Remember last year when a Ubiquiti employee stole data from his employer to extort them, then went to Brian Krebs as a whistleblower about the incident that employee created? Ubiquiti is now suing Mr. Krebs for publishing an article about the extortion attempt, but didn't mention that the previous article he wrote using this "whistleblower" information was in fact an extortionist. It's very confusing, but Ubiquiti are basically very salty about the reputational damage of Kreb's articles about the data breach and want him to pay them damages of US$425,000.
Facebook has apparently been suffering a "bug" for the last six months with the News Feed, where "posts that would usually be demoted by the company's algorithms being boosted by as much as 30% instead" - Facebook is calling this a "massive ranking failure". The type of content getting free rein included "probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine". Shit happens, hey?
Australian software-based startups have struggled to claim the R&D tax incentive (RDTI) as many software development activities don't cleanly come under the "experiment or experiments being carried out for the purpose of generating new knowledge" criteria, so startup lobbyists have been begging the government to create a new program tailored for software. Unfortunately for them, a review of the RDTI by the Board of Taxation has decided against this, arguing that it current setup achieves government's policy objective of "stimulating the economy by encouraging companies to develop innovative ideas and activities".
We've all used the Wayback Machine at some point to look back at an old website, so if you know how to use Docker you should give back and run the Archive Team Warrior. When a website (usually with lots of user generated content) announces it's shutting down, your instance is activated and starts helping to download the site and send it back to the Internet Archive for safe keeping. I have a few cheap VPSes (all are under $10/yr) running around the world that do nothing but run instances of the Archive Team Warrior Docker container. If there's a heaven, I expect this pure and noble act to score me big points when the Big Man decides if I should be let in.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
📻 Dance - Art vs Science
😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.
💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.
👋 Forums not your thing? The Sizzle has a Slack group you can procrastinate in and chat with other nerds bored at work.
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📚 Browse The Sizzle Archive. A few issues are missing and it's not searchable, but it's better than nothing.
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