Google and the US DoJ are still in court arguing if Google's ad business is a monopoly and as part of Google's defence against the the DoJ's allegations, they produced a wild chart intending to demonstrate that it is possible to buy ads on websites without Google getting a cut. Go look at said chart. Are we done laughing? Yeah, it's a shitshow and according to the Centre for Journalism & Liberty who have been following this trial closely, this "spaghetti football", "might have backfired as it also made it evident that Google is ubiquitous in digital advertising". No shit.
You know how the government did the free to air TV networks a favour cooking up a "prominence framework" so their streaming apps are equally as accessible as Netflix on smart TVs? The same thing is happening with radio stations. The aim "shape the way radio services are found on smart speakers, to make sure local radio services can be easily and accurately found". Right now the government is asking for feedback on stuff like which radio stations should be given prominence, the services that need to adhere to this framework (Alexa, Google Home, Siri, etc) and how to actually do it.
The committee tasked with investigating the 12-hour Optus network outage back in November 2023 has handed in its report to the government and made seven recommendations - an "enforceable" standard for telcos that forces them to communicate what's going on during an outage, get the telcos to do "large-scale" roaming during an outage, mandate telcos as "critical infrastructure providers", work with the TIO to come up with a way for consumers to get "appropriate compensation" after a mass outage and for ACMA to update the Customer Service Guarantee Standard to include mobile telcos.
A Swiss PhD student found that reCAPTCHA v2 is absolutely useless against AI bots. Combined with a VPN to avoid detection from repeated tests from the same IP, a "special mouse movement model" and fake browser and cookie info from real browsing sessions, the "YOLO" model they devised had a 100% success rate identifying stairs, motorbikes, crosswalks and so on used by reCAPTCHA v2. reCAPTCHA v2 is pretty old and Google recommends using reCAPTCHA v3 now (which relies on a "a score to tell you how suspicious an interaction is and eliminating the need to interrupt users with challenges at all") but loads of sites still use reCAPTCHA v2.
The original picture is hard to find. Here is an attempt to recreate the original as well as possible. The original picture shows the TQFP housing of the TMU of Voodoo 1 and not the BE of Voodoo 2 as shown here (also a TMU). The two exposed extra chips are not present in the original. The small exposed chip in the foreground is the TMU of Voodoo 1, and not the chip that is wired in the Voodoo 2 BE housing (Fritzchens Fritz / Flickr)
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