NEWS
NBN made it harder to know what they're up to because they are bastards
NBN has ditched their three year construction plan (which hasn't been updated in over a year anyways) and making it almost impossible to know what sort of NBN tech is in a certain area. NBN will just update their website's map every month or every quarter instead - which doesn't tell you what sort of NBN connection is available. In addition to that, many areas have had their NBN build start dates pushed out by years from the previous dates published a year ago. Nice timing on the news too - a few days before Christmas, hoping nobody would notice their failures.
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AU government looking in to using its metadata in civil cases
Our government is thinking about letting people involved in civil legal matters access the vast trove of metadata it collects on us. Civil matters, if you don't know, is stuff like copyright infringement, or family law cases or even stuff like someone suing someone for not meeting clauses in a contract. Yeah, the government wants to be able to let relatively trivial cases access the metadata vaults. Let me remind you, that Senator Brandis (the mastermind of this metadata program and its biggest fan), back in 2014 said that "breaches of copyright is a civil wrong. Civil wrongs have got nothing to do with this scheme." - you fucking wanker Brandis. Fuck off already you gigantic hypocritical shitcunt. Go suck on the CIA teat some more why don't ya.
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Facebook lied to the EU about what it'll do with Whatsapp, EU wants revenge
Much like Senator Brandis promising not to do something in order to sell the idea to the public, Facebook has done the reverse. It lied to the EU saying it'll never combine WhatsApp data with Facebook data in order to get approval to make the US$22b purchase. About 2 years later, it did just that. I don't know what the repercussions would be for Facebook for lying to the EU, but the EU is mega pissed and has told Facebook its got until the end of Jan to make its case as to why it did nothing wrong (aka, spin it somehow so Facebook looks good).
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COOL SHIT
An oral history of Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads
Here's a fun oral history of the "I'm a Mac" ads starring John Hodgman and Justin Long, which first aired 10 years ago. The people involved in writing and creating the ads for Apple talk about how Steve Jobs was a huge pain in the arse to work with, but admit he was an excellent filter of what is shit and what is good. Also Justin Long really didn't want to do it, because he didn't want to be an ad guy, but a serious proper actor, haha. You'll always be Mac to me mate, sorry fancy pants theatre man. I wonder if there's a way of working out how many Macs those ads sold, or measuring their effectiveness? Would the Mac have taken off during that time just due to Vista being a bucket of shit and the iPod halo effect, or did the ad genuinely make people consider buying a Mac over a PC? I don't know how advertising works.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from Ch-Check It Out, by Beastie Boys. Like The Sizzle? Like it on Facebook!