Facebook is pissing in everyone's pocket and telling them its raining with the launch of a $15m Australian News Fund. According to Facebook it will hand out a bunch of grants for "innovation and revenue-generating projects, such as subscription paywalls and membership program development" and "to fund news projects of public interest value and to encourage media diversity". I'd rather eat my own dick than take a cent from Facebook. What's this one off sugar hit of cash gonna do besides give them a tiny bit of positive PR? Absolutely nothing. They're also launching a beta of Facebook News to a handful of Australians before giving it to all Australian Facebook users "in the coming months".
Australian patent law just got spicier, as the Federal Court has said that an AI system can be named the inventor of a patent - which seems to be the first judicial determination in the world of its type. Dr Stephen Thaler, a US-based developer of Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) made the patent claim and put on it that DABUS, not himself, invented a "food container and devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention" (I think this is the patent in question). Initially IP Australia said it's bogus because a human needs to be the inventor, but the federal court overturned that decision as the Patent Act doesn't define the term inventor, so the judge figured "We are both created and create. Why cannot our own creations also create?".
Blizzard's president J. Allen Brack and human resources boss Jesse Meschuk have quit the beleaguered gaming company as sexual harassment claims pile up. An IT worker admitted to installing spy cameras in the women's toilets in 2018. A security engineer said she was mocked and harassed by Blizzard employees at a 2015 Black Hat conference. Male Blizzard employees would "would often walk into the office's breastfeeding rooms without knocking and refuse to leave until asked". All this in addition to the previous stories of women being groped and harassed at work. A pathetic HR department is one of the core complaints made by the women involved in the lawsuit against Blizzard, saying their lack of action on stuff like this enabled male staff to keep acting like fuckwits.
📻 Strange Human Being - Regurgitator
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