I'm taking a short break from The Sizzle. As of tomorrow, Josh, Chris and Dan will be taking over until the 21st of November while I log off for a bit. Don't forget The Sizzle meetup at the ACMS in Sydney on Sunday at 12, see ya there!
The Victorian Department of Health gave a bunch of COVID contact tracing data to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission who then chucked it into Palantir's (known for their morally bankrupt "predictive policing" software) data mining Rube Goldberg machine to see if they could get anything useful out of it. I know the department was probably desperate at the time and yes, it was "de-identified" and had "strict conditions in place about its use, accessibility and destruction" and the trial ultimately led to them building their own software, but this is exactly why nobody trusts anyone when it comes to the collection of data and what it will be used for. People co-operated in good faith only the health department would be using it, but then handed it over to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission! Along with the QLD cops and WA archives, it's proof that once you collect data it's impossible to resist using it elsewhere.
FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges is getting purchased by Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange due to a "significant liquidity crunch" (i.e: people are asking for their money but they don't have it like they promised). This is interesting as the owner of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was doing the same thing for smaller outfits like Bitvo, BlockFi and Voyager Digital when they were going broke to avoid a wider crypto-economy collapse. It's even more interesting because FTX is in trouble because Binance's boss, Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, decided to sell $US584m worth of FTX's underlying token, FTT. To put it into perspective, this is kinda like NAB buying up Bendigo Bank and Bank of Queensland after they can't return customer's term deposits at the end of the term, then NAB getting purchased by Commonwealth Bank because people can't get money out at the ATM - all without any insurance, regulations or government guarantees.
The bunch of business lobby groups (ABA, ACS, AIIA, Tech Council of Australia) want "safe harbour provisions" placed into the Privacy Legislation Amendment that aims to fine companies up to "$50 million; three times the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information; or 30% of a company's adjusted turnover" for "serious or repeated privacy breaches". The ACS pitches it as "pink slips" but for cybersecurity. If a company took place in a "voluntary certification scheme", they'd receiver less punishment should they get hacked as it would be proof for the courts that they took "reasonable" steps to avoid getting compromised. I guess it makes sense, sometimes shit just happens with computers, even if you did do the best you can to prevent something going wrong. What I worry about is the lobbyists making the "voluntary certification scheme" so hollow or weak that even the shittiest of companies could spin that they took "reasonable" steps when in reality, they didn't.
Elon Musk's stench is wafting across Twitter and people no longer able to rub a bit of peppermint oil under their nose and carry on like he doesn't exist are fleeing to Mastodon, which just hit 1 million users - half of those signing up in the last 2 weeks. The Conversation has a good introduction to the platform if you're just hearing about it for the first time. Mark Hughes has a list of do's and dont's for Mastodon that you might find handy should you want to participate. I've had an account for a while (decryption@aus.social), but never really used it. For all its faults, I still prefer Twitter and the people I follow there who simply aren't on Mastodon and probably never will be.
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its use had almost disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s (wossman / Internet Archive)
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