Notices by Glen Turner (glent@aus.social)

@davidaugust here's a packing list Australian kids in primary school (US: elementary school) use when learning about fire evacuation. It's prepared by a state fire agency:

https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/449/Emergency_Kit.pdf

Best of luck to you all!

@mattblaze @SteveBellovin There are some tiny "continue application online" links at the bottom of the page text, which finally lead to this page

https://apply-for-an-eta.homeoffice.gov.uk/apply/electronic-travel-authorisation/how-to-apply

(Edit: it's clear what is going on here technically. They want the applicant to use the app so they can check that the applicant's issued passport is an ePassport. That lowers the risk of the applicant arriving at Heathrow and then being detained and returned to the originating airport. So the escape route to the web application is very poorly marked.)

@sindarina Similarly there is a test/documentation range for USB IDs:

0x1d50:0x5200 through to 0x1d50:0x52ff

https://vk5tu.livejournal.com/53240.html

That John Howard lied about going to war is as much a surprise as it will be when we learnt that Donald Trump letches on the junior women White House staff.

#auspol

Arrrgh. Wikipedia is not short of money. It is short of supporters, mostly because kindness and listening are not its organisational virtues, and so it tends to hack off the people who would otherwise support it the most effectively.

Eg: You are a world expert. You clarify some text in the entry of your expertise. I'd say it takes less than ten times of doing this before you swear off helping Wikipedia forever.

American tourist stopped at Australian Customs

Customs: are you carrying any prohibited items?

Tourist: no

Customs: "What about the gun in your bag?"

Tourist in deep shit: "Oh yeah, I forgot about that."

Then our US tourist digs the hole deeper:

- claimed she brought the gun for protection [and the license for that use is where? Gun licenses for the reason of protection are rarely granted to individuals]

- asked where she planned to store the gun while she was in Australia, she indicated under a vehicle’s passenger seat [Australia has strict specifications for gun storage]

- claims she would not shoot anyone but "I would probably just pistol whip" [carrying an blunt force instrument for use as a weapon is also illegal]

In the ultimate irony, she came to Australia to go to clown school.

12 months jail, the first 4 months of that to be full time. Then she'll be deported never to return. She'll now need a visa to travel most places, and many countries will deny a visa for a person with a firearms smuggling offence.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/09/us-woman-caught-with-golden-gun-in-luggage-at-sydney-airport-jailed-for-a-year-ntwnfb

@swacknificent @inthehands @scott @blogdiva There are over a million e-bikes sold in the USA each year. This program will fund 1,500 e-bikes. So yeah, if you want one then be quick with the mouse on launch day.

@dangillmor US tech firms have been very flippant about the social harm they do. So naturally governments are going to intervene. Typically, the Australian government has chosen the worst possible option.

That's partly because the Australian Public Service is too deskilled to understand the problem, partly because Murdoch wants to use the Australian Government as a club to beat Facebook (Facebook have stopped paying Murdoch for use of news content).

But the era of tech firms hiding behind a peculiar US definition of "free speech", and behind "Section 230" is over. Social networks are a curated platform, its publishers are responsible for the content they republish, and governments are on a search to find ways to make that responsibility stick even when the tech firms try to escape that responsibility by playing jurisdictional games.

@floatybirb @thomasfuchs Having travelled a bit, maybe it's more important for public transport to be free if the society has no culture of public transport.

Japan's trains and buses can be private because people will catch them anyways. It's more convenient than owning a car most of the time. For a start, you've got to prove you have off-road parking for the car.

But in the US public transport has to compete with cars -- who don't pay for their externalities from parking to CO2 emissions. Reducing those externalities alone covers the provision of public transport from an economic point of view, the question is one of finance.

An.illustratiom of why all these data leaks matter.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1796640601431027979.html

Basically, when an organisation collects too much data about you, it's enabling criminals to steal your money and wreck the lives of people.

@mattblaze @SteveBellovin @karlauerbach Even though the departure could not be secret, there was could be tight security.

Napoleon famously kept the destination of his Mediterranean invasion fleet secret, to inhibit pursuit by the Royal Navy, with its faster warship-only fleet. Nelson sailed back and forth across the Med, catching news of where Bonaparte had been, only catching up with the French fleet after they had already disembarked Napoleon and his army in Alexandria, from where they rapidly conquered Egypt (a complex power play to separate India from Britian, the plunder of India paying for the British forces in the Napoleonic Wars).

Then, being Nelson, he wiped out the warships of the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile despite the French pre-prepared and advantageous position. (The streets of my Port Adelaide -- an Empire maritime town -- are named after this battle, it was widely admired as his technically best victory.)

Anyways, it's clear what a difference even one telegram could have made, and why the British Empire paid such large sums for undersea cables, initially of short life.

*Natural* pine nuts, so happy I didn't buy the non-natural ones.

@danirabbit UBI doesn't allow people to sit at home and smoke weed all day, at least for very long. Weed costs money, and the word 'basic' in UBI carries some meaning.

What UBI does do is to provide a safety net. Including to entrepreneurs who never meet the criteria for social welfare. UBI means that you don't risk your family starving if your new venture has a cashflow crisis. You don't need to justify to some social welfare agency why you need cash for your family when a month ago a bank just gave your firm millions of dollars for capital purchases. The UBI just appears in your bank account, like it has every week when you didn't need it.

That UBI will be the best thing to happen to new small business often escapes both the left-wing promoters and right-wing detractors of UBI.

UBI will allow a new wave of entrepreneurship and new businesses. That in turn makes the entire economy richer.

@danirabbit I'd also add that UBI is a huge benefit for the unmeasured economy. A huge amount of economic activity goes unmeasured by the System of National Accounts. Particularly caring, such as childcare and care of the sick and disabled.

As a concrete example, if a grandmother wants to help their daughter care for a new baby for its first year, UBI makes that affordable for the grandmother.

UBI also allows a better end-of-career. People can wind down their hours without affecting their 'pension'. This is a great help to business, which would far prefer a phase out of an experienced staff member, rather than their sudden disappearance on a magic birthday.

@tylermorganwall I do love this. Australia has a tiny 'state' fully enclosed in another (ACT in NSW). Making that visible is a major pain for map visualisations. This looks like a nice possible approach.

@thomasfuchs Philips have been good. It's a soft recommend as the US models can differ from the models in Aus.

I often program and write for pleasure. Both are skills I like to exercise. Often, but not always, I'll give the results of that hobby away for free.

But here comes Google, saying "We want a presumption that we can use all of your works -- whatever copyright license you choose -- to train our AI systems."

Just fuck off. You already use some of my software for free. Why when I say that this particular item of prose is for me, do you presume to want that too.

It's some sort of tech-bro colonialism.

(Don't give me any "But you can opt out" b.s. "Just like robots.txt" isn't a viable opt-out mechanism. The people who do metadata and rights professionally -- libraries and rights collection agencies -- don't use that mechanism, but link the metadata to the work via ISBNs and the like, or embed the metadata as seen by the copyright notice on every movie or the Dublin Core markup. How about we use a opt-in mechanism, a set of rights to make a copy, we could call it "copy right".)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/google-says-ai-systems-should-be-able-to-mine-publishers-work-unless-companies-opt-out

Australia doesn't have fair use in its copyright law. It has fair dealing -- a list of allowed exceptions to copyright, narrowly drawn. There is no way that list includes "training AI".

I am so looking forward to this...

A note to US speakers. The rest of the English speaking world has no idea what a 'sophomore' is (and no interest in having it explained).

Related: the relationship between 'college' and 'university' in the US is similarly unique, and incomprehensible in the Bologna Process world.

Excellent interview with Meredith Whittaker

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/11/signals-meredith-whittaker-these-are-the-people-who-could-actually-pause-ai-if-they-wanted-to

Highlights:

Q: Is it interesting to you how their [Gebru and Mitchell's] warnings were received compared with the fears of existential risk expressed by ex-Google “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton recently?

A: If you were to heed Timnit [Gebru]’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies [such as Google]. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared.

Geoff’s warnings are much more convenient, because they project everything into the far future so they leave the status quo untouched. And if the status quo is untouched you’re going to see these companies and their systems further entrench their dominance such that it becomes impossible to regulate. This is not an inconvenient narrative at all.

Q: Unlike many other tech entrepreneurs and academics you didn’t sign either of the two recent petitions, the Future of Life institute “pause AI” letter or last month’s Center for AI Safety “existential threat” letter.

A: No. I don’t think they’re good faith. These are the people who could actually pause it if they wanted to. They could unplug the data centres. ...