The US President's annual State of the Union address is a big deal, outlining what the President's hopes and dreams for the year ahead. In this year's address, Biden said that "it's time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on kids and teenagers online, ban targeted advertising to children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data these companies collect on all of us" and implored Congress to "pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage". Big words from the big man. A good place to start would be for Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act.
Nintendo held one of its Direct online press conferences last night. The big news is a fresh Zelda game for the Switch - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It'll go on sale May 12th and for the Zelda fans there will be a Collector's Edition with a fancy case, booklet and some pins. Nintendo also made a few Game Boy and Game Boy Advanced games available on the Switch online store. Elsewhere in gaming news, the UK looks set to deny Microsoft's US$69b acquisition of Activision, arguing that it's pretty fucken obvious Microsoft will eventually make Activision titles exclusive to its platform, resulting in "all gamers seeing higher prices, reduced range, lower quality, and worse service in gaming consoles over time".
Google's "Live from Paris" event took place last night, showing off a bunch of AI-powered features for Maps, Lens and Translate that were re-heated from previous Google I/O keynotes (and still unreleased!), plus a demo of Bard - which got busted giving out lies right on the damn promo page. There was supposed to be a demo of something called "multisearch" but they lost the phone that had the demo on it. A few hours later and the live stream still isn't available to watch. Sounds like a shitshow compared to Microsoft's announcement yesterday of Bing and Edge that was so well received, Satya Nadella had the bravado to say "this new Bing will make Google come out and dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance".
The Bank of England and HM Treasury has released an "assessment of the case for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) – a so-called digital pound". The digital pound would "be a new form of sterling, similar to a digital banknote, issued by the Bank of England. It would be used by households and businesses for their everyday payments needs. It would be used in-store, online and to make payments to family and friends. If introduced, it would exist alongside, and be easily exchangeable with, cash and bank deposits". I don't know enough about economics to know if this is good or bad, but I do find it ironic that the blockchain and cryptocurrency will probably end up like the government's digital pound, not some libertarian utopia freeing us from the "slavery" of fiat currency.
Buzz Aldrin dazzles in eccentric silver suit and patriotic socks as eight surviving Apollo astronauts pose for 50th anniversary photo, April 9, 2019 (Felix Kunze)
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