Daily Tech News 1 July 2023

• A new Canadian law requires Google and Facebook - and apparently no-one else - to pay news organisations - almost all of which receive government funds - for the right to link to news articles without which the news organisations would have even fewer readers than they already do.
  
  Google and Facebook responded - and I quote - Canada who? (Ars Technica)
  
  And have pulled all their links to Canadian news, which is almost all crap anyway because of the whole government funds issue.
  
  
  

• Seagate's 8TB Barracuda sells for $100. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Compared to a Team MP34 or a Crucial P3, that's half the price, twice the capacity, and at best twenty times slower.
  
  It's getting to the point that hard drives are just backup devices, what tape drives used to be. Not quite, but if SSD prices keep going down at this rate it won't be long.
  
  
  
• The LILYGO T-Deck is a sort-of Blackberry for $50. (Liliputing)
  
  Except that it's about as fast as the original Blackberry from 1999, has neither a case nor a battery, and can't make phone calls (though neither could the original Blackberry models).
  
  It's an interesting little device for hobbyists though.
  
  
  
• Urtopia has announced a smart e-bike with ChatGPT integration. (Notebook Check)
  
  Now even your bike can accuse you of racism.
  
  
  
• You now need a Twitter account to read Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Once upon a time the entire Twitter feed was public for everyone.
  
  What I think this is about is API access. Twitter has locked down the API behind insane fees, but you could get around that by just reading the website.
  
  And the reason for locking down the API is probably AI training data. Same deal with Reddit.
  
  The fundamental problem with this is that it's not Twitter's data - or Reddit's - and never was. They understood this once, but have long since forgotten.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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