### Issue 2022 - Wednesday 7th February, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- You can sign up for Bluesky without an invite now
- AI-generated images will get warning labels on Facebook, Instagram & Threads
- Coles will use Palantir software across entire business to try and save money
- WhatsApp working towards allowing other messaging apps to talk to WhatsApp users
- Cheap Lenovo Legion Slim 5 laptop, Kayo/Binge gift cards, 18" 1080p USB-C monitor, Dell thin clients, Starlink hardware kit

## The News

### You can sign up for Bluesky without an invite now

Bluesky had ended the invite system and is opening itself up for public signups. If you don't know, Bluesky is a Twitter clone that was a skunkworks project within Twitter back in 2019 but got spun out as its own thing when Elon took over. Jack Dorsey (the co-founder of Twitter) and Jeremie Miller (the inventor of XMPP) sit on the board and Jay Graber is the CEO, who previously worked as an engineer for some cryptocurrency businesses. Unlike Meta's Threads and Mastodon, Bluesky doesn't use ActivityPub but rather it's own "AT Protocol" - they made a weird little comic to explain how Bluesky is different. It would be nice if there was some sort of interoperability so I can view and interact with posts on Bluesky and Meta from within Mastodon and vice-versa! I'm @decryption over there but don't post much.

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### AI-generated images will get warning labels on Facebook, Instagram & Threads

Meta is gonna start labeling images it thinks are AI-generated on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. According to a press release, "we're building industry-leading tools that can identify invisible markers at scale – specifically, the 'AI generated' information in the C2PA and IPTC technical standards – so we can label images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney, and Shutterstock". OpenAI announced today that images created via DALL-E 3 will have the C2PA watermark embedded. I don't know what other markers Meta's system is looking for, as if I post a legit photo to one of those services (which isn't going to have one of these watermarks as it's not an AI-generated image), how do they know if it's AI or from a camera?

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### Coles will use Palantir software across entire business to try and save money

Coles has signed a 3 year deal to use Palantir products, specifically Foundry ("Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise" whatever the fuck that means) and AIP ("full spectrum AI"). If the name Palantir doesn't make you vomit, it works with many governments to do "digital profiling" on immigrants and citizens, with Amnesty International claiming Palantir is "contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government". Coles said they'll use Palantir's platform to "to identify efficiencies across 10 billion rows of data", "bring legacy data systems and machine learning into a shared end-to-end view of the retail ecosystem" and "help to connect the Coles C-suite with its day-to-day operation of stores with an aim to make better decisions in terms of efficiencies and cost-savings".

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### WhatsApp working towards allowing other messaging apps to talk to WhatsApp users

WhatsApp has divulged a tiny bit on how it'll meet its responsibilities as a "gatekeeper" company under the EU's DMA. In a chat with Wired, WhatsApp's engineering director Dick Brouwer said "WhatsApp users who opt in will see messages from other apps in a separate section at the top of their inbox" and non-Gatekeepers that want to interoperate with WhatsApp users will have to "sign an agreement with the company and follow its terms". Matrix and Threema have been working with WhatsApp, but Matrix can't say anything due to an NDA and Threema reckons WhatsApp's approach, saying "we'd have no way of knowing what actually happens with the user data that gets transferred to WhatsApp". The big question is if Apple will have to do the same with iMessage as the EU is still investigating if iMessage is a Gatekeeper after Apple reckons it isn't popular enough to meet the 45 million monthly active EU users threshold.

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## Bargains

- Lenovo Legion Slim 5 (14.5" 2880x1800 OLED touch display, Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB RAM, RTX4060 GPU, 1TB SSD) - $2149 from Lenovo
- 15% off Streamotion (Kayo, Binge, etc) gift cards at Amazon
- ZSUS 18" 1080p 100Hz IPS portable USB-C monitor - $133 from Aliexpress
- Dell Wyse 5070 Thin Client (Intel J5005 CPU, 8GB RAM, 32GB eMMC) - $59 from Metrocom
- Starlink hardware kit new or refurbished - $399/$199 + delivery from Starlink

## Image Of The Day

Microchip (switch controller), 8x magnification. Ron J. Oldfield, Macquarie University Department of Biological Sciences (2003 Nikon Photomicrography Competition)

## The End

📻 Again & Again - the bird and the bee

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