### Issue 1928 - Friday 8th September, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Elon Musk's biography confirms he disabled Ukrainian Starlink access on Russia's request
- Microsoft assumes liability for any copyright infringements its Copilot AI services vomit up
- eSafety approves updated Industry Code for search engines
- Chrome's new Privacy Sandbox sends your browsing history to any website that asks
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap refurb Dell laptop, Football Manager 2023 for PC, 27" 4K monitor, Samsung 5K monitor, budget HP laptop, Samsung flash drive

## The News

### Elon Musk's biography confirms he disabled Ukrainian Starlink access on Russia's request

Remember when Elon Musk shut down Starlink around Ukraine a few months ago because he was shitty about the US government sucking him in to covering the costs? According to an excerpt from his own biography (written by Walter Isaacson, due for release next week), that shutdown was actually "driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk's conversations with senior Russian officials". After that conversation he ordered SpaceX engineers to turn off the network above the warzone, thwarting a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's naval fleet. Musk re-enabled Starlink once the US and EU paid for a huge bulk order of 100,000 terminals. We all know Musk is a dumb motherfucker, so I am not surprised he got finessed by a slick talking Russian spy a conference to do their bidding while making him feel like he is some sort of peace crusader.

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### Microsoft assumes liability for any copyright infringements its Copilot AI services vomit up

One of the big issues with AI/LLMs is that they're trained on copyrighted materials without permission and the output of those systems can reproduce copyrighted content that you don't have permission to reproduce. To ease that fear, Microsoft has announced the Copilot Copyright Commitment. From their blog post - "if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft's Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products". Meanwhile, the Github Copilot class action is still happening over in the USA.

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### eSafety approves updated Industry Code for search engines

The Search Code Industry Code of Practice for the Online Industry (lol) has been approved by the eSafety Commissioner. This one relates to search engines and wasn't approved with the rest of the codes back in June because it didn't do enough to "address the risk of class 1 material including child sexual abuse material on their services in Australia". The industry submitted an updated code that eSafety is now happy with, which requires "services like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo to take important steps to reduce the risk that material like child abuse material is returned in search results and that AI functionality integrated with the search engines are not used to generate 'synthetic' versions of this material". What this means in practice, I don't know (pretty sure the search engines already try pretty hard to avoid CSAM popping up, nobody wants that!), but it's a thing.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Chrome's new Privacy Sandbox sends your browsing history to any website that asks

Chrome got a big update this week and there's one feature Google hasn't been too keen to promote. It's called the "Privacy Sandbox", which is a a new name for what was previously called FLoC, then the Topics API and is is enabled by default. According to Arstechnica, "this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask". Google calls it a "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web", as they plan to use this privacy sandbox feature instead of third party tracking cookies other browsers like Safari and Firefox got rid of years ago. Google isn't keen on doing that without an equivalent way to track users lined up, so that's why the dubiously named Privacy Sandbox and API exists in Chrome, but not other browsers, as the other browsers have no business interest in spying on you for advertising purposes.

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## Friday Forum Update

Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.

- wolfjay wants to know if anyone's keen on the Lenovo Legion Go handheld gaming PC
- tuey is after opinions on moving from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 or Fastmail or Exchange for email and contacts
- gurgle needs a good torch to give their kids when they go camping - torch nerds, this is your time to shine!
- jonoabroad ponders if any fellow Sizzle subscribers are into Peertube, "a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform powered by WebTorrent"
- Pete starts a discussion on the new Fairphone 5

## Bargains

- Refurb Dell Latitude 7390 2-in-1 laptop (i5-8350U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 13.3" 1080p touch screen) - $303.05 from Metrocom's eBay store
- Football Manager 2023 & other PC games free with Prime Gaming (included in Amazon Prime)
- QSM Q27FHB 27" 4K IPS monitor with 65W USB-C charging - $299 from Mwave
- Samsung S90PC ViewFinity S9 27" 5K Monitor - $1798 at Harvey Norman
- HP 732J7PA 250 G9 laptop (i3-1215U, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 15.6" 1080p screen) - $699 from shallothead's eBay store
- Samsung BAR Plus USB3.1 128GB flash drive - $24 from Amazon

## Image Of The Day

The Datong Solar Power Top Runner Base is a work in progress, but it's already one of the biggest solar farms in the world in terms of capacity—clocking in at an impressive 1.07 GW so far. An additional 600 MW is currently under construction and the long-term plan is for the total capacity to hit 3 GW. (Trilect Solar)

## The End

📻 Drain You - Nirvana

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