The News

Your lawyer does not want you to post on social media

Social media posts and accounts are becoming a common form of evidence supporting legal cases and even to prompt new charges in Australian family courts (SMH, $). While it’s not a huge surprise that what you post online can be used against you, lawyers are using people’s online presences in sophisticated ways: Instagram stories are prompting investigations into people’s assets in separation proceedings, Facebook rants become criminal offences when they illegally divulge court proceedings, photographs of wine collections are used to get subpoenas to wine houses to see how much was spent to purchase them. Intertwined digital presences — things like shared Apple family accounts etc — also present a new challenge when separations are happening, and potentially an avenue for coercive control.

The Sizzle: I have legal alerts for a lot of tech-related keywords, and it’s crazy how often people’s private social media presence is used to discount claims. I’ve seen someone’s workers compensation claim challenged because they were doing tarot card readings on TikTok.

I’m sure almost everyone reading this knows this but everything you post online is discoverable. If I was your lawyer, I’d tell you to Never Post. Since I’m not, and to be a bit more realistic, my advice is: assume everything you post will be seen by everyone.

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Even police are freaked out by Flock cameras being used by the government

American police are turning off their Flock Cameras after a string of overreaching uses of the surveillance data by government agencies (Seattle Times). Police in the city of Redmond, just outside of Seattle, turned off the city’s Flock cameras after ICE arrested a number of people close to them. While the City Council says that ICE didn’t access Flock’s data, it couldn’t rule out that the immigration police wouldn’t in the future (Seattle Times). This comes as Flock was accused of giving access to Texas police as part of an abortion investigation (EFF) and has given people tracking abilities to ICE, Secret Service and the Navy (404 Media, $)

The Sizzle: It is insane to me that people, businesses and organisations are paying Flock for the privilege of letting every government agency surveil them. Flock might be the worst, but other companies like Amazon’s Ring often do the same. Please, if you do want to have security cameras, please, please, please promise me you’ll just run them locally.

Fun fact: Transport NSW supposedly has a number of Flock cameras. Wonder who gets access to them?

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A little but important power shift in the AI data centre boom

The AI industry literally can’t get enough of Nvidia’s GPUs, which has made them one of the most important and valuable companies in the world. But earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that Microsoft has “a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in” because they don’t have enough data centres with power and water (Yahoo). Now, a story in Bloomberg says that “two of the world’s biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia Corp.’s hometown that may sit empty for years” because of power problems.

The Sizzle: It seems like the bottleneck for major companies at the moment isn’t the chips, but everything that houses them. That’s not to say that Nvidia is about to go bust — these companies will still take as many chips Nvidia will sell them, Nvidia has waitlists out the wahoo, and the limited shelf-life of the chips means there’ll be plenty more new orders coming in the door. Still, it’s a bit of a power shift from where the only thing that mattered to the future of your AI company was how much Jensen Huang liked you.

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

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Oh, Also

I did not know this happens when you take a photo in FaceTime

So you know how there’s a button to take a photo while you’re on FaceTime with someone? Well someone on Reddit noticed something odd: the photo metadata shows the details of the people whose photo was taken, not the person who took the photo.

It turns out this is because taking a photo on FaceTime isn’t merely a screenshot of the incoming video data on the phototaker’s device, but is actually an image taken by the subject’s camera which is then sent to the other device. Neat!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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