The Australian Red Cross Lifeblood service are keen to speak to some people who play Forza (or similar video games) to explore how they might be able to engage with that community in order to promote blood donations. If you can spare 45mins to answer your questions and share some thoughts, please email Yogesh at yjuggurnath@redcrossblood.org.au - also donate some blood if you can, give up your precious bodily fluids to help others!

In This Issue

News

Twitter slaps a misinformation notice on some Donald Trump tweets

Twitter finally did it, they marked a Donald Trump tweet as being full of shit. The tweets in question relate to his complaining that a postal vote for the 2020 Presidential election would be open to immense fraud. Twitter put a little "get the facts about mail-in ballots" warning under his tweets that link to articles explaining why postal voting is legit. Of course, Trump went nuts over it saying Twitter is stifling free speech and so on. What surprises me is that of all the tweets to "fact-check", this is the one Twitter chooses? On the same day Trump was firing out tweets accusing an MSNBC host of murdering his wife with no evidence, yet some bullshit about postal votes is what Twitter decides to grow a spine over? The mind boggles.

Proof that Facebook knew their algorithms were driving people insane but did nothing

In 2016 and 2018, Facebook execs were given reports done by their own staff about how "our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness" - yet changed nothing. They were also told that over 60% of people that joined "extremist" Facebook groups did so because Facebook's recommendation algorithms egged them on. Apparently the lack of action was the result of Joel Kaplan, Facebook's VP of global public policy who was also George W. Bush's former chief of staff. Zuck loved him and he would veto everything that could be construed as targeting conservatives, like not fact-checking political ads or limiting the influence of "super-sharers", so Facebook is a smaller target for accusations of bias.

Dodgy government IT project managed gave company he owned $14m worth of work over 13 years

Victoria's IBAC found that a project manager working in the Department of Education and Training funneled $14m worth of contracts over 13 years to an IT consultancy he owned. IBAC found that he was "misusing departmental information, influencing processes for procuring contracted staffing services, and circumventing those processes to obtain an unfair advantage over other IT contractor suppliers". To make matters worse, his line manager knew that there was a conflict of interest, yet nothing was done because he was a "go-to-guy" in the department. IBAC blames a "culture of relying on IT consultants" for this happening so often, over such a long period of time. The full Operation Betka report is a fascinating read if you've ever worked somewhere and thought "how the hell did these clowns get the contract".

Not News

Lithium pillows, rackounted Pis, macOS in VirtualBox , Philly Pi-Hole & Ventoy

Bargains

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