Issue 2340 - Tuesday 27 May 2025

The News

AI’s copyright threat is an attempt to pitch countries against each other

Former Meta PR guy Nick Clegg says asking permission to train on data would “kill” the AI industry (The Verge). This is obviously bullshit. The open internet has enormous wealth of data with a very simple system of signalling how people should treat your data in robots.txt, even if it isn’t always adhered to. If you want copyrighted data, then you maybe should pay for it. The second thing — that’s been somewhat missed in the reaction — is that Clegg’s comments were specifically trying to spook the UK into not regulating its industry. It’s the “race to the bottom” playbook that you see with corporate tax rates, where industries and companies play countries off against each other. But it’s not that simple. Regulation isn’t just a bad thing for business. Look at the Wild, Wild west of crypto which has scared off a lot of normal people if you want to see how people feel about having no rules (Pew).

Telcos are blocking phones and no one’s monitoring them

Friend of the Sizzle Julian Fell has an interesting piece out looking at the grey area of telcos blocking phones from using their services (ABC News). The big takeaway is that he was able to scrape data from both Telstra and Optus showing thousands of blocked types of devices but it’s not consistent across the pair. More importantly, this blocking is not regulated or even monitored by ACMA, and there is a potential conflict-of-interest where telcos could be tempted to block phones because it encourages people to buy handsets direct from them. Speaking of Telstra, the company came out on Friday afternoon and said actually, no, our networks do coverage 3 million km² without an antenna (Telstra). It’s deeply confusing why Telstra walked back its claim, then walked back its walk back. The Australian ($) says government data shows its claim can’t be true but I don’t think that’s definitive. It seems inevitable this is going to end up in court.

China’s tech advantage isn’t because of small Chinese women’s fingers

A NYT article about why iPhone production can’t move from China to the USA has caused controversy for claiming that “young Chinese women have small fingers” that are essential for installing screws and other small parts (NYT, $). It was a bit of an odd claim for a few reasons: Chinese women’s hands aren’t significantly smaller than their global counterparts (Futurism). Even if they did, there are plenty of men who do iPhone repairs around the world so it mustn’t be necessary. Anyway, it gets at a bigger issue about how some — including, seemingly, the US government — are missing the fact that China’s manufacturing capabilities aren’t because of just small hands or cheap labour, but because the incredible electronics and computing production expertise built over the past 20-30 years that doesn’t exist in the US (Rest of the World).

Leftovers

Oh, Also

Using Portal 2 to build and host websites

Continuing in our theme of weird things that we can use to host a website, YouTuber PortalRunner was able to use turn the 14-year-old game Portal 2 into a web server (YouTube). Thanks to a feature shipped as part of the Linux port of the 2008 zombie game Left 4 Dead that was left in Valve’s Source engine, they were able do to things like host a static web page, track an object in-game, and then eventually build a modular in-game UI to build websites.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal 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.