NSW premier wants Meta to stop "broadcasting illegal acts" somehow

The NSW premier told the Daily Telegraph yesterday that he's requested a meeting with Meta to join him and the police, to discuss stopping "the broadcast of illegal acts", after members of Blockade Australia spent the last week being mildly inconvenient to fossil fuel companies for their crimes against the planet. Ignoring the civil liberty and democratic issues with this thought bubble, and ignoring the technical aspects of implementing this, it really demonstrates the extremely low, lizard brain, level of operation politicians in Australia operate at when it comes to technology. Shit like this should be laughed at when uttered out loud, not published in a daily newspaper as a legitimate thing to do.

Robotaxis keep getting in the way of San Francisco emergency services

San Francisco's Fire Chief is pissed off with robotaxis from Waymo and Cruise that keep getting in the way of emergency vehicles, logging at least 39 incidents since they started operating without a safety driver in the last year or so. Some examples include "sitting motionless on a one-way street and forcing a firetruck to back up and take another route to a blazing building", "entering an active fire scene, then parking with one of its tires on top of a fire hose" and "blocking firehouse driveways, requiring another firehouse to dispatch an ambulance to a medical emergency". Imagine if it was your house burning down, or your heart collapsing, and a goddamn robotaxi was holding up assistance.

TPG call NBN uncompetitive, Canada passes their own News Media Bargaining Code, OpenAI lobbies EU for less regulation

• TPG's submission to the ACCC over NBN's price increases says that "in a competitive market, NBN Co would be expected to reduce or minimise price increases, increase service quality, or do both. The fact NBN Co is comfortable imposing annual price increases close to its potential maximum demonstrates it is not at all concerned with competition from other providers". TPG is correct.
• Canada's copied our News Media Bargaining Code and passed a law that once worked through a bunch of box ticking exercises, will force Meta and other tech companies to negotiate with publishers and pay them for linking to their content. In response, Meta will do what it did here and remove news from Facebook and Instagram for Canadians. That didn't go well for the media companies, did it?
• Time has seen documents from EU officials showing how despite begging for AI regulation, OpenAI lobbied to have general purpose AI systems taken off the "high risk" list, attracting strict rules that would place a burden on OpenAI's products in the EU. They succeeded too, with the latest EU draft watering down the level of transparency and human oversight systems like ChatGPT would need to comply with.

Videos of visionOS simulator hit YouTube, some new features discovered

Now that the visionOS SDK is live, there's a few YouTube videos of the Apple Vision Pro simulator in action from AppleInsider, MacRumors and TechLead. It's obviously not as good as wearing the headset, but it's a way for developers to see if their apps even work. One feature I saw in the demos that was nice is a "guest" mode where users can't see messages, photos, and other private info when they bug you to try out your fancy new headset. There's also a "travel mode" built-in that's designed for use on an airplane and adapts the headset for the "specific constraints of an airplane cabin". MacStories has a collection of tweets & toots from iOS developers getting their apps running on visionOS.