IT Essentials: Just hit it with a hammer

The trusty standby when diplomacy fails

When all your finely tuned instruments aren’t working, sometimes bashing the problem really hard is your only solution.

I love a bit of DIY. I’m not good at it, as such, but I do get huge satisfaction from seeing something I’ve built, hung, painted or levelled.

Still, there are times – normally after the third or fourth trip to B&Q for yet another essential item to finish that one project – where I lose all patience. At those times, I have to convince myself to breathe deeply and not, i.e., pick up a hammer and start blindly swinging it at the offending article.

This is the situation governments worldwide have found themselves in when it comes to regulating social media, and as companies repeatedly refuse to engage, that hammer is starting to look mighty tempting.

Australia became the first to lay the groundwork, but more than 40 countries now have active or proposed legislation to ban teenagers from accessing apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Including, as of this week, the UK.

This really is using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, but when social media bosses put themselves above the law and refuse to show remorse or enact serious age controls (asking you to self-report your age at sign-up is not a secure verification method), governments are left with little choice.

Penny and I talk in detail about this topic in next week’s episode of Ctrl Alt Lead, coming on Monday. We discuss alternative approaches to the ban, like targeting specific aspects of social media (infinite scroll, etc); the role of parental responsibility when coming up against a product designed to be addictive; and the harms caused by media versus medium.

But that’s not all. We also dig into the Anthropic and SpaceX IPOs (oh boy, do we have Thoughts), and the Trump White House’s seemingly spiteful targeting of Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models - the UK government not the only one to lose patience and go after its detractors with a blunt instrument, it seems.

With the World Cup heating up, I talked to NetScout CTO for security Darren Anstee in a bonus episode of Ctrl Alt Lead, where we went over the practices and pitfalls of defending football’s biggest tournament.

Speaking of defence, Penny reports from the recent AI Summit, where Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton (UK Chief of Defence Staff) spoke about the importance of understanding and investing in AI, as well as compressing traditionally lengthy innovation timelines.

And we’ve looked in detail at Amazon’s first ever release of its datacentres’ water consumption stats: a significant step towards transparency, though not necessarily accountability.