The eSafety Commissioner submitted a report on mandatory age verification for accessing adult content online to the government back in March, but it is not public yet. When asked yesterday when that report will be made public, the Communications Minister said that'll happen in the "near future" and that "we do not want young people having unfettered access to pornography" - which I don't think anyone does, but gives the government and the eSafety Commissioner an excuse to introduce mandatory age verification via some sort of government ID that anyone with half a brain will be able to circumvent. Then we need to worry about how the government will react when the prudes and wowsers decide VPNs and other privacy protection tools are evil because they let you look at naked people.
Tesla's annual shareholder meeting took place in Texas today (entire thing is on YouTube), so there's a bit of Tesla news around:
OpenAI boss Sam Altman got up in front of US Congress and told them that if AI "goes wrong, it can go quite wrong" and that "we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening". His solution? "a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including giving out and taking away permits for AI companies" and "firms like OpenAI should be independently audited". You don't often see ~US$30b businesses asking for regulation unless that regulation benefits them in some way. Sure, the government should probably regulate AI before it gets out of hand, but Altman only wants it because it'll add a nice little moat for his business against smaller competitors, even if there's a carveout for companies under a certain threshold.
Apple has unloaded even more product announcements silently overnight prior to WWDC in a few weeks time. They previewed a huge range of new accessibility features presumably coming in iOS 17, with the main one being Live Speech combined with Personal Voice, that'll let someone generate an AI model of their voice that can be used to do text to speech on the device and used in calls. There's also "concert discovery features" in Apple Maps and Apple Music, and Tap to Pay on iPhone is now a thing in Australia. This lets anyone with a Westpac or Tyro Payments merchant account download an app and use their iPhone to accept contactless payments. Stripe and others will be "available in the coming months". Meanwhile, Apple has registered "xrOS" as a wordmark in NZ. An "extended reality" device and operating system would be the exact kinda thing that would soak up an entire WWDC keynote.
One of the most noteworthy exhibits in the parade was the Robotron PC 1715, a workstation computer. In a time when computers were not as widespread as they are today, the Robotron PC 1715 was cutting-edge technology and a symbol of the GDR's industrial and technological achievements. (Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum)
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