In this edition: Roblox, landlords, Services Australia, Booking.com, OpenAI, Darko Mesaroš, Google Search, iCloud Mail and Windows 98. Plus, deals on Sony headphones, Toshiba hard drives and Apple MacBooks.

The News

RentTech is making landlords more powerful, not helping renters

New tech used in renting is helping landlords squeeze more money from tenants, suck data out of them and consolidate the industry, new research says. A cool open access paper from friend of the Sizzle Sam Floreani takes a critical look at 'RentTech' and how it's changing the industry. What she and co-author Jathan Sadowski found is that platforms that put themselves between landlords and tenants are giving more power to the landowners to charge the most, discriminate against who they want to rent to, and make it easier to own enormous house portfolios. Meanwhile, the companies behind the platforms are clipping the ticket, too. 

The Sizzle: Sam's article is free to read and very accessible for an academic paper. It's got some crazy real world examples of the fucked ways that tech is exacerbating the power imbalance between landlords and tenants in the current market: algorithmic decisions about a tenant's "safety score", asking tenants to pay for their own background checks to help their applications, automating maintenance requests so that tenants are stuck dealing with robots when they need help. 

RentTech serves as a great example about why tech often ends up serving the powerful: there's money in making the landlords' lives easier and they're the ones who can say what technology gets used, not the tenants. The question is: which of those two groups really needs the help? 

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Roblox is really ramping up its youth safety features

Roblox is set to introduce the strictest age restrictions on any major kids’ game by setting hard boundaries on what players are allowed to play based on their age (The Verge). Roblox has been under fire, particularly in Australia (ABC News) for claims that young kids are being targeted with inappropriate content or creeped on by predators. Now, the company will limit children up to 8 and non-age verified accounts to the most "mild" in-Roblox games with no chat functions. Then, kids verified as being between 9-15 will be able to play "moderate" games, then, 15-year-olds and older can play any approved game. These are some pretty big changes, but such is the pressure that Roblox is under.

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

There's one, poorly-running computer that runs Australia's welfare system that costs $126m a year

Taxpayers are footing a $126 million bill each year to run the federal government's 40-year-old mainframe that runs our social security system (InnovationAus, $). The system, Income Security Integrated System (ISIS, lol), was built in the 1980s but is still "Canberra's single source for key calculations". Which is not great because it is "difficult to interrogate and known to malfunction", and was recently responsible for $5 billion of inaccurate welfare payments. After a nearly $200m replacement failed, we're still stuck with it and there's no replacement in sight. Cool! 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

Just seeing this RAID0 set up gave me hives

Look, I'm all for recycling old equipment and giving it a new life. But I think I've found my limit. Software developer and serial "stupid idea" doer Darko Mesaroš has made a RAID0 array running on what he says are "32 of the worst USB flash drives money can buy" and is trying to see how reliably he can run an S3-style storage system. Writing that sentence made me shiver. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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