Folks, put it in your calendar now: the last Sizzle of the year will be December 19!

The News

The BOM website that everyone seems to hate also cost an insane amount of money to make

BOM spent almost $100 million on a website that it previously said cost $4 million (SMH, $). BOM’s new chief Dr Stuart Minchin revealed the full price of the whole project which was launched last month: $4.1 million for the redesign, $79.8 million for the website build and $12.6 million for the testing and launch. Now the environment minister says he’s met twice with Minchin in the first two weeks of his job to speak about the website and its cost (Guardian).

The Sizzle: People complaining about how much more it costs the government to build websites is often a bugbear for me. Government departments can’t just roll out a stock Wordpress build because the higher standards and requirements for a public resource. BOM, in particular, has a lot of requirements because its weather data is used globally: from farmers to markets to defence forces. Any new BOM website build was always going to take forever, cost a shitload, and end up as a Franken-website.

With all that in mind: $96.5 MILLION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Maaammaa mia!!!! To put that in perspective, that’s 1.6 million Sizzle annual subscriptions. (And I think the Sizzle website is better too).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

X now shows user locations and it immediately revealed a lot of grifter accounts pretending to be someone they’re not

Elon Musk’s X now has a transparency feature that purports to show a user’s location information — and it immediately revealed some people are lying on the internet (Tech Crunch)! X now displays user accounts info like where they’re based, when they joined and how many times they’ve changed their username (X).

People were quick to notice that quite a few major MAGA accounts were, in fact, supposedly based in Nigeria, Eastern Europe, Russia and India (Daily Beast).

The Sizzle: Take X’s data with a grain of salt: my profile says I’m based in America because I only ever crosspost to X using a third-party posting service.

That being said, we should be 0% surprised that people around the world are pretending to be someone they’re not to cash in on online engagement. Earlier this month, an investigation revealed that a Sri Lankan influencer says he makes $100,000s by making AI-generated racist, anti-immigrant slop on Facebook for UK audiences (The Bureau Investigates). When platforms like X started letting users earn money from engagement, they supercharged the incentives for creating sensationalist, engagement-baiting content. Now, this is the world we live in.

Or, as one Bluesky user put it: “If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?”

Related reading: Majority of Australians encountering misinformation online, regulator finds 

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Powerbank use soon to be banned on flights

Power bank use will be banned on major Australian airlines starting from early next month (Australian Traveller). Last week, Qantas and Virgin announced that usage will be banned on December 15 and December 1, respectively. This comes after a handful of reports about power banks short-circuiting mid-air. Travellers will still be able to take up to two 160 Wh power banks on a flight. Most planes offer some in-seat charging — but every plane in the airlines’ fleets use USB-A, so remember to bring your adaptor!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Experience Gmail like Jeffrey Epstein

When all those Epstein estate emails were dropped the other week, the dump was a complete mess. Thankfully, someone has now figured out the formatting and is helping sharing them as a recreation of Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox so you can experience his emails just like he did!

Why not put yourself in the shoes of the guy and read messages from Paul Keating’s daughter, Katherine Keating, or see what disgraced cosmologist Lawrence Krauss had to say about allegations of sexual harrasment at an Australian event! What a treat.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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