Amazon decides to ban TikTok on company phones, then changes its mind
France is going to copy the UK’s age verification system for porn
LinkedIn sued for dodgy clipboard reading on iOS devices
What’s next for the NBN now that the rollout is pretty much done?
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Amazon sent an email out to employees saying that "due to security risk, the TikTok app is no longer permitted on mobile devices that access Amazon email" without saying what that security risk was. A few hours later they walked the statement back saying "this morning's email to some of our employees was sent in error. There is no change to our policies right now with regard to TikTok". On its own you could write this off as an honest mistake, but it adds to the noise surrounding TikTok lately. There was a very vague off the record mention of the Australian government considering banning TikTok last week, plus the US Secretary of State going on the record saying they're considering a ban of TikTok as well. India has already banned it because they're pissed off with China and don't trust that the app isn't a cyber trojan horse.
The French government is lining up to make age verification mandatory for viewing porn on the internet. The plan is to let the sites decide how they verify age, but there has to actually be some record of verification as there will be audits. Looks like the most popular way of verifying someone's age is via credit card. I assume you'd lock it down to credit cards only (not Visa/MC debit or pre-paid cards) as you can only get a proper credit card if you're over 18. Nothing stopping little horny Jacques getting his parents' credit card number and using that Australia is considering it and the UK tried their best to get some sort of age verification, but is struggling to find a practical way of implementing opt-in that also didn't create a "who looks at porn" list that could backfire spectacularly when it's inevitably hacked.
A "New York-based iPhone user" has filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn "for allegedly reading and diverting users' sensitive content" from the iOS clipboard. LinkedIn hasn't responded to the claim, but did release a new version of their app that stops doing this sneaky shit, saying that reading the clipboard was a bug and not intentional. Apparently heaps of apps were doing it - TikTok, AliExpress, Reddit and more were only exposed thanks to a new feature in iOS 14 (which isn't even out yet) that notifies you when an app reads the contents of your clipboard without your permission. I don't know why legitimate apps would be doing this, what were they hoping to gain from viewing random shit in people's clipboards? Only thing I can think of is being able to do smart pastes of content like tracking numbers of parcels, for example.
The Sydney Morning Herald has a succinct article about what's next for the NBN now that the rollout is practically complete. Apparently NBN has a $4.5b budget for upgrades over the next four years so technically it could start upgrading parts of the network it reckons will juice its value for when it inevitably gets privatised. The easiest upgrade would be moving cashed up areas with FTTN to FTTP because they know there's a high likelihood those affluent users will pay more for faster internet. If they don't do some major upgrades soon it'll be vulnerable to growing 5G networks where ISPs like Telstra, Optus and TPG (who also happen to be over 80% of the NBN market) decide to shift the profitable customers over to 5G instead of fixed line. NBN not doing well financially sucks because it'll be taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars if NBN is privatised without having repaid the government the enormous amount of money it spent over the last decade.
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