Home Affairs has sent out a decree that there is a "pressing need for Australian government entities to harden their technology management practices" - something I don't think anyone would disagree with! As a result, they are now mandating that "any hardware, software or information system, platform, mobile application or as-a-service offering, which stores, processes, transmits or transforms official or security classified information belonging to, or utilised by, the Australian government" is audited and wants to develop a "technology security risk management plan for all internet-facing systems or services". Good luck with all that, sounds fun.
OCLC is shitty with Anna's Archive for scraping the entire WorldCat database (pretty much a list of every book ever made with an ISBN) over the course of a few years. OCLC sued what appears to be a random librarian they think is "Anna", but she's denied all connections to the site and the other email addresses OCLC served the lawsuit to have not responded. It's now arguing for a default judgement because "it continues to fight an unknown defendant who is unwilling to show up in court". OCLC is hilariously asking for over US$5m in damages, claiming it had to spend $1.5m on hardware upgrades due to the years of scraping, an extra $600,000 on Cloudflare for DDoS protection and "the salaries of 34 full-time employees, who were tasked with mitigating the harm caused by the attacks". Get absolutely fucked OCLC.
Fresh from being acquired by Canva, Serif has launched a new six-month free trial for its Affinity creative suite. You can test drive the entire suite for 6 months, then if you want to buy it, you can get it for a one off purchase of US$165 - or for as low as US$83 in their 50% off sale. There's never been a better time to crawl out from under Adobe's boot if you can (40+ years of product development from Adobe makes it tough, I know). Semi-related, there's a good interview with Canva's CEO, Melanie Perkins, over on The Verge. I used to think Canva was a bit of a joke but after having used it recently, it's actually filling a product need for so many people. Purchasing Serif makes so much sense for them. I wish Canva luck in busting Adobe's balls and even sweeter that it's an Australian company.
Have you ever visited Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page? Some bizarre posts on there lately:
luciano - nirvana - grunge is dead.ans (16colors)
📻 Pennies - The Smashing Pumpkins
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