Thursday, February 18
Daily News Stuff 18 February 2021
Arrivederci Edition
Arrivederci Edition
Tech News
- Facebook has blocked all news into, out of, from, for, by, or about Australia. (ABC)
Including articles posted by the news organisations themselves, government weather reports, and emergency services.
I'm not exaggerating. Here's their own blog post.
If you're pretending to take a principled stand, try not to cut off emergency services during an emergency.
- Google meanwhile has struck a deal with News Corp. (Protocol)
That's only one of the big Australian news organisations, and though it has global reach its market share within Australia is not particularly large.
- The HP Spectre x360 14 is a flippy convertible laptop with a 3:2 touchscreen. (Tom's Hardware)
You can choose between a 1920x1280 LCD or 3000x2000 OLED display, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and either a quad-core 11th generation Intel CPU or... No, that's the only choice.
It does have the Four Essential Keys though.
- Citibank just blew half a billion dollars due to a bad UI. (Ars Technica)
In fairness, it's a really bad UI.
In further fairness, the judge is an idiot, arguing in his decision that major banks wouldn't make huge and obvious blunders.
- This interview with Bill Ottman, CEO of Minds, is worth a listen. (Quillette)
He seems to have his head on straight. While I don't agree with everything they do, they are neither incompetent, nor crazy, nor openly antagonistic towards freedom of thought, where most of their competitors fall into at least two of those categories.
Also, Quillette being an Australian commentary magazine, they got shut down by Facebook. Not being incompetent or crazy themselves they have their own site, their own forums, their own podcast, but one third of their traffic was coming from Facebook.
- As Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter have shown very clearly, if you deal with American Big Tech you have to have a backup plan that doesn't involve American Big Tech, because they not only cannot be trusted to do the right thing, or to abide by their own contracts, they can't even be relied upon to obey the law.
Disclaimer: Facebook who?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:14 PM
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1
Facebook is a dumpster fire, no doubt. But if you're relying on that dumpster fire to get your message out, maybe you shouldn't be trying to get them to pay you for the privilege.
Posted by: Dreamlord at Thursday, February 18 2021 11:53 PM (Knf75)
2
Facebook is a dumpster fire, the legislation is a dumpster fire - it has popular bipartisan support, which is always a bad sign - and most of the Australian news media is a dumpster fire.
I'm just hoping they can all lose.
I'm just hoping they can all lose.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 12:34 AM (PiXy!)
3
Citibunk or corp or whatever, was servicing the intrest and paid a bit too much towards the principle on some loans. I don't think the judges ruling was terrible, since the money was in fact owed, they just didn't intend to pay it quite so quickly.
Posted by: normal at Friday, February 19 2021 01:52 AM (LADmw)
4
But the ruling was based on the expectation that banks wouldn't make major mistakes when the past couple of decades is nothing but banks making major mistakes and the case in question was itself a bank making a major mistake. We'll see what happens on appeal.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 02:38 AM (PiXy!)
5
I don't have the time to look at the ruling, but I suspect that this is bad reporting. It sounds like the issue is the duty of the recipient of an erroneous wire. If I get an unexpected wire out of the blue from a party I'm not expecting money from, I can reasonably conclude that it is a mistake and should not do anything with the funds. On the other hand, if I'm a creditor, and I get a wire from a borrower that precisely pays off the loan instead of just the interest that is due, do I need to set aside the funds because this might be an error, or can I just retire the debt? It sounds like the ruling is saying that Revlon's creditors had no particular reason to believe that the wire was a major mistake, not that the judge thinks that the bank wouldn't make a major mistake.
Posted by: benzeen at Friday, February 19 2021 06:14 AM (sA62t)
6
Yes, I understand it's correct as a matter of law, but the judge put forth a really bad argument in support of his decision. Just say "this is the law", don't say "nobody would expect banks to make classic blunders".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 11:13 AM (PiXy!)
7
Well, to be fair, nobody ever expects a bank error in their favour.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2021 11:14 AM (PiXy!)
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