Australia is getting a COVID-19 vaccination digital certificate program. After getting both doses of the vaccine, you'll be able to log into myGov or the Express Plus Medicare app to get proof you're immune to COVID-19. It'll pull info from the Australian Immunisation Register (which IBM recently upgraded up for $19m) and will only show your COVID vaccine status, not any other vaccines or health info. There's not much more to it than that and sounds pretty hard to fuck up, but I believe the federal government can find a way.
El Salvador's government has succeeded in passing laws to make Bitcoin legal tender. All businesses there will have to accept Bitcoin for goods and services in the near future. Considering how much the price of Bitcoin moves from day to day, it'll be fascinating to see how El Salvadorian businesses handle accepting Bitcoin. The Development Bank of El Salvador will be able to instantly convert Bitcoin to USD for businesses that want to lower their risk, but there's still the issue of having to constantly alter pricing to avoid making a loss or charging too high of a price to customers.
It's a slow news day, so here's some stuff I bookmarked in the lsat few weeks that never made it into the Sizzle the day I read it:
Looking for an open source alternative to Slack? Zulip might be what you're after. It's a bit different to Slack in that Zulip is centered around threads. You can make a new thread in each channel and have conversations there. To me it looks like taking a forum style approach to a chat platform. You can read Zulip's argument for why their approach to threads and asynchronous chat is better than Slack's. There's a free tier that's pretty capable or if you prefer, you can self-host it on your own server with no restrictions. Like many things I mention in The Sizzle, I've not used Zulip much so don't entirely vouch for it, but it looks interesting at face value!
📻 Wring It Out - Rival Schools
😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.
💬 Did you know that The Sizzle has a Slack group? Join in and chat with other subscribers like you.
💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info? Visit the customer portal.
The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.