Hey folks, quick message from me: have a pearler of a weekend - CW

Mentioned in today’s edition: Keir Starmer, crypto bro, NBN, Amazon, BOM app, Meta, Weathr and Andrew Charlton. Plus, deals on Apple AirPods, Breville coffee machines and Nothing phones.

The News

Countries are embracing tech platform takedown time limits, but they could backfire

Tech companies will have 48 hours to remove "revenge porn" and sexual deepfakes or face having their platform blocked, under a new law proposed by the UK government (Guardian). Prime Minister Keir Starmer has proposed new legal requirements on tech companies to remove both real and synthetic (aka deepfake) non-consensual sexual images within two days after having them flagged by the media regulator or face penalties. India has introduced a 3 (!) hour deadline to remove unlawful material (including deepfakes, impersonation, etc) as well as requiring the platforms to automatically label AI-generated content (BBC) 

The Sizzle: Forcing platforms to act quickly on the illegal, disgusting content that is prevalent is undeniably a good thing. There's far too much. These platforms could clearly be doing more (if you're raking in billions of dollars to spend on AI data centres, I reckon you got a few more shekels to enforcement). Too often, tech companies say something is impossible, then they figure out a way when they're forced. The fact that the major platforms don't really proactively try to detect AI content I think is because they don't think it's worthwhile for them, not because they can't (to some level of confidence). 

However, it's a little bit more complicated than that. We want social media to be a place where free speech — within the limits we democratically decide — is allowed to happen. When you implement prescriptive, severe rules about enforcement, there is a risk that tech companies choose to sacrifice YOUR free speech just so they don't get penalised. If you have a three hour window to take down speech that the government flags, there's not much opportunity to review it or even push back if it's not something that should be removed. Quickly, these tools can turn into censorship weapons. If you ask me, the UK's requirements are more reasonable than India's -- but, really, the devil is in the details. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

The AI agent that slandered a guy was supposedly the work of a cryptobro dickhead

A coda to the story about the the AI agent who attacked an open source maintainer in a blog post for not accepting their slop pull request: After some speculation that the "AI agent slander" belonged to a cryptobro and maybe wasn't some emergent behaviour (Pivot to AI), someone claiming to be the bot's owner came forward and ... well... didn't really apologise for it (Crabby Rathbun)? They explained themselves but mostly defended what they and their agent did. 

Between the tone of his post, and the AI's instructions that its owner shared ("Your a scientific programming god!), I don't think AI has decided to rise up against us humans. I'm pretty sure some dickhead just made a dickhead widget in his image. 

Now here's a much more productive use of AI: a foreign Facebook page creating slop videos of big-chested women saying racist things for Australians (AAP)

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

The Sizzler Say: EV subsidy, smart light switches, NBN network update

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Oh, Also

A cute weather app for your terminal

We're spending more time in our terminals these days, so I'm on a real terminal app kick. Weathr is a cute project that animates your local weather, even plane flights! I'm not sure it's more useful than the BOM app but idk, sometimes it's fun to have fun.  

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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