Electronic Frontiers Australia has put out a statement that it is "deeply troubled" by the government's decision to abandon "the requirement to keep all personal information generated by the Digital ID scheme within Australia". They say that if the data is stored in Australia, it would be more secure, boost the economy, "assert national sovereignty" and improve performance. I'm sure all those are true in some form and I generally trust the EFA, but some more detail would be nice on the practical dangers of allowing data on Australians to be stored in the US. Is the big risk here the fact US privacy laws are virtually non-existent and by storing the data in the US, the data could be used there in a way that would be illegal here?
Apple Vision Pro goes on pre-order today in Australia, but news out of the US is that sales of the $6000+ VR/AR headset have basically evaporated. Market analysis firm IDC reckons Apple is yet to sell 100,000 units a quarter of these things and overall sales are down 75% this quarter compared to last quarter. It's unlikely they'll hit 500,000 AVP sales in a full year. Maybe international sales will see a small bump, but it's not going to be the next iPhone or even the Mac any time soon. If spatial computing is going to be a thing it's gonna be a slow burn. I've booked in a demo AVP at the Highpoint Apple store for Monday afternoon, so expect a little write-up in Tuesday Sizzle. I'm excited to finally try one out with the proper prescription lenses for my fucked up eyes!
The EU announced it ceased investigating Apple Pay and Apple's refusal to provide access to NFC capability on iPhones to other payment platforms, because Apple has given "third-party mobile wallets" access to NFC via "Host Card Emulation mode" and competing wallets will be able to use Face ID, Touch ID, passcodes and users can get access to the wallets by double-clicking the side button of the iPhone. While there still seems to be a distinction between third party wallets and Apple Pay (something about a "secure element" Apple gets but others don't), it's a huge improvement over the status quo. So when can we do this in Australia? If it's good enough for Europe, it's good enough for us. Would be incredibly useful for gift cards and pre-paid Visa/MasterCard, etc because they wouldn't need to give Apple a cut of every transaction made.
Do you know who Fabrice Bellard is? He's the original developer of FFMPEG, an impressive piece of software for video/audio encoding (and more) that's used in fuckton of places thanks to being open source. That alone would put you in the deadset legend status of computing, but no, Fabrice is such a genius that they also decided to fuck around and spit out QEMU. If you've ever used a virtual machine that isn't VMware, chances are it was some sort of QEMU variant. Fabrice's website is banger after banger of projects that even if you did just one, you'd be absolutely stoked with and would dine out on it for years. I haven't read it yet, but the ACM did a profile on Fabrice in 2009 and put him in the same league as Alan Turing, Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Kosovar refugees, safe haven, Singleton Army Base, New South Wales, September 1999, John Immig (National Library of Australia)
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