As recently as January Elon Musk was "confident" that Tesla vehicles would achieve the holy grail of level 5 autonomy. This caught the eye of California's DMV who called up Tesla's director of Autopilot software to "address, from an engineering perspective, Elon's messaging about L5 capability by the end of the year". According to a DMV memo of the meeting that was improperly censored in an FOI request, "Elon's tweet does not match engineering reality" and that "Tesla is at Level 2 currently". Once again Tesla/Elon tells the public one thing and the regulators (be it financial or automotive) another when their words have consequences.
Looks like NSW is gonna be the first state to have a mandatory data breach notification scheme. If passed, the law "would require agencies that suspected a data breach had occurred to immediately attempt to contain the breach and assess whether it met the 'serious harm' threshold. If so, the agency would need to immediately notify the NSW Privacy Commissioner with as many details as possible and provide subsequent updates as required". Unlike the federal law that requires businesses and non-profits turning over $3m/yr to report their breaches, the NSW law is only for state public sector entities.
Flurry, a "professional-grade mobile app analytics platform that's completely free" that is owned by Verizon media (hmmm) reckons that only 4% of users in the USA running iOS 14.5 have bothered to enable the "Allow Apps to Request to Track" feature that Facebook was cracking the shits about and begs you to enable. Worldwide that grows to 12% of users. I'm honestly surprised it's that high. I don't know what incentive there is to allow apps to track you across other apps and websites. It's a risk nobody needs to take. Also goes to show how big of an impact making a setting default is. The vast, vast majority of people don't fiddle with the settings on their devices.
Live in Sydney? Like old computers? Get on down to the Australian Computer Museum Society's launch of the National Computer Heritage Centre on the 15th & 16th of May. You might remember the ACMS as the mob who had to evacuate shitloads of vintage computers back in 2018 when the owner of their warehouse wanted to demolish it and redevelop the building. The collection languished for years, rotting away, until last year when the board was totally overhauled with new energetic members. Now they have a dedicated space in inner-Sydney to show off our computing heritage. It's a huge achievement and I can't wait to visit!
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