According to "figures obtained by Guardian Australia", Border Force has "seized or retained more than 1,000 devices from travelers entering Australia in the past five years". Which you know, could be legit, maybe there is kiddie porn on all of em, I dunno. But if you ask Border Force, they have "no records available for how many criminal charges or other legal action have arisen from data obtained through phone searches at the border". So you've got all these devices, plus the hundreds per year you rummage through aimlessly in a secret room at the airport then hand back, but you can't tell us if any of this resulted in legal action??? Fuckwits.
Apple will cough up US$50m to settle a 2018 class action lawsuit over the crappy butterfly action keyboards used on MacBooks between 2015 and 2019. If you've erased this low point in Apple's modern history from your mind, the butterfly keys had "issues with keys repeating, sticking, and otherwise failing when dust and other particulates got into the butterfly mechanism". They were truly ratshit keyboards, horrible to type on too, not just mechanically unreliable. After a few years of this nonsense Apple replaced the keyboard with the ones we've got on MacBooks now and they're way better in every aspect. It's a US case so none of that cash will flow down to us, but maybe Apple will think twice before inflicting user hostile crap like this on us again.
The ACCC and ASIC have teamed up to trial "automated takedowns of websites hosting phishing and other scams". They kicked things off in June using Netcraft (didn't they used to have a thing monitoring website uptime back in the 90s?) that the UK's National Cyber Security Centre has been enjoying for 4 years now. The ACCC says there's been "dozens of takedowns" in the last 3 weeks, mostly "phishing sites impersonating Australian businesses and government authorities", "puppy scams, shoe scams, cryptocurrency investment scams and tech support scams". I'm unsure how this is all automated. Maybe it's the detection/reporting of a scam that's automated?
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy looks like a great book. It is the "first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers ("topsites") in the mid-to late-1990s". I haven't read it, but the title and description enticed me enough to download the free PDF and upload it to my e-book folder on OneDrive with the aspiration to reading it on my iPad one day.
📻 Fuck Off - The Frogs
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