Hi team! Posted a little bit about the Sizzle behind the scenes after doing it for six months on the forum. Also, you might see below, I’m playing a bit with adding a section called “The Sizzle” to separate out the news and analysis. Curious to hear what you think!

The News

Tesla hiding and fudging its Autopilot safety data, according to leaked documents

Tesla is withholding data from regulators and designing systems to technically avoid responsibility for crashes involving its assisted driving systems, a new book reveals (The Guardian). The piece is a super interesting excerpt from a book written by two reporters who got given 23,000 Tesla files by a whistleblower. It reveals the lengths that the Elon Musk-run carmaker goes to fudge or hide the safety data for its “““"autopilot full-self driving”””” system, despite Musk bragging about how much data each car collects as part of its training.

The Sizzle: The biggest yikes for me? It’s been documented Tesla’s Autopilot feature deactivated “less than one second before impact” which means it technically wasn’t engaged for the crash. This type of chicanery means it’s very hard to trust the company’s claim that its assisted driving is safe.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Will the US TikTok sale end with an American Great Firewall?

TikTok will create a US version of its app as a condition of an imminent sale demanded by Donald Trump (Reuters). After the deadline for parent company ByteDance to either sell the app so it was majority US-owned or face removal from the App Stores was kicked down the road again, the US President says he’s got a group lined up to buy the app. Apparently, US users will be able to use the existing app until March next year, after which the new app, M2, will be the only way to use the platform.

The Sizzle: There’s not a lot of detail on M2 but isn’t it crazy how the US is reverse engineering the Great Firewall of China by getting its own version of the Chinese-only TikTok, Douyin. Will we see US-only moderation? Who’s to say the Trump approved buyers won’t be fiddling with the algorithm knobs to promote MAGA? The departure of the US — TikTok’s largest user base by country — leaves a vacuum that I believe it is only right for Australians to fill and become a global culture superpower.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

I’ve taken the vertical tabs plunge

Mozilla has finally added a vertical tabs option to Firefox as a feature (ZDNet) like other browsers including Edge and Safari (ZDNet). I switched over to vertical this weekend to give it a test ride. My first impression? Muscle memory is so powerful. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been momentarily bamboozled about where my tabs have gone. I’m now a few days in and my verdict is that it hasn’t made a huge difference. Having tabs on the side does seem like a better because web experiences are increasingly being designed for the portrait-shaped mobile screens, leaving big gaps on the side.

Have you made the switch? I’d love to hear from you! I’ll check back in after a few weeks to let you know if I’ve stayed the course or switched back.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

The internet’s horny Library of Alexandria went offline because too much horny

The world’s greatest collection of (largely horny) fan-fiction was brought to its knees because of its own version of the 2038 problem.

Warning: click on any of these links at your own risk. 

Archive of Our Own, which goes by AO3, is the online home of written fan fiction and mostly slashfic — romantic relationships between characters of the same gender — for everyone from Kirk and Spock (AO3) to Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull (AO3). The website was down for a few days because its user base had made 2,147,483,647 bookmarks — the maximum positive value for a 32-bit integer — and the site’s operators needed to migrate it to a new system (Reddit). Fittingly, this last bookmark was for an extremely NSFW story about the One Direction boys called “The Breeding Cage”(AO3).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electronics & electrical

Computing

Mobile

The End

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

🤖 We love robots at the Sizzle but this newsletter has always been and will always be written by humans for humans.

🗣️ Have any feedback, a tip or just want to chat? Send me an email or Signal message. I promise to reply!

💬 Want to hang out with other Sizzlers? There’s a subscriber-only Slack server and forum if you want to procrastinate and chat about tech-related news.

🌐 The Sizzle is on Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn if you’re feeling social.

💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info, change email address or cancel your subscription? Visit the Beehiiv customer portal.

🎁 Make someone's day and gift them a 12 month gift subscription to The Sizzle.

💔 Don’t want this any more? I won’t take it personally. There’s a unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email or here’s a guide.

🦺 The Sizzle has been tested to meet and exceed ISO 3533 standards.

Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

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.