The ALP has managed to turn one of their computer related bills into law this week - the Cyber Security Bill. If you're unfamiliar with the bill, one of the more interesting things it'll introduce to Australia is a set of 33 mandatory requirements for "IoT devices", aligning Australia with Europe's ETSI EN 303 645 "Cyber Security for Consumer Internet of Things: Baseline Requirements" standard to raise the bar on security, software updates, vulnerability handling and so on. It'll also require "certain businesses to report ransom payments", establish a Cyber Incident Review Board (CIRB) to "conduct no-fault, post-incident reviews of significant cyber security incidents in Australia" and loads more. Press release here.
Story in the ABC today about the "Bundaberg Gays and Surrounds" Facebook group having posts removed because the moderation bot thought them sharing a post about Non Binary People's Day was malicious software. The mods of the group requested a review of the post removal, which led to the entire group being closed down and the moderator's accounts restricted so they couldn't even post on their personal accounts what the fuck happened. Really crap for the gays of Bundaberg and of course there's no recourse and Meta hasn't commented, but innocent groups shitcanned due to automated moderation happens all the time unfortunately. It's easy to yell "don't use Facebook!" but people are gonna use it just due to the sheer number of people there.
The Macquarie Dictionary (a true blue Aussie book of words for us little battlers unlike the pretentious Oxford dictionary) has declared their word of the year for 2024, enshittification - "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking". Macquarie chose this word because it "captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment". It's a word I use regularly as a shorthand for the current state we find the internet now compared to the internet of my youth. If you haven't seen it yet, Cory Doctorow (the "inventor" of the word) gave two good talks at this year's and last year's DEF CONs discussing what we can do about enshittification.
On Sol 422 (April 28, 2022), Mastcam-Z took this scenic landscape image during a routine dust devil searching activity. In the image, you can see the delta front on the left and the Isle Royale and Santa Cruz mountains in the distance. In the center, you can see the previous tracks of the Perseverance rover's wheels (for scale, the tracks are 2.2 meters apart). The rover has been breaking Martian driving records, completing the longest autonomous drive ever by any rover on Mars at 509.75 meters on Sols 350-352. This feat is enabled by the rover's onboard auto-navigation system which can autonomously detect obstacles in the driving path such as large rocks or steep slopes. (Mastcam-Z)
📻 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Field of Vision
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