### Issue 2241 - Thursday 19th December, 2024

Some housekeeping before I ride off into the sunset tomorrow: all your subscriptions have been transferred to Cam's Stripe account and he will be using Beehiiv to manage the entire thing. It's way more slick than the homebrew mess of interconnected services I cooked up before people making money from newsletters on the internet was a thing. From now if you wanna cancel your paid subscription to The Sizzle, you do so by logging in to Beehiiv at https://thesizzle.beehiiv.com. There will be a link at the bottom of every email Cam sends from Beehiiv too.

## In Today's Issue

- US government probably banning the sale of TP-Link devices
- New set of Online Safety Act "standards" become law
- Appple annoyed with Meta's EU interoperability requests
- A quick guide to digitising books, magazines, etc
- Cheap refurb iPhone SE, Google Play gift cards, Minisforum mini PC, Arc B580 GPU

## The News

### US government probably banning the sale of TP-Link devices

The Wall Street Journal got a tip off that the USA's Commerce, Defense and Justice departments have opened "probes" into TP-Link and that "authorities could ban the sale of TP-Link routers in the US next year, according to people familiar with the matter". Basically Huawei 2.0. TP-Link devices often have security flaws that don't get fixed or if they are fixed, the updates don't flow down to customers in a timely fashion and while they're overall decent products, they leave a lot to be desired in terms of robust cybersecurity. There is evidence of the vulns in TP-Link devices being used in botnets by state sponsored Chinese hackers, so yeah, not entirely surprising, but it's not like TP-Link are the only ones. D-Link anyone??

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### New set of Online Safety Act "standards" become law

Australia's Online Safety Act forced the entire telco & tech industry to come up with eight industry codes to regulate/censor the internet and telecommunications services, but two of the codes the industry developed wasn't severe enough for eSafety so they took over and made two "standards" instead. Those standards are now law and apply to Designated Internet Services (DIS) and Relevant Electronic Services (RES). A regulatory guidance document is available if you wanna know more. Very simply, they're applying the National Classification Scheme (MA15+, G, PG, etc) to every single thing on the internet. If it would be refused classification under that scheme, it has to be removed. eSafety also said they're giving tech companies two extra months to comply with the new law banning kids from social media because it's "complex" (i.e: nobody knows what the fuck is going on).

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### Appple annoyed with Meta's EU interoperability requests

Apple had a sook to Reuters about Meta submitting interoperability requests as is their right under Europe's DMA. Meta made 15 interoperability requests "far more than any other company" and Apple said that if it granted all those requests "Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could enable Meta to read on a user's device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords, and more". Meta replied to Reuters with "what Apple is actually saying is they don't believe in interoperability" and that "every time Apple is called out for its anticompetitive behavior, they defend themselves on privacy grounds that have no basis in reality". I'd love to know what those interoperability requests are before passing judgement. Without that info, this is just Apple trying to scare everyone about the DMA - again.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### A quick guide to digitising books, magazines, etc

One of my hobbies is scanning books and magazines and uploading them to the Internet Archive (my suspended account & my current account). I got really deep into it during COVID but have eased off lately as I kinda solved how to scan and archive hundreds of thousands of pages of literature, which was the interesting bit to me. It took me months of fucking around to get a nice workflow but Jason Scott posted on Reddit a great FAQ on his experience doing the same (at a much grander scale) that I totally agree with and lines up with my experiences too. The main tip is to not over think it, just digitise as much as you can, as best as you can.

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## Bargains

- Get 2000 Flybuys points when you buy a $100 Google Play gift card at Coles
- Refurb Apple iPhone SE 5G 3rd Gen 64GB - $259 from Phonebot
- Minisforum MS-A1 mini workstation PC barebones kit (BYO RAM, SSD & AMD5 CPU) - $399.99 from Amazon
- MAXSUN Intel Arc B580 Milestone 12GB GPU & $20 store credit - $429 + delivery from Mwave

## Image Of The Day

Technical Officer, Trevor Roots replaces a printed circuit board in the PABX at the new Parliament House, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory - Telecom Australia Annual Report 1988 (National Library of Australia)

## The End

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## Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

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.