The ACCC is going to investigate online e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon Australia, eBay Australia, Kogan and Catch.com.au as part of it's ongoing remit to regulate digital platform services. They will "will consider pricing practices, the use of data, the terms and conditions imposed on third-party sellers, and the impacts on competition when the marketplace itself operates as a seller on the platform". On the consumer side of things, "the ability of customers to leave and read reviews of sellers and products, how complaints are handled and how consumers’ data is collected and used" will be investigated. The ACCC has a survey for consumers to share their thoughts on online retail marketplaces. Now is your chance to whinge and be listened to!
Shane Sonderman, an 18 year old that killed a man via "swatting" has been sentenced to jail for 5 years. For those unfamiliar, swatting is the act of making a fake report to police that there's an active shooter at someone you don't like's home, so the police come flying in guns blazing and scaring the shit out of ya. That's exactly what happened to Mark Herring, so got so scared when the police showed up, he had a heart attack and died. Why was he swatted? Because he owned the Twitter handle @Tennessee and Sonderman wanted it. Sonderman had form, doing the same to other owners of "prestige" usernames on social media accounts. Reply All has a good podcast episode about the antics of "hackers" (usually teens) who steal people's social media accounts for the fancy usernames.
Elon Musk let loose on Twitter that Tesla will be "making our Supercharger network open to other EVs later this year". Don't know much more else than that, but in Europe and Australia, all of Tesla's Superchargers use the exact same plug as every other EV (called CCS2) so it's certainly physically possible - the problem would be the billing side of things. I reckon Tesla is going to replace their current proprietary billing method with Plug & Charge, which part of the ISO 15118 standard for EV charging. It requires the EV's charging hardware to support it and no EVs on the road currently have it, but it'll become available for new EVs pretty soon and vastly improve the public charging experience.
Anyone that's ever asked me about backups has heard me crap on about the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of data, 2 on different mediums and 1 offsite. Simple to understand and it's never let me down so far, but Backblaze are making the argument that it's time for more modern backup strategies like 3-2-1-1-0 or 4-3-2, so that "one or more copies should be physically or virtually isolated in the event of a digital disaster like ransomware that targets all of their data, including backups". 3-2-1-1-0 is interesting - it adds an 1 offline/immutable copy and verification that data can be restored with 0 errors to the 3-2-1 setup.
📻 Too Old To Die Young - Brother Dege
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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.​