You know that Simpsons meme where the two chimps are fighting while a crowd looks on? We are the crowd watching Elon Musk and the eSafety Commissioner fight about the removal of a Sydney stabbing video. eSafety wants the video removed entirely or they'll fine X $785,000 a day, whereas X/Musk reckon blocking it from view in Australia is enough, with Musk saying "the Australian censorship commissar is demanding *global* content bans!". The Online Safety Act gives the eSafety Commissioner the power to force ISPs to block the platform hosting material it considers unsafe for Aussie kids and the comms minister said they are "united with eSafety in our very clear expectation that social media companies remove this content immediately" - so, X blocked in Australia soon???
A guy who got busted via the AFP & FBI's backdoored secure messaging app AN0M for "dealing with property reasonably suspected of being the proceeds of crime" had their trial date vacated because "South Australia's Court of Appeal had been asked to rule on the legality of the encrypted messaging app AN0M and the information intercepted by police". His lawyer reckons the evidence gained via that app may be inadmissible and regardless of the outcome, plans to challenge it in the High Court. This article by Barrister Edward Greaves explains in more detail. It could be interpreted that because AN0M is not a telecommunications network, just an Android app that sends a copy of the message to the AFP, that it doesn't meet the criteria for warrantless interception. I think - IANAL.
Home Assistant is now part of the newly formed Open Home Foundation. It is a non-profit organisation that will "own and govern all of Home Assistant and its related entities". The board members all work on Home Assistant and their mission statement is to "fight against surveillance capitalism, and offer a counterbalance to Big Tech influence, in the smart home — by focusing on privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart home users". They're also expanding the Home Assistant Works With device certification program, building a locally-based voice assistant for Home Assistant and exploring "ways to improve its UI to make it easier for everyone in the home to use Home Assistant". God speed to them. Home Assistant is awesome.
Heaps of important shit is stored in my emails. Not just information, but also communication with dead people that I really want to keep. That means backing it up is important. I use Apple Mail, which downloads all my messages off Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail and iCloud (I have too many email addresses) via IMAP and stores them on my Mac, which I can then back up like any other file. But if you use Gmail and don't use a mail client on your computer, Got Your Back could be useful. It is a "command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your local computer. It uses Gmail's API over HTTPS". Do a big dump of all your emails on the first run, then set up a Linux cron task to run every day and it will download all your new messages from the lat 24 hours.
Technopolis Volume 1 - August 1982 (RevengeOfTheHubz / Internet Archive)
📻 Pig - Sparklehorse
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