The News

Australians are data-hungry, fibre-fed piggies: NBN

Australians are rapidly switching to fibre connections and slurping up more data than ever before, according to NBN Co (Canberra Times). The national broadband network’s latest annual results paints a picture of a nation that can’t get enough internet (NBN Co). Since last year, about 500,000 new premises now have FTTP, 700,000 more premises are on 100 Mbps plans or above, and the average household’s monthly data usage has increased 13% to 508GB.

The Sizzle: It’s so painfully obvious now that it might even be hard to remember just how painfully obvious it was that Tony Abbott was wrong in 2013 when the then-prime minister said: “We are absolutely confident 25 Mbps is going to be enough -- more than enough -- for the average household.” (SMH). Just to put it in perspective: the average monthly household data use in 2013 was less than the year-on-year increase in monthly average data use (Swoop).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

GitHub will no longer be independent from Microsoft

Microsoft is completely absorbing GitHub into its “Core AI” team, ending a near decade of supposed independence (Ars Technica). The news came out that GitHub’s CEO — the second since the $11.5B acquisition in 2018 — is leaving and won’t be replaced by Microsoft. Instead, GitHub will be folded into the team that builds AI coding tool Github CoPilot.

The Sizzle: Lots of parallels between this move and Elon Musk’s xAI’s “acquisition” of X. Vibrant online communities are boiled down to the value of being easily digestible training data sets. The problem with purchases like this is that the best interests of online spaces often clash with the interests of the owners trying to protect their data assets.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Reddit blocking Wayback Machine from archiving its platform

Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive from archiving most of its platform, citing AI scrapers and “respecting user privacy” (The Verge). The Wayback Machine will be limited to only archiving the Reddit homepage and will no longer have access to “pages, comments or profiles”. According to Reddit, it’s caught AI companies crawling the archive as a proxy for scraping Reddit. The company also took issue with Internet Archive failing “respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content”.

The Sizzle: As you might remember, Reddit now literally blocks all search engine crawlers other than Google, with which it has a commercial partnership. This has led people to believe this is just a bad faith excuse to squeeze more money from other companies. Maybe! But I’m also interested in the second half of the explanation: that Wayback Machine should delete content removed by Reddit. As someone who’s relied on Wayback Machine for investigations, it’s been a crucial resource for the accountability of both individuals and platforms. I’d hate to lose it.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

This website gives you a birds-eye view of the internet

1,000,000 screenshots is a website that more-or-less does what it says on the box: it’s a visual snapshot of 1,048,576 websites, updated each month, and shown to you at random.

It’s cool to have a quick scroll through. My take-away? So much of the internet looks exactly the same now. Sad!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Elecitrcal & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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