The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has ordered Meta/Facebook sell off Giphy, the animated GIF repository it purchased for US$400m in May last year. According to the regulator, "Meta could cut off the supply of GIFs to rivals, or demand more user data from them in order to keep using Giphy". GIFs are vital to the economy I guess? Meta is trotting out the usual "reviewing the decision and considering all options, including appeal" and reckons "consumers and Giphy are better off with the support of our infrastructure, talent, and resources" blah, blah, blah.
Our federal government announced a Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety today. It will look into "the range of online harms that may be faced by Australians on social media and other online platforms, including harmful content or harmful conduct" (full terms of reference are in this PDF). It'll present its findings by the 15th of Feb 2022. You might be thinking, didn't the government just pass an online safety bill? Doesn't the inquiry usually come first, then the law is built around the findings of that inquiry? Well yes, that's how a normal, sane and responsible government works. We don't have one of those, so arse backwards we go.
Amazon's big re:Invent conference where they announce AWS related things has kicked off. Most of it is over my head and deep enterprisey/developer territory, but there two announcements I found interesting. AWS Private 5G is a thing (in the US) where you can build your own 5G network using Amazon infrastructure and managed via the AWS console. Amazon ships the hardware and SIM cards to you. The other is the third-generation of their homegrown Graviton ARM SoC (will be used in C7g instances, 25% faster than Graviton2, currently in preview) alongside a new custom machine learning chip called Trainium. Watch out Intel and Nvidia, Amazon wants to own the entire stack.
Anything you ever wanted to know about the technical details of electric vehicle charging is probably answered by Schneider Electric's electrical installation wiki. It goes into detail about not only the different types of EV chargers, how long it takes to charge an EV, but also how they authenticate, how to design an electrical switchboard for one, managing multiple chargers off a constrained supply and an introduction to "smart charging". Cool resource. The entire wiki has heaps of info about electrical fundamentals if you want to be an armchair electrician like me.
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