We've entered a new age of website blocking, with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) ordering ISPs to block 40 "of the most highly visited commercial cheating services that are targeting students at Australian higher education institutions". Yeah, that's right, a pissant government agency is able to get websites blocked because the law allows it to. I had no idea TEQSA had that sort of pull. Dunno which websites were blocked, nobody is saying. We might found out in a year's time after a few FOI requests? As usual (like the torrent and gambling sites regularly blocked in Australia), it's only a DNS level impediment and super easy to access if you use Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server or Google's 8.8.8.8 server.
Not even squeaky clean Apple can escape the Silicon Valley tech bro vortex, with 15 current and former female Apple employees telling the Financial Times (paywalled, sorry) about incidents where HR ignored their claims of sexual misconduct from fellow employees. One woman had her clothes removed and photos taken of her topless. Another had a colleague "texting her sexual messages at all hours of the day". A store employee was "raped by a colleague who offered to drive her home from work". Another colleague "hacked her devices and threatened her life after an abusive relationship". All these women said Apple's HR department virtually ignored the claims and did nothing, pretending like it never happened and minimising their experience.
Earlier this week I wrote about a US judge saying that allegations of Visa being complicit with Pornhub in monetising child porn are valid enough that a trial should be held to determine if it's true and to what extent Visa knew what was going on. Today Visa stopped offering services to TrafficJunky, an ad network owned by MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub. PornHub uses TrafficJunky to monetise the videos on their site. It is a big enough deal that Visa's CEO made a blog post about it. I find it hard to believe that Visa didn't know about the large amount of revenge porn and underage porn getting uploaded to PornHub, but also fuck people using Visa as a wedge in their anti-porn crusade.
The Sweet Setup has a nice review of Unfold - a smartphone app that helps you make really nice looking Instagram Stories posts. Maybe there's other apps out there the kids use these days, but Unfold seems handy. Also can I just say how refreshing it is to read an in-depth review of a smartphone app? They were common a decade ago (I wrote dozens of them!) but since Apple ended affiliate links for the App Store, removing a way for reviewers to monetise their hard work, nobody seems to discuss mobile software anymore and the world is worse off for it.
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.
📻 Sleepwalking - Ammonia
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