social media for under-16s, a new survey has found.
Now that is just astonishing, isn’t it?
Those who haven’t are to be given remedial IT lessons…
The most valuable thing about porn bans is kids having to learn about computers. Put a barrier between teenage boys and smut and they will go through the labours of Hercules. By the time they’re 16, they’ll know the difference between a VPN and a HTTP Proxy, figure out there are other browsers. If the parents get particularly good, they might be booting Linux from a USB drive.
Personally, I think “under 16” rules are mostly daft for media. 20% of people lose their virginity before they are 16. Sexual activity is going to be a lot higher than that. It’s not some weird, abhorrent thing. It’s more common than people supporting the Conservatives or the Greens.
But everyone infantilises kids nowadays. They don’t have Saturday jobs, they don’t leave school until 18. They have tons of pointless homework piled on them. Kids physically and mentally become adults through puberty. They start to develop their own interests. Most filmmakers started when they were 12 or 13, and not because school showed them, they did it themselves with the family cine camera or video camera and a load of school mates.
Nah, they just need to socialise more.
I wonder how many of them needed a grown up to show them how.
Probably not many. Kids don’t generally get embarrassed by failing at things, which is why they can learn so much faster. And they do teach each other.
Ha Ha I get your point. Square root of not very many at all…
I call my kids when I can’t figure out my phone. If I wanted to find porn, I’d probably have to find some under-30 guy to help me. This whole idea is silly.
So doubling down then?
Ooo, I wonder what MTK will do? “I vow and pledge, cross my heart and hope to die, that I will do whatever is best for the British public. After I’ve had a word with Ursula and Waheed.”
Why not making owning a smart phone only possible for adults? That would give them more power over their children.
Or you know, use the tools that Apple and Google provide that allow parental management of phones where you can limit the apps kids can install, the websites they can go to, and monitor their activity.
This isn’t difficult. They even have an age range thing. Stuff that under 12s can get, 12-15 etc. And you can change settings for things as you think right. Takes literally minutes to set up and it’s a very robust solution that even tech savvy kids would find hard to bypass.
When my kids were small, I had it set up on the PC. They could do homework, maths games. Microsoft erred on the side of banning, and I had to unlock a few things like Wikipedia for them.
In my experience setting up this stuff is too difficult for most people. Too many accounts to create; too many functions; too much choice. People treat phones like modern cars: they can drive them adequately but rarely open the bonnet and have no idea what’s under there (apart from perhaps the oil and screenwash filler caps) when they do.
True enough, but if you hand a tool to your children, you have an obligation to know how powerful and dangerous it is.
It really isn’t. This is the Microsoft guide to setting up parental controls on Windows 11…
https://www.internetmatters.org/parental-controls/smartphones-and-other-devices/windows-11-parental-controls/
I know it really isn’t, but in my experience people just won’t read this stuff. Some of them get me in to do it, which is fine by me and my bank account.
It’s an absolute piece of piss, Norman, seriously.
My wife restricted all access to our router to our kids from 8pm (we have effectively no mobile signal where we live) and beyond that we just banned them from having phones in their rooms until they turned 18. We had rows with them, but we don’t mind a row, and we won. They snuck the odd burner in when they thought we weren’t looking but we always found them and eventually they gave up.
(They now firmly believe we were right. And interestingly my younger brother – who has kids aged 3, 5, and 8 – says parents are pulling together much more on this now, having lived through the worst of it themselves.)
I know it’s a piece of piss if you’re prepared to read instructions.
The key thing in your comment I, is that you were prepared to say no, and meant it. This is something most parents seem incapable of doing these days (although to be fair I remember watching a discussion with plod many, many years ago where a PC was saying the problem they were having with ‘young adults’ was that the Police were the first people telling them they couldn’t do something).
Yep, we decided right from the off that we would stick to what we said and present a united front, and by and large we did that.
It was difficult for my wife as I was overseas a lot during the early years particularly, so she needed a system.
Funny thing is you end up with lovely kids and a lot less heartache.
We had a good friend – an impeccably posh public school girl who had fallen into reading the Guardian – who took the opposite tack and would never chastise her kids for anything. ‘My children will never hear the word No from me,’ she once said.
The son’s okay, but her daughter ran away from home at about 15, was on the game and/or shacked up with much older men, and at twenty-odd now has ballooned to about 15 stone, had multiple abortions, and is a dope-smoking no-hoper.
May not have helped that her dad, a soldier who had been in some very tight spots in his career, had all sorts of what we now call PTSD, and became mildly violent and occasionally deranged at home, and he and his wife split up.
We don’t see the woman at all these days though I’m still in touch with the bloke, and he’s calmed down a lot, so how much of his behaviour was down to his military experiences and how much to living with a lunatic leftist whom he could see was destroying his children’s lives by believing the bollocks she was reading in the ‘newspaper’ I can’t honestly say.
A united front is crucial. The moment a toddler learns to divide and rule you’re fucked.
A good idea – but a friend’s child just bought their own phone – not that expensive – to avoid any parental control.
It would help if schools didn’t use youtube for homework.
That’s a good point.
The thing is, any hobby for any kid, the internet is the place to be. You want to learn programming, movie making, you need to be connected.
A weird anecdote…. remembering back to when I was 8/9/10-ish it was the junior library where all the radio construction books were, and not the adult library next door, where I was allowed in as a precocious reader. so the “restricted” data source had better information than the “open” source.
True although some restriction is possible. Personally the best and 100% effective is paying youtube pro so they don’t see the adverts about how easy trading etc is and think they don’t need to study. Apart from the Green party website, the most dangerous thing on the internet.
Very robust… *if* the kids in question actually use their assigned login profile…..
Because..yknow… you can totally not set up an “adult” profile and use that out of sight of the Parental Units….
Up to …12-ish? yes… will probably work…
When the Kids have entered that Teen stage? Ummm… yeah… Good Luck…
You can’t do that. The parent account is an “admin”, the child account is a “user”. Admin accounts have rights like creating users, installing software, changing settings. User accounts can’t do those things by default. The only way they can do those things is if the Admin grants them rights, or if they figure out the Admin password.
Getting past that is a world of pain. Setting up a server on a cloud, remote desktop to it running a browser on that server and downloading porn. You might as well just find some old pictures of Betty Grable.
yeeeesss…. And how many Parents have their “Admin Account” login creds known by the Teen Units? Hmmm?…
If only because it’s the Teen “fixing the PC/Tablet/Phone”, because the Parents *can’t*….
And that’s not even considering the rather trivial $$ Teens can pay at one of the *many* Phone Repair Shops to either completely flash or rip/dualboot Mobile Devices….
The way to work around *anything* you put in place has been around for well over a decade, approaching two now… And available in every single mall/shopping district in the world..
Oh…. and checking the Kids’ Phone for Shenanigans?
The same Busybodies and Bansturbators who came up with this came up with the Notion that a Kid’s Phone is Private Property, and accessing it in due diligence of your Parental Control is a War Crime against the Rights of the Child…
If there was any more proof needed what utter morons they are…….
My lad went for MAC address spoofing to get around the restrictions I had placed in him. He wasn’t trying to go to naughty sites, he just wanted all the bandwidth.I resorted to VLans and QoS. He resorted to a long ethernet cable.
Top man
Thats thinking laerally (literally!)
Get yourself some port blockers
Only for Adults, eh?
Have to include tablets into that restriction as well… Oh, and laptops, and….
Y’know…. The stuff School uses nowadays instead of pen and paper?
Go on… try it… I can use a laugh….
My daughters 2 year old worked out the PIN on her mums phone.
“that is just babytown frolics”
Apple has already partially done that. If you update to the latest iOS 24.1 (which you pretty much “have” to do because of a terrible internet thingie that has conveniently appeared) then there is an age verification process installed on the device.
In Singapore, South Korea and the United Kingdom (us) the age verification is active. If your Apple account is 18 years old or you have a credit card registered to it, you are automatically verified. Otherwise you will have to scan a credit card or government ID (driving license but not passport) in to your device in order to pass age verification. If you don’t do this, your iPhone or iPad will revert to junior mode with highly restricted internet and settings access along with some monitoring tools enabling Apple to watch your activities.
Before you attack Apple (they do deserve a kicking because they’ve brought this in before there is a legal requirement and then lied that there is such a requirement), be aware that operating system level age verification is coming to everything, everywhere (at least in the consumer market). Very likely to VPNs, too.
By 2030 we’ll be in a different internet.
Shit!!!
Good VPNs are outside the jurisdictions of the “free”, “liberal”, “democracies” intent on limiting free speech, so Gestapoesque outfits like Ofcom may demand but cannot exact legal or financial sanctions on them.
Thank you.
Just got it!
And why does it consider a credit card suitable proof, but not a debit card? And a driving license but not a passport?
You need to be 18 to have a credit card (since it’s a credit arrangement) whereas a debit card can be issued to 11 year olds (maybe even 6 for certain pre-paid types via their parents). As to driving license vs passport, I do not know.
I suspect Apple is using the UK as a guinea pig for this stuff (probably a result of them having to kowtow to other UK government regs). The update installed the same tech on Americans’ iphones but won’t be activated until later (Jan next year for California).
I don’t do auto-updates so my iphone is on some older version (that I can’t be bothered to look up). I use my browser in “private” mode and the phone in “lockdown” mode which apparently protects me against the horrid h@ck anyway (I checked and don’t have the supposed signs of compromise). I also don’t visit dodgy places on it and don’t do important stuff like banking.
Besides, we Apple women can just throw these things in the bin.
“Before you attack Apple (they do deserve a kicking because they’ve brought this in before there is a legal requirement and then lied that there is such a requirement), be aware that operating system level age verification is coming to everything, everywhere (at least in the consumer market). Very likely to VPNs, too.”
Apple stuff is for women who just want a nice looking thing that does Facebook and shopping, and they throw in the bin when it goes wrong. Their customer base are more than happy with this.
The politicians can say this. Now do it practically.
How are you going to stop a kid installing Linux on a laptop? Are customs officers going to check what is on cheapo Temu tablet from China? How do you regulate VPNs or HTTP Proxy, when it’s just an application running on a box, possibly somewhere else in the world. You can block the IP address, and the next day, they change it.
My view on all this is that once a boys balls drop, you might as well let them get on with it. 18 is a ridiculous age, considering puberty is about 12 or 13. They’re going to find something to look at, whether it’s hardcore porn or pictures of Florence Pugh in a sheer dress where you can tell how cold it was.
You’re falling into the trap of thinking this about “protecting” kids. Age verification routines are part of establishing a tracking based internet where anonymity is essentially impossible for normal people doing normal things (such as banking, shopping, gaming or posting on FaceTube). In the future it may indeed be possible to throw an old linux distro onto an old laptop and connect to something using an underground VPN, but it’s going to be for niche stuff in the shark infested waters of the dark web.
If you look at the ways the laws are being drafted around the world, it’s all about penalties on “third parties”. A website, service or app has to check in with a connecting device / OS / browser to see that age verification has been done. Because fines, if they can’t tick that box they’re going to block the connection. Age verification today, digital ID tomorrow (to “protect” us from h@ckers, etc)
You should be able to see that sooner or later only “permitted” devices will be able to connect to anything public facing. Eventually even timworstall.com will have to comply and you won’t be able to natter here anonymously. Tim has fewer tech skillz than us Apple women, so don’t expect to find his secret tavern up the old pirate lane.
Good!!!
Now I can get the kids to show me how to use it!!
Amen. People have kids so they will show them how to use modern tech.
At what age do people learn how to take surveys?
“Do you use ____ on your phone?”
“No, mate.”
But let’s rewind it a bit. How do you survey ‘under-16s?’
I have a feeling “Who dafuq are you?!!” and “None of your business, mate…” are not taken into account as a percentage of the answers given, as usual…
Or are lumped into that “still have access” percentage, because if they don’t want to anwer Shiney Honest Pollsters they must have something to hide..
But you have to laugh…
If you posit the average understanding of how phones and the internet work by the Politicians and Bansturbators wanting that Ban at 1….
Then the average understanding *and ability* of a 12-16 yr. old regarding those matters ranges from….100 to the Avogadro number.
Especially when there’s Incentives, like when “Adults” try to keep them from Fun Stuff and think a Law is going to magically stop them….
This problem is being approached from the wrong angle.
Although age verification checks are easy to by-pass, all children betray themselves through their behaviour online; every how one physically interacts with a device can be a giveaway as to age. The sites know exactly how old everyone of their users is. They know where every child goes to school and even which class they are in.
A child cannot successfully pretend to be an adult no matter how mature he thinks he is because he is a child. You will get a few false positives from children near sixteen but for the vast majority of cases the sites know with 100% accuracy which of their users are children.
Which they are not , y’know….., *supposed* to know, because they’re Definitely Not Doing That Kind of Profiling… Honest Guv’ner…..
“all children betray themselves by their behaviour…”
Not universally true: I remember that one of my childhood friends (now sadly deceased) used to habitually behave like a gentlemanly adult even as a pre-teen – but that shouldn’t be a problem as anyone like that would not be seeking to access porn sights or gambling hells.
“every how one physically interacts with a device can be a giveaway as to age. The sites know exactly how old everyone of their users is. They know where every child goes to school and even which class they are in.”
I would love to know how you know this. When a request hits a webserver, it knows the IP address of the sender, and it will have some headers with it. Headers are things like languages that you accept, file types you accept, browser and device type and referrer. It’s mostly information to help improve the response. If you only accept French, it gives you the French text. If you’re on a mobile, maybe it reduces the content.
https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-http-headers-is-my-browser-sending
An IP address can tell you the country, and in some places a region or state. I think US states have allocated blocks, the UK doesn’t. You can’t even tell Scotland from England.
The problem is that once you get a VPN involved, the IP address that the server receives is the IP address of the VPN. It’s like taking a letter with a British stamp on it, taking it out of the envelope and putting it in another one with a Norwegian stamp. The webserver is like “This came from Norway” and it behaves accordingly. And when it sends a letter back to Norway, the reply is taken out and sent on to England.
“A child cannot successfully pretend to be an adult no matter how mature he thinks he is because he is a child. You will get a few false positives from children near sixteen but for the vast majority of cases the sites know with 100% accuracy which of their users are children.”
How are you going to determine from the data that it’s a man watching Sasha Grey and not a 15 year old? Do you think an interest in Hello Kitty is limited to 14 year old girls instead of 21 year old women? You could take things written by 12-15 year olds, and things 16-19 and train an AI model to do some Bayesian sorting, but I think the false positives would be huge.
You might be able to look at some writing and think it’s a child, but it’s about making a machine figure that out, and reliably.
And at a certain point, the answer is: they’re you’re fucking kids. Parent them. Martell are not responsible if you leave the Cognac out and the kids get hammered. Toyota are not responsible if you leave the keys out. And those are far more risky than a 14 year old seeing a blowjob.
Doesn’t this actually suggest some hope for the future generation of Aussies as they have been getting a reputation for being a little too compliant.
In other breaking news, most Australians under 16 have had a drink and a smoke too.
Did anyone believe this was going to work?
Oh yeah, the search for 16 year old virgins might be a bit difficult too. No wonder we can’t catch those damn unicorns.
Short of the IT professionals, any adult who thinks they are staying ahead of the kids on tech is smoking their socks. Best you can do is work on their morality.
I dunno. Speaking as a GenXer, I grew up throughout the 8 & 16 bit era, back when playing a game meant typing it in out of the pages of a magazine. So I’m pretty savvy about the inner workings of computers, tech and t’internet.
I reckon a large proportion of ‘da yoof’ has as much idea about the workings of modern technology as my gran has of quantum electrodynamics, and she’s dead.
You only have to see the success of Apple to know that a very large proportion of users see modern technology as the equivalent of a kitchen appliance, can turn it on and use the telly-tubby interface, but not much else.
This just in:
“Under-16s in Australia have gotten together and decided they are going to lock adults out of social media.”
Cheer Gamecock. This means I won’t be able to make my inane comments on Tim’s blog anymore!!!