Hi all, a quick, special shout-out to Sizzler Dan whose company MagicBrief got bought by Canva (SmartCompany) 👀.

The News

Aussies love age assurance tech! They also have NFI what it is

Australians almost unanimously support enforcing the teen social media ban using technologies they mostly don’t know about and assume will have, at worst, no negative consequences for them. Last night, the government released a big survey on age assurance tech (Department of Comms) which I wrote about for Crikey ($) and was also posted about by Sizzler Justin (Mastodon). The takeaway is that while it’s popular to do so in theory but, in practice, Australians have no idea and, therefore, aren’t too worried about all the big problems that have been raised. It’s easy to imagine this could change if people start getting asked for their passport to access TikTok.

The bit of the survey that I wanted to share with Sizzlers is this chart: Teens say the major reason they use social media is to connect with friends and family, for hobbies and to do work. In all the chat of the downside risk of social media, there’s not much appreciation for what is being taken away by banning it altogether.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

When push comes to shove, the global internet feels like a risk to countries

I try to make the Sizzle a haven from everything awful that’s happening, but stories about Iran telling its citizens not to use WhatsApp (AP) and telling its top officials to avoid using anything connected to the internet (Times of Israel) are super interesting. Very different in potential risk, but both show how these global systems and platforms go from being a part of everyday life to a threat vector when your country doesn’t own them. It also shows how even things like WhatsApp’s E2EE aren’t a magic bullet: despite what Meta says about not being able to read messages, even metadata can give you enough information to put you at risk in war.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Mastodon: ‘Pretty please don’t scrape our posts for AI’

Mastodon is asking politely for people to not scrape data from its official server to train AI and to only use its services if they are 16 or older, according to its new terms (TechCrunch). I’m being a bit mean because these rules don’t count for anything without enforcement. The US hoovering up online data to use in its immigration system (Freedom House) is a wake-up call that we should assume anything we put publicly online will be permanently associated with us.

While we’re talking fediverse, Threads now has an integrated reverse chronological feed (TechCrunch) but it’s not enough to change the fact that my “Threads could supercharge the fediverse” hope was completely wrong.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Turn newsletters into RSS with this cool tool

I am an RSS-head. And I’m terrible with email. (No the irony is not lost on me). I know many paid RSS readers already have this feature, but I wanted to share Kill the Newsletter. It’s a free service that allows you to turn a newsletter into an RSS feed by creating an email address that ingests editions and spits them out into RSS.

There’s plenty of uses for this including — oh I don’t know — a certain Australian daily tech newsletter which offers an RSS feed that doesn’t work with the full, paywalled edition. Bon appetit!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electronics & electrical

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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