Who could have predicted that age-gating large sections of the internet in a crusade to shield children's eyeballs from vaguely defined "harmful content" would have disastrous consequences and wouldn't ultimately protect kids? Apparently, the United Kingdom's online regulator, Ofcom, couldn't. 

On Thursday, Ofcom released a report assessing whether the government should make changes to the content categories of the 2023 Online Safety Act, a set of laws which require companies operating in the U.K. to prevent children from "accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise." The act's "child safety regime" (Ofcom's words) went fully into effect in 2025, when porn websites in the country began checking IDs. Unfortunately, as Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has pointed out, the age-verification rule has impacted far more than adult websites. Already, the Online Safety Act has age-gated a wide range of content, including war news, the "NoFap" subreddit, and a historic art image, creating a mass chilling effect online. 

Ofcom's report, however, says little about these age-gating concerns for adults, and its own findings highlight the act's underwhelming results. In the report, Ofcom notes that "Most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period." It adds that "at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children's safety duties came into force in July 2025." So, it appears the act is requiring adults to fork over their IDs to access a wide range of content, some of which is innocuous, while playing a never-ending and unsuccessful game of whack-a-mole trying to eliminate "harmful" online content from kids' feeds. 

Instead of suggesting to repeal the Online Safety Act because it does not seem to be working or because it imperils online freedom, Ofcom's report proposes to broaden the law's scope. The regulator recommends adding "body stigma content and depression content, currently identified by Ofcom as kinds of non-designated content, to the category of priority content that is harmful to children." Priority content is defined as "content that services must protect/minimise the risk of children in age groups judged to be at risk of harm from encountering." In other words, online platforms could have more reasons to potentially age-gate, block, or avoid publishing out of fear of violating the law. 

The report does not address the U.K. government's plans to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing social media, and Ofcom says it will soon publish an assessment of "what highly effective age assurance looks like" for determining whether someone is 16 or older. But if the social media ban unfolds anything like it did in Australia, where kids are easily circumventing it, it is likely to flop, just as the Online Safety Act has.

The post The U.K.'s Online Safety Act Has Been a Failure. Regulators Want To Broaden It Anyway. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

There has been much consternation this week about the use of fake polls in the media, with some government officials promising swift, and legally dubious, punishments for broadcasters that use them. 

The use of these fake polls came to light on Wednesday, when The New York Times reported that "well-known polling aggregators," including the paper itself, had been citing fake surveys by Wedgewood Polls. The fake polling scheme was revealed when the outlet FivePlusOne contacted Wedgewood Tuesday for comment about an investigation into the pollster. That night, Wedgewood posted a now-deleted statement declaring that it was an "experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall barrier to entry in the modern polling industry." The fake pollster claimed it was "far too easy" to be taken seriously in media and public commentary. 

A similar "social experiment" was revealed in August, when the Los Angeles Times reported that a poll by Median Strategies showing Mayor Karen Bass "leading ahead of Councilmember Nithya Raman by a wide margin" was "bogus." An earlier poll by Median Strategies showed Francesca Hong, who lost her race for Wisconsin governor, up by more than 20 percentage points. Median Strategies told the Times that the firm was "created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."

If Wedgewood's polling stunts were in fact social experiments (pollster Nate Silver is very skeptical of this explanation), then the experiment worked. Nobody is completely immune to deceit. And while savvy media consumers have become more attuned to detecting AI writing and video fakes, masses of people still fall for more than fake polls, as they have for a long time.

In 2018, when the word "slop" meant food for pigs and before anyone wrote posts using ChatGPT, the Intelligencer asked the question: "How much of the Internet is fake?" The answer, the outlet concluded, was "a lot."

At the time, Reason's Nick Gillespie noted that the article was a "sobering and obvious revelation that much of what we browse, engage, and interact with is in some fundamental way, total bullshit." Gillespie solemnly observed, "we're living not in the disintermediated, utopian world chronicled in the early days of Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe's Wired, but something closer to the endlessly creative, weird, off-kilter, semi-insane world imagined by Philip K. Dick and, later, Neal Stephenson."

Eight years later, the "semi-insane" world is no less insane, and humans, as they always have, are falling prey to increasingly intricate schemes and hoaxes. In September, Semafor's Max Tani revealed that a large number of YouTube videos—several of which garnered hundreds of thousands of views—were made by "ghost creators." In these videos, presented as news reports, real actors were paid to read AI-written scripts "laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods." According to Tani, these "accounts appear to be run not by political operatives trying to win, or foreign intelligence efforts seeking to destabilize the US, but by engagement junkies detached from the stakes of politics." While any semi-media-literate person in 2026 could tell you that not all YouTube videos should be taken as fact, the scale of the operation was staggering. 

The deception crisis plagues the media as well. Recently, the platform Qwoted, which connects journalists with sources, had to remove a supposed art therapy expert from its website after her "details were found to be false," reported the Press Gazette. According to the Gazette, the fake therapist's insights had been cited in several outlets, including Psychology, Forbes, Glamour, and Vice. I have also raised concerns about news outlets and commentators citing polls published by EduBirdie, a Cyprus-based company that sells human-written academic papers to students for $8 a page (ethics aside, what a bold business model in the AI age).

So what is to be done? As Gillespie wrote in 2018, there are existing legal levers to root out fraud, but any top-down approach to squashing online lies "will be poorly applied, repressive, and ultimately arbitrary." Government-led crackdowns on COVID-19 "misinformation" have proven him right. Outsourcing the arbitration of truth would only diminish our access to information, and no one entity, particularly the government, should be trusted to determine what is true or false. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has not learned much from the pandemic era and has instead repeatedly tried to crack down on media coverage it doesn't like.

Ideally, media organizations would act as B.S. detectors, but clearly, they often fail to do so. So, consumers are left to wade through lies, AI hoaxes, and so-called "social experiments." This may be tedious work, but it is necessary for consumers to evolve as technologies change. This sleuthing for scams may even be enjoyable. Why pay to have your brain scrambled by Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary when you can drive yourself insane by tracking down and scrutinizing widely cited statistics and polls?

The post Worst <i>Nathan for You</i>–Style Scheme Ever? A Polling Company Claimed Its Fake Polls Were a Social Experiment. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The first-generation Apple foldable may feel awkward, but it’s an intriguing step toward merging phones and tablets into one.

© Camille Cohen for The New York Times

Presidente brasileiro reforça que qualquer crime na internet deve ser tratado como "um crime na vida real", após polémica sobre Meta ter suspendido contas e publicações durante período eleitoral.

© Andre Borges/EPA

Editores defenderam a suspensão da cláusula e reclamaram as garantias de que os conteúdos jornalísticos não serão utilizados para fins comerciais sem autorização dos respetivos titulares.

© ADAM VAUGHAN/EPA

If you're reading this, then the internet still works. But that's something that we shouldn't necessarily take for granted after this week's global cybersecurity meltdown.

"Think of it this way: someone discovered that millions of buildings in the country have the same broken lock, and now everyone knows how to open it," writes Matt Shumer in a lengthy post on X about the situation. "The lock maker has sent out a fix, but every building owner has to install it themselves, and many haven't yet."

That massive vulnerability was identified with the help of AI, but the growing capabilities of AI-powered hackers mean that vulnerabilities can be exploited much more rapidly too.

This is the world we live in now. In August, more than 100 tech companies signed a letter warning about exactly this possibility. On Thursday, one of Anthropic's top information security officers wrote that cybersecurity threats "are going to get a lot worse before they get better." Major banks are rushing to secure themselves after reports of autonomous agents operating inside accounts (though many of them may have been authorized by account holders).

This is unlikely to be the last incident like this. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says it saw twice as many "agentic intrusions" (hacking done by an autonomous or semiautonomous AI) in August as in July, and then the number doubled again in September.

Scary stuff, for sure. As is usually the case, however, prevention is better than panic.

Shumer's post contains many helpful suggestions for better online security—it is particularly important to secure your email accounts, since that is the gateway to so much of what we do online. Here's a 15-step plan to stay more digitally secure in the AI age. (And if you're really worried about everything falling to bits, Reason's got you covered there too.) If your devices and browsers have updates available, install them. And for the love of digital gods, don't click on random links in strange emails!

The man who (maybe) saved the internet? There is an old XKCD webcomic—and I'm dating myself as a very specific type of millennial by even referencing that—that seems to perfectly sum up what happened this week. Here it is:

Here's the craziest part: That's basically true! Except the one random person lives in Czechia instead of Nebraska. His name is Ondřej Surý, and The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel found him:

Surý, who lives in Czechia, does not work for the PHP Foundation. But alongside his day job as director of domain-name-system engineering at the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium, in a volunteer capacity, he maintains and helps automate patches for the coding language. His work, with that of just a handful of others, has allowed countless websites and organizations to fix these vulnerabilities quickly. Over the past 48 hours, he's become arguably the unsung hero of the entire internet—despite the fact that the only compensation he receives is from modest donations. "Ondřej will save the internet today," a user in the PHP Subreddit wrote.

In the war between AI hackers and AI defenders, it's still humans who are the heroes. At least for now.

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Art of the steal. Yesterday, in this space, I detailed how voters are fed up with the Trump administration's seemingly endless stream of corruption. But it's been a whole 24 hours, which means there is yet another scandal in the news—thanks to a Vanity Fair article about President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book. In it, author Matthew Cole claims that Dutch investigators gained access to Kushner's phone with the help of Russian hackers. The evidence from the phone and other sources shows that Kushner has been taking money from the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to "push their agenda with Trump."

Kushner says the article's claims are "outrageous and categorically false."

But wait, there's yet another corruption story. The Justice Department is reportedly probing whether Trump ally Corey Lewandowski profited from his role as a top adviser at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Washington Post reports that the investigation is based on a referral from the DHS inspector general and is focused on "contracting fraud."

It may or may not be connected to other allegations that surfaced in September, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Lewandowski approached officials in Qatar and the UAE about being hired to help with "visa issues" and other matters.

In both matters, Lewandowski has denied the allegations. He's no longer working for the department, having been fired earlier this year amid a messy scandal involving then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who was also canned.

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Scenes from Virginia: Federal prosecutors indicted state Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D–Portsmouth), one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia, on charges of racketeering and money laundering in connection with illegal marijuana sales. (Don't get me started on how dumb it is that recreational marijuana use has been legal here since 2021, but commercial sales are still forbidden. If it's legal to use something, it should be legal to sell it!)

Lucas pushed the failed Virginia redistricting effort and has been an outspoken critic of Trump. She plans to fight the charges. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, also a Democrat, said in a statement that the timing of the indictment, just days before the midterm elections, "further erodes the trust the American people deserve to have in the Department of Justice."

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QUICK HITS

• "The last thing José García-Sorto remembers after being shot in the chest is being pulled from his car, pinned to the pavement and handcuffed, his blood pooling around him on a Phoenix interstate. All he could think about was what would happen to his two young children if he died." The New York Times has a harrowing account of a Honduran immigrant who was shot by immigration officers last year. He's never been charged with a crime in connection with the incident, which suggests "the authorities did not find evidence that he had put anyone in danger."
• Phil Magness and David Hebert debunk the notion that tariffs can help "infant industries" grow and succeed in a global market.
• The Cato Institute's annual ranking of "Freedom in the 50 States" is out. Arizona takes the top spot. How did your state do?
• Is alchemy real now? A California company claims it has successfully turned mercury into gold.
• The World Series begins tonight, and it ought to be terrific. Despite low payrolls, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee were the top teams in their respective leagues this year. They are deep, talented teams full of characters worth cheering—Brewers' star pitcher Jacob Misiorowski is a huge Pokémon nerd; Rays' star hitter Yandy Diaz escaped from Cuba after being imprisoned there. And this is the first World Series since 1980 to match two franchises that have never won a championship.

The post The Man Who Saved the Internet appeared first on Reason Magazine.

On eBay Live, livestreaming is for the entrepreneurial everyman. It is a no-frills, decentralized QVC for the modern age.

The interface is clunky, the sellers are unpolished, and the viewer numbers are low. The site is more like a digital garage sale than a Sotheby's auction, but it's just as thrilling to watch a bidder win a rare baseball card as to watch one win a Rothko.

Items for sale include Rolex watches, Funko Pop toys, commemorative coins, and Michael Kors backpacks, which sellers hawk to audiences of anywhere from 10 to 1,000 other souls. These online auctioneers set countdown clocks, sometimes as short as 10 seconds. Bids start as low as $1.

Tuning into a sub-100-viewer eBay Live auction is strangely intimate. Sellers, often in makeshift home sets or nondescript warehouse backrooms, fill the time between auctions with banter and often play music on their own speakers. Sellers also respond to the audience, affectionately referred to as "chat."

One bidding frenzy drew me in. Ten seconds and a flurry of clicks later, I became the proud owner of a $3.81 Dragonite Pokémon card. I know nothing about Pokémon, yet I felt a surge of joy hearing my username declared the winner. There is a simple pleasure in buying and selling real things in a digital auction house.

The post Review: eBay Live Is QVC for the Modern Age appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Milhares de sites tiveram que ser desligados em todo o mundo devido a falhas detetadas no PHP através de modelos de IA. As vulnerabilidades já foram corrigidas. Cátia Rocha é a convidada.

The call from the president about the Starshield network came after officials in Ukraine reported that they found new limits on the use of military drones in their war against Russia.

© Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

O Supremo Tribunal de Justiça confirmou que mensagens em grupos fechados são vida privada. Colégio de Braga suspendera aluna de 16 anos 12 dias com base nessas conversas.

© Getty Images