According to the AFR, "30 popular finance influencers attended an invitation-only briefing with senior officials from ASIC" last week where the regulator told them to get a financial services license or shut the fuck up. Simply put, if their followers "think they're receiving financial product advice from you" (regardless of how many times they say this is not financial advice), you need a license or you'll face a penalty. These laws exist because we learned decades ago that allowing anyone to spout financial advice unregulated ends badly. The internet and social media doesn't change that.
I wasn't gonna bother mentioning this story, but close to a dozen people sent this in so I figure I should. The big brains at news.com.au reported this morning that a house in Sydney caught fire and killed the family cat due to a charging Tesla malfunctioning. EV charging fires are pretty rare, so TechAU reached out to Fire and Rescue NSW for confirmation that a Tesla or an EV was involved. Their response: "I have just spoken to our investigator who is on site and can confirm no electrical vehicle was in the garage nor was charging unit involved". Yet the article remains up on news.com.au as I write this (1:30pm) - what a bunch of crooks.
The Victorian Department of Education is mandating the installation of something called Zscaler on staff and student BYO devices across the state's schools. If you're not familiar with Zscaler it installs its own SSL root certificates and is designed to inspect browser traffic. The department told iTnews that "Zscaler is disabled in situations where the device connects to the school's network remotely" but wouldn't confirm that if "Zscaler monitors staff traffic from home". A privacy impact statement exists but the department "refused to release it or summarise its details". Cowards.
Den Delimarsky vents the multiple ways Windows takes "one step forward and two steps back with every update". Things like the UX inconsistency (so many different ways to render context menus for example), ads all over the bloody place (Edge is the worst culprit), continued UI changes for no reason (the Windows 11 file explorer context menu goddamn it!), forcing Microsoft account usage on people, all the damn telemetry that when you turn off gets re-enabled next update so much more. Windows could be awesome, but instead Microsoft are going down the death by 1,000 cuts path.
📻 This Kiss - Alex Lahey
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