The IT Thread

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's weird to think there are still cars with manual transmission. It seems like that should have been done away with a long time ago.

FREEDOM!!!!!

I learned to work a manual transmission at the intersection of Fifth and Harrison, Alexandria, In. 1967. The Y-donor signed for the car, my first with a stick, and drove off. The learning curve was steep.

[pattylt]

Until my knees became too damaged to work a clutch all the time, I loved my various standard transmissions. Our Jeep Wrangler is still a manual. Heck, I learned to drive on a manual. I prefer driving my car to just aiming it down the road. And you can easily jumpstart a manual.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Neither system is 100% better than the other. When I go to Telluride I'm riding a stick. Automatics tend to make bad decisions and a 1,000 foot drop isn't that forgiving.

[pattylt]

My Rogue allows me to set which gear I want by sliding the shift to the left. Then I can go up or down gears with a forward or back pull. It does allow me to decide which gear I want when I don’t agree with the automatic. It’s one of the few features I like on this vehicle. Mostly, I hate this SUV. It doesn’t do well in snow and ice, even with snow tires. Yes, I do know how to drive in those conditions and I know how to get unstuck…except this one.

[Rizen]

I've been busy setting up a website and facebook page for when my book launches. Anyone else use wix? It's really cool what you can do and fairly easy. I'm learning as I go but I think it's looking good. I added a contact page where you can type in a comment and it goes strait to my author email.

[SYZ]

Lately I've been finding YouTube videos very, very slow to
start loading, and to finish loading. The page starts to render
apparently okay, but then stops, and starts again from scratch.

I'm using its "dark" mode. Could that be an issue?

My connection (FTN) is running at 45 down and 12 up.
Win 11 Home 64 bit, Firefox 145.0.1, and a YouTube ad-blocker.

[mordant]

Lately I've been finding YouTube videos very, very slow to
start loading, and to finish loading.  The page starts to render
apparently okay, but then stops, and starts again from scratch.

I'm using its "dark" mode.  Could that be an issue?

My connection (FTN) is running at 45 down and 12 up.
Win 11 Home 64 bit, Firefox 145.0.1, and a YouTube ad-blocker.

We've got all Mac hardware and one particular machine will hesitate like this for reasons I can't make sense of. I'm a software dev, not a sysadmin, so I'm planning to hire a good networking guy to evaluate the setup here. The only variable I can see is the machine is new-ish and has the latest WiFi hardware, but the hot spots here are based on an aging Google mesh network setup. So maybe there's a backward compatibility issue. IDK. It's above my pay grade really. I don't want to thrash around and spend several hundred bucks on new hardware only to find the situation unchanged (or worse).

[Rizen]

It was a cat-astrophe!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Computer
Aided
Tomography

[SYZ]

Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

Services that Australian eSafety considers will be age-restricted
social media platforms:

   Facebook
   Instagram

   Kick
   Reddit

   Snapchat
   Threads

   TikTok
   Twitch

   X   (formerly Twitter)
   YouTube

An Australian court can order civil penalties for platforms that
don’t take reasonable steps to prevent underage users from
having accounts on their platforms. This includes court-imposed
fines of up to AU$49.5 million.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And I'm betting school kids are passing along workarounds for all that.

[brewerb]

Did they define or give examples of what would be considered "reasonable steps"? That's very ambiguous, my guess is no.

[SYZ]

Did they define or give examples of what would be considered "reasonable steps"? That's very ambiguous, my guess is no.

Yes, a very flexible term indeed.  I guess "steps" that the company is
actually capable of developing and maintaining in order to comply with
the as-yet unpublished Federal legislation.  I can't even guess what
defines a site as "unsuitable" for the under-16s to view?

Some are obvious; bestiality, incest, paedophilia, torture and snuff, illicit
drugs and alcohol sales, calls to anarchy, racism and sexism, neo-Nazism,
and all/any of the other stuff that should also be banned from adult sites.

I personally don't have any issue with PornHub or Chaturbate or the
WorldWatch, but then I absolutely wouldn't want my 12-year-old son
or 8-year-old daughter going anywhere near those sorts of sites.      

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I used to work for State Farm, an auto insurance company, as a claims adjuster while I was in grad school. "Reasonable" meant "if it doesn't cause a problem." Deliberately ambiguous to allow wiggle room for enforcement people. Then it would go to the courts if "the Vigoro hit the Mixmaster".

[SYZ]

Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts...

Today's followup story from the Guardian Australia:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...-moustache

An Instagram notification was sent to a test account with the age
set to 15, to see what would happen when the under-16s social
media ban came into effect. Instagram subsequently sent a
notification:

“You will not be able to use your Instagram account until you’ve
turned 16. This means you can’t use Instagram and your profile
won’t be visible to you or others until then.

“We’ll let you know when you can use Instagram again.”

[Paleophyte]

Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

How much effect do you think this will have on the average Australian teen? It feels about as useful as legislating away teen sex. Proscription for proscription's sake and little else.

[SYZ]

Here in Australia, From 10 December 2025, age‐restricted
all social media platforms must take reasonable steps to
prevent Australians under 16 years of age from having
accounts. This follows amendments to the Online Safety
Act 2021 in late‐2024 to introduce a social media minimum
age framework under the Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA)
obligations.

How much effect do you think this will have on the average Australian teen? It feels about as useful as legislating away teen sex. Proscription for proscription's sake and little else.

Hard to say.  Teenagers are currently very IT literate in Australia,
and I'm sure they'll find ways to easily circumvent proving their
identity and real age details.  (Many Aussie parents simply don't
know and/or care what sort of sites their kids are accessing... sadly.)

I've read of people fooling some sites demanding identity by simply
holding up three colour A4 photos of their face; front, left and right
profiles—and moving them slightly.

I think a lot of it's gonna come back to parental control of tweenies'
mobile phones' access to specific overseas servers or IP addresses etc.

Maybe this?

   The Best Parental Control Apps for Your Phone.