### Issue 2004 - Thursday 11th January, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- eSafety gets a response from X about moderation and finds there's not much moderation going on
- SEC approved a bunch of Bitcoin ETFs
- Apple fights EU Digital Markets Act, claims only iPhone App Store meets regulation requirements
- The Open Australian Legal Corpus is designed for LLM's to ingest Australian laws
- Cheap Oricom CB radios, Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, Lenovo 24" monitor, UniFi Express, Samsung Watch6, Samsung Tab A9+, Pixel 7 128GB

## The News

### eSafety gets a response from X about moderation and finds there's not much moderation going on

X has finally responded to eSafety's request for more info on how they moderate and what they're doing to meet the Basic Online Safety Expectations. It won't surprise anyone that X isn't doing much at all, with eSafety finding an 80% reduction in "safety engineers" and policy staff, 50% fewer moderators and full-time staff dedicated to "hateful conduct" since Musk took over. When asked "what tools were used to detect volumetric attacks or pile-on's in breach of Twitter's targeted harassment policy", X said they don't have any. X also reinstated over 6,100 Australian accounts (eSafety is guessing they're Australian, X wasn't clear) that were previously banned, 194 of those "previously suspended by the platform for hateful conduct violations". eSafety's response to all this? Nothing except some words from the commissioner about how this is all very bad.

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### SEC approved a bunch of Bitcoin ETFs

Big news for Bitcoin - which occupies so little space in my brain these days I almost forgot it still exists - as the USA's SEC has approved 11 Bitcoin ETFs from legit financial companies like BlackRock and Fidelity. This happened a day after the SEC's X account was hacked (they didn't have 2FA enabled, lol, morons) and a fake announcement was made that the ETFs were approved, boosting the price of Bitcoin. So yeah, if you wanna invest in Bitcoin but don't want to hold any Bitcoin yourself, you'll eventually be able to log in to your favourite broker and buy shares in an ETF that holds Bitcoin. You could also take your money to the casino, more fun too. You gotta laugh at the irony of a cryptocurrency ETF, all regulated and shit, when one of the key tenets of cryptocurrency was freedom and liberation from the oppressive regulation of such entities.

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### Apple fights EU Digital Markets Act, claims only iPhone App Store meets regulation requirements

Apple is trying to argue with the EU that they have 5 separate app stores, not one big App Store and all but the iPhone app store don't meet the user threshold to be determined as a "platform" within the the EU's Digital Markets Act, which would result in Apple having to allow alternative app stores on all their devices with an app store. I guess they're right - the App Store on the Apple TV is pretty different to the one on the iPhone, ditto the Mac. They've got until April to either comply or get a court to say otherwise, which isn't much time. Apple has acknowledged this in their financial reporting for the first time, kinda admitting they're going to have to play ball with the EU at some level and it'll impact their business.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The Open Australian Legal Corpus is designed for LLM's to ingest Australian laws

Umar Butler built "Open Australian Legal Corpus, the largest open database of Australian law". In a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention, they wanted to train an LLM on Australian legal data but one didn't exist, so they built their own. It contains " every in force statute and regulation in the Commonwealth, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Norfolk Island, in addition to thousands of bills and hundreds of thousands of court and tribunal decisions". Victoria is the odd one out as Umar is yet to get permission to ingest the laws of the greatest state in the country into the database. Impressive work from what appears to be a single person, but I fear what fresh hell Umar might conjure up combining the law and an LLM.

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## Bargains

- Oricom UHF CB Radio 2W 2-Pack - $80 from Supercheap Auto
- Samsung Galaxy Buds2 Pro - $204.99 from Amazon
- Used Lenovo ThinkVision T24i-10 23.8" 1080p IPS monitor (no stand) - $75 from UN Tech
- Ubiquiti UniFi Express - $309 from Wireless1
- Samsung Watch6 Classic 47mm LTE (watch face only, box damaged) - $411.72 from Samsung's eBay store
- Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ Wi-Fi 128GB - $344.98 from Bing Lee's eBay store
- Spend $300 at JB, get $30 off - good for the Pixel 7 128GB, brings the price down to $469

## Image Of The Day

The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. (Steve Jurvetson / Flickr)

## The End

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