Google is gonna drop some huge coin in Australia via what it calls the Australian Digital Future Initiative - a $1b, five-year program to "strengthen digital infrastructure, develop Australian technology and talent, and solve global and local challenges". Google will set up a research hub somewhere to be decided in the country that will use "a team of local researchers and engineers that will use AI processes to explore job creation, education, and training". They'll also work with the CSIRO to "explore clean energy, natural hazard management, and protect the Great Barrier Reef" and with Macquarie University to research quantum computing. Wow! Is there nothing Google can't do???
Twitter has taken its new API out of beta, closing the feature gap between the official client and third parties. In fact, in an interview with The Verge, Twitter's developer platform lead said that the new API would "would make things better for users who wanted third-party Twitter clients" and has "removed language in our Developer Policy that restricted some elements of how you build with Twitter's core features and limited the number of users you can support through your app". Stuff like polls, Super Followers, Spaces, lists and more are supported now, so technically a third party app can support them too.
Russia has apparently blown up one of its satellites in-orbit using a ground-based missile (called an ASAT test), which sounds fucken cool until this next sentence - astronauts (two of which are Russian) on the ISS had to "shelter in place" due to a cloud of space debris that passes the ISS every 90 minutes as it orbits Earth. Nothing appears to have hit the ISS or caused major damage, but the astronauts had to spend hours inside the Soyuz and Dragon capsules, ready to quickly abandon the ISS as a precaution. Sounds like the plot to a movie, but nope, 100% real and actually happened.
This came out a few months ago, but I missed it at the time - in 2019 Apple was gonna ban Facebook from the App Store if it didn't do more to prevent human trafficking on Instagram. Apple found out via a BBC investigation that exposed a huge amount of posts (typically not in English, probably why Facebook didn't know/didn't give a shit) just listing people for sale as if they're cattle. Apple then told Facebook to lift its game, Facebook did a "proactive sweep" looking for human trafficking and kept Apple off its back. Imagine a world where Apple or Google remove Facebook's apps from their stores. It would be glorious.
📻 You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm
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