### Issue 1908 - Friday 11th August, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Twitter goons front up to Australian parliament inquiry defending a CSAM distributor
- Facebook isn't that bad according to Oxford's Internet Institute
- CNET burning decades of blog posts because Google's algorithm rewards it
- Dirac Live Active Room Treatment is the cutting edge of DSP enhanced audio
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap 65W output USB battery, Logitech Blue Snowball USB mic, Xbox Series X Console + Diablo IV Bundle, Belkin USB-C dock

## The News

### Twitter goons front up to Australian parliament inquiry defending a CSAM distributor

According to Elon Musk and two of his lackeys, if you post videos of a kid getting horrifically abused on X, but do it to "share content out of outrage to raise awareness", that's okay and your account won't be banned despite being illegal practically everywhere in the world. They said this, out loud and with a straight face, to an Australian joint federal parliamentary committee on law enforcement yesterday. Why they attended in the first place is beyond me as they have no offices, employees or legal business structure in Australia, but it's even more bizarre that you'd attend and then defend why you aren't removing the accounts of people sharing literal child pornography yet in the same breath, argue you have a "zero tolerance" approach to this filth.

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### Facebook isn't that bad according to Oxford's Internet Institute

A large study from the Oxford Internet Institute has found that Facebook probably isn't tearing apart the fabric of society. They took "well-being data from nearly a million people across 72 countries over 12 years and harnessed actual individual usage data from millions of Facebook users worldwide", did some science stuff to it and saw results that "align with other findings suggesting that technology use has not become increasingly associated with negative psychological outcomes over time, and that the increased adoption of Internet technologies in general is not, overall, associated with widespread psychological harms". Might be a sign for me to scale back my support for any terrorist organisation that wants to orchestrate a multi-continent attack on Meta's data centers.

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### CNET burning decades of blog posts because Google's algorithm rewards it

CNET, one of the longest running tech websites, has decided to delete decades of blog posts to appease the beast that is Google's PageRank algorithm. CNET told Gizmodo that "in an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalised by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site", as "pruning" old content "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results". It's a perverse set of incentives, but in public at least, Google says the opposite and strongly recommends not deleting old content. The algorithm doesn't agree however and this is apparently a common practice. All the more reason to

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Dirac Live Active Room Treatment is the cutting edge of DSP enhanced audio

Big news for audiophiles - Dirac's Live Active Room Treatment (aka Dirac ART) software is out in the real world. Unfortunately it's only available on fancy French brand Storm Audio's $20,000+ AVRs and processors, but it exists and is apparently, awesome. If you're unfamiliar with room correction/treatment software, it's like Truplay on Sonos gear or the auto-EQ on Apple's HomePods and is how they can get great sound out of such small speakers. There's not a lot of first hand reviews of Dirac's ART out there due to being on such esoteric hardware, but StereoNET has been using it for a few months and reckons "the results are remarkable". Audioholics has a nice article from earlier this year explaining how Dirac ART works (considers the system as a whole and uses a kind of noise cancellation to filter out weird frequencies) and there's a thread on Audio Science Review if you wanna know the latest on when it'll filter down to more affordable hardware. Rumour is Denon & Marantz's high end units will get a paid upgrade early 2024.

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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.

- andyb started a thread about TPG no longer offering a free email service and making users pay to keep their tpg.com.au email addresses
- Daskarzine and others are still on the hunt for someone to convert their old 27" 5K iMacs into monitors
- zuccs explains how they get The Sizzle and other newsletters as an RSS feed using Fastmail's email rules and Feedly's email to RSS feature
- jez was asked by a family friend how to restrict what their kids can and for how long on various devices
- judges119 kicked off a discussion about specialist terms and acronyms people pronounce weirdly

## Bargains

- Baseus 20,000mAh USB powerbank with 65W output - $52.79 from Baseus via eBay
- Logitech Blue Snowball USB mic - $49 + delivery from Bing Lee via eBay
- Xbox Series X Console + Diablo IV Bundle - $799 from Big W
- Belkin INC003AUBK triple display USB-C dock - $129 from i-Tech

## Image Of The Day

The year after his first run of Grand Slam appearances, Djokovic continued to make his hard-to-spell name recognizable when he took home his first ATP title at the 32-man Dutch Open. (Men's Journal)

## The End

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