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Indie game seller bullied, Ggl lnk shrtnr klld and what Sizzlers are saying

Plus: If you have this type of email, you won’t need to verify your age online

Author

Cam Wilson
July 25, 2025

Edition 2382

Folks, have a belter of a weekend.

The News

Indie game seller bullied into hiding games because of overzealous puritans

Popular indie game marketplace Itch.io has suddenly deindexed many of its adult games following a campaign by Australian group Collective Shout (Itch dot io). With no warning, Itch.io made games marked as “NSFW” invisible in its search because of “scrutiny from our payment processors”. While Collective Shout’s campaign started with No Mercy, a pretty gross game which I covered in a previous Sizzle, this decision means that many games that don’t feature abuse or torture have been essentially disappeared (WIRED, $). Even Elon — sigh — has weighed in on the debate to push back against the campaign (Australian, $)

itch.io/updates/upda... I just read this and you should too. Itch is doing literally everything right right now, both for themselves and for the creators on their platform. They were handed a shit sandwich and I don't think there's anything better they can do than what's described here.

— Kat Marchán (@zkat.tech)2025-07-24T06:37:26.605Z

The Sizzle: The WIRED article above does a good job of pointing out how Collective Shout — a group that was obsessed with trying to get lingerie store Honey Birdette to stop showing ads of women in underwear in shopping centres (god forbid!) — has a history of conflating truly abhorrent material with normal, adult stuff that puritans don’t like. Even if you ignore their targets, the result of their actions is kneecapping many indie creators who’ve done nothing wrong. They are not a good faith group, and we should not accept a debate about the bounds of what is culturally acceptable being set by them.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Ggl’s is kllng its lnk shrtnr

Google’s short link domain Goo.gl will stop working a month from now, meaning that all existing links will die (The Verge). Google first said it would stop shortening links in 2018, and last year said that 99% of the links had no activity in the last month (Google Blog). Google will continue using the domain for its own, internal services like Google Maps.

The Sizzle: I know there’s a joke about Google shutting down services with like 100 million users because it’s too small for them, but I gotta say this is pretty annoying. Sure, running the link shortener is another problem for them with no benefit, and it’s a free service so you get what you pay for, but sucks to know that a little piece of internet infrastructure that holds together old websites will break in a month.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

What Sizzlers are saying

  • Sizzlers in the forum were fired up about the data on how Google’s AI answers is killing the web by essentially ending search referrals.

  • mvyrmnd on Slack shared his go at the “now industry standard test” on Proton’s new private LLM app.

  • Andy linked to an AI crawler’s fuck-up while summarising an article.

  • Meski corrected me on the NSW Health banning Copilot story which wasn’t clear enough that the policy was specifically about people logging in with their individual accounts.

  • Heaps of people like RaymondPierreL3 on Mastodon were enamoured with a Sizzle picture of what I’m now learning were called “washing machines”.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

  • What OpenAI’s Sam Altman suggests you do to keep your job (AFR, $) Exclusive Australian interview 

  • NBN Co to axe millions of useless planned outage notifications (ITNews) 

  • Explainer: The potential legal battle brewing over Nintendo’s new Switch 2 terms (Infinite Lives)

  • Starlink satellite internet back after 2.5 hour outage, Aussie users struck with no Internet or Remote SMS services (EFTM) 

  • Is the new ChatGPT agent really a weapons risk? (Information Age) 

  • Shazam has viral charts from what people hear (Pickr)

  • What are the new UK online safety rules and how will age checks on adult content be enforced? (The Guardian) 

  • Nvidia AI chips worth $1bn smuggled to China after Trump export controls (FT, $) 

  • Apple iOS 26 public beta arrives (TechCrunch)

  • Introducing the Google Trends API (alpha): a new way to access Search Trends data (Google) 

  • Google rethinks search results with its new AI-curated ‘Web Guide’ (The Verge) 

  • OpenAI prepares to launch GPT-5 in August (The Verge) 

  • NFTs qualify for trademark protection, Ninth Circuit rules, sending Yuga Labs case back for trial (The Block) 

  • Graphene OS: a security-enhanced Android build (LWN) 

  • The VTuber world is in crisis over ‘owed’ donations (The Verge) 

  • No, of Course You Can’t Actually Play the New Lego Game Boy (WIRED, $) 

  • How to defeat AI crawlers with a HTML zip bomb (Ache)

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

If you have this type of email, we won’t need to verify your age online

With the UK having various age checking requirements coming in today, Elon Musk’s X has put up some details about how it’ll comply. One estimation method that caught my eye: “users’ email address will be used to estimate their age.”

Immediately, I started thinking about what email addresses would prove your age? The serious answer is probably emails like .gov, but then I started thinking of ones like @bigpond.net.au or @ozemail.com.au that I associate with the more mature, wise types. I thought I’d throw it to the Sizzlers: What are the signs that might reveal the age of an internet user? Email addresses, choice of browser, whether they know how to use a file directory? Let me know!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.