Nath

Anecdotal, I realise - but my niece and all her classmates were on Instagram last year. When that was cut off from them, it wasn't replaced (the cohort didn't move to some other social media). So in her case, the ban has been a success. She'll be 16 in Feb anyway.

My son on the other hand hasn't been affected. He is on YouTube and Discord and hasn't noticed the ban at all. He hasn't seen any age verification stuff. So in his case, the ban has been a total fizzle.

It was an example, but what you do in this situation is update the alert deployment process to cater to the failed devices (and it wouldn't likely be as simple as 'these iphones', rather a combination of factors). Focus testing on the specific scenarios/devices that were previously incompatible. There's a point where you're talking about 0.4% of devices, and you'd note that on some risk registry somewhere.

I don't know the acceptable thresholds, but I would expect that if 99% of the population receive the emergency alert, they can give the other 1% a heads-up. Then again, those acceptable thresholds might be 99.9% for all I know.

Either way, sample testing the assortment of phones you have in the lab will only take you so far. At some point you want to trial a full alert to find anything you may have missed.

I don't think "hectare" is the measure that people struggle with. It's how many hectares a given area takes up. For example, if you put 24,103 hectares into one big square, that square would be smaller than 16km x 16km. People would assume this should a much bigger square. 241 square km (24,103 hectares) is 241 km x 1 km.

These links are 1. The State government press release that the article is referencing and 2. Some more useful that should bloody well be interpreted, summarised, referenced and included in the damn article. The fact that this information is out there further highlights how lazy the article is.

As an infrastructure dude, I would definitely want to know about edge cases where what I think of as "TELL EVERYONE" does not in fact, tell everyone.

"There's a tsunami coming. Alert every phone tower within 2 km of shore!"
[Emergency alert sent]
"Hey, it turns out that iOS 18 and earlier and upwards isn't compatible with alerts in this format."

So, 12% of iPhone users in the critical zone miss out on the tsunami alert.

Everyone knows how far 100m is. It's an insult to your fellow Aussies to suggest they don't know that a hectare is 100m x 100m. We all learned about hectares in primary school.

I live on the other side of the country, so don't know the gravity of the topic as you put it, and after reading this article, I still have no idea of the gravity.

We aren't told how much woody land NSW has. We aren't told whether this reducing figure is even a problem. All we are given is a number and that the chief executive of Nature Conservation Council of NSW finds that number disappointing. That's the whole core of the article.

No suggestion of what that number should be. No proposed policy that would be preferred. They don't even tell us whether that land is being cleared for construction and development or for pulping woodchips to make toilet paper.

It's a lazy article that is lacking in all the relevant info and hangs everything off 'clearing land bad. Rage bait engagement good'. And look, here we are discussing it. So, from their perspective, it's a great article.

I'm not hostile to land conservation by any means. And if the land is being cleared in an unsustainable way, I will be critical of that. But that's the issue as well - this article doesn't actually address that topic. For all I know, 0.03% of NSW per year in cleared land is perfectly sustainable.

Why not say "66 hectares"? What is this nonsense of measuring things in "football fields"? Particularly in the same week as the World Cup final? Football has so many meanings especially in NSW. Football as in soccer? NRL? AFL? The article provides the actual amount of woody land cleared:

In 2024, 24,103 hectares of woody vegetation was cleared, a decline on the previous year – when clearing skyrocketed to 32,837 hectares – and 19% below the 2018-2024 average of 29,800 hectares.

But even that was eight paragraphs into the article after initially giving the fact "Clearing of vegetation across the state increased by 16% in 2024, reaching 81,293 hectares". Is that bigger number actually relevant? Are we talking about clearing bushland? Or suburban areas for housing? They don't say. They also skimmed over the fact that land clearing was below the average annual amount. So is land clearing declining after all? Or were there other reasons in play for the lower number?

The article also doesn't say how many trees were re-planted - that'd be a super relevant statistic to provide in context.

I'm upset by this article for all the wrong reasons. They're trying to rustle my jimmies about land clearing, but they're rustling them for cherry-picking some facts to highlight while skimming over relevant information to provide a full picture of the issue. I think it's important to call out shitty journalism like this, because of we don't, we'll end up with 'Fox News for the left' side of politics. I don't want that.

Mum smoked a pack (of 25s) per day in the 80's. That habit would cost over $100/wk these days. I presume some of the drop is simply that smoking is too expensive these days.

The West Australian font page article today was all "they had a strike but it was a complete failure, BHP claims victory". They claimed that fewer than 50 staff walked off the site. I don't know how true that is, though.

Funny world we live in where we can't trust a supposedly prestigious newspaper to be 100% truthful.

There are good reasons to opt out of MyHealthRecord, but this case isn't proving your point. What we have here is a private health provider having their database compromised. A private database that will have a percentage of patients opting out of MyHealthRecord. Their data was still breached.

What are the odds of MyHealthRecord itself being breached? That's super difficult to say as someone totally unconnected with that database. I will say though that health providers are notorious for being bad at IT; because their first focus is health stuff and IT has been a bolted-on afterthought. IT systems and database(s) tending to get added to ad-hoc as a needed administration requirement and not designed upfront with potential hacking in mind. It's practically a meme in IT professional circles - look up what "WannaCry" did to British hospitals. They're also getting a lot better on this front.

A centralised government database would (should) have been built from the ground up with data security and integrity as it's primary and singular objective. With no first-hand knowledge on the specific health database, but plenty of experience working with other government IT agencies, I believe they'll have approached this content with decent protections. The bigger fear with the centralised database is that clinics and hospitals around the country can access that data. So instead of someone hacking the central database, they compromise South Cairns medical centre (example) and use their permissions to access your data. While I'm sure any single set of credentials would get locked out of the API if it were to try to slurp everything up, the risk remains that your records could be sniffed out from that vector before that cut-off.

There was also an independent audit of the MyHealthRecord implementation that was pretty good - sadly it pre-dates the Essential Eight maturity levels, which is a shame because I'd love to know how compliant they are, and the fact that they haven't published their Maturity Level is actually a bit of a yellow flag (if not red). Not that I am aware of any government agency anywhere attaining Maturity Level 3, but I'd love to hear that MyHealthRecord was at least Maturity Level 2.

So, leaving your health record on a private database can be dangerous, and leaving it on MyHealthRecord can be dangerous. What's the solution, then? Something the architects of MyHealthRecord did that is a good idea is giving patients the ability to set a Record Access Code. Basically, your health records are encrypted without you providing a PIN. Hop onto the MyGov app and set a RAC. Then if your record is downloaded, the data is encrypted/useless to whoever has it without you giving them your RAC.

So, what are good reasons for/against having your data in MHR?
For opting in: You actually have a significant medical history. You want the myriad of health data in your history to all be available to the doctors in Emergency in the event that you are hospitalised.
Against opting in: You haven't got much of a health history. There's no advantage to you in having your (lack of) health data being simple to access for a doctor. You can just tell them that you don't have a significant medical history.

I agree that is the best approach. And so did Kevin Rudd. You're describing NBNCo, and I think that's been a success - despite a decade of lies and resistance from the coalition about its successes. The two big issues with this approach are:

1. What we saw with the NBN: The political party who doesn't build it will smear it and taint it with the populace.
2. Eventually, the government could look at this lovely piece of infrastructure as a huge asset that it can sell for a quick buck to fund some shiny thing.

This one's a little more nuanced. The government owned (and sold off) the old copper phone lines. And yes, that sale hurt the people for two decades.
The government did not have 5G data towers. Hell, they didn't have 3G data towers. There were some 2G towers, but most of the mobile network at the time of the Telecom sale was analogue.

They have had government assistance/incentives while deploying mobile towers in rural areas, but they have pretty-much always privately owned their mobile telephony infrastructure.

I understand what's in this for us, for Optus and Vodafone.

But what's in this for Telstra?
"Great job deploying all those towers in places where the other carriers don't cover. Now give access to those towers to your competitors' customers"

I mean, I want this - I'm on the Telstra network explicitly for the better coverage. If I could get that same coverage on any carrier, I would no longer feel the need to be on the Telstra network. But at the same time, the very fact that this change could lead to Telstra losing thousands of customers makes me understand why they'd fight this kicking and screaming for all they are worth.