The new government has heard all the teclos complaining about NBN's proposed update to the Special Access Undertaking and said last night that they will issue NBN a new "Statement of Expectations" ASAP. As a result, NBN withdrew its updated SAU that nobody was happy with and will come up with a new one once they get the new list of things the government wants them to focus on. The government also said "it will retain NBN Co in public ownership for the foreseeable future, expand full-fibre access to more homes and businesses, and ensure the NBN delivers for consumers and facilitates productivity". This piece on Innovation Australia details the interesting times ahead for little ol' NBN now that there's a new government.
Back in 2020, Google said they will phase out support for third party tracking cookies in Chrome in two years. Today they made a blog post saying they'll do it in the 2nd half of 2024 instead - another 2 year delay. Google says they "need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies", which should be ready by Q3 2023 and adopted by enough developers by 2024 so Google can block them. Have a look at the Privacy Sandbox. It's basically a shopping list of ways to track you across the internet but still maintain privacy (lol). It seems so needlessly complicated that the only one who benefits from it is Google. All this nonsense simply for targeted ads that honestly, aren't that great at targeting!
Besides Civilisation, the other franchise that manages to turn me into a full-on goblin mode gamer is Grand Theft Auto. Therefore I am pleased to tell you that according to this Rockstar puff-piece in Bloomberg, GTA 6 is coming "April 2023 through March 2024", but "developers are skeptical" and "people interviewed for this article said they didn't know of any firm release date and that they expect the game to be at least two years away". There's also going to be a woman (gasp) protagonist. She will be Latina and "be one of a pair of leading characters in a story influenced by the bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde". The bulk of the article is about Rockstar being less of a frat house/sweatshop and people like working there now.
There's a heap of news around, so no cool fun nerdy thing today. Just boring "why is the world like this" news. Sorry, I don't make the news, I just write about it:
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