Current Events > Australia: "this is a kid's brain on C++" (real)

(+) Yeah! (+)

GitHub, along with several other platforms, might be damaging to kids, according to Australias watchdog. The commission is investigating which companies will need to comply with age restrictions coming into effect in December.

Australias eSafety Commissioner has fired off a letter to GitHub, asking the Microsoft-owned code-sharing giant to consider whether it should be treated like a social media platform that endangers children.

Starting December 10th, Australias new rules will ban teens under 16 from using certain social media platforms deemed harmful to kids.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and X are on the suspect list. But according to ABC News, regulators have also been contacting other platforms, including GitHub, to see if they meet the legal definition of social network.

https://cybernews.com/news/australia-github-age-restriction-kids-protection/

Github is as much of a social media platform as Slack is lmfao
(barring a few meme repositories)

The danger of learning something useful

this sounds weird that they are targeting a coding site. Is someone mad that kids wont get addicted to chatbots for coding?

Frankly I hope nothing more than for the worlds websites to turn around to this unelected puffed-up arrogant unqualified (she literally has zero qualifications regarding children and the internet) possible-foreign interest asset and tell her to kick sand over this.

The laws aren't even actionable legally. Its just going to be a massive utter shit show where big corporations will use it as an excuse to start mass compiling facial meta-data of the entire nation (if I were to put on my tinfoil hat I'd even bet money that was half the purpose of the entire bill, to shovel all of our data to Thiel and his Palantir bullshit as a massive nation-wide labrat test before rolling out a similar system in the US) and everybody with half a brain cell simply turns to using VPNs and changing their DNS'.

Not to mention for all the squealing about "for the children!!!!" the reality is they're all going to do two things about this. They'll bypass it day 1 hour 1 or they'll start using extremely unsafe websites (not to mention a lot of them will bypass it using unsafe free VPN services, doing both at the same time).

Absolute fucking shitshow. Shame on the Federal Labor government and f*** this democracy-circumventing persons policies.

Australia with another horrible censorship take. Must be another day that ends in y.

I can see the underlying logic, but no. Just no.

Bump

_____Cait posted...

this sounds weird that they are targeting a coding site. Is someone mad that kids wont get addicted to chatbots for coding?

I think it is just obsession with one particular metric to the detriment of everything else, including common sense

The site is pretty much full of discussion spaces / comment areas. This is important so people can leave bug reports, plan new program features, discuss changes to code, etc. So, if you were really, really intent on making sure kids did not interact with adults online you might want to restrict it, but like... that's just dumb

Charged151 posted...

Australia with another horrible censorship take. Must be another day that ends in y.

How so?