Issue 1662 - Tuesday 2nd August, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Visa could be held partly responsible for allowing PornHub to monetise kiddie porn

About a year ago, Serena Fleites and 34 other women sued PornHub for monetising child porn. They argue that PornHub made shitloads of money off videos of minors doing sexual acts - obviously a very bad thing to be making money from. The allegations are laid out in this New York Times article from late 2020 and led to PornHub deleting millions of videos and only allowing verified users to upload content. Now Sarah and the other plaintiffs are taking aim at Visa. A Californian judge agrees with them, saying that "Visa knew that MindGeek's websites were teeming with monetized child porn" and that Visa could be partly responsible for any harm. The trial is yet to take place, but if the judge is going on hot like this already, it's not good for card processors and adult content.

Indonesia blocks Steam & PayPal for not complying with local regulations

Indonesia doesn't often get a run here, but when you cut off Steam and PayPal from over 273 million people, it's newsworthy. They introduced a new law making it mandatory for all service providers have a local presence and that they must respond to "urgent removal of material deemed harmful to national security and the public" within 4 hours. Google, Meta, TikTok, Spotify and 200 other foreign services responded, but a couple didn't, so they got blocked. On one hand, sweet, Big Tech companies seeing consequences for ignoring government rules. On the other, the government rules suck. By the way, Australia has pretty the same law - get rid of "class 1 material or class 2A material" within 24 hours or get a "a civil penalty of up to 500 penalty units" or "several other enforcement options".

Linus Torvalds likes the MacBook Air, a new version of Winamp appears, AMD GPU owners get magic noise cancellation

Something I Saw On The Internet

Does a computer processor get worn out?

Someone on Reddit asked a beautifully naive question - "does a computer processor get worn out?" - that lead to some great answers in the comments. You'd think no a CPU doesn't wear out as there's no moving parts that collapse from of wear and tear. But there is something called "electromigration", which is the wearing away of atoms inside the nanometer thin wires that make up a modern CPU. Those wires are so thin that eventually the mere act of electricity passing through it for decades will cause one to "snap" and the CPU will malfunction.

Bargains

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.