Quick Links - James Robinson

Quick Links are an assortment of links to code snippets, development tools and articles about web culture, the role of technology, and the impact of technology companies on society…

Wed 22 Mar 2023

Ezra Klein on why advances in ML and AI change everything. www.nytimes.com

Mon 20 Mar 2023

Hacked servers owned and operated by Datatime, a technology company hired by QIMR Berghofer to scan and process surveys for its skin cancer study, have been hit by an unpublicised data breach. Data belonging to 1,128 people has been compromised, including names, addresses and Medicare numbers. www.abc.net.au

Sun 19 Mar 2023

Australian lender, Latitude Financial, has been hacked, leading to the loss of personal information for more than 300,000 customers. In an email to customers, they revealed that “103,000 identification documents, more than 97% of which are copies of drivers’ licenses, were stolen from one service provider. Approximately 225,000 customer records were stolen from a second service provider.” www.abc.net.au

Sat 18 Mar 2023

A system font stack CSS generator, organised by typeface classification for every modern operating system. modernfontstacks.com

Midjourney has released version 5 of their AI image generator, and leapt ahead of competing products. twitter.com

Fri 17 Mar 2023

On the current trend of websites requiring an email address to access and read content: “This is some real tragedy of the commons shit. The web is becoming a miserable experience because some salesbro who is trying to meet his KPIs is doing stuff to marginally increase the number of paying customers.” www.theverge.com

Thu 16 Mar 2023

OpenAI launched GPT-4, the latest version of its large language model. The blog post about the release claims that GPT-4 is “more reliable, creative, and able to handle much more nuanced instructions” than its predecessor. openai.com

Tue 14 Mar 2023

A Gippsland police officer, accused of threatening, stalking and intimidating his ex-wife, has also been accused of accessing a police database, known as Law Enforcement Assistance Program, to stalk his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend over a six-year period. www.theage.com.au

Fri 10 Mar 2023

Associate Professor, Ethan Zuckerman, outlines the compelling case for Elon Musk being the “Worst Human of 2023” after he fired designer, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Haraldur Thorleifsson. ethanzuckerman.com

Tue 07 Mar 2023

Australian tech company Atlassian has announced “around 500” employees would be made redundant worldwide — equivalent to 5 per cent of its workforce. The company is not facing financial difficulty, but needs to “reduce our investment in specific areas, in order to reinvest in others”. www.abc.net.au

Thu 02 Mar 2023

Unreported large-scale data breaches impacted millions of Australians’ personal information in the second half of 2022, according to the national information watchdog. There has been a 67% increase overall, with 497 data breaches, mostly in the health and finance sectors, which represented a 26% increase. www.abc.net.au

Mon 27 Feb 2023

Google Chrome changed the access available to browser extensions with the release of Manifest v3. This article shows just how much data can be scraped by a malicious browser extension. mattfrisbie.substack.com