The government is gonna float the "Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022" into parliament this week so it looks like they care about people's privacy after the Optus and Medibank data breaches made it an issue. As per Innovation Australia, "the proposed changes would lift the maximum penalty for serious or repeated privacy breaches from its current $2.22m penalty to whatever is the greater of $50m; three-times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information; or 30% of a companies adjusted turnover in the relevant period". They'll also give the "Australian Information Commissioner more powers to resolve privacy breaches, as well as strengthen the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme to ensure that companies provide the Information Commissioner with comprehensive details of precisely what information has been compromised".
Facebook is threatening the Canadian government with leaving the country if it decides to pass an "Online News Act" share revenue with news outlets. Sounds extremely familiar, doesn't it? Australia tried the same thing, Facebook called their bluff, left for a glorious few days, then returned when the media companies shit their pants after traffic to their sites fell off a cliff. Ultimately a weakened version of the law that Facebook could tolerate and the media companies could save face with was passed and called the News Media Bargaining Code. Facebook is using the same arguments (our users don't really give a shit about news, it's way more important to you than it is to us, etc.) with Canada's Online News Act, that going by the info page on the Canadian government's website, is almost identical to ours. Australians, be proud to be on the forefront of enabling rent-seeking behaviours world wide!
October 1st marked the 40th anniversary of the compact disc. Billy Joel's album 52nd Street was the first disc to go on sale alongside the Sony CDP-101 player in Japan. Here's a video from the ABC's "Towards 2000" showing off this wondrous new technology to an Australian audience. The Quietus has a nice essay on the CD's legacy. It's interesting that we never really topped the quality of a CD for mainstream music listening. Movies progressed to Blu-Ray from DVD and VHS but music moved to online streaming at an arguably lower quality - the rare handful of "hi-fi" releases aside. Selling my CD collection to pay rent in the early 2000s was necessary at the time but damn I miss those shiny circles 20 years later.
National Museum of Australia: "This receiver unit was used by CSIRO in the invention of the original Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) prototype. It was developed with other components including a 40 GHZ transmitter unit, an analogue to digital converter, a digital to analogue converter, and a Fast Fourier transfer (FFT) chip. This unit was used to detect the modulated signal and output a pair of baseband analogue (voltage) signals (containing the modulation information) to the ADC unit"
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