The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have published separate feature stories last week about "parents who run social media accounts for children — mostly girls — who aren't old enough to meet the platforms' minimum 13-year-old age requirements" and how they "sold materials to their large audiences of adult men, including photos of their children in revealing attire, exclusive chat sessions, and their children's used leotards and cheer outfits". Pimping your kid to pedos is one of the lowest acts I can possibly imagine and I think something we can all agree on being a Bad Thing, yet, Meta doesn't seem to give a fuck, refusing to do things like "requiring accounts that sold child-focused subscriptions to register themselves for monitoring or banning subscriptions to such accounts entirely". Facilitating a genocide wasn't enough for Meta, they had to get into the child exploitation game too. Blow the fucken joint up.
A Senate committee hearing was held last week to discuss the proposed "prominence framework", a set of laws tailor made for Australian free to air TV networks designed to appease their complaining about Netflix and other streaming services being pre-installed on TVs while their apps are not. There were a few chuckles at a Network Ten exec that "needed 45 minutes and the help of an engineer to be able to download 10Play" onto their new TV, despite being "tech savvy". The ABC and SBS complained that TV makers wanted a "a 15% revenue share arrangement and a placement fee" or their apps would be removed from the TV's homepage. We all know that Smart TVs are hot garbage and most of us don't even dare connect them to the internet, but that's not what 95% of Australians do and if you aren't pre-installed, you don't even exist, particularly for the younger generation that don't even plug the TV into the aerial.
ISP Aussie Broadband already owns 19.9% of competitor Superloop and now they're offering to buy the rest of Superloop's shares to create an even bigger ISP. Aussie also purchased software company Symbio this month, a $262m takeover that'll help them provide a "broader range of white-label services that could be marketed to smaller companies". I remember being offered shares in Aussie Broadband as a customer back in 2020 at like $1 a share. If I purchased $5k back then, it'd be worth $23,400 now. I was a fool not to throw Phil Britt some cash! Also in Aussie tech company finance land, Canva has decided to do its "Canva Create" (I guess the WWDC equivalent of Canva?) conference in Los Angeles instead of Australia, which The Australian reckons is to juice up its attractiveness to US investors ahead of an imminent IPO, but Canva says the move is simply because the US is their biggest market now.
Gough Lui has completed a mega comparison of all the various video codecs, publishing his conclusion after months of testing. He's charted the VMAF score versus the bitrate for almost a dozen types of codecs and encoders, which I have never seen done before. If you're not familiar with VMAF it's "an objective full-reference video quality metric developed by Netflix in cooperation with the University of Southern California" and the closer the number the VMAF analysis software gets to 100 on the compressed video, the closer it is to the original source footage. A score of 95 or above is basically impossible to detect the difference and above 90 is still pretty bloody good - think of it like a 192k AAC vs 320k AAC audio file. On Gough's high quality footage test, libsvtav1 (Intel's AV1 encoder) and libaom-av1 (Google's AV1 encoder) were clear leaders in bitrate efficiency, achieving the highest VMAF scores at high and low bitrates. SVT-AV1 can be hardware accelerated via Intel's Arc GPUs too.
This incredible snapshot from Euclid is a revolution for astronomy. The image shows 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100 000 additional galaxies further away in the background, each containing up to hundreds of billions of stars. Many of these faint galaxies were previously unseen. Some of them are so distant that their light has taken 10 billion years to reach us. By mapping the distribution and shapes of these galaxies, cosmologists will be able to find out more about how dark matter shaped the Universe that we see today. This is the first time that such a large image has allowed us to capture so many Perseus galaxies in such a high level of detail. Perseus is one of the most massive structures known in the Universe, located ‘just’ 240 million light-years away from Earth, containing thousands of galaxies, immersed in a vast cloud of hot gas. Astronomers demonstrated that galaxy clusters like Perseus can only have formed if dark matter is present in the Universe. (ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA)
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