‘I love a cunning plan’: How crime boss cut CFMEU-endorsed and tax-dodging deals
Secret police recordings helped unravel George Alex’s sprawling and corrupt labour hire empire
Maria Baradell, known as @leafandloadco on Instagram, is an influencer who often shares baking tips with her followers. In her latest video, she took her culinary skills to the skies, making a loaf from scratch while heading to Spain, much to the scorn of her fellow travelers
Anyone who’s undertaken a deep dive into their local Colesworth’s international foods aisle might surface wondering at some of the options on offer. What would possess anyone to export grass tea herbal jelly in a can, for example? Is there a person in the world prepared to chance an arm on something that looks like milk, sounds like a Flower Power perennial and tastes like spleen and regret? No doubt it’s a delicacy somewhere, but without the requisite local knowledge, that bottle of fermented sludge-in-a-single-serve is destined to languish on the shelf, locked in a game of chicken with its own use-by date.
Hats off to Melbourne for flushing Kyle and Jackie O down the toilet
Hiker rescued after workmates left him on mountain, says search crew BBC. During an office retreat.
Antidepressants Are Seeping Into Fish Everywhere – And It’s Changing Them.
Net Negativity: Thinking About Online Brutality and Ways to Fix It Nippon.com
MIGRAINE NEWS: Migraine drug Ubrelvy may stop headaches at first sign.
Verge – No one’s ready for this -Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.”…Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place. Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed…But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule…
Google understands perfectly well what it is doing to the photograph as an institution — in an interview with Wired, the group product manager for the Pixel camera described the editing tool as “help[ing] you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.” A photo, in this world, stops being a supplement to fallible human recollection, but instead a mirror of it. And as photographs become little more than hallucinations made manifest, the dumbest shit will devolve into a courtroom battle over the reputation of the witnesses and the existence of corroborating evidence…”
See also The Byte: Google Uses Magic of AI to Let You Insert Yourself Into Other People’s Family Photos
Internet Archives Blog: “While MTV News took all its sites offline in June, its contents are now available in the Wayback Machine, with more than 470,000 pages dating back to 1977 (here’s a sample search for Peter Gabriel). Similarly, CMT News is also available—with 70,000 pages saved dating back to 2002 (sample search for Dolly Parton). These archives are valuable as they serve as living records of entertainment history and highlight the importance of web archiving in maintaining our digital culture.”
Reddit is back up after a 30-minute outage
A spirit so good people are smuggling it in suitcasesBBC
What Can We Learn from Menstrual Blood? New Yorker
