News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps... by ryandrake on Wednesday July 30, 2025 @07:55PM (#44740929)
> The real kicker to me is that the government has passed a law restricting access yet they haven't determined how they're going to enforce an age check. It's wild that they passed a law without consideration to its mechanics or feasibility.

I predict it won't even matter. This law is unenforceable in practice. There is nothing that a bored and highly-motivated teenager who has hours after school to fuck around, won't be able to circumvent. I think back to my teenage years: None of the half-assed attempts made to keep teenagers away from booze, cigarettes, drugs, or porn even remotely worked. These things were readily available to anyone who wanted them. If there is an "I am an adult" digital token, teenagers will easily figure out how to mint them. If the restrictions can be bypassed with VPNs, that's what they will do.

Re:Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps... by __jochen__ on Thursday July 31, 2025 @07:05AM (#44744377)
Amazing! Do you have some spare time? Can you quickly mint me a BTC token please. kthxbai ;)
Re:Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps... by giantg2 on Thursday July 31, 2025 @09:20AM (#44745364)
Stealing them is a possibility too. I think the point is still valid.
Re:Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps... by __jochen__ on Thursday July 31, 2025 @11:23PM (#44752721)
From a technical perspective there is so much you can do to secure things, including against theft. While it's hard to lock things down past 99.9% usage, it is not too hard to make token issuance secure enough for practical, wide-spread use (there are a plethora of crypto protocols out there to prove the point).

There's no guarantee that the government will pick the best standard, but one can hold out hope (e.g. when the US govt adopted Rijndael as the AES encryption standard).