Google and Microsoft's employees have cracked the shits with their management for making them work on projects they deem unethical - now it's Amazon's turn. Employees there have sent Jeff Bezos a letter saying that they want Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition software to law enforcement and to cease providing AWS products to Palantir (the grubby data mining outfit that snitches on everyone to the cops and military). I don't think Bezos and his cronies will suddenly tear up contracts, but maybe, hopefully, with enough volume and repetition, those capitalist pigs will feel some guilt in their fat bellies about the things they do to earn their filthy lucre.
Brian Krzanich, Intel's CEO, resigned today because he has having an affair with a direct subordinate Intel employee. It was a consensual relationship, not technically an abuse of power (or so Intel says), but it thoroughly violates Intel's policy for employee relationships. Robert Swan, Intel's CFO, is now the CEO whilst they look for a replacement. It's not my place to moralise this guy's life choices, but it's a really bad look for Intel, who is under intense pressure commercially. Not only do they have to worry about their competition, they have to do it without a CEO and go through all the hassles and loss of direction that entails.
Remember that guy Elon Musk said tried to sabotage the Model 3 production line? Tesla has sued him, so he went public saying he's a whistleblower. But Martin Tripp, a former Gigafactory tech said that he was not hacking the production line or stealing to give data to competitors. Martin insists that he was collecting data to show that Telsa is shipping Model 3s with damaged battery packs, inflating the number of Model 3s produced and wanted the world to know about how much waste is being generated in the production of Tesla's cars. It's all very messy between Tesla and its former employee - hopefully the truth comes out in court soon.
NBN has revealed that out of the 358 applications its received to swap an area over from whatever shitty tech they have planned to the good FTTP stuff, only 90 out of them went a step further to get a more detailed quote. To make matters worse, only 3 of those actually went ahead to get FTTP once they saw the price. That's under 1% conversion rate. If you've hung around Whirlpool and seen the quotes people have received after dropping a grand or so for the privilege, it's unsurprising so few decide to get their area upgraded. I reckon NBN purposely gives these astronomical quotes because if the price was realistic, way more people would upgrade and that would make the NBN's MTM approach and the government look bad.
I'm not keen on regurgitating Apple rumours here because that's low-brow news for Apple zealots with nothing better to do. However, I am keen as hell for the Apple AirPower charging mat that Apple announced in September last year as coming out in 2018, but half way into 2018, the damn thing still isn't out. Don't laugh, I know you there's hundreds of you reading this that are in the same pathetic consumerist boat as me. Anyway, Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg has some top notch gossip on the AirPower mat and he reckons it isn't coming out until September 2018 - over a year since it was announced. Boooooooo.
The US recently passed a law called SESTA/FOSTA with the aim to reduce sex trafficking by theoretically making websites like Backpage and Craigslist that host ads for sex workers responsible for any adult or child trafficking. In reality, it took what was a relatively safe way for legal sex workers to promote themselves and closed it down, placing a vulnerable industry into an even more dangerous place. Other sites like Twitter & Instagram, freaked out at the potential of being responsible for the actions of their users and "shadowbanned" anyone it identified as sex workers. As a response to this, a couple of Aussies (who are Sizzle subscribers!) created Switter - a Mastodon instance for sex workers to communicate and promote without the fear of being banned. It's gone from 0 to 100,000 users in only a 50 days.
You know how NSW is keen on digital licences for everyone in the new future? Well their trial in Dubbo has hit a few snags. Despite "several education sessions" with police "present[ing] the legal obligations of the trial and how the interaction of the DDL with the Police MobiPol device for licence searches and infringement processing", 10% of the people in the trial who had to present their licence to a cop had their fancy digital licence rejected. That's a bit shit - if you can't rely on your digital licence being accepted 100% of time, you're gonna carry a physical licence on ya anyways, kinda defeating the purpose. I assume the NSW government will figure out a way to remedy this post-trial.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
The Sizzle acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures, and to elders both past and present.
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