YouTube finally came to the party and knocked off some of Trump's videos. Apparently one of his uploads violated their content policies on inciting violence - dunno which one, YouTube isn't saying - but it's one of his post-insurrection uploads. They also removed two videos uploaded to the White House's official channel. Trump's been issued a "strike" on YouTube, which means "the channel is now prevented from uploading new videos or livestreams for a minimum of seven days - which may be extended". I'd be surprised if YouTube doesn't keep him on ice until at least the inauguration of Biden on Jan 20th.
Yesterday, CBS's morning TV show in the USA said in an exclusive interview with Tim Cook that Apple has a "big announcement" for tomorrow. It's now tomorrow and that big announcement is Apple spending US$100m to expand its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI) - "the Propel Center, a first-of-its-kind global innovation and learning hub for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); an Apple Developer Academy to support coding and tech education for students in Detroit; and venture capital funding for Black and Brown entrepreneurs". Not what I was hoping for from a "big announcement" from Apple, but this is nice too.
Guardian journo Josh Taylor got his hands on some new info about COVIDSafe's costs. They've got contracts worth over $7m and have spent almost $6m on this turd of an app, with over $2.5m going to AWS. I'm no big city programmer, but that sounds like a lot of money for an backend infrastructure that isn't supposed to store much data? The rest of the cash is spread across various consultants sucking at the government teat doing who knows what. At leat Vision Australia got $16,000 for accessibility consulting work. Oh, and they're still refusing to say how many active users COVIDSafe has - no doubt because it's embarrassing and everyone's removed it from their phones.
I absolutely love hearing about the projects Sizzle subscribers work on, so I was delighted to get an email from Charlie Gleason last night telling me about an open source app he made called Pika. It's a colour picket for macOS that "makes it simple to quickly find colours onscreen, in the format you need, so you can get on with being a speedy, successful designer". I have absolutely no need for it, but it looks cool and useful for people more creative than me. Another Sizzle subscriber called Paul took made a faithful reproduction of Solitaire of Windows 3.1 on iOS by using the original cards.dll file! Adorable.
📻 Rock N Roll - Peaches
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