Meta & Liberals rightfully salty about proposed ACMA powers to censor internet content

Meta is predictably not a fan of the proposed law that'll give ACMA the power to "to combat online misinformation and disinformation", aka the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023. Meta's head of public policy in Australia, Josh Machin, told a Senate inquiry that the draft law has "some potential for that power to be abused, or for it to be used in a way that inadvertently chills free and legitimate political expression online". Coalition MPs are also going around on Sky News and whatnot calling it a "Ministry of Truth". It's weird to be agreeing with Meta and the Liberal party, but here we are. The law to me, at face value, seems deeply fucked up to have the government determine what can and can't be said online, while the "mainstream media" gets a free pass. My gut feeling is that this is a very bad idea.

Microsoft persuades judge better than FTC does, on track to close Activision acquisition

Microsoft's managed to beat the FTC in court over its purchase of Activision Blizzard. The core of the FTC's argument is that too many games will be restricted to Xbox and Windows once Microsoft gets its hands on Activision. The judge disagrees, saying that "the FTC has not shown a likelihood of success on its theory the merger may substantially lessen competition in the Gen 9 console market because the combined firm will have the ability and incentive to foreclose Call of Duty from PlayStation", and didn't think the FTC's arguments that gaming subscriptions (i.e: Game Pass) and cloud gaming were very strong either. The FTC can appeal, but if it doesn't by July 14th, Microsoft is free to complete the Activision deal.

RIP to the Intel NUC, a good little computer

Bad news for fans of Intel's little NUC computers - they're gonna stop making them. There's no specific date, but they said in a statement that they've "decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth". Makes sense to be honest. There's some great products from OEMs like Beelink and Minisforum these days, plus Asus and Gigabyte have been making mini PCs for a while now. There's also the 1L/micro PCs from Dell, Lenovo and HP that are easy to get too. Fingers crossed now that Intel is no longer competing with its own partners, those partners spice it up a little and make more unique form factor devices (i.e: more laptops without a screen essentially) for us to buy.

Lessons us technologists can learn from the government's Robodebt disaster

You've probably heard a lot about Robodebt in the news over the years but didn't really know exactly what went on and how the government abusing its access to computers was at the core of the disastrous program. Justin Warren has published an excellent brief summary of the disaster and its consequences. You may not think any of this is relevant to you, a humble computer toucher, but it is because we are the ones tapped on the shoulder to build this kinda thing. Being aware that your work is not benign could help avoid something like this happening again, or at the very least, avoid you being involved with it so when the shit hits the fan you are far away.