Apple nuked Tumblr's app from the App Store on November 16th and it still hasn't returned. Apparently Tumblr was serving up child porn and obviously Apple doesn't want to be associated with that. What makes this interesting is that all the content on Tumblr is user generated, much like Reddit - but unlike Reddit, Tumblr seems to have made no effort to remove the child porn (mostly teens posting nudes of themselves, which whilst consensual is still kiddie porn) and that's what's made Apple turf em from the App Store.
NASA is going to do a "safety review" of SpaceX and Boeing due to Elon Musk's weed smoking antics on the Joe Rogan Show a few months ago. NASA reckons Elon's antics are a sign of a worrying safety culture at SpaceX and wants to dig in further. Seems a bit prudish to me and roping in Boeing smells of "well we can't just look into SpaceX otherwise Elon will bitch and moan about Boeing getting a free ride". The downside of this review is that crewed launches to the ISS that were planned for early 2019 are probably going to be delayed even further and the USA has to keep on paying the Russians to use the Soyuz.
Peter Dutton is whining that the scrutiny being applied by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to his precious Assistance and Access Bill is happening to simply "delay and obfuscate" its introduction. He also said in an interview with Sky News (his safe space), that he's asked PJCIS to cut short the public consultation to speed things up. Luckily PJCIS has held course and will continue with three more public hearings over the next fortnight. Despite this, Dutton plans to try get the bill through the Senate again next week. Let's see how the Senate cross bench gets pork-barreled this time!
From July 2019, business supplying the federal government with IT contractors for projects worth over $4m will need to hand over documentation showing that they pay their taxes. I'm shocked this wasn't a thing the government checked before, but apparently it's not! This means there will be a level playing field so companies that don't do this stuff can't under-bid on tenders, pushing out the legit companies. Businesses will also need to disclose if they or their directors have been "convicted of tax evasion, phoenix activity, and bribery or corruption offences". Sounds good to me and hopefully weeds out the cowboys in the industry.
Google has made its Digital Wellbeing feature available to all Pixel & Android One devices via the Play Store. You can use it to see how long you spend using each app and locking yourself out of apps when you use em too much. It's also got a weird feature that'll slowly turn the device's UI to greyscale before your bedtime, to remind you to put the phone away. How fucking hooked are people to these things that they're fighting their natural desire to sleep?! Facebook's added similar features to its smartphone app so you can add time limits, see how much you've used Facebook in the past week and muting push notifications for certain time periods.
In the day and age of companies like Facebook and Google copping shit from all corners over how they handle user data and privacy, you'd think every CEO worth their salt would keep their mouth shut regarding how they plan to make money off customer data. Ford CEO Jim Hackett didn't get the memo and blabbed on a podcast about how they know so much about their customers (predominately via Ford's finance division), that selling and re-purposing Ford customer data is something they're keen to do in order to offset losses from a shrinking automobile market.
There's a new expansion pack for Civ 6 coming Feb 14th! Civilization 6: Gathering Storm will introduce the concept of climate change to Civ for the first time. Yep, your civilisation will have to contend with the externalities of its production - just like in real life. Using resources such as oil and coal would presumably make the chances of natural disasters increase and other resources like food or luxuries disappear or appear in other areas of the map. I look forward to wasting an entire week of my life playing this. Here's a trailer and here's some gameplay.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
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