Victorians, your digital drivers licence is (almost) ready. After a few months of testing in beautiful Ballarat, the rest of the state can get their drivers licence in either the VicRoads or Services Victoria app in May. Businesses will be able to use their smartphones to scan a QR code to verify that your ID is legit. Police can also use it, but it seems risky handing my unlocked phone over to a cop. Unfortunately the Victorian drivers licence implementation does not use the ISO 18013-5 standard so can't be added to your smartphone's built-in wallet. Learners and P-platers have to wait until "later in 2024".
Apple has changed global App Store policies to allow "software that is not embedded in the binary" in certain cases, with "retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games" specifically listed as one of those cases. As Arstechnica explains, the emulators are perfectly legal, but the ROMs are the iffy part, which Apple obviously won't make easy to load on to your iPhone. But "Sega could offer a Sega app that would allow users to download an ever-expanding library of Sega games, either as part of a subscription, for free, or as in-app purchases". I wonder how heavily inspired this was by AltStore's EU launch that'll make the the Delta emulator easily available?
Good news for those of you with HFC NBN as NBN has told iTnews that "sustained investment in the HFC network has resulted in network improvements, which will allow download speeds of the HFC network to be more closely aligned to those experienced by customers with full fibre (fibre to the premises) connections". Apparently "HFC services have been subject to a Layer 2 network management configuration that applied a maximum sustained information rate (MSIR) of 750Mbps", which is now being lifted so instead of getting your gigabit speeds in little bursts, you (should) be able to sustain 750mbit or more. The more bandwidth the better I say. Can never have too much internet pipeage in your home.
The popular PiVPN software package is officially ceasing development. v4.6.0 was released a few days ago with a message from the project boss saying "there are so many tools out there that do the job much better than PiVPN does, and I genuinely believe PiVPN's mission in life was accomplished and is no longer relevant. Just as everything in nature has a start, there's also an end, and this is how PiVPN ends its journey". I'm sure someone will fork PiVPN and continue development, but I migrated all my VPN stuff to Tailscale about two years ago and haven't looked back.
Pictured: a photo of the utility-scale IBM Quantum System One, which was unveiled on April 5, 2024 in RPI's Voorhees Computing Center, a former cathedral. It is the first IBM Quantum System One to be installed on a university campus. (IBM Research / Flickr)
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