Moorebank high school in Sydney has come up with the utterly bizarre idea of installing fingerprint scanners to grant access to student toilets. They told parents, "we are introducing this system to monitor students' movement during class time and to reduce the incidents of vandalism". Handing over your biometric data isn't mandatory, over 1,000 students have already provided their fingerprint so they can use the toilets without "obtaining an access card from the office". What troubles me is that they ran this by a focus group and the "decision to install the mechanism was ratified by this group on more than one occasion". Most people don't seem to think this is weird at all.
Twitter is finally rolling out an edit feature. According to a blog post, "Tweets will be able to be edited a few times in the 30 minutes following their publication. Edited Tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp, and label so it's clear to readers that the original Tweet has been modified. Tapping the label will take viewers to the Tweet's Edit History, which includes past versions of the Tweet". Editing tweets will be available as part of the paid Twitter Blue subscription whenever they decide to move the feature out of testing. When that happens, I will start coughing up for Twitter Blue.
The EU is floating additional right to repair mandates. They want a vast range of "mobile phones, cordless phones, and slate tablets" parts available to "professional repairers" for up to 5 years after the device is no longer on sale. Devices should have removable batteries or include batteries designed to have "83% of its rated capacity after 500 full charging cycles, then 80% after 1,000 full charging cycles". The EU also wants security updates for at least 5 years, "functionality" updates for at least 3 years and that the updates are made available within 2-4 months of "an update of the same operating system... on any other product of the same brand". Sounds good to me.
While I was away, the Online Safety Act went into its next phase - the release of eight draft "Online Safety Codes" developed by six industry associations. The codes cover "various online services like social media, gaming, search messaging and app distribution, as well as internet carriage services and manufacturing and supply of any equipment that connects to the internet". The range of codes is extremely broad and will impact almost every online service in Australia. These aren't voluntary drafts either. They're mandatory and have punishments enforced by the eSafety Commissioner should a business not adhere to them. Bad time for the Australian tech media to be gutted out and running on the smell of an oily rag, I don't think these codes will get the public scrutiny they deserve.
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