Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai have been dragged to another US government hearing, but this time joined by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. They were there over video conference to take part in a 4-hour US Senate hearing into the Republican's latest dogwhistle, changes to Section 230 of the USA's Communications Decency Act. As Wired explains, "the event, however, the hearing was mostly an opportunity for Republicans on the committee to berate Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for supposedly discriminating against conservative users—especially conservative user number one, Donald Trump", digging up examples and comparisons of what Twitter has and has not deleted, with Ted Cruz proclaiming to Dorsey, "who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?". Video of the shenanigans is available on C-SPAN.
AMD has announced a brand spanking new generation of graphics cards using its latest RDNA2 architecture. The Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT use the Navi 21 GPU (made by TSMC with a 7nm node) and are designed to take on Nvidia's latest RTX 3000-series graphics cards. The benchmarks out there are from AMD, so always take em with a grain of salt, but they are claiming twice the 4K performance over the current RX 5000 series of graphics cards. The RX 6800 XT is a smidge faster than the RTX 3080, but much cheaper (~A$1000 vs ~A$1300). AMD's new cards go on sale November 18th. Fingers crossed they do a better job getting stock out to the market than Nvidia. You can't get an RTX 3000 card regardless of who you promise a sexual favour to! A Ryzen 5 5600X and Radeon RX 6800 would make a mighty fine gaming rig I reckon.
Caroline Nilsson is accused of killing her mother-in-law and staging a home invasion, with Nilsson arguing that it wasn't her but two men "who looked like tradies" that bound and gagged them. The prosecution has interestingly brought up that the "victim was wearing an Apple Watch which tracked her last movements, recording a "flurry" of 65 movements in 39 seconds before her heart rate stopped at 6:41pm on that day" as evidence that contradicts Nilsson's claims. Apparently the first time data from an Apple Watch has been used in an Australian criminal trial. The trial ended in a hung jury and will be re-tried, but just goes to show that these little computers hidden everywhere can and will be used against you. Make sure to take them into account when you conduct your next crime.
I'm not big into Amigas, they were well before my time, but I do like computer magazines so it makes me happy to bring Amiga Addict to your attention - a dead tree magazine from the UK that kicked off issue one in 2020. They need at least 500 pre-orders to actually get it printed, but I admire their dedication to the cause. While we are on the topic of computer magazines, I'll use this an excuse to mention my current favourite computer/technology related magazine, Logic. Every quarter they put out an issue that does a great job exploring and discussing the impact of technololgy on society. Here's a preview of their latest issue, looking at "technologies that are changing how we give and receive care—and the care that our machines themselves need". Well worth the US$30/yr I pay for the PDF version that I then print and read because I'm turning into my Dad.
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