Hi, it's Kathy Reid here at the helm, bringing you The Sizzle for the back end of the week while Anthony enjoys some well-earned time off. I'm a critical technologist, and you might know me from places like Linux Australia, Mycroft.AI or Mozilla's Common Voice team, and I'm currently finishing a PhD at ANU's School of Cybernetics around data used in speech technologies like Whisper.
Hot off the heels of Mozilla's foray into privacy-preserving attribution for advertising, and Google's backflip on scrapping third-party cookies, comes the privacy violation identification service webXray. Based on the doctoral research of privacy researcher and Google alum, Dr Tim Libert, webXray tracks thousands of cookies across the web, allowing you to enter a search term, and see the results returned for that search - along with the cookies they set. While the free version only allows you to see a subset of results, and the tracking only covers the United States, it's one more tool in the fight for privacy. This is a for-profit service, aimed at corporate litigators, so I don't know how much help it's going to be to the Average Jax on the street whose data is getting hoovered up for more fine-grained ad control. Is privacy inevitable, as Libert claims? Probably not, but tools like webXray are a step in the right direction.
With props to Sizzle Slack stalwart @jurgen for the find, there are reports that only the Google search crawler, GoogleBot, is now able to index Reddit's content, coming after its $USD 60 million a year token-harvesting ^H^H^ content licensing deal with the platform. This follows recent moves from Cloudflare to block web scrapers, which it identifies using machine learning, and Amazon taking action against Perplexity.AI for using its infrastructure to scrape content from major websites. I'd care slightly more if Google Search was still functional, but it can no longer find a needle in the hAIstack. In the words of my good friend Cameron Tudball, "I tried to find something on Google yesterday, and failed. It's been getting harder, but I have never failed to find something before."
Hamish Hansford, Australia's critical infrastructure boss at Home Affairs, is saying all the right things, via this interview with Judy Skatsoon from the Tech in Government conference this week in Canberra. With the CrowdStrike outage firmly front of mind, Hansford points to risk ownership, supply chain management and the interdependence of risks as the things that keep him up at night. This "systems thinking" approach to critical infrastructure is one I can get behind.
As humans continue to accelerate climate change, you might be feeling a bit chilly with the recent polar blast. If you or a loved one is a knitter or crocheter (thank you Tom Daley for normalising men knitting again), then you can now make your own temperature blanket with local climate data as an ode to our collective inaction. Sorry, this was meant to be light, and it started out that way but got dark. Just like all the temperature blankets 🔥
Margaret Hamilton in 1969 with the source code her team developed for the Apollo missions. (The Guardian)
😎 Today's issue of The Sizzle crafted lovingly by Kathy Reid fuelled by equal parts coffee and rage.
💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.
👋 Forums not your thing? The Sizzle has a Slack group you can procrastinate in and chat with other nerds bored at work.
💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info, change email address or cancel your subscription? Visit the customer portal.
🎁 Make someone's day and buy them a 12 month gift subscription to The Sizzle.
📚 Browse The Sizzle Archive. A few issues are missing and it's not searchable, but it's better than nothing.
🫂 Friends of The Sizzle is a small group of businesses or organisations operated by Sizzle subscribers. Support your fellow Sizzler!
💔 Tired of my bullshit? Unsubscribe and I'll never speak to you again.
The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.