Issue 2343 - Friday 30 May 2025

The News

What the fuck is Mark Zuckerberg cooking up at Meta?

Meta is an AU$2.5 trillion tech company that sells advertisers access to 3 billion people on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. using the most sophisticated tech systems ever created. That’s what it says on the glossy brochures — but that’s not the experience for the average user.

Based on its quarterly “most viewed content report” released overnight, the top reasons people use Facebook is to see spammy engagement bait (Engadget), AI slop that’s been fact-checked (Facebook) and conspiracy theorists (Bluesky). Its new AI app has a billion users (Engadget) which has characters like Step Sis — “I’m stuck in the wash step bro help” — and Baddies Club as its most popular characters. Meanwhile it’s releasing increasingly popular VR glasses (The Verge) and, now, hoping to use that tech to build high-tech military headsets to the US army (WSJ, $). This all started with a website created to rate college girls.

Still no answer for how to do age verifications and it’s 6.5 months until the teen social media ban kicks in

It’s T-minus 6.5 months until Australia can start fining tech companies up to $49.5 million for not taking reasonable steps to stop teens from using social media apps and the trial of the age verification technologies has only tested 1 — one — method to verify users’ ages (The Guardian Australia). The government’s tenderer running the trial, ACCS, is a month behind schedule and has warned that there will only be “enough testing” to confirm claims made by various companies using “relatively modest level” of experimentation. I don’t blame ACCS, the issue is that the Australian government decided to drive into an extremely complicated, unsolved problem and tell everyone that they have a year to sort it out. Good luck to them! Also worth watching out for: the eSafety Commissioner is right now coming up with internet rules around “age appropriate content” and experts warn that these could end up hurting access to sex and health educational material if done wrong (The Conversation).

Australia’s own Trump tech tariff?

It’s weird that no one in Australia is yet reporting on this but there’s a special tech-related treat in the Trump administration’s big tax cut bill just for us (Bloomberg, $). Hidden in the 1,000 pages is a Section 899 that says it’s going to lump extra tax on residents from countries that have “discriminatory” digital services taxes — like Australia. Considering this will hit any institutional investor with US assets which likely includes every working Aussie with a superannuation fund, looks like we could all get a little taste of the Trump tech tariffs fun.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

Experience the past and future of surfing da web

Inside of all of us, there are two wolves. You are either:

Surfing da web like it’s 2005: Cast your mind back to pre-WebKit internet by using Opera Mini, the mobile browser that allowed people to go to websites that were not designed to be mobile friendly by routing page requests through a cloud server that rendered the page in a friendlier way. Some guy figured out that this service is still operating, emulated a Java-friendly phone and found that it handles some of the modern internet okay (Spacebar.News). Or

Surfing da web like it’s 2025: Thiswebsitedoesnotexist is a web page that is redesigned and rewritten using AI every time it’s loaded, meaning it’s new every time you refresh. In one sense, an insane way to run a website. But it’s also probably the future? This is a taste of the “generative UI” content that I expect we’ll see a LOT more of soon.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.