Mentioned in today’s edition: Microsoft, Canva, Pixel 11, Telstra, Paul McCartney, ChatGPT and Samsung 990 PRO SSDs. Plus, deals on Soundpeats earbuds, Xiaomi robot vacuums and Kobo e-readers.

The News

Australian teens set to get new online privacy protections (and are still on social media)

Australian kids might not be off social media but they are set to gain the "right to delete" and other privacy protections under new draft rules (OAIC). Today, the OAIC has released a draft of its online privacy code for children (under the age of 15) that would make social media networks, gaming platforms, even educational tools do things like:

Meanwhile, the federal government announced that 5 major social media platforms are being investigated for not adequately enforcing its social media ban (ABC News), as its own research showed that 7/10 — SEVEN OUT OF TEN — parents say kids who had social media accounts are still on platforms post-ban (eSafety).

The Sizzle: Getting both of these on the same day is perfect. The teen social media ban is not keeping teens off social media and hasn't reduced reports of harm. I know I keep banging on about this and it probably seems obvious to many of you, but, as I wrote in Crikey today, it's not working so far. 

Meanwhile, the privacy commissioner wants to reform platforms that currently have the kids on them to treat them better. No fucking around with new age check tech, no whack-a-mole with refugee kids, not forcing people to hand over more data to the platforms. The kids' code is just a draft, and will no doubt change, but its design lets us focus on figuring out what protections we should extend to kids (and maybe, adults too?) instead of trying to fight kids who want to be online.

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Apple turns 50 years young!

It's Apple's 50th birthday this week, and there's plenty of fun content out there celebrating one of the all-time most creative, weirdest and, ultimately, great companies of our time. Information Age's Tom Williams spoke to some Australian Apple megafans and even its first Australian employee (who is now a farmer). The Verge has an excellent series, Apple @ 50, which includes some great retrospectives on the Apple II and the MacBook Air. Paul McCartney is rumoured to perform for Apple employees this week too!  And, perhaps the sweetest gift of all: Apple has apparently fixed a mystery bug that was causing typos on the iPhone (WSJ, $). 

Relatedly: the Verge is ranking everyone’s top 50 Apple products by letting you choose your favourite of two randomly paired options.

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Microslop's Copilot is putting AI ads into people's pull requests

And now we turn to Microsoft, which continues to have a terrible run. Its latest act of rake stepping is that its Copilot AI is now inserting a̶d̶s̶ "tips" into pull requests (Windows Central). Developer Zach Manson's colleague asked Copilot to fix a typo. It happily complied but also took it upon itself to insert a sentence about how to use its AI with Raycast (Zach Manson).

This isn't an isolated error, either! One Hacker News commenter found 1.5 million (!) of the same tips on GitHub. A Copilot employee now says they've disabled the "tips" in pull requests. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Oh, Also

These are some really impressive counterfeit SSDs

I want to give credit where it's due: whoever made these fake Samsung 990 PRO SSDs found by Japanese tech website AKIBA PC should probably be hired by Samsung. The drive, its packaging — it all looks good. It has the promised amount of storage. It even performs as well as the real deal. At first. The DRAM-less counterfeits use SLC caching to run blazing fast until the cache fills up, and then transfers become probably slower than old school hard drives. Still, pretty impressive! 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

The End

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