Australia & UK sign Online Safety and Security Memorandum of Understanding

Straight from the press release - "Australia and the United Kingdom have today co-signed an historic Online Safety and Security Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), ushering in a new era of bilateral cooperation between the two countries to support safer and more positive experience online". The two countries have "committed to closer cooperation in the form of in-person dialogues, coordinated bilateral and multilateral engagement, regulatory engagement, shared research projects, and working with industry to address safety challenges posed by design choices". I don't know what this means in practice beyond each country giving each other slaps on the back and confirming each other's bad decisions, but I doubt it's a good thing considering the UK's focus on age verifying everything, blocking access to porn and an extreme desire to bust end-to-end encryption.

Don't need to share your phone number on Signal now (but do need one to register)

Speaking of end-to-end encryption, Signal has added some new features that make their messaging service even more private. According to their blog post, "your phone number will no longer be visible to everyone you chat with by default", "you can now create a unique username that you can use instead", "can share a QR code or unique URL that shortcuts to your username in Signal" and "unless people have your exact unique username, they won't be able to start a conversation, or even know that you have a Signal account – even if they have your phone number". You still need a phone number to sign up for Signal (why???) but at least now you can totally hide it and people can find you by username instead. Beats me why they still insist on a phone number and don't simply let me register with a username and password.

Acrobat gets AI-chatbot, Swifties used 35TB of data at the MCG, fingerprint acoustic hacking is a thing

• In features nobody asked for, Adobe's added an AI-assistant to Acrobat. It is a "conversational engine" that takes whats in your PDF and lets you ask questions about what's in the document. Sure, that sounds cool, but who the fuck would trust the answers the chatbot gives you?
• Attendees of Taylor Swift's concert at the MCG last week used 35TB of data across three nights on Telstra's network. 35TB doesn't sound that impressive, but it is 200% more data than "other artists at the same venue". Peak usage was just before the show and "when it was time for the surprise songs, downloads decreased".
• Researchers were able to leverage "the sound characteristics of a user's finger swiping on a touchscreen to extract fingerprint pattern features" using "any chatty app where users carelessly perform swiping actions on the screen while the device mic is live". It's not perfect and not easy, but that's some wild research.

3D trinkets for your spatial computing environment

Beautiful Things is a website that has beautiful things designed to just sit and look pretty in a spatial computing environment. Like how you'd place a nice vase or a ceramic trinket or whatever in a physical space to pretty up the place, you can get these 3D USDZ files and on the Apple Vision Pro, "can be freely placed anywhere in your environment alongside other windows, allowing you to inspect up close, say, a Spider-Man model, a Lamborghini, or, should you feel like it, a first-gen iPod classic". What a time to be alive.