Digital Rights Watch have made a submission to a Senate Inquiry on the influence of international digital platforms suggesting a government owned Australian Digital Corporation. The ADC would "begin by building publicly owned cloud computing infrastructure that brings technical capacity that has been outsourced to big tech back into the public service" and also "be empowered to develop publicly owned payment processing, streaming services and social media. It could play a role in supporting other public services to establish a larger presence online such as libraries and public schools". I haven't read the full submission yet (it's 40 pages) but the concept of the Australian Digital Corporation is an interesting one.
The UK is the first of the big government regulators to block Microsoft's US$69b take over of Activision. According to the Competition and Markets Authority, Microsoft has a 60-70% market share of cloud-gaming already and by purchasing Activision would Microsoft wouldn't be able to resist making its titles exclusive to their platform, despite promises and deals with Nintendo and Nvidia to supply games for the next few years. The CMA also added that it would be a pain in the arse for them to constantly monitor Microsoft to make sure they're abiding by these agreements. It's easier just to not allow the acquisition in the first place. Microsoft will appeal this and the EU and USA still hasn't decided what they'll do.
I ripped this straight from the excellent Garbage Day newsletter because it's a better summary than I'll ever write: "It seems highly likely that Elon Musk was using an alt account last winter to roleplay as a horny toddler or, I guess, more of a horny toddler than he usually is. How do we know? Well, Musk tweeted a screenshot of his app to brag about the amount of paying subscribers he now has for "exclusive memes" and the profile pic of the horny toddler account was in the screenshot as a switch user. Also, probably worth noting that a very small percentage of his followers are actually subscribing to him. What's even worse - like impossibly worse - is that Musk's weird alt account appears to be him roleplaying as his two-year-old son X AE A-XII". Thanks gtch for bringing it to my attention in The Sizzle's Slack channel.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. This is an undated network map, likely from the mid-70s. (National Museum of American History)
📻 Slave - Silverchair
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