Tech companies including WhatsApp and Reddit as well as streaming giant Twitch and gaming firm Roblox could be among more than a dozen sites added to Australia’s social media ban for under-16s, the country’s regulator said Wednesday.

Platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were already included in the ban—a world-first.

But the head of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has written to 16 more companies to “self-assess” whether they fall under the ban’s remit.

The list also included Pinterest as well as Lego Play, streaming company Kick and gaming platform Steam.

Companies will need to make a case if they believe their platform should be exempt from the ban, the national broadcaster ABC said.

Inman Grant told the network that while some cases were “pretty clear,” the regulator would “give them the due diligence process.”

“We need to hear them all out,” she said.

The regulator said it will initially focus on platforms with the greatest number of users, where there are higher risks of harm.

A Roblox spokesperson insisted the platform was not a social media company and therefore did not qualify for the ban.

“We prohibit users from uploading real-world photos or video, or re-sharing news, and we do not offer social media feeds within experiences in Australia,” the spokesperson told AFP.

“We completed the self-assessment process and communicated to eSafety that our position remains that we are an exempted online gaming platform,” they added.

‘Vague’ regulations

Australia has been a leader in global efforts to prevent internet harm, but current legislation offers almost no details on how the ban will be enforced—prompting concern among experts that it will simply be a symbolic piece of unenforceable legislation.

The eSafety Commission will be able to fine social media companies up to Aus$49.5 million ($32.6 million) for failing to comply with the rules.

Social media companies have described the laws as “vague,” “problematic” and “rushed.”

Canberra has struggled to pin down how precisely platforms will verify the ages of their users.

This month, Communications Minister Anika Wells conceded that firms would need to self-regulate.

An independent study ordered by the Australian government found this month that age checking can be done “privately, efficiently and effectively,” though it admitted no single solution would fit all contexts.

The regulator has also introduced a number of rules taking effect in Australia in the coming months to protect children from “lawful but awful” content, including online pornography and AI chatbots capable of sexually explicit conversations.

This month, Roblox agreed to curb the risk of adults grooming children on its platform in Australia.

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He suspected this absurd-seeming pattern was due to limitations baked into the software used by parking control officers. Whatever its reason was for existing, the pattern of sequential ticket IDs, paired with parking officers likely claiming batches of ticket numbers, meant Walz was able to track their routes by plotting each parking ticket on a map as soon as it was entered into the system. A car owner could look at the activity of the officers currently out on patrol and see if any of them were slowly descending on their neighborhood.

Last year, parking officials in San Francisco issued over a million tickets within city limits, which amounted to over $100 million in fines for car owners. “I actually don’t have a car, but I have plenty of friends that talk about it,” says Walz. Like most costs in San Francisco, these tickets can quickly add up. For example, forgetting to move your car during the weekly street sweeping—an error my household has made more than once—will cost you $90 every time.

Dude, Where’s My Parking Cop?

The website’s live updates were pulled from the city government’s website and visualized on an Apple Map. “Find My Parking Cops” tracked the routes of individual parking control officers, giving them each unique visual identifiers, as well as their cadence of tickets.

On Tuesday, for example, the site displayed one officer seemingly starting their shift around 10:30 am and handing out 35 tickets over the next few hours as they patrolled a neighborhood in Lower Pacific Heights. The citations logged were primarily for expired meters, which cost $107 per ticket, and not having a residential permit, which cost $108 per ticket. In total, the fines racked up by that one officer over a few hours amounted to almost $4,000.

Who’s handing out the most tickets each week? Walz included a leaderboard on the website that ranked just how much in fines each officer handed out. While officers were only identified on the map by a number and their initials, their cumulative ticket cost was tracked. When WIRED was last able to check Walz’s website on Tuesday, the top fine giver had issued 157 tickets so far, handing out over $16,000 in fees for violations.

Prior to “Find My Parking Cops,” Walz created another San Francisco-specific website. This one used a phone, placed on a street corner in the Mission district, to identify what songs people were listening to in public. He then uploaded a live feed of the songs, captured and identified through the Shazam app, onto the “Bop Spotter” website. It provided a little peek into what neighborhood residents were bumping at the time while also slyly nodding at the abundance of surveillance in the city. He’s also previously built a site, called “IMG_0001,” to surface old YouTube clips uploaded by everyday people in the platform’s early days. Those grainy, private videos stand in stark contrast to the stuff that dominates the platform today.

The parking ticket tracker was another side project for Walz. “I worked in my free time on the weekends the last few weeks to make it happen,” he says.

While Walz’s websites sometimes come with a dose of social commentary, he didn’t envision this project as making some kind of grand, sweeping statement about parking tickets or what it means to drive in 2025. Rather, it’s another entry in his repertoire of cool websites powered by unique data sources.

“I’m not ‘pro’ parking cop. I’m not ‘anti’ parking cop,” says Walz. “It’s just data I was able to unearth, and I thought it would be cool to visualize it.”

And now it’s gone. Representatives for Apple did not respond to immediate requests for comment. I reached out to Walz after the city’s data feed was cut off, but he didn’t pick up.

OpenAI is planning to build five new data centers in the United States as part of the Stargate initiative, the company announced on Tuesday. The sites, which are being developed in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, bring Stargate’s current planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts—roughly the same amount of power as seven large-scale nuclear reactors.

“AI is different from the internet in a lot of ways, but one of them is just how much infrastructure it takes,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a press briefing in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday. He argued that the US “cannot fall behind on this” and the “innovative spirit” of Texas provides a model for how to scale “bigger, faster, cheaper, better.”

Three of the new sites, in Shackelford County, Texas, Doña Ana County, New Mexico, and a yet-to-be disclosed location in the Midwest, are being developed in partnership with Oracle. The move follows an agreement Oracle and OpenAI announced in July to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of US data center capacity on top of what the two companies are already building at the first Stargate facility in Abilene.

OpenAI claims the new data centers, along with a planned 600 megawatt expansion of the Abilene site, will create more than 25,000 onsite jobs, though the number of workers required to build data centers typically dwarfs the amount needed to maintain them afterwards.

The two remaining sites are being helmed by OpenAI and SB Energy, a SoftBank subsidiary that develops solar and battery projects. These are located in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas.

Stargate is one of several major US technology infrastructure projects that have been announced since President Donald Trump took office at the start of the year. OpenAI said in January that the $500 billion, 10 gigawatt commitment between the ChatGPT maker, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX would “secure American leadership in AI” and “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”

Trump touted the mammoth initiative just two days after he returned to the White House, promising that it would accelerate American progress in artificial intelligence and help the US compete against China and other nations. In July, Trump announced an AI action plan that called for speedy infrastructure development and limited red tape as the US tries to beat other countries in the quest for advanced AI. “We believe we’re in an AI race,” White House AI czar David Sacks said at the time. “We want the United States to win that race.”

OpenAI initially framed Stargate as a “new company” that would be chaired by Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Now, however, executives close to the project say it’s an umbrella brand name used to refer to all of OpenAI’s data center projects—except those developed in partnership with Microsoft.

The flagship site in Abilene is primarily owned and operated by Oracle, with OpenAI acting as the primary tenant, according to executives close to the project. The buildout, which is being managed by the data center startup Crusoe, is on track to be completed by mid 2026, sources close to the project say. It is already running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and supporting OpenAI training and inference workloads, those sources add.