Issue 2296 - Friday 21 March 2025

The News

EU is getting all the features that US tech companies said they couldn’t get, but with more protection and more open

After some grousing, Meta is going to let EU citizens use its AI bot (Engadget). The delay for rolling these features was EU’s “complex regulatory system”, although Meta says it is still not quite releasing its full multi-modal models. Last month Apple, too, released its delayed AI features in Europe, too (9to5Mac). I don’t know what people are doing with these specific functionalities — I assume it’s some kind of perverted or freakish image generation — but I flag this for the larger point: for all the noise they make about regulation, these big tech companies are frothing to bring their products to the EU. And what do EU citizens get in return for a few months delay? Well, they get the ability to opt out of having their data used for training (The Guardian). The rest of the world benefits too — just thank those Brussels bureaucrats for being able to charge all your devices with USB-C (WIRED, $). And now, the EU is trying to force Apple to open up iOS notifications to third-party devices, AirDrop and other stuff (The Verge).

Weren’t we all supposed to have folding phones now?

As someone who read tech media over the past half decade, I kinda assumed by now that my phone would be a folding one by 2025. But my iPhone 16 Pro is not, so what gives? Mobile World Congress still showed off a bunch of foldable concepts this month (Gizmodo) and there are real, available models produced by major phone makers (Tom’s Guide). Apple’s foldable phone is always just around the corner (Macworld) or a foldable iPad (MacRumors) or Apple Watch (Apple Insider). Having done some poking around, the answer as far as I can tell is that foldable devices are significantly more expensive — because there’s more of them — and also thicker and more prone to breaking. Also, I don’t know if I’m being blinded by status quo bias, but I struggle to see the benefit of a significantly bigger phone. After all, you could just … hold your existing phone closer to your face. What do you think? Do you lust after a foldable or even have one? Let me know.

Government’s finally settled on crypto regulation, dragged feet on AI plan

Australian crypto exchanges will avoid being regulated like financial markets and instead have the same expectations as banks under Labor’s proposed crypto rules (AFR, $). The government has been pissfarting for ages around crypto regulation but, in the end, is promising to come up with legislation to let them operate under a financial services license and not a stricter market licence, as lobbied for by ASIC. In practice, this means obligations to do things like “providing services honestly, fairly and efficiently and avoiding conflicts of interest”, per the AFR. Also on the government dragging their feet front, the government rejected an “AI Growth Plan” before last year’s budget (InnovationAus, $) but has ended up just doing an “AI Capability Plan”, just later.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

Just a cool looking website

It’s so close to da freaken weekend, so here’s a website I came across that will help create some Good Vibes™ for you on this Friday afternoon and beyond.

The Liquid Shape Distortions (collidingscopes) gives me flashbacks to watching the Winamp or Windows Media Player visualisations as a early teen. It’s described as a “psychadelic animation generator” that can be “(p)art of your next trip”, but I just found it relaxing to go in a browser window while I worked. Enjoy 😎 

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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