Bureaucracy breaks UK internet access
Also payment processors hate video games.

The Unauthorised Use of a Member of Parliament's Credentials

The United Kingdom has rolled out the Online Safety Act, a piece of legislation that seems to have confused a large portion of the internet-using population for children. The Act forces a massive, ill-defined age-verification system onto platforms to protect people from "harmful" content. Predictably, the main result has been a sudden, collective decision to use a Virtual Private Network, which is the digital equivalent of wearing a disguise to work. This surge in digital anonymity is the opposite of what the new rule intended.

Meanwhile, a satirical protest website called Use Their ID has appeared. The website encourages citizens to use the publicly available ID details of a Member of Parliament to bypass the new age-check mandate. It is a clear demonstration that the system has all the security of a Post-it Note on the server room door. One cannot attribute malice to this; only the flailing, over-eager incompetence of a legislative body that treated "The Internet" like a television set that needed a parental control lock.

The Credit Card Lobby has Entered the Chatroom

The world's largest financial rails, Visa and Mastercard, are getting tired of people buying the wrong kind of digital entertainment. They have reportedly started overwhelming payment processors with demands to enforce stricter content policies, specifically targeting adult-themed video games sold on platforms like Steam and Itch.io. This corporate decision is essentially a quiet veto on content production; an accidental de-banking of developers whose work is not deemed "safe for reputation" by a pair of finance companies.

The resulting "gamer fury" is the sound of thousands of people realizing that the only thing that matters more than free expression is the frictionless movement of money. It is a classic tale of two companies trying very hard to clean up their image and, in the process, accidentally becoming the world's most powerful, puritanical content moderator. At least it is a break from the usual cryptocurrency scams, a tiny bit of corporate censorship drama to liven up the work day.

Anthropic's Rate-Limit Department Discovers Burnout

Anthropic, the team behind the helpful LLM Claude, has decided its "Code" model is simply working too hard and needs a time-out. They have introduced weekly rate limits for its usage, which is a great way to guarantee that a professional development tool is precisely as useful as a junior developer who disappears without warning at 3:30 PM on a Tuesday. This move forces developers to wait or, more likely, to simply use a less-capable model for the bulk of their work.

The core issue is that you cannot market a product as the future of coding and then treat it like a free sample at a wholesale store. The whole exercise feels like a manager trying to boost morale by giving everyone a half-day off, but only after they have finished all the work for the entire week. It turns a powerful assistant into an unreliable bottleneck; the only consistency is the sudden, arbitrary halt to productivity.

Briefs

• Copyparty: A tool that turns almost any device into a file server. Because what the world really needed was yet another way to misplace important documents.
• Debian Time: The distribution switches to 64-bit time for everything. Congratulations, we have solved the Y2K38 problem by pushing the problem out to a year when none of us will be here to deal with it.
• Samsung Bootloader: Samsung removes bootloader unlocking with One UI 8. The tech giant is ensuring you love their phone so much that they are permanently removing your access to the source code, just for your own good.