In This Issue

News

People outside the boundaries of “normal” were semi-shadow banned on TikTok to avoid bullying

TikTok is in trouble again, this time for hiding videos of users with disabilities in the main feed. Their policy was to mark users with "facial disfigurement, autism and Down syndrome, a slight squint, a facial birthmark" or those who identify as "LGBTQIA+ or fat" as "special users" and hide their posts from getting too popular in order to protect from them from bullying (or more likely, don't damage TikTok's reputation when ratbag users find them, heap shit on them and the media catches on). This was discovered by a German blog called Netzpolitik and confirmed by a statement from TikTok, who said they've since changed this policy and it is no longer in effect.

Xerox and HP are conducting a slow and delicate mating ritual of their printer businesses

Carl Icahn has is still trying to get Xerox and HP to merge, sending a letter directly to HP shareholders today saying that the HP board and management have a shitty plan and if they want to see some financial returns they should take Xerox's offer to combine their businesses. Icahn owns 10% in Xerox and 4% of HP and reckons "the combination of HP and Xerox is one of the most obvious no-brainers I have ever encountered in my career" - which would be a very fair assumption. Think of all the synergies! This is HP by the way, who make printers, like Xerox. Not HPE who make servers and enterprisey computer stuff. I can't wait to crack the shits with a HP-Xerox multifunction colour laser printer some time in the future.

SA government CIO sent to the slammer for lying on their resume

Veronica Theriault, the former CIO of the South Australian department of Premier and Cabinet, has been sentenced to 25 months in jail. She lied on her resume about working for "several large technology firms and universities", as well as impersonating her references and getting her brother (sho was also sent to jail) to pretend to be a reference too. Oh and she gave her brother a $21,000 "service integration team leader" contract within the first few days of starting the job. While this is all bad and it sucks and it's nice to see CIOs get sent to jail, who knew you could go to jail for 2 years for faking your resume? Seems unfair that I can go to jail for pumping up my resume, but if my boss underpays me all they have to do is pay a pissweak fine.

Not News

Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the first PlayStation went on sale?

To celebrate 25 years of Sony's PlayStation, The Verge has compiled a series of insightful articles about the little grey box that ruined my secondary education. My favourite piece in the series is about the PS3's use in supercomputing clusters. It had an insanely powerful GPU and was at the time, the best bang for buck (in terms of performance, price and power consumption) number crunching device on the market. Dozens of other universities and research groups like UMass Dartmouth, the Air Force Research Laboratory and North Carolina State University created clusters of hundreds of PS3s to run their computing projects on. There was even an official PS3 F@H client that was available on the PS store to download, so you could contribute to the project. 15 million PS3s participated and provided 100m hours of computing time. I ran F@H 24/7 when I wasn't playing a game on the PS3.

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😁 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.

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.​