The Communications department let loose that their trial of age verification technology that's supposed to inform the legislation that'll ban kids under 16 from using social media, will not be complete for at least six months as the tender for the trial was only awarded last week to UK not-for-profit Age Check Certification Scheme. This is a separate trial to what the eSafety Commissioner is currently running on "age assurance". None of these trials will be done before the government plans to introduce the legislation by the end of November. Laws based on vibes and moods, awesome, fantastic governance.
Netflix announced that 60 million households decided to stream the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing match that was exclusive to their platform on Saturday afternoon. Some outlets reckon this is a record for live online streaming but some Indian cricket streams may have had a handful more viewers. When I watched the stream it dropped to potato quality for the bulk of the event and shit itself entirely a few times despite a hard-wired gigabit internet connection. This caused a lot of buffering/pre-loading, so what I was seeing was actually delayed a few minutes and not live. Awful experience and would infuriate me if it was something important.
I'm ashamed to say this, but I have never played Half-Life or Half-Life 2. Yeah I am a bad nerd, what have I been doing with my life (playing much superior Rockstar games!) and so on, but I plan to change that as there's now a cool remaster of Half-Life 2 that was released this week to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this legendary game. Valve has "fixed bugs and restored some content, added new graphics settings, updated gamepad controls, and a whole lot more" - the full list of updates is on Steam. Half-Life 2 is free for a few more hours so if you're uncultured swine like me, now is the time to grab it along with the original Half-Life for just $1.45.
A very wealth nerd made a website about the custom designed and build LAN gaming room in his house. It's a basement with 12 computers built-in to the walls that fold up into cabinets that all run off a bunch of servers in a different room with everything plugged in via long fibre optic USB and DisplayPort cables. His buddies rock up and they play games in a dedicated room and there's guest bedrooms for them to sleep in if they've traveled from far away. There's even a Dance Dance Revolution pad built-in to the floor. The setup is cool and all, but imagine having 12 friends!
Camouflage Cell Tower (CharClarPhoto / Flickr)
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