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When the soon-to-be ex-British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told the nation last week that a full social media ban for all under-16s from social media was “the right choice" for the country, a group of people was watching closely, and thinking about what to do next.For them, policies like these are problematic. They require all users (adults included) to undergo mandatory age verification checks. That means face scanning or ID document sharing to prove that any user is old enough to access content and social media services – and that’s something that privacy advocates and technologists have long warned is "a cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen".But for this group, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, it’s your face they’ll want to scan. Tomorrow, it’ll be your messages.So, after a social media ban in Australia, the development of Canada’s Bill C-22, the expansion of mandatory age verification in Europe, the EU's Chat Control debate, and discussions on children’s online safety proposals in the US Congress, the UK’s announcement was the final strawOn June 16, 2026, just 24 hours after Starmer's speech, that the Stop Killing the Internet campaign was officially unveiled with its mission to defend the open internet against state policies that could trigger mass surveillance and excessive control."Any restriction that restricts people's human rights and right to access the open internet is what we're opposed to,” Programme Manager at the Open Rights Group (ORG), James Baker, told TechRadar.(Image credit: Getty Images / NurPhoto)The ORG is just one of many high-profile UK digital rights groups that have come together to form Stop Killing the Internet, along with Big Brother Watch, and Index of Censorship. They are calling to arms other worldwide organizations committed to finding rights-based solutions to online social problems to join in.“We hope to expand globally because it affects people in all countries, including places like India or China, where the internet is a lot more restricted."Ahead of the launch, Baker and the rest of the group have already held urgent meetings with over 20 organizations, listened to the perspective of young people about the UK's proposed teen social media ban, and decided it was time to take action.Stop Killing the Internet was formed as a sister campaign of Stop Killing Games, a movement created by the gaming community to advocate for legal protections to prevent publishers from shutting down video games.But why have gamers joined forces with digital rights advocates to challenge ongoing children's online safety policies? And, most importantly, which solutions is the group proposing instead?Why restricting the internet for teens is a bad idea(Image credit: StockPlanets/ Getty Images)We can divide children's online safety policies into two main strands — each has its critics warning of dangerous unintended consequences.The first are access barriers which cut children off from online spaces and content thought to be unsuitable for their age.Policymakers first started by barring children from adult-only sites with age verification checks. Then came total platform blocks such as Australia's world-first under-16s social media ban, which the likes of the UK, France, Malaysia, and other countries are also looking to follow.Baker believes that, ultimately, these bans won't work — an idea backed up by recent data from Australia — but it’s the nature of the approach that bothers the ORG’s Programme Manager."If there was rowdy behavior or a fight in a town hall or a public square, you'd try to police it and solve it — you wouldn't completely shut down the space for everyone,” he said.“Yet the response to internet problems is to try to shut down the space and exclude people based on their age."The second group of child protection policies focuses on content scanning.An example here is Keir Starmer's ultimatum to Big Tech to find a way to prevent children from accessing explicit images on their devices. It's a plan that so unpalatable from a privacy perspective that it prompted private messaging platform Signal to say that it "would rather exit the market than undermine the technical guarantees that people trust for their privacy".Content scanning is an old idea that continues to arise on lawmaker agendas and, often, fails to translate into actual legislation.One incarnation of this client-side scanning was initially part of the UK's original Online Safety Act, but it was halted until "it's technically feasible to do so" in a privacy-respecting manner. And there's been no mention of it since, with regard to OSA, most likely because it's easily said by politicians but next to impossible in practice.In the EU, another message scanning movement, commonly referred to as Chat Control — the nickname for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) proposal — has been in negotiations for over three years and still there's no final text that's convincing enough for privacy experts to accept.In reality, though, according to Stop Killing Games' Strategy Lead Moritz Katzner, all of these copycat policies, wherever they are in the world, have very little to do with child safety at all."You have to seriously ask if this is actually about protecting children. As someone who was recently part of that demographic, I do not believe them, because they did not care about me, nor my gaming communities, for a very long time," he told TechRadar.Katzner explains that a crucial part of the Stop Killing the Internet campaign is indeed making people understand that there is no difference between chat control, age verification, and ID verification."They are all reasoned from the same agenda," he said. "It is an escalation ladder where they start by scanning your face, then require ID, and eventually start scanning your chats."How Stop Killing the Internet plans to reset the debate(Image credit: Stop Killing The Internet)For the people involved in Stop Killing the Internet, it's a non-negotiable — what's needed to protect both children and the open web is to shift the focus of the online safety debate."Our primary goal is to force a hard reset of the debate,” said Katzner. “To do so, we should listen to what experts have been saying for three decades and look at the algorithms, because these platforms are addictive to adults, too."And how do they plan to do that?Stop Killing the Internet aims to make the knowledge of academics, computer scientists, civil societies, and other experts, mainstream directly via social media content creators. This strategy would allow them to bypass mainstream media, which, they believe, has mostly failed to critically report on this issue.An important goal of the movement is to expose the global network of funding that they say backs up these laws. According to Katzner, it's vital to make a clear distinction between genuine advocacy and corporate lobbyism."Meta spent millions in the US and UK lobbying for platform-level age verification because it serves their interests, and politicians are being misused in this process," he said.While Big Tech plays hot potato with the responsibility of children's safety, how the laws land make a huge bearing on the likes of the gaming community, according to Katzner. Gaming platforms are also included in age verification and social ban policies. Yet, as Katzner explains, there's also a tactical reason for Stop Killing Games to be involved in this fight.Stop Killing Games has material successes in its fight to date. It brought its cause to the political agenda and helped the Protect Our Games Act to pass California’s Assembly vote — as reported by The Guardian.“We are now bringing the strong muscle of online communities into this campaign," Katzner added, with reference to the broader internet freedom fight.What's next for Stop Killing the Internet?While Stop Killing The Internet is expected to fully launch on June 27, 2026, — and reveal all the people involved — Baker from Open Rights Group said that it has already attracted interest from organizations and individuals from Australia, Canada, the United States, Africa, and Europe.In the coming days, we will also know what the movement's first step will look like.What's certain, however, is that the problems with children's online safety policies are only its starting point — the goal is to save a free and open internet from all forms of online restrictions.

Growing water scarcity could hamper the expansion of lithium mining in the U.S., deepening its reliance on foreign imports over the coming decades, a new study finds.Lithium is used in electric-vehicle and energy-storage batteries due to its high energy density and low weight compared with other minerals, but mining it requires a huge amount of water. Currently, the U.S. has only one active lithium mine, in Nevada, and with demand for the metal projected to explode over the next few years, the government and private companies are planning to open at least 115 new mines across the country, according to the study.However, most of the proposed mines that are in advanced stages of development overlap with water-stressed areas, specifically in the western U.S. In the new study, published May 28 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists found that if lithium mines start operating in these regions, they will compete for water not only with households, agriculture and industry, but also with one another and with other proposed mineral mines."Future water availability under climate change may constrain whether new lithium mines will have sufficient water to operate," study senior author Jennifer Dunn, a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Live Science in an email.The U.S. imports more than 50% of its lithium, mostly from Chile and Argentina. Policymakers and corporations want to reduce this dependence, but even with the existing Nevada mine and the 22 proposed mines that are the closest to coming online, the U.S. won't have enough lithium to meet domestic demand, Dunn said."Every mine produces a different amount of lithium — depending on its deposit type, lithium grade, and final product — so we are unable to determine how many mines exactly would be needed," she said. "Our analysis estimated that if all 22 advanced [stage] proposed mines and the sole operating mine continued operation into 2050, 0.14 [to] 0.25 million metric tons [0.15 to 0.28 million tons] of lithium content in products could be produced per year."This range falls short of the 0.83 million to 1.9 million tons (0.75 million to 1.7 million metric tons) of lithium per year that other researchers previously estimated the U.S. would need to cover its own demand.However, the water demand to produce more lithium would be astronomical. That's because lithium is typically extracted from brines and rocks known as pegmatites, which require large-scale evaporation and aggressive processing with fresh water, respectively.To find out if the U.S. would have enough water to support additional lithium mines under intensifying climate change, the researchers calculated the future water use of the 23 lithium mines most likely to be active in 2050, using data from mining companies. Then, they layered this projected water use on top of projected water uses from other sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, under four modeled socioeconomic-climate scenarios between 2040 and 2060.The researchers found that the available water supply will, in most cases, be insufficient to support new lithium mines. The starkest example was Southern California's Salton Sea, which contains roughly 4.5 million tons (4.1 million metric tons) of lithium. The Salton Sea is fed by the Colorado River and showed the least water available to support lithium mining and other water demands, owing to the river's dwindling flow.Southern California's Salton Sea has been shrinking for decades, partly because inflow from the Colorado River has declined. A deposit of geothermal brine beneath the sea area is believed to hold one of the planet’s largest reserves of lithium. (Image credit: Mario Tama via Getty Images)Lithium deposits in the U.S. are clustered in Nevada, Arizona and California. These are also some of the most arid and water-stressed states. Although the study found an increase in rainfall under a high emissions, "business as usual" climate scenario, these regions likely won't have enough water to support other activities, let alone additional lithium mining, Dunn said.There were four exceptions in the study, including lithium-rich sites in North Carolina and Arkansas, which may have enough water to support future mines. However, there are other concerns related to lithium mining."Many of the lithium deposits in the United States reside near federally-recognized Indigenous and Tribal reservations, and the mines could violate Indigenous rights," Dunn said. "Lithium mining could also disturb sensitive ecosystems and biodiversity. And, like many other mineral mines, pollution, soil erosion, and water contamination are concerns."Together, the findings highlight a catch-22 in the quest to source lithium: Lithium is essential to support a green energy transition and curb climate change, but shrinking water availability due to global warming is making it harder to extract lithium.RELATED STORIESScientists just discovered an enormous lithium reservoir under PennsylvaniaDays numbered for 'risky' lithium-ion batteries, scientists say, after fast-charging breakthrough in sodium-ion alternativeSalar de Uyuni: The world's largest salt desert and lithium reservoir surrounded by volcanoesThe study did not explore potential improvements to water-use efficiency that could reduce the pressure on some water resources and increase the availability for activities such as lithium mining. Nor did the researchers include water exchanges known as interbasin transfers (IBTs) in their analysis, due to the lack of studies about these transfers under climate change."IBTs could help supply water to arid or water-stressed regions," Dunn said.Still, there is likely an upper limit on how much water can be allocated to lithium mining in a warming world, according to the study. This means the U.S. will probably continue to partially rely on foreign supply chains for lithium and other critical minerals.

Researchers have created a new chip that turns one of quantum computing's biggest frailties into a programmable feature. They say this first-of-its-kind experiment could carry implications for developing error-corrected, fault-tolerant quantum computers in the future.Unlike digital bits in a classical computer, which are represented as either "on" or "off," a quantum bit (qubit) has a much higher failure rate — roughly 1 in 1,000, compared with 1 in 1 billion for digital bits. That's because quantum computers are susceptible to "noise" — interference that's often cited as the biggest barrier preventing quantum computers from being more capable than the fastest supercomputers.As engineers develop quantum systems that are large enough in scale to perform useful functions, the amount of noise generally increases. Scientists can combat this noise using various error-correction techniques. But despite recent progress in this field, the challenge of developing a truly fault-tolerant quantum computer remains.That's because noise comes from various sources, many of which scientists have no control over. These include unpredictable disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, nearby radiation from Wi-Fi routers and other electronic devices, cosmic rays from space, and even neighboring qubits. This unpredictability has made it difficult to study this noise.But researchers have now devised an experiment that turns the error-correction paradigm on its head. Instead of trying to rid a quantum system of noise, they have created a chip that lets them introduce errors at will so they can examine noise and signal loss in a controlled environment. In the new study, published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers described how this quantum computing chip uses photons captured from laser pulses as qubits. It also has what the researchers called a "side channel" that photons can be diverted to so the team could imitate the losses that occur under normal operating conditions and study them in detail."In many quantum experiments, anything that does not fit the ideal textbook picture is simply treated as loss and ignored," Govind Krishna, first author of the study and a doctoral student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, said in a statement. "The chip enables us to simulate those non‑ideal processes in a controlled way."(Image credit: David Callahan CC by 0)The chip can be programmed to imitate errors in multiple ways, thus making it possible to simulate specific types of loss due to noise. The researchers can essentially modulate the amount of noise the system simulates in order to generate conditions for practical study. They do this by adjusting the number of photons that get sidetracked and the degree of quantum superposition, in which qubits share information over space and time through a process called quantum entanglement."The chip works a bit like a programmable railway junction for quantum light," Krishna explained. "By changing the control signals, we can decide whether the photons mostly stay on the main track, are mostly diverted to the loss channel, or end up in superpositions that depend on their quantum interference." This means the noise itself becomes an asset that scientists can use to further improve quantum computing systems, rather than trying to eliminate it.Related storiesMicrosoft breakthrough could reduce errors in quantum computers by 1,000 timesQuantum internet inches closer thanks to new chip — it helps beam quantum signals over real-world fiber-optic cablesScientists trained an AI model using an IBM quantum computer — and it answered questions correctly that the base model couldn'tAccording to the study, the novel chip design can model errors in any type of quantum system — even a non-photonic system, like a superconducting qubit-based quantum computer or one designed with neutral atom qubits. The scientists ultimately want to give researchers more tools to study how noise infiltrates and accumulates in quantum circuits. This could, in theory, lead to a greater understanding of how to perform more effective error-correction techniques in future systems, especially as those systems scale and interact with their environment even more. "Understanding how quantum systems behave under this messiness is crucial if we want our experiments to say something about nature as it really is, not just idealized setups," Krishna said.