Local news for local people
General and miscellaneous articles - Page 1
There are miscellaneous stories in the archives.
Things that don't fit anywhere else.
 | National Collaboration Resolves Insurance Concerns for Landholders living near Renewable Energy Projects A lot has been said about the liabilities of people living near renewable energy projects, much of it scaremongering and disinformation. This media release from the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner (AEIC) should dispel most of the concerns. |
Moron Alert It was a lovely day for the 175th birthday of the town of Rockley. Unfortunately, some people decided that their convenience overrode other people's needs. |  |
 | AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI - and reliable information is getting harder to find If you've looked at a Google or Bing search lately you would have been presented with an "AI summary" before you got to the actual list of pages that contain what you are looking for. What isn't obvious is that these summaries reduce meaningful traffic to the sites that actually contain information (while spuriously inflating the visitor count). Not only that, AI is feeding on itself by crawling AI generated sites. There could come a day when it's virtually impossible to find reliable stuff without using another way to search for it. This article from The Conversation looks at the problem. (The good news is that the site search system here bypasses Google's AI BS and only provides links to pages on the site that contain what you are looking for. Google will probably eventually find a way to "fix" this, but until then ...) There is also an answer to the strange visitor statistics for this site (and any others, of course). |
Older people's media literacy can be boosted in just 60 minutes - new study I know I keep harping on about the sewer pipe of mis- and disinformation that floods us every day from social media (and real media, too). Some new research published in The Conversation indicates that older people might be more susceptible to this while some (but not all or enough) young people are taught something about critical thinking at school. The research went on to look for ways to correct this deficiency, and the good news is that there is some evidence that the problem can be averted with a quite small amount of education and training, although this needs constant reinforcement. |  |
 | Another winter driving hazard to worry about Now that winter is here, this is your annual reminder about freezing fog. This is a road hazard that rarely gets mentioned but which can be very serious (and frightening) when it happens. |
Photos of children on the Internet It's a tragedy of our times that anything can be abused by perverts. The latest is that AI systems are being used to exploit photos of children by removing clothing or putting other heads on bodies. The world's largest pornography site, PornHub, recently banned one of their advertisers who was paying a million dollars a year to advertise AI-generated child porn. That company is Australian. Elon Musk is threatening to sue a US state because it has banned Musk's Grok AI for the ease with which it can be used to produce images of naked children. Musk claims this is an infringement of free speech, a statement that renders sane people speechless. Legitimate search engines are blocked from indexing any images on this site but it is almost impossible to prevent web site content from being scavenged by AI robots and the only alternative is to not publish photos, so over the next few weeks I will be going through all the sports and school reports on the site and removing any photos in which kids can be identified. (This tiny and obscure site is continually trawled by AI bots, although all except ChatGPT try to remain anonymous. The papers published by Nine Entertainment are currently being hit 30,000,000 times a month by AI content thieves. It is work for several people just to try to keep up with the blocking.) The two articles below from The Conversation address the danger of putting your kids' photos online. |  |
Another week. Another scam. The creativity (or perhaps dishonesty) of scammers is remarkable. They never tire of finding new ways to steal money from unsuspecting targets. Here's a statement from the Oberon Men's Shed about one going around town right now. The Shed has received an enquiry stating that a "Jeff" from the Men's Shed had done some odd jobs at a home for a lady in town. She had overpaid him and was requesting the return of the overpayment. The Oberon Men's Shed doesn't perform odd jobs for members of the community as our insurance doesn't cover this type of work. Nor do we intrude on the type of work local handymen undertake. Additionally, the Shed has never had a member called "Jeff." Please be aware that if "Jeff" or anyone else approaches you claiming to be from the Men's Shed looking to do handyman's work around your home, we reiterate that we don't perform this sort of work for the community as we don't have the required insurance. |
There are a lot of cattle around Oberon
July 23, 2026 in General News
Thanks to Scott Hilburn at the Argyle Sweater
 | How to stop fraudsters tricking disabled people out of their NDIS funding There is a temptation to blame welfare recipients for fraud and wastage in government programs. There are almost certainly people claiming benefits to which they are not entitled, but almost all the fraud in the NDIS is being conducted by those people pretending to be the ones doing the helping. This report from The Conversation provides some details of the fraud involved. |
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Could this be Australia's warmest winter ever? Hottest June day ever in the UK. Heat waves across Eastern Europe and
the USA. Hottest ever start to winter across most of Australia. But don't
mention climate change or someone will tell you that it was really cold
in Oberon last Friday so global warming is a HOAX (the word is always capitalised).
This article from The Conversation is written by a couple of academics
who probably know what they are talking about. |
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