Issue 1516 - Thursday 16th December, 2021

In Today's Issue

The News

Don't mind us, we're just Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data

The USA & Australia have signed the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (Cloud) Act that will "allow Australian and US law enforcement agencies to use existing warrants to demand information from overseas-based companies to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute serious crime". Essentally Australian cops can demand American companies like say, Facebook or Google, or even hosts like AWS or Cloudflare hand over user info, with an Australian warrant. No need for them to go via US cops and get a US warrant. The reverse applies too, with US cops givin Australian telcos and online services a US warrant that's now valid here.

Peter Molyneux's new game sold virtual land as NFTs for real money, making virtual landlords

Peter Molyneux is a legendary game designer, responsible for titles like Theme Park, Black & White and Fable. He's currently working on Legacy, a "town management" game where you "design, build, and take care of a company town, whose residents will work in its factories to make the products you invent and sell" that actually seems kinda fun. The reason I mention it today is that Legend has sold almost $74m worth of virtual land in this unreleased game via NFTs and a cryptocurrency called LegacyCoin minted for the game. Literal landlords in my videogames, fucks sake.

SharePlay supported added to Disney+ on iOS so you can FaceTime up to 32 people and watch along

Disney+ has added support for Apple's new SharePlay feature introduced in iOS/tvOS 15.1. It allows you to watch "Disney+ series and movies in sync with friends and family while on a FaceTime call together" and is available globally across the entire Disney+ catalog. Up to 32 people can watch at once and each person can pick their own audio and subtitles. Apparently lots of other apps support it too, like Apple TV+, Apple Music, TikTok, Twitch and Paramount+. What a great feature. Wish this was around back in the deep lockdown days. Would have been cool to watch some stuff with mates I couldn't see in person.

Something I Saw On The Internet

BusKill, a dead man's switch for your laptop

BusKill is a "a hardware Dead Man's Switch that can trigger your laptop to lock, shutdown, or self-destruct if your machine is physically separated from you". The use case here is if someone tries to steal your laptop, they at least have to try and get the data out of it while it's turned off instead of you logged into stuff and the laptop on. By "self-destruct" they mean "wipe RAM and encryption keys", making the data on the device totally useless. The target market includes crypto traders, jouranlists, activists and so on. Must be stressful carrying such sensitive data around that you'd need this kinda thing.

Bargains

The End

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