The US DoJ has filed with the court what it wants to see done to end Google's search monopoly. As rumoured earlier in the week, it does include wanting Google to divest its Chrome web browser and even has the possibility of forcing them to divest Android "to incentivize it against circumventing other remedies". They also want to stop Google "offering money or anything of value to third parties — including Apple and other phone-makers — to make Google's search engine the default", mandate it gives access to the Google search index at "marginal cost, and on an ongoing basis", let websites opt-out of AI summaries without penalising their search ranking and "require Google to syndicate its search results, ranking signals. What exactly will happen is anyone's guess as by the time any of this is decided Trump will be fully installed in the White House and the DoJ will have a fresh roster of Trump loyalists leading it who may or may not take the same approach to punishing Google as the Biden's DoJ.
A new study by Katharine Kemp at UNSW is "the first in-depth analysis of privacy terms relevant to connected cars in Australia" and found that "carmakers in many cases fail to appreciate the seriousness of privacy and security threats presented by connected cars". It's similar to what Choice discovered a few months ago. Manufacturers make the terms and conditions difficult to find, don't get informed consent from owners the cars prior to purchase, make it a pain in the arse to disable data collection, don't outline the exact types of data they hoard, are ambiguous if they share the data they collect with third parties and who those third parties might be and now, aren't explicitly saying if what they collect will be used to train AI.
Straight from TorrentFreak: "A recent study published in the Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice sheds light on people's motivations to use Z-Library. Expensive books and limited access to academic material play a key role among those surveyed. That includes a group of Chinese postgraduate students who believe that shadow libraries help to overcome (academic) poverty". Why societies are okay with limiting human curiosity is beyond me. I kinda get the copyright cartels with media, games and software, but locking up scientific research behind paywalls does nobody any favours except a handful of publishers and actively holds back progress.
Scan of the Month is a website made Lumafield, a company that sells computed tomography scanners, as a way to promote CT scanner use outside of the medical field. They place everyday objects into one of their machines and post pictures of the results along with explanations of what we're looking at. Who knew browsing through thousands of x-ray layers of batteries, AirPods, gamepads and other stuff would be so interesting?
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.
The public telephone, notice board and internet access terminal inside Wagga Wagga Airport, 5 July 2005 (Loui Seselja / National Library of Australia)
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