Issue 1539 - Thursday 3rd February, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Meta's global userbase has shrunk for the first time ever

Meta's share price tanked 22% after missing earnings targets and its first ever drop in in daily/monthly active users. Zuck has taken aim at TikTok in particular, saying "people have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly". Also in feel-good news, Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest is suing Meta for all those scummy cryptocurrency ads they allowed to run featuring his face, alleging they "failed to create controls or a corporate culture to prevent its systems being used to commit crime". The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Anti-trolling bill unmasked as a pro-defamation lawsuit bill

Our Prime Minister has been going around calling the Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill "some of the strongest powers to tackle online trolls in the world" that will "better protect Australians online", like it's some sort of problem impacting regular people in their day to day lives. But in reality, the Attorney-General's department told a Senate inquiry that "the bill is about defamation and it is not intended to address broader types of online harm", further elaborating that "it is a targeted bill that is about defamation and only defamation" - nothing to do with genuine trolls at all! Once again, we have a law designed to protect and empower pissant politicians and their mates from the harsh truth that everything thinks they're wankers.

News that couldn't fit elsewhere

Something I Saw On The Internet

Firewalla routers look pretty nice, I would like to try one

Never heard of em until today, but the Firewalla range of routers looks pretty cool. They appear to be little ARM-based SBC's (Orange Pi/Nano Pi units you get off AliExpress) but with properly designed firewall and routing software that's controlled via a smartphone and is easy to set up. Every feature under the sun available too - Wireguard VPN, ad blocking, deep parental controls, smart queues, network segmentation, etc. etc. Again, I've never used this thing so it could suck and their gigabit capable router, "Purple", is $470 shipped to Australia (oof) but I liked Firewalla's boss shitting on VC funding in TechCrunch today.

Bargains

The End

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