Sydney guy arrested for blackmail over Outaboxed/Clubs NSW data breach

Well that was quick. Less than 48 hours after the Have I Been Outaboxed site went live, NSW Police's Cybercrime Squad has arrested a 46-year-old bloke in Sydney's Fairfield West and charged him with blackmail related to the Clubs NSW/Outabox data breach. The police also said they've "made attempts to disable and ultimately seek the shutdown of a website that housed the leaked personal information". What that means exactly and what legal mechanisms they've used to try and "disable" a website is unknown. It's amazing how quickly the cops acted and how seriously they're taking it, as well as how quiet the mainstream media is compared to other data breaches of similar scales. The Optus & Medibank breaches made news for weeks, had federal politicians cooking up new laws on the fly - but this? Ssshh, poor smol bean Clubs NSW are innocent victims of bad hacker men.

Meta still threatening to remove news in Australia is forced to pay for it

Meta is threatening to do to news in Australia what it did to Canada - remove it entirely from Facebook & Instagram - should it be forced into paying money to Australian media outlets again as those deals expire. This comes straight from the horse's mouth, according to Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones who said that's what Meta told him and the threat "should send a shudder down the spine of every small business in Australia that uses Meta as a platform to ply their trade". Yeah, sure, okay buddy. Maybe the fact Meta is so intertwined with Australian small businesses is the problem here, not the fact it won't pay a ransom to your mates in the media? Anyways, the Assistant Treasurer is still waiting for advice on if Meta should he should "designate" Meta under the news media bargaining code, which would force Meta to do a deal, which they won't, so it'll end up in court much like X/Musk and the eSafety Commissioner and I can't wait to see the government's brain farts face real scrutiny.

Microsoft accounts get passkeys, Apple changes Core Technology Fee, Google's Audio Emojis are weird

• You can now use passkeys for your Microsoft accounts. If like me, you're skeptical about how passkeys have been implemented by the big tech companies, this blog post by the person that wrote a Rust library for Webauthn will confirm your point view.
• Apple's changed the very rude Core Technology Fee for apps distributed via 3rd party app stores in the EU. If you've go a free app or earn under 10 million euro, you don't have to pay it. It gets pretty complicated beyond that and is still an insult to developers that I hope the EU tells Apple to remove.
• Google's phone app on Android is getting "Audio Emoji", aka sound effects you can play while on a phone call. At first I thought this is fucking dumb and should be illegal, its use punishable by 5 years in prison, but you could play a "poop" noise while making an appointment for a colonoscopy and that's pretty funny.

Convincing myself why spsending US$69 on a calculator app is okay

If I told you I've spent US$69 on a calculator app, I would totally understand if you thought I'm a dickhead pissing his money away. There's free calculator apps! Spreadsheets are a thing! But the US$69 I've spent on Soulver (once-off purchases of $20 on iPad, $14 on iPhone and $35 on macOS) over the years don't bother me at all because I use this app every damn day for what I call "napkin math" - those calculations that need more than the built-in calculator app but aren't that complex where I need a spreadsheet. I've tried other notepad style calculator apps on various platforms but nothing clicks with me like Soulver does. It's apps like this and Reeder, Transmit and Audio Hijack that while not totally unique in their capabilities, are so well done that I persist with Apple's other bullshit and remain an Apple user.