### Issue 1932 - Thursday 14th September, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Stripe taking money from deepfake porn sites but still bans legit sex workers
- New music generation AI model and freakish video translator AI tool
- There's a big software update for the PS5 now available
- OVH is building a watercooled datacentre in Sydney
- Cheap Lenovo tablet, Boost Mobile SIM, ThinkPad P14s, Motorola Edge Pro 5G, refurb Optiplex 7040 SFF PC, 42" LG OLED

## The News

### Stripe taking money from deepfake porn sites but still bans legit sex workers

404 Media has caught giant payment-processing company Stripe turning a blind eye to AI-generated porn while actively seeking out and banning sex workers from their platform. Sites like CivitAI and Mage.Space allow users to "generate non-consensual sexual images of celebrities, sometimes by using the same models on CivitAI, by simply typing in a prompt naming specific people and sex acts". It costs between US$4-15 a month and they collect payments for it via Stripe, which has a pretty strict no adult content policy, even for sex work that is legal in many places around the world - but this AI-deepfake porn is illegal in most places, yet Stripe happily takes their cut for this nonsense.

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### New music generation AI model and freakish video translator AI tool

Stability AI, the mob behind the popular Stable Diffusion image generation platform, has a new AI model for music - Harmonai. It lets you make CD quality music by providing a prompt, e.g: "epic trailer music intense tribal percussion and brass" or "lofi hip hop beat melodic chillhop 85 bpm". They worked with stock music provider AudioSparx to train this new model on over 800,000 audio files and 19,500 hours of music. Also in AI-land, I saw people use HeyGen to translate their videos from English to another language. Not only does it turn what you say into a different language, it keeps your voice and even modifies your lips to match the new sounds of a different language. Pretty amazing. Here's an example in French and here's one in German.

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### There's a big software update for the PS5 now available

Sony's got a new update for the PS5 with a few interesting features. First up is Dolby Atmos support. Why this wasn't already support is beyond me, but better late than never. Apps like Netflix or Disney+ need an update to take advantage of it. PS Remote Play can now stream to a Chromecast with Google TV (4K) as well as other Android TV OS 12 devices (i.e: Nvidia Shield, TCL/Sony TVs). You can pop in an 8TB M.2 SSD if you can find one. Finally, there's a new "Use Second Controller for Assistance" feature that'll let you "assign a second controller to one account as an assist controller, and use two controllers to operate your PS5 console as if you were using a single controller", opening a "a new way for you to enjoy games collaboratively with others or help a friend or child navigate a particularly challenging section of a game".

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### OVH is building a watercooled datacentre in Sydney

OVH is kinda the low-end option when it comes to cloud computing. Azure/Google/Amazon are the top, then there's Digital Ocean/Vultr/Linode in the middle, with OVH just a step above the lovable junk on LowEndBox. It was interesting then to read a brief interview with OVH's CEO in an Australian blog, ARN, outlining their plan to spend a few million bucks to build a water-cooled data centre in a NextDC building in Sydney and fill it with 10,000 servers. According to the CEO their watercooling tech is what keeps operating costs lower than rivals that use air conditioning. I just wish they'd speed up their control panel. It's so damn slow to the point of unusable. At least it's cheap.

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## Bargains

- Lenovo Tab P11 2nd Gen w/ Precision Pen 2 - $356.11 from Allphone's eBay store
- Boost Mobile 365-day SIM with 160GB data - $181 from Oz Tech Biz
- Lenovo ThinkPad P14s G4 (R7-7840U PRO, 32GB DDR5 RAM, 512GB SSD, R780M GPU, 14" 1920x1200 IPS) - $1574.10 from the Lenovo EDU store
- Motorola Edge 30 Pro 5G [Dual SIM] 8GB RAM/128GB - $488 from The Good Guys
- Refurb Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF PC (i5-6500, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD) - $85.02 from Australian Computer Traders eBay store
- LG OLED42C3PSA 42" OLED 4K TV - $1790 from Appliance Central

## Image Of The Day

Dick Smith's Fun Way Into Electronics Volume 2 - 1980 (Jongleur / Internet Archive)

## The End

📻 Lost Cause - Cosmic Psychos

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