In news that'll shock nobody, COVIDSafe is still as useful as tits on a bull. NSW Health told Innovation Australia that "experience to date in NSW has shown that the COVIDSafe app may be most useful where case interviews have not been successful in identifying contacts. It has not been necessary to use the COVIDSafe app with any recent cases in NSW in 2021". It was also not used in Victoria's latest outbreak. All up over its 15 month lifespan, COVIDSafe only "identified 17 new close contacts that weren't already picked up by manual contact tracers". I haven't read anything lately about the success or uselessness of similar apps overseas, so I think the entire notion of smartphone based contact tracing is dead.
Google has announced Gmail will start using the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard. As The Verge explains, "the idea is that an organization's logo will show up in your inbox when they send you an email that's authenticated using the DMARC standard to help reduce the likelihood that you’ll open and act on an email posing as one from a legitimate source". Gmail users don't have to do anything to see the brand logos, it'll just happen. More information on the process is available on the BIMI working group's website. Maybe one day you'll see a logo attached to future issues of The Sizzle to verify you're getting legitimate tech news and not that garbage low quality gear cut with ads and sponsored content.
Any nerd obsessed with data hoarding is probably familiar with Backblaze's Storage Pods - custom made rackmount server enclosures that aim to shove as many hard disks into a 4RU box as possible. After 12 years and 6 iterations of Storage Pods, they've decided to fill their new Amsterdam datacenter with Dell servers instead, arguing that the market has caught up with their needs and the case for rolling their own isn't as strong as it used to be. I look forward to reading more detailed analysis of how the Dells they chose compare to their homebrew boxes.
📻 Los Angeles - Frank Black
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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.