Threads has a website now, still sucks though

Meta's Threads social network finally has a website for old people like me that still consider a desktop computer to be a first class internet device. It appears to work well. Still waiting for ActivityPub support, you need to have an Instagram account to view more than a handful of messages and the joint is still mostly influencers and brands that are extremely boring, but at least now I can view it in a browser. Now that the dust has settled, I've landed on Mastodon as my primary social media presence, but I still check in on X every now and then, with Threads and Bluesky an afterthought. Facebook for Marketplace and local community info, TikTok for drooling idiot content to turn off my brain and Instagram for the occasional "look at me I'm doing something interesting" selfie.

Zoom's CEO wants workers back in the office 2 days a week

Zoom's CEO has ordered "employees within 50 miles of an office that they must report to the office a minimum of two days a week", because "it's difficult for Zoomies — the pet name the company gives to employees—to build trust with each other on a computer screen" and "it's difficult to have innovative conversations and debates on the company's own platform because it makes people too friendly". Of all companies you think would be remote work friendly, it would be Zoom. I've worked for myself, at home, for over a decade now and would never return to office, but I can kinda understand why sometimes, working with your team on a project can be useful. Mandatory minimum in-office quotas though? Get fucked.

Apple supports Californian right to repair bill

In a surprising move, Apple has lent its support to a Californian law that will require "vendors of consumer electronics and appliances to make sufficient documentation, parts, and tools for repairs available to customers and independent repair shops". Apple has vehemently argued against these laws in other jurisdictions, but in its home state, wrote to a state Senator saying that it supports the bill so long as it forces "repair providers disclose the use of non-genuine or used parts and provides "assurances that the bill would not threaten consumer safety and data security" by requiring manufacturers to disable security features. Apple's actions need to speak louder than their words (piles of perfectly good but bricked Macs? what about all those "obsolete" iPads & iPhones that can't be repurposed??), but at least there's words now.

The world still yearns for increased internet bandwidth

Alan Mauldin, a researcher at TeleGeography, investigated why there's still so much demand for new submarine fibre optic cables. There's terabits upon terabits of capacity added every year, but who the hell is using it all? It's a 15 minute video presentation (or check out the slides as a PDF), but the answer is pretty simple - "content providers". CDNs, cloud providers and gaming companies are growing rapidly and need to link their data centers to each other and to edge PoPs (i.e: ISP data centers) and are building their own networks rather than using the "public internet" for more quality control. Amazing how after all these years of the internet, we are still seeing exponential growth in data use. Just this week, work commenced on the "SMAP" cable that'll connect Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth via a 5,000km submarine cable capable of 300Tbps.