### Issue #2138 - Thursday 25th July, 2024

Hi, it's Kathy Reid here at the helm, bringing you The Sizzle for the back end of the week while Anthony enjoys some well-earned time off. I'm a critical technologist, and you might know me from places like Linux Australia, Mycroft.AI or Mozilla's Common Voice team, and I'm currently finishing a PhD at ANU's School of Cybernetics around data used in speech technologies like Whisper.

## In Today's Issue

- Former privacy researcher and Xoogler Dr Tim Libert launches privacy violation detection service webXRay
- In Token Wars news, only Google can now crawl Reddit; other search engines blocked
- What keeps Hamish Hansford, Australia's critical infrastructure boss, up at night?
- Cold? Make your own temperature blanket to materialise climate change
- Ducky Mia mechanical keyboards, Dell Monitors, Anker portable bluetooth speakers, Scorptec Christmas in July sale, RPi 4 heatsink case

## The News

### Former privacy researcher and Xoogler Dr Tim Libert launches privacy violation detection service webXRay

Hot off the heels of Mozilla's foray into privacy-preserving attribution for advertising, and Google's backflip on scrapping third-party cookies, comes the privacy violation identification service webXray. Based on the doctoral research of privacy researcher and Google alum, Dr Tim Libert, webXray tracks thousands of cookies across the web, allowing you to enter a search term, and see the results returned for that search - along with the cookies they set. While the free version only allows you to see a subset of results, and the tracking only covers the United States, it's one more tool in the fight for privacy. This is a for-profit service, aimed at corporate litigators, so I don't know how much help it's going to be to the Average Jax on the street whose data is getting hoovered up for more fine-grained ad control. Is privacy inevitable, as Libert claims? Probably not, but tools like webXray are a step in the right direction.

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### In Token Wars news, only Google can now crawl Reddit; other search engines blocked

With props to Sizzle Slack stalwart @jurgen for the find, there are reports that only the Google search crawler, GoogleBot, is now able to index Reddit's content, coming after its $USD 60 million a year token-harvesting ^H^H^ content licensing deal with the platform. This follows recent moves from Cloudflare to block web scrapers, which it identifies using machine learning, and Amazon taking action against Perplexity.AI for using its infrastructure to scrape content from major websites. I'd care slightly more if Google Search was still functional, but it can no longer find a needle in the hAIstack. In the words of my good friend Cameron Tudball, "I tried to find something on Google yesterday, and failed. It's been getting harder, but I have never failed to find something before."

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### What keeps Hamish Hansford, Australia's critical infrastructure boss, up at night?

Hamish Hansford, Australia's critical infrastructure boss at Home Affairs, is saying all the right things, via this interview with Judy Skatsoon from the Tech in Government conference this week in Canberra. With the CrowdStrike outage firmly front of mind, Hansford points to risk ownership, supply chain management and the interdependence of risks as the things that keep him up at night. This "systems thinking" approach to critical infrastructure is one I can get behind.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Cold? Make your own temperature blanket to materialise climate change

As humans continue to accelerate climate change, you might be feeling a bit chilly with the recent polar blast. If you or a loved one is a knitter or crocheter (thank you Tom Daley for normalising men knitting again), then you can now make your own temperature blanket with local climate data as an ode to our collective inaction. Sorry, this was meant to be light, and it started out that way but got dark. Just like all the temperature blankets 🔥

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## Bargains

- Ducky Mia mechanical keyboards 50-60% off
- Dell 27" 4K USB-C monitor for under $360
- Anker portable bluetooth speaker less than half price
- Up to 40% of monitors at Scorptec
- Good deal on aluminium alloy heatsink case for RPi 4 at Little Bird

## Image Of The Day

Margaret Hamilton in 1969 with the source code her team developed for the Apollo missions. (The Guardian)

## 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.