Remember that Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety announced last week by the Prime Minister (which still isn't listed on Parliament's website)? Guess who got appointed to the committee - Craig Kelly. Yep, the bloke kicked out of the Liberal party and banned from Facebook for shitposting about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin is gonna write a report on "the potential impacts of online harms on the mental health and wellbeing of Australians". That said, it's probably good Craig has input. He's a prime example of how social media smooths boomer brains. Social media totally broke this guy, we should study how that happened.
The New York Times interviewed 19 people that worked on Tesla's infamous Autopilot driver assist feature over the years and published an enlightening article about how far Elon Musk's claims about "full self driving" are from reality. The big problem is Elon's insistence on a "two-eyes metaphor" (humans have two eyes and can drive, why do we need anything other than cameras???) as the way forward, rejecting multiple engineers claims that radar and lidar are necessary for the system to work safely. Engineers also warned Tesla's marketing department not to call the system Autopilot, or refer to it as "autonomous" or "self-driving" as it would "mislead the public".
The company buying Tile, Life360, has had their deep wholesaling of user location info detailed by The Markup. Former employees of companies like Cuebiq and X-Mode claim Life360 is "one of the largest sources of data" for the targeted advertising industry. Life360 made $22m in 2020 selling almost-live data streams of where its users are. They admit to selling this stuff in their privacy policy, and you can opt-out within the app, but now that Tile (and the Tile app) is going to be part of Life360 and I know a few Sizzle readers are Tile users, you might want to re-assess who you're giving your location data to.
IPv4 addresses are getting expensive. According to IPv4 global, an online marketplace for IP addresses, the current price for a single IPv4 address is in the US$50 range. Less than a year ago it was hovering around US$25, but has been steadily climbing ever since. I knew about the concept of IPv4 address exhaustion and (only 4.3b IPv4 addresses are possible, we've used em all up) and that everyone should be using IPv6 by now, but I had no idea they were that valuable. When I rent a $5/m VPS, a big chunk of that is probably just the right to use that previous IPv4 address.
📻 Burning Effigies - Tigercub
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