My week of Monday 7 to Sunday 13 August 2023 was dominated by laryngitis. So that’s that. But do read on, because there’s some interesting things that don’t involve me.
If you want to know how the laryngitis went, listen to me sounding like a contra-bass duck on Thursday. On Friday I sounded like a pubescent boy with a cracking voice. And by Sunday night I was almost sounding normal.
Articles
- Digital developments from Canberra 48. So many topics this week. Shoddy work from Home Affairs. Shoddy IT procurement. Surveillance. Digital identity. Data breaches. And pigs. Feral pigs. FERAL PIGS!
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning.
Podcasts, Videos, Photos, Media Appearances, Corporate Largesse
None of these again this week. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear.
Recommendations
Sometimes I wonder why I’m bothering with tracking Elon Musk news. But then he’s one of the richest people on the planet, so what he says and does can change things.
- Events in Australia showed once again how Elon Musk is just such a sook. He accuses Australia’s ABC of embracing censorship after it shut down Twitter/X accounts, as if Twitter is the only way that Australians can access what the ABC produces.
- Elon Musk to auction off Twitter memorabilia from San Francisco HQ, because of course it’s now called X.
- By Seizing @Music, Elon Musk Shows He Doesn’t Know What Made Twitter Good.
- Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg look to Italy to host their planned cage fight.
- What the madcap cage fight between Musk and Zuckerberg tells us about how to make Brexit Britain richer, say, um, Boris Johnson.
- And finally, Casey Newton says It’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk. “After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach,” he writes, but frankly that’s the role of journalism in any field.
In other news:
- New evidence suggests the world’s largest known asteroid impact structure is buried deep in southeast Australia.
- Bloomberg’s CityLab gets All Aboard the ‘Crime Train’ Narrative, exploring the long-running trope that providing more trains will cause urban (!) crime to reach out into the nice safe suburbs. You’ll be shocked to hear that part of it is racism.
- After Backlash, Zoom Now Says It Won’t Use Any Customer Content to Train AI Systems.
- From the lovely Alex Kidman, What Japan’s military museums say about war – and why it changes Japanese video game production.
- This week was the seventh anniversary of the 2016 Census #censusfail. A year later I wrote Lessons from the Censusfail omnishambles. isn’t it brilliant that the Australian government now knows how to do IT procurement! Lol.
- And finally, The Toilet Snorkel Could Save Your Life.
The Week Ahead
Assuming for the moment that I really have dealt the laryngitis a solid blow, this will be a solid week for client work, at least for Monday to Thursday. Obviously I’ll pace it out a bit.
On Friday I’m heading to Sydney for a medical appointment and then Aaron Chen’s Chen + Friends at the Enmore Theatre. I’m looking forward to catching Mr Chen before he heads off to live in New York. I’ll be staying down in Sydney for the weekend, which will include a session of geekery on Saturday for a friend. I’ll return to the Mountains on Sunday night.
Further Ahead
- TechLeaders 2023, Pokolbon NSW, 26–28 August 2023.
- APNIC 56, Kyoto and online, 12–14 September 2023. I very much doubt that I’ll be going to Japan, but this is always such a good conference (TBC).
[Photo: A red and black spider (Nicodamus peregrinus) photgraphed at Bunjaree Cottages on 12 August 2023.]