Telstra spun off its infrastructure to a standalone business called InfraCo in 2018 as part of its T22 strategy to streamline their operations and cut costs. Today it's T22 a step further and splitting the Telstra Group into three entities: InfraCo - Fixed (ducts, the pipes, fibre, data centres, subsea cables, exchanges, etc), InfraCo - Towers (passive, physical mobile tower assets) and "ServeCo", a placeholder name for the company that'll "own the active parts of our network, things like software defined networking" and "radio access network equipment on our mobile towers, our spectrum holdings, and the electronics that light up the fibre in our fixed network". The AFR reckons Telstra is doing this to prepare itself to buy the NBN and avoid the wrath of the ACCC.
After five years of storing unlimited "high quality" backups of everyone's photos for free, Google is taking this popular feature away from Google Photos. It'll now store 15GB of pics for free, anything more than that and you've got to pay for more storage on your Google account, which is shared with Drive, Workspace and all the other Google crap you've got going. This doesn't apply to Pixel smartphone owners however, they'll be able to keep uploading an unlimited amount of high quality (i.e: compressed versions of the originals) to Google Photos. The change takes effect June 1st 2021 and your existing photos won't be counted towards the 15GB, just new photos. Casey Newton makes the excellent point that so many great photo services (Everpix, Loom, etc) were driven out of the market due to Google Photos' free service. Now that it's ending, those services will probably never come back. Competition killed, mission accomplished.
NSW is making it mandatory for businesses to use an electronic based method of recording customer/visitor contact details, ideally using the NSW government's Covid Safe Check-in feature within the Service NSW app. For those without a smartphone or if the system they're using craps out, businesses can manually record details on paper, but it has to be digitised within 24 hours (e.g: Word or Excel) so it can be handed over to the government immediately if needed. Personally, I really like NSW's approach to venue check-ins as no personal info is shared with the business and because the vast majority of businesses will be using the government provided platform, you don't need to have your details shared with a multitude of privately run services. Victoria is apparently developing its own similar QR code based solution, but honestly this seems like a great use of COVIDsafe - what a missed opportunity.
I'm still pumped about Apple's M1 SoC, so here's some very Apple-nerd niche stuff about it and the new Macs using it that I stumbled upon the last 24 hours:
📻 Lazerray - TV On The Radio
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