Word got around certain parts of social media that Zoom updated their terms and conditions back in March to say that by using Zoom you give them "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license" to use anything you do on Zoom to train "machine learning or artificial intelligence" models and algorithms. Sounds yuck and people were saying bad things about Zoom on the internet, so Zoom added a quick "without your consent" clause to that part of the EULA, then published a detailed blog post to calm people down and not to cancel their Zoom subscriptions. Thus completing the social media outrage to company blog post cycle in a single weekend.
PayPal is creating their own cryptocurrency - PayPal USD (PYUSD). It's a "stablecoin", fully backed by US dollar deposits and redeemable 1:1 for US dollars. One PYUSD is one US dollar. PayPal says PYUSD is "designed to reduce friction for in-experience payments in virtual environments, facilitate fast transfers of value to support friends and family, send remittances or conduct international payments, enable direct flows to developers and creators, and foster the continued expansion into digital assets by the largest brands in the world". PYUSD will be available to "eligible" US customers over the coming weeks. Not sure why you'd use this coin instead of USD in your PayPal wallet.
The latest Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey (regularly carried out by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner), has found that "three-quarters of Australians feel data breaches are one of the biggest risks to privacy they face" and that "78% of Australians place a high level of importance on privacy when choosing a product – the third-most important factor behind quality and price". 62% of people say their "personal information was seen as a major concern in life", but "57% of people do not know what to do to protect it". What used to be tin foil hat mood is pretty mainstream now. Hopefully it gives government the mandate it needs to tighten up privacy laws in favor of us, not businesses.
As you know, I'm a big fan of the Kagi search engine. It's still fresh and it costs money to use, but I really like it and reckon everyone should give it a week as their primary search engine. Anyways, they have a feature that lets you block, lower, raise or "pin" domains in your search results. For example, if you never want to see Quora appear in your search results you can block it. Maybe you really like the documentation from Mozilla for your web development - you can boost that so those results appear before others. Kagi has an informative leaderboard of the top domains its users fiddle with. Pinterest is the most blocked (fair) and Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are the most raised/pinned.
Cursor - Newsletter of the Commodore Computer Users Group QLD Vol 6 No 6 Feb 1990 (abeckett / Internet Archive)
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