Once again Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have been dragged into the US Senate to listen to politicians bitch and moan about censorship on their respective platforms as part of the US government's attempt to reform Section 230. Jack had to defend the decision to delete the New York Post's half-arsed article about Joe Biden's son's laptop from Republicans and Zuck had to defend the decision not to ban old mate Steve Bannon for using Facebook to spread his opinion of wanting Dr. Fauci's head on a pike. Then it got into Twitter and Facebook's constant warning labels and engagement limiting on Trump's claims he won the election. I can't be the only one who finds it very bizarre that politicians are so upset about internet drama. Everyone needs to log off.
Twitter has launched a new feature called Fleets - "a Stories clone, borrowing all of the best ideas implemented by Instagram and Snapchat. You can share text, respond to others' tweets, or post videos with the same background color and overlaid text options you get on other messaging apps with ephemeral features, with every message disappearing after 24 hours. You can also respond to others' fleets by tapping on one and sending a direct message or emoji to the creator, which will start a DM conversation similar to how the story reply process works on Instagram". Twitter is also looking into copying Clubhouse, a group voice chat thing that seems nuts to me, but the kids love it.
A few weeks ago Service NSW made public "that 738GB of data, which comprised of 3.8 million documents, was stolen from 47 staff email accounts". In the 2020-21 budget announced yesterday, it was revealed that "investigations into this matter are still ongoing however, Service NSW is expected to incur legal and investigation costs of approximately AU$7 million"- $7 million bucks! Getting owned isn't cheap, is it? Also in the NSW budget is a $1.6b Digital Restart Fund that'll spend over $500m every year for the next 3 years over various IT/digital projects in the state like additional cybersecurity initiatives, a huge injection of funding to close the digital gap between metro & rural schools, stuff for digitising the court system, adding Revenue NSW to Services NSW and loads more. Good time to get fat off government work for NSW nerds.
Anandtech have released their first take of the M1-based Mac Mini. They've only had a few days with it and were not allowed to open it up, but the benchmarks they did run make it clear that Apple and the M1 SoC are not here to fuck spiders. Unlike the laptops which have tighter thermal and power constraints, the M1 in the Mac Mini is tweaked to be a 20-24W TDP SoC yet performs like a CPU with twice the TDP. I won't crap on about all the benchmarks, just check out the Anandtech article. Arstechnica has a decent review too. Also Apple Silicon related, Photoshop is currently in beta and downloadable now. Chrome is coming on Wednesday. Docker might take a little longer though.
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