### Issue 1625 - Thursday 9th June, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Twitter gives Elon the firehose
- EU close to banning ICE car sales by 2035
- ACMA & NZ fight spam, AFP & Monash Uni to make kiddie porn database, Grong Grong crowdfunded solar farm
- Victorian community batteries are cool
- Cheap Lenovo tablet, Edifier speakers, Ableton software & packs, LG 55" OLED, ThinkPad E15 Gen3, Nintendo Switch Sports, Chromecast

## The News

### Twitter gives Elon the hose

After Elon's lawyers officially whinged to the SEC that Twitter isn't co-operating with detailed info on how many bots or spam accounts are on the platform (a pathetic attempt to get out of the bad deal to buy Twitter that he agreed to), Twitter has called Elon's bluff and is dumping the entire "firehose" onto him. Twitter is basically saying if you reckon our stats are bullshit, here's the raw data of every single tweet in real time, do your own research fucko. The Texas attorney general also wants to investigate Twitter's fake account stats, aligning himself with Musk. Maybe they can suck on the firehose together.

### EU close to banning ICE car sales by 2035

Europe has taken another step towards banning the sale of cars that emit carbon dioxide by 2035, with the EU Paraliment passing the proposal - effectively banning internal combustion engines. The only thing left now is for the EU member states to agree to it and pass their own laws enforcing the ban. Meanwhile in Australia, people want to buy EVs but can't because stock is allocated to areas like the EU which have laws and penalties mandating low CO2 emissions, but Australia does not. It's so bad that people are scalping Kia's EV6 and Hyundai's Ioniq 5 with $10,000 - $20,000 premiums.

### ACMA & NZ fight spam, AFP & Monash Uni to make kiddie porn database, Grong Grong crowdfunded solar farm

- Spam is a scourge and to fight it, ACMA is hooking up with its New Zealand equivalent to "further promote strategic engagement, facilitate information sharing and enhance compliance and enforcement outcomes". ACMA apparently has agreements with Canada and the US for the same level of info sharing.
- The AFP and Monash Uni are making an "ethically-sourced" image set to train AI about kiddie porn. They'll collect 100,000 images of kids in "safe situations" so images with kids in "exploitative" situations can be detected. People can contribute their nude child images (umm) via the My Pictures Matter website.
- The small town of Grong Grong just outside Narrandera in NSW, is getting a solar farm. Nothing unusual about that, but this one is mostly crowdfunded and the opportunity for random punters to invest is about to kick off. Disclaimer: I'm keen and will likely plough a few grand in pending a read of their offer document.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Victorian community batteries are cool

Tarneit, a sprawling suburb on the western fringe of Melbourne that I visit on a regular basis, is getting a 150kW/388kWh community battery funded by the state government. There's plans for for a few of these community batteries around the state that'll soak up excess solar power during the day and feed it back into the grid at night. Loads of homes in Tarneit have solar, so much so that the grid can't handle all the exports. As a result, many home owners in the area are unable to export much, if anything. Batteries like this will allow more exports and for that power to be used locally. The first one was installed in Fitzroy and it has a dashboard you can gawk at. Cool.

## Bargains

- Lenovo Tab M10 2nd-gen - $197 from Amazon
- Edifier R1855DB active bookshelf speakers - $149 from Amazon
- 25% off all Ableton Software & Packs from the Ableton online store
- LG OLED55C1PTB 55" 4K OLED TV - $1895 from The Good Guys eBay store
- ThinkPad E15 Gen 3 (Ryzen 5 5500U, 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, 1080p) - $899 from Lenovo (get 15% cashback via Cashrewards)
- Nintendo Switch Sports - $49 from Amazon
- Google Chromecast with Google TV - $78 at Officeworks

## The End

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