X has finally responded to eSafety's request for more info on how they moderate and what they're doing to meet the Basic Online Safety Expectations. It won't surprise anyone that X isn't doing much at all, with eSafety finding an 80% reduction in "safety engineers" and policy staff, 50% fewer moderators and full-time staff dedicated to "hateful conduct" since Musk took over. When asked "what tools were used to detect volumetric attacks or pile-on's in breach of Twitter's targeted harassment policy", X said they don't have any. X also reinstated over 6,100 Australian accounts (eSafety is guessing they're Australian, X wasn't clear) that were previously banned, 194 of those "previously suspended by the platform for hateful conduct violations". eSafety's response to all this? Nothing except some words from the commissioner about how this is all very bad.
Big news for Bitcoin - which occupies so little space in my brain these days I almost forgot it still exists - as the USA's SEC has approved 11 Bitcoin ETFs from legit financial companies like BlackRock and Fidelity. This happened a day after the SEC's X account was hacked (they didn't have 2FA enabled, lol, morons) and a fake announcement was made that the ETFs were approved, boosting the price of Bitcoin. So yeah, if you wanna invest in Bitcoin but don't want to hold any Bitcoin yourself, you'll eventually be able to log in to your favourite broker and buy shares in an ETF that holds Bitcoin. You could also take your money to the casino, more fun too. You gotta laugh at the irony of a cryptocurrency ETF, all regulated and shit, when one of the key tenets of cryptocurrency was freedom and liberation from the oppressive regulation of such entities.
Apple is trying to argue with the EU that they have 5 separate app stores, not one big App Store and all but the iPhone app store don't meet the user threshold to be determined as a "platform" within the the EU's Digital Markets Act, which would result in Apple having to allow alternative app stores on all their devices with an app store. I guess they're right - the App Store on the Apple TV is pretty different to the one on the iPhone, ditto the Mac. They've got until April to either comply or get a court to say otherwise, which isn't much time. Apple has acknowledged this in their financial reporting for the first time, kinda admitting they're going to have to play ball with the EU at some level and it'll impact their business.
Umar Butler built "Open Australian Legal Corpus, the largest open database of Australian law". In a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention, they wanted to train an LLM on Australian legal data but one didn't exist, so they built their own. It contains " every in force statute and regulation in the Commonwealth, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Norfolk Island, in addition to thousands of bills and hundreds of thousands of court and tribunal decisions". Victoria is the odd one out as Umar is yet to get permission to ingest the laws of the greatest state in the country into the database. Impressive work from what appears to be a single person, but I fear what fresh hell Umar might conjure up combining the law and an LLM.
The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. (Steve Jurvetson / Flickr)
📻 Where Did She Come From? - Hard-Ons
😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.
💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.
👋 Forums not your thing? The Sizzle has a Slack group you can procrastinate in and chat with other nerds bored at work.
💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info, change email address or cancel your subscription? Visit the customer portal.
🎁 Make someone's day and buy them a 12 month gift subscription to The Sizzle.
📚 Browse The Sizzle Archive. A few issues are missing and it's not searchable, but it's better than nothing.
🫂 Friends of The Sizzle is a small group of businesses or organisations operated by Sizzle subscribers. Support your fellow Sizzler!
💔 Tired of my bullshit? Unsubscribe and I'll never speak to you again.
The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.