COVIDSafe is dead. The app got a final update last night and the release notes state that "the COVIDSafe app will longer collect or transmit data. Data is no longer collected and will be deleted from the National COVIDSafe Data Store. Data on your device will be deleted when you uninstall the app". It operated for almost 2 years, cost $10m to develop and $60,000 a month to run. A grand total of 17 "unique close contacts" were found. The money spent on COVIDSafe is practically a rounding error in the scheme of things, it's the refusal to switch to Apple and Google's contact tracing framework that shits me the most. It may have actually been useful if the government took their head out their arse.
Remember when Roe vs. Wade was repealed in the US and everyone said it's only a matter of time until one of the big tech companies is complicit in sending someone seeking an abortion to jail? Well it's happened. Nebraska cops subpoenaed Meta for the Messenger chat logs between a mother and daughter they suspected of having an abortion and Facebook handed over the data. Thanks to the chat logs, the pair have been charged with a crime. Facebook Messenger does have support for encryption, but it's not on by default and has to be enabled on a per-contact basis. If you had any doubt about the real-life implications of a technology decision, here it is. Encrypt everything and store as little data as possible.
Google has created a website and social media campaign (#GetTheMessage) dedicated to shaming Apple into supporting its forked version of Rich Communication Services (RCS) natively on the iPhone. They mention how crap the experience is for an Android user sending an SMS/MMS to an iOS user - blurred images, broken group conversations, no encryption, lack of status indicators, etc and provide their own version of RCS with encryption (the default RCS standard lacks it) as the solution to fix what Apple "broke". The only people I converse with on iMessage these days are the hardcore Apple fanboys (you know who you are). Everyone else is happy with SMS or is on Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter DMs, FaceBook Messenger or Signal.
Look at this single HTML file website. It has multiple pages and a navigation bar and stuff, but it's actually a single HTML file. Instead of using HTML anchors and scrolling down to different bits of content, it uses the CSS :target pseudo selector to show and hide "pages" as you click on the link to the "page". Maybe you already know how to do this and it's not very impressive, but I thought it was a neat little trick. That's all, nothing else to see here.
📻 ! (Song Formerly Known As) - Regurgitator
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