Issue 2293 - Tuesday 18 March 2025

Hello! I wrote a short Behind the Sizzle re: the deals section, prompted by some feedback I got from Sizzler Phil yesterday. If you’re a deal demon 😈 make sure to weigh in — CW

The News

World Wide Web inventor slags off Meta, makes case for open social media standards

Governments should force social media platforms into being interoperable, Tim Berners-Lee reckons (FT). The inventor of the World Wide Web has “reservations” about the state of the internet, saying “a [social media] company whose bottom line is determined by the time that people spend on a platform” — no points for guessing who — has locked people into a toxic and polarised online walled garden.

Berners-Lee, who is also spruiking his new start-up that is making a personal AI assistant trained on your data, says the solution is open social media standards (Solid Project). What I like about the essay is that he actually makes a positive case about things that could be better, rather than just (rightly) complaining about how broken everything is now. As you know, I’m a big open standards guy but, let’s be real: people just want stuff that works for them. Berners-Lee gets that convincing people to make the switch means being specific about how their lives would improve.

Amazon kills local Alexa feature

Relatedly, Amazon is killing a feature that let its Alexa assistant work locally and avoid sending voice recordings to the cloud (Gizmodo). The company has sent an email to Alexa owners essentially saying that they need to gobble up that data for their new Alexa AI project.

It sucks that they’re taking away this feature. I also think that there are a lot of cool things in technology that rely on externally sharing data, and that doing so isn’t unequivocally a bad idea. Like, if you want Alexa or Siri to be able to answer a request like “can you find out when my mum’s plane is going to land”, you are going to need to give it access to data including your messages, contacts, and online flight tracking data. The solution to the data hungry companies who are irresponsible with our data isn’t hoarding everything from them, but — in the spirit of what Berners-Lee is talking about — is having more information and granular control over what we are sharing and how.

Hacked Australian company being sued didn’t use multi-factor authentication

Australia’s corporate watchdog is suing a finance firm for having truly dogshit cybersecurity that led to having 18,000 of its clients’ data stolen by hackers (Information Age). ASIC alleges FIIG Securities broke the terms of its financial services licence by failing to protect its clients from Russian ransomware gang AlphV, which stole “highly sensitive customer information” including drivers’ licences, passports, TFNs and bank account details. According to ASIC, the company failed to patch its software, properly use firewalls and lacked multi-factor authentication in some situations, lol. FIIG hasn’t publicly said much in response. Also in cybersecurity news, India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban affairs allegedly left open an AWS bucket with 1.9 million people’s records (CyberNews). Oops.

Leftovers

Oh, Also

How emoji code was used to hack US Treasury

Remember when we found out those those Silk Typhoon attacks that pwned US Treasury (Cyber Daily). I came across this rather amusing newsletter that used a fun hook — emojis — to explain the details of how it happened (Slam Dunk Software). It’s a very accessible read but the TLDR is: an old bug in how some software processed Unicode, the standard for displaying characters ranging from alphanumeric symbols to the 💩 emoji, opened the door for a SQL injection attack which gave access to some of the most sensitive data in government.

Bonus fun bit: the newsletter also alerted me to Unicode Consortium’s official character adoption program (Unicode). It is now my life’s goal to sponsor an emoji. But which one…..

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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

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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.