Linkage

Another brilliant rant from Girl on the Net. [Standard disclaimer: She's a sex blogger, so some of the ads on her site may not be the sort you want your boss to see over your shoulder. Assuming you read blogs during working hours. And if not, why not?]

Wiki isn’t the only site concerned about censorship, though, and early implementation of age verification in the UK shows that it – like any attempt to regulate ‘porn’ – ends up catching a lot of other content too. Reddit users have already begun documenting subreddits that have been age-gated, including support forums for sexual assault survivors and help on how to quit smoking. On top of this, a tonne of LGBTQ+ content and sex education has already been caught in the net. Expect much much more of this to happen going forward.

This isn’t a question of just getting the government to write in exemptions, either. Although Wikipedia may earn an exemption through the court case (I hope it does), one of the core problems with the Online Safety Act in implementation is that the definitions are incredibly broad and the penalties are potentially extremely harsh. Websites need to assess whether they have a ‘significant number’ of UK users – what’s significant? 10% of total traffic? 10 people? 10,000 visitors per month? They also need to consider whether it’s likely to be accessed by children. What does that mean – ‘likely’? Sites which aren’t marketed to children or shared in any spaces where children are likely to be browsing… are they exempt? We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that sites which do not comply will be investigated by Ofcom, and potentially fined up to 10% of their annual revenue or £18 million – whichever is greater. The chilling effect of penalties like this, especially when combined with ‘guidance’ from the regulator that could generously be described as ‘vague’ means that any site with any content that could potentially be classed as ‘harmful to children’ would be taking a giant leap into the expensive unknown if they didn’t proactively comply. And compliance with ‘age verification’ is costly and time consuming: I personally can’t afford to do it, which is why I’ve just blanket blocked UK users from hearing the audio. Many other sites – both adult and non-adult – are coming to the same conclusion. Check out the Blocked page, from the Open Rights Group, which is tracking site closures and blocks as a result of the Act. Submit any sites you know of that are doing this too – let’s keep track of what we’re losing.

So there’s another harm: you’re not just losing access to this content unless you hand over private details, in many many cases (particularly with smaller sites and services) you’re losing access to it entirely. Even flashing your passport won’t get you to the content, because the site owner can’t afford to hire a bouncer to check your ID.

[…]

The UK government’s implementation of AV, without any exemption or concession for small sites, essentially means that those with the deepest pockets will get the most traffic. That means the large, ‘free’ porn tube sites – already an extremely dominant force in the adult industry, hoovering up a lot of the money and even shaping how we define ‘porn’ in the first place – will only become bigger and more powerful. Meanwhile those smaller sites trying to swim against the tide, offering a view of sexuality that is broader and more diverse than what you see on the front page of TubeFuck will struggle to get traction. As TechDirt put it this week:

   “This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.”

The system working as intended:

A National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) service provider was allowed to pocket more than $1 million by incorrectly billing for personal training services, while at least 4,000 other providers also incorrectly charged Australians with disability, the federal government says.

The provider that incorrectly billed for more than $1 million charged disabled Australians $193.99 an hour, nearly three times the government's recommended price.

The rort centres on a category of service called "other professionals", which was intended for services provided by a qualified therapist to deliver evidence-based supports.

However, unscrupulous providers submitted a range of other claims under that item, including payments for decluttering, personal training, golf lessons, float tanks and horse therapy.

The crackdown is part of a broader censorship of crucial sexual and reproductive health and rights information tracked by global NGO ReproUncensored all around the world.

Founder and executive director Martha Dimitratou told Index they have documented nearly 600 cases across big tech platforms in Australia and globally, with more than a dozen new cases reported in just the last few days.

Dimitratou said that Australia’s world-first teen social media ban, introduced last year and now set to be followed by about 20 other countries, could be to blame.

Adam Finch, marketing, branding and communications coordinator for Brisbane-based nonprofit HIV charity, Queensland Positive People, said that he had recently had one set of the same posts approved one day but then censored the next.

“I think we’ve just managed to dodge a bullet (but) in many ways it’s a matter of time,” he told Index, adding that they were starting to self-censor.

Dimitratou said that Meta and Google must be held accountable and provide full transparency on why awareness campaigns were being restricted.

“They must take immediate steps to ensure their moderation systems do not block lawful, evidence-based public health information,” she said.

“Finally, governments must reclaim democratic oversight from the growing sovereignty of US big tech companies, enforce the law, and call these practices what they are: illegal.”

This article presents findings from a para-ethnographic research/practice partnership with the National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA). Community-led public health organisations such as NAPWHA practice both public and counterpublic health promotion. They seek to work with and advocate for their constituent communities, while also seeking to work against public discourses stigmatising sex, drug use, sex work, and HIV. However, social media platforms increasingly suppress health promotion content as ‘sexual solicitation’, ‘misinformation’, or inappropriately ‘political’. At the same time, NAPWHA member organisations’ social media accounts are increasingly targeted by trolling and abuse framed as ‘freedom of speech’. Findings reveal the challenges of engaging people living with HIV (PLHIV) within the fragmented publics of contemporary digital health communication. Findings highlight the existential threats that social media platform policy and governance pose both to the political subjectivity of communities affected by HIV, and to public health promotion and outreach more broadly.

In 2016, 44.6% of MX-publishing domains in the top million ran their own mail server. In the 18 July 2026 snapshot that figure is 22.4% - and it is still falling, down another half a percentage point in the last thirty days alone.

[…]

The domains didn't disappear; they moved. Google Workspace now receives mail for 21.8% of MX-publishing domains and Microsoft 365 for 16.8%. Together that is 38.6% of the measured Internet's inbound mail behind two companies. Nobody else comes close: the next named provider, Proofpoint, sits at 1.9%.

It is easy to read this as a market-share story, but for this community it is really a resilience story. The RIPE community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralisation; email is following the same path, just more quietly. When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback - a rejected message is simply gone.

There is a second-order effect too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean.
 

The Age newspaper estimated 6,000 participants, but based on my own experiences at marches, and comparing this crowd to past pro-Palestine rallies that have attracted anywhere between 3-30,000 people, I think the crowd was at least 10,000 strong. It was overwhelmingly white and skewed older and male.

The next observation I made was how incoherent the rally was. There was no clear structure, co-ordination, agenda, strategy or directions. The participants were also motivated by various grievances. The anti-immigration strain was quite clearly the most prominent, but there were sizable blocs agitated by Victorian state government policies, tax, and over-policing.

[…]

Some have pointed to these contradictions and suggested that the rally was a bust because the messaging was confused and uncoordinated. I think it’s important to understand that this is the case at most large rallies, including those organised by the left. The fact the first such rally of this scale, organised by the far-right, did not have message discipline is not really a surprise.

What’s more important, and became quite clear to me, is that whatever organisation and discipline there was, was being provided by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network, led by Thomas Sewell.

The heavy police presence in the CBD was overwhelmingly focused on blocking and disrupting the counter-protest. This effectively let the March for Australia take over the CBD and pour into whatever streets, lanes and public places they saw fit. It resulted in Sewell addressing the rally from the steps of Victorian Parliament, delivering white supremacist slogans to a crowd of thousands that cheered back in support and encouragement.

The same pattern played out across the country. Despite attempts to portray the march as somehow de-linked from organised far-right activists, it was quite obvious who was running the show.

The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The defendant, Sam Tunick, was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

[…]

Marlon Kautz, a member of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, said: “We all have a right to secure our private data against unconstitutional searches. And we should – especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, Boutry, who lives in France, said Tunick’s case was of a piece with tendencies in France and Spain, where authorities have been frustrated in attempts to gain access to the phones of journalists, lawyers and political opponents due to GrapheneOS.

In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people with Google Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members.

At the same time, Boutry said, the “main goal [of the operating system] is protection of privacy”.

“They’re our phones and the state can’t tell us how to use them.”

Way back in the late 1990s, more than a quarter of a century ago, the consumer price index (CPI) used to actually reflect the cost of living. It included all of the big costs incurred by households, including – importantly – mortgage interest payments. At the time, mortgages accounted for an average of $5 of every $100 each wage earner spent.

Then in September 1998, in response to representations from the Reserve Bank and the Treasury, the bureau changed the way it calculated the index. It excluded mortgage and other interest payments, in a decision it acknowledged would make the index worse at measuring living costs.

[…]

While the consumer price index (the one quoted by the treasurer) increased 5.4% in the year to September, the living cost index for households headed by wage earners climbed 9%.

For these working households, the price of food climbed 4.8% in the year to September, the price of electricity 14.5% and the price of mortgage interest charges 68%.

It’s the increases in mortgage rates that have made the increases in the other prices hurt so much.

The overall increase in prices faced by wage-earners – 9% – is way above the typical wage increase of 4%.

Bill Mitchell of the University of Newcastle points out that on this measure, the correct one, the buying power of wages has been falling for two and a half years. He says it puts the treasurer’s comments in a wholly different light.

I think this is interesting — certainly clever — and similar in its way to proposals by Bob Hockett and Saule Omarova where they try to squeeze their ideal US financial sector reforms into a shape that requires as little new legislation or disruption to existing agencies as possible. For my money, I think it's essential to establish the MMT Job Guarantee as a clear model for other public provision of essential goods and services, rather than trying to smuggle it in. I mean, neoliberals are not averse to imposing "shock therapy"; why shouldn't we implement our own bold "pleasant surprise therapy"?

The Minimum Wage Jobs (MWJ) Framework is the most operationally efficient version of a Job Guarantee for the United Kingdom. It achieves the dual objective of a modern stabilisation system: eliminating involuntary unemployment while providing a permanent anchor for inflation.

[…]

The framework is a fully distributed policy that requires no new agencies, committees, or open-ended ministerial powers. It functions as a seamless extension of the existing tax and benefit architecture, operating automatically across every region and nation of the UK. The system is designed to be “light-touch,” integrating seamlessly with the distinct tax policies of devolved governments. By processing payments through the established PAYE and RTI frameworks, the policy scales to local needs rather than through central command.

Implementation is pragmatic and low-risk. One-off implementation costs are conservatively estimated at £100 million, with annual running costs under £50 million: less than the current cost of operating the Monetary Policy Committee and the Debt Management Office.

I don't usually follow the Federal Budget nonsense, as it's generally a lot of content-free platitudes and political horse race analysis, but my friend and colleague Kev seemed certain that the Albanese government (of all people) were taking a step in the right direction. So my cynicism led me to seek out business lobby press releases, half-expecting to find smoking guns all over the place. I was wrong. Of course the business lobby are not going to announce "This is fine!" They are professional whingers. To them, it's always the end of the world. However this one sunny exception stood out:

AFIA is also assessing announced changes to negative gearing, set to be limited to new residential property builds, and the decision to replace the 50 per cent CGT discount with cost base indexation and a minimum 30 per cent tax from July 2027, applying to all existing CGT assets.

“In terms of our housing markets, it is pleasing to see the government balance these major tax reforms with complementary supply-side measures – establishing a $2 billion local infrastructure fund and putting $227 million towards accelerating environment and planning approvals.”

"Supply side measures" means public subsidies (such as the 5% Deposit Scheme and the Help to Buy Scheme) to maintain the steady supply of borrowers that are the bread and butter of the finance industry, and critical to keeping property prices inflating at the pretty constant rate of the last quarter century.