The New York Times published a story about Apple removing 3rd party parental control/usage monitoring apps from the App Store, not long after they introduced similar features in iOS 12. The developers quoted in the article pitch their plight as Apple being unfair monopoloists, makes life hard for anyone who dares competes with them. That hit a nerve with Apple, who put out their own statement saying they removed these apps for abusing Mobile Device Management features, making them a privacy risk. This issue of Apple's impartiality is going to come up more often as they dig for revenue outside selling hardware.
Elon Musk has received two pieces of news over the weekend that will make his life a little bit more difficult. First up, the SEC said they'll drop its request for Musk to be held in contempt if he agrees to more specific rules around the supervision of his tweets and gets a lawyer to sign off on them before he sends them out. Meanwhile, a judge has refused Elon's request to dismiss the defamation launched by Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver that Elon called a pedo. That means it'll go to court and Elon's lawyers will have to do more mental gymnastics to defend their irritating client.
Australia's ranking on the latest Ookla Speedtest Global Index has slipped from 59th to 62nd for fixed line internet. Despite the $60b NBN rollout coming to an end speeds are only marginally improving. Australia's average speed is 35.11 Mbps, but the global average is 57.91 Mbps. There's so many fingers to point (the ALP for the stupid pricing model, the ACCC forcing 121 POIs, the Libs for wasting time with HFC & FTTN), but this is the reality of those decisions - substandard internet for what is slowly becoming a substandard country.
If re-elected, the Liberal party will implement a "$156 million boost to Australia’s cybersecurity capabilities". Of that $156m, $50 million would be put towards a "cybersecurity national workforce growth program" that'll include "scholarships for postgraduate, undergraduate and TAFE studies directly associated with cyber security, with 50 percent of the scholarships reserved for women". The rest will go to the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Defence Force to stop overseas hackers hacking us, be they organised crime rings or state sponsored hackers. Cool.
This article is on the Daily Mail and references a paywalled story from the NT News, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's too interesting not to mention. It looks like the Darwin city council is going to implement Chinese developed facial recognition tech to set "virtual fences" around the city, so if a person that's not supposed to be somewhere enters that area, "an alert goes out to whatever authority". It'll also be used to "collect information such as how many people walk on footpaths and what websites and apps they visit in certain areas of the city". Sounds fucken awful to me.
Pi-Hole lovers, I have some nice content for you today! Here's a tutorial on how to use the free tier of Google Compute Engine to run a fast and public Pi-Hole instance behind a VPN so you can use your Pi-Hole anywhere you like and enjoy some VPN-based privacy. If you prefer Wireguard over OpenVPN and don't want to associate yourself with Google, here's a different tutorial on setting up Wireguard and Pi-Hole, but it'll cost ya a few bucks a month for a VPS to run it on. Unless you need Windows support or can't afford a VPS, I'd go with the Wireguard based VPN.
Timothy Lee over at Arstechnica has a great piece on the challenges Tesla will face getting to their goal of robotaxis operating in public by the end of 2020. To summarise it, the goal is totally achieveable, it can happen - the debate is over how long it will take (Musk's late-2020 goal seems totally ridiculous) and if it can be done via radar and image processing alone (Tesla reckons it can, everyone else reckons it can't) or if additional sensors like "HD maps", lidar and V2I/V2V communications are required. God speed to everyone involved, just don't get sucked into the hype.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
Aussie Broadband is the best ISP I've used since Internode's glory days. Their CEO gives talks at AUSNOG about their network and they even have network utilisation charts for every NBN POI. Their pricing isn't the cheapest, but if you want an ISP that's fast & reliable, give them a shot. Use my affiliate link or my referral code (1001031) and we both get $50 credit on our next bill.
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