Issue 2288 - Tuesday 11 March 2025

Hello everyone! Me and 👶 are under the weather today so apologies for a rushed edition this morning.

In Today’s Issue

The News

No, Ukraine is not hacking Elon Musk’s X

Elon Musk is almost certainly full of shit when he says that the outage of X, formerly Twitter, is because of a cyber-attack using “Ukrainian IP addresses” (The Verge). Musk may even be telling the truth about the IP addresses but the implication that Ukraine, in the middle of defending against a Russian invasion and now without US aid, is DDoSing X for… reasons ??? makes zero sense, unless you have addled your brain with too much ketamine (The Atlantic, $). Meanwhile, Bluesky continues to add features — this time, increasing video lengths to 3 minutes and filtering spam DM requests (TechCrunch) — that make it a good, mainstream alternative.

National Library shuts out long-time historian’s API access

Sizzle readers may be familiar with Tim Sherratt, a historian and programmer who has built the tool GLAM Workbench tool around the National Library of Australia’s enormous library of archival data, as well as many other sources. His NLA API keys were recently revoked for allegedly breaking its terms of service that supposedly limit the extraction of full text rather than just metadata (Information Age). This is despite, in Sherratt’s telling, the API being changed to make it easier to pull the full text. The Information Age article links this to AI but AFAIK the NLA hasn’t explicitly said this. I’ve emailed the NLA and haven’t heard back yet — but needless to say, the NLA should be doing everything it can to work with researchers like Sherratt to make their catalogues more available and useful.

Xbox handheld, AI-written games and SNES getting faster: gaming wrap

I don’t cover that much gaming stuff on the Sizzle but I thought I would wrap in a few things here. Microsoft is looking like it’s going to get into the burgeoning handheld PC gaming market with its own device (Windows Central), but the future of the Xbox hardware itself looks grim as the company ramps down the number of exclusive games. Game-makers are falling over themselves to put AI into games like a leaked Sony prototype (The Verge) but gamers understandably would prefer human crafted content over AI slop. Also in a totally weird thing: the speed-running community might be affected by the news that SNES consoles appear to be getting faster as they get older (Time Extension) because of its ceramic audio processor? Weird.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

A fun, anonymous and encrypted way to have a yap

Fancy a yap with someone on the internet? Enter yaps.chat which is a totally anonymous, encrypted chat platform that lets you randomly chat with an individual or group. It’s like a text-based Chatroulette or Omegle! And the fact that’s text only means it probably doesn’t have the pretty serious predator problems those sites had (BBC). yaps.chat feels like an older version of the internet that we’ve lost, where there were little nooks and crannies with different quirky designs. I had a nice chat with someone who told me they were in the US and quite scared about where things are going in their country and, well, fair enough.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday afternoon. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.