The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) has submitted its thoughts to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) as part of its inquiry into the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 and let loose a wild opinion regarding the use of encrypted chat apps like WhatsApp, Wickr, Signal and so on - "there is no legitimate reason for a law-abiding member of the community to own or use an encrypted communications platform" and that they "are used almost exclusively by serious and organised crime groups". No regard at all given to privacy, just straight to the ol' if you have something to hide you must be a crook argument.
As well as yesterday's game development tax offset, the government has a bunch of other techy/digital related stuff in the upcoming budget it's lumping together as a $1.2b "digital package". The bulk of it is $300m for My Health Record and the majority of that will be used to "provide citizens with COVID19 test results as well as their vaccine status". The next biggest spend is $200m for myGov to get various upgrades and a chat bot. Cool. There's $50m for the CSIRO to host a National Artificial Intelligence Centre and $34m to fund its projects. $130m will be added to the Regional Connectivity Program to upgrade the mobile phone networks in more regional areas. There's probably more announcements to come once the full budget is let loose next week.
The Apple vs Epic court case is still going (and will go on for a week or two still) and there's been so many interesting tidbits coming out of the hearings:
The Atlantic has a great overview of SpaceX's current position and what the deal is with Elon Musk's plans to go to Mars. Unlike Musk's usual bullshit, SpaceX really looks like it'll succeed in getting people to the Moon, and with some luck, to Mars. It's only a small part of the story, but it made me realise that SpaceX is this generation's NASA. For nerds around my age and older there's an incredible amount of respect for NASA, but anyone say, in their teens, probably reveres SpaceX more than NASA as they've seen SpaceX do more than NASA due to Musk's personality and the ambition he and SpaceX has compared to NASA's severe conservatism and relative austerity because they're a politicised arm of the government.
📻 Girl And The Sea - The Presets
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong 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.