Melbourne based Australian artist Jarrod Grech, has painted a mural (Instagram link) of Ahmed Al Ahmed, who heroically wrenched a rifle out of the hands of one of the shooters during the terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community, at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, on Sunday 14 December 2025. Ahmed was one of several...

From a post on the Firefox for Web Developers Mastodon account: Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’s how seriously and absolutely we’re...

Ivan Mehta, writing for TechCrunch: Over the last week, several users have spotted Meta’s test, which impacts link posting. Social media strategist Matt Navarra noted that users part of the test can only post two links unless they pay for a Meta Verified subscription, which starts from $14.99 per month. The proposed...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Elon Musk’s X is updating its Terms of Service to indicate it still lays claim to the “Twitter” trademark. The move to add this detail to the company’s terms follows an announcement from a Virginia-based startup, which recently filed an application to trademark the term...

Steve Buttel, a former NSW police officer, speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporters Lia Harris and Pablo Vinales: A former NSW Police sergeant claims he repeatedly warned his superiors years ago that local officers would not be equipped to respond to an active-shooter attack in Bondi. Between...

The poll will probably be closed by now, but New York City based software developer Rafael Pérez was asking other Mastodon users what their preferred non-work operating system (OS) was. Perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that GNU Linux or UNIX OS’s, were, as of the time I type, favoured by sixty-two...

Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from copywriters who have lost their jobs to AI powered technologies, as part of a series, AI Killed My Job, that he has been compiling this year. I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer when it comes to my off-hours creative pursuits, and I hope to eventually write what I’d...

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has flagged more restrictions on gun ownership. At present, to legally possess a gun, a person must, among other things, be “fit and proper”, have a genuine reason for ownership, belong to a gun club, and undertake to store the weapons securely. Chris Minns, the Premier of...

Social news aggregator Reddit has filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Australia, claiming the ban preventing Australians aged under sixteen using social media intrudes on free political discourse. The Australian Constitution does not protect free speech as such. In fact, the document seems more concerned with...

While making the Elvis biopic, which was released in 2022, Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann succeeded in finding unseen, but rumoured to exist, footage of American singer Elvis Presley. The reels, located in a Warner Bros. archive in the US state of Kansas, featured much unused footage of Presley, originally...

Terrible news from Bondi Beach, this evening. As of the time I type, twelve people, including one of two perpetrators, are dead. Some sixteen people, including two police officers, have been injured. Here’s hoping there are no further causalities.

An American startup called Operation Bluebird is hoping to take ownership of the defunct Twitter name, the term “tweet”, and famous blue bird logo, and relaunch Twitter anew. Operation Bluebird’s backers believe the old micro-blogging service can be restored to its former glory, and revive the “town square” the old...