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@ squigum @aussie.zone

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3 yr. ago

  • Mozilla partner Perplexity advertised in search engine dropdown

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  • Not sure if there's such a thing as a "good" AI company but I gather this is one that achieved its position via shady practices and is privately funded to serve ultra-wealthy interests.

    Perplexity AI has attracted legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times. According to separate analyses by Wired and later Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of news websites who disallow or explicitly block web scraping.

    Promoting companies like this is part of the more fundamental issue with Firefox's funding model. The Mozilla Foundation uses Firefox as a cash cow by doing deals with devils (chiefly Google), putting some of the money back into Firefox while the rest goes toward activities the foundation sees as forces for good. You might call that irony or ingenuity, or both, but we're stuck with it absent roughly five million users pitching in 50 bucks every year, at least based on current development costs.

  • Firefox 144.0 Release Notes

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  • Bravo to whoever's responsible for screenshots being added to the release notes. So much quicker to understand what the descriptions are referring to.

  • Firefox 144.0 Release Notes

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  • The avatars aka "profile-specific badge" is an important new aspect because, at least in Windows, there was previously no way to tell which taskbar icon correlated to which profile. The only way to address that annoyance was via a somewhat obscure feature to change the Firefox program icon (changing the taskbar icon alone doesn't work as it doesn't persist on opening the program), and that only worked by having a separate Firefox install for each profile.

    Looks like the old Profile Manager might still be the go for advanced users (e.g. new UI appears to lack ability to set the folder).

  • What game is he playing? The PM and AUKUS

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  • Well, he doesn't provide much insight into what Albo's game is, but goes on to make the slightly absurd argument that subs are "surplus to requirements" because our electronic warfare aircraft are such a potent capability on their own.

    Interesting morsel here though:

    According to references in a book by former foreign minister Bob Carr, I was told, the departments of PM&C, Treasury, Finance and Defence all opposed the purchase of the Growlers.

    Wonder what the current view is on whether it'd have been a better to have more F-35s but no Growlers.

  • Why Keating’s greatest speeches still matter after the Voice failed

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  • Was a little too young to have paid much attention at the time but I remember the cultural vibe thanks to Yothu Yindi etc. Lesson in politics came with the way his call for recognition was framed as a call for "white guilt", which Keating explicitly rejected, but is still used today in order to polarise and poison the debate.

  • Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites

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  • Yep, I'm not against proper age checking as long as it's developed carefully with a secure/private by design mentality, but this government's self-imposed deadline and focus on ticking political boxes will effectively put consumer choice and privacy far below the interests of tech companies and age assurance industry investors. It's looking like a familiar story - outsourcing responsibility for the practical implementation to questionable interests and promising "industry standards" and "safeguards" to protect consumers which are then poorly enforced or not practical to enforce. That'll replicate the fundamental shortcomings of our privacy regulation more broadly which have made poor policies/practices and data breaches so routine.

  • ANZ, NAB and ‘Bigger for You’ Bendigo’s ever bigger greed

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  • Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites

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  • Just watched it and yeah, that's an even more depressing picture of how it was covered. The headlines I'd seen were:

    "Social media age verification possible but laden with risks, landmark study warns" (ABC)

    "Trial of tech that could be used to keep Australian under-16s off social media finds some errors ‘inevitable’" (Guardian)

    Those stories at least didn't just parrot the government's spin - trouble is they made the study sound more sceptical/balanced than it is and didn't question its credibility.

  • Australians soon facing age checks when viewing adult websites

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  • Haven't seen much scrutiny over the "landmark" report released by the government a couple of weeks ago which forms the basis for the practical implementation of this system.

    https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/age-assurance-technology-trial-final-report

    It's not an academic study from a trusted institution or even just an established think tank, but from an organisation that sort of popped up out of nowhere some years ago which appears to provide paid certification services for age assurance companies, while also evidently offering "research" for governments on the viability of implementing these schemes. They'd previously done a similar report for the UK government, which makes me rather cynical about our government's motivations in choosing them. The news reporting on its release was a bit strange as it made it sound like the report was quite sceptical, but you don't need to spend much time looking at it to see it's very much telling the government what it wanted to hear (given they'd already committed to implementing such a scheme).

    The companies people will be required to provide their documents/biometrics to also kind of popped up out of nowhere, and these are the sorts of folks behind them: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/07/31/the-online-safety-act-is-forcing-brits-to-hand-over-personal-data-to-unregulated-overseas-corporations-with-questionable-privacy-records/