Remember when Donald Trump tried to force TikTok to sell itself to a US company? The Biden administration is doing the same thing. According to the New York Times, ByteDance/TikTok has been trying to convince the White House to accept some sort of "an agreement with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data", but the government is demanding a sale (dunno if they mean a sale to a US company or just a not-China company) or else it will ban it from the USA entirely. Related to this, Forbes is reporting "a source in position to know", that the FBI is investigating TikTok over allegations ByteDance used the app to "access U.S. journalists' location information". New Zealand isn't taking any chances, joining the US, UK and others in banning TikTok on government devices.
Bit of a sad one for nerds of a certain age - SETI@Home is going into hibernation. If you don't remember, it was a project that distributed chunks of radio telescope data to volunteer computers with the aim of finding anything interesting that might be aliens trying to communicate with us. A post on their website says that "we are no longer distributing tasks. The SETI@home message boards will continue to operate, and we'll continue working on the back-end data analysis. Maybe we'll even find ET! Thanks to everyone for your support over the years. We encourage you to keep crunching for science". I loved running SETI@Home on my computer as a screensaver back in the early 2000s. I hope they find something one day.
Sizzle subscriber Phil Whitehouse attended SXSW over in Austin last week and wrote an interesting blog post about what he saw there. Unlike previous years, he reckons the "crash of crypto, the unfulfilled promises of NFTs and VR, the mass layoffs and the Twitter purchase by Elon Musk took a lot of wind out of sails before the event, and then the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (on day one of SXSW!) was a cautionary tale for anyone trying to make a quick buck". He writes some stuff about GPT-4, brain computer interfaces, climate repair/carbon removal and one of my favourite boondoggles, Hyperloop. SXSW is coming to Sydney this year (October 15-22), I was inspired to attend and do a write-up or two of what I see thanks to Phil's post but then saw that a ticket is $1,300!
Yellow pages directory - copies various aspects - 4 August 1986 - computer screen displaying online version (National Archives of Australia)
📻 Rabbit With Fangs - Magic Dirt
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