AEC didn’t like how indifferent Google Australia was to helping them investigate unauthorised political advertising
Federal government contemplating mandatory age verification laws for Australian porn connoisseurs
Uber reckons drivers aren’t core to their business after California passes stronger contractor classification law
What the hell is Apple’s U1 ultra-wideband chip?
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The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has cracked the shits with Google for being a pain in the arse to deal with regarding their investigation into the advertising integrity of last year's federal election. The AEC wanted to know who was placing a bunch of unauthorised political ads using Google's Adwords platform and Google Australia basically told the AEC to go through Google HQ in the USA, not providing any further help. It took over 5 days to get a response, which by the time it was received the dodgy ad had run its course and the election was over. The AEC also blasted Google for not providing the same level of transparency about political advertising in Australia as it does for the USA and other countries.
Australia might be getting stupid age verification laws for looking at internet porn, inspired by the UK's pitiful attempts. An inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs has kicked off to examine "the potential of age verification as a mechanism for protecting minors online, federal and state laws that relate to age verification requirements and the potential benefits of further online age verification requirements, including to protect children from potential harm, and business and non-government organisations from reputation, operational and legal risks". Check out how it works in the UK - I bet you that Australia will fuck this up even harder than they have, for even less benefit.
California (the world's 5th largest economy by GDP) has passed a law that's supposed to make it harder for companies like Uber and other "on-demand" businesses to classify their workers as independent contractors. If the workers meet an "ABC test" of criteria, they're employees and need to receive full entitlements, unlike a contractor. Uber has come out and said that none of their drivers would meet that criteria as "drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces" - basically driving cars isn't a core part of Uber's business. Which is obviously pure horse shit and classic denial.
Perhaps one of the most low-key announcements at yesterday's Apple keynote was the little Apple-designed U1 ultra-wideband chip they're putting in all the new iPhones. Brian Roemmele posted on Quora (don't laugh, it's higher quality than most Quora posts) about what he reckons the U1 will be used for. The U1 comes into play for not just making AirDrop better, but for quickly and accurately mapping a room for AR/VR purposes, which when paired up with this obvious as dog's balls readme file in the iOS 13 GM about an Apple AR headset, starts to make the U1 a lot more interesting. It seems to me like Apple had a big announcement lined up for this event, couldn't pull it off and left a lot of clues behind.
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