Good morning. It’s the morning of Australian Budget Day, and it’s Google I/O Eve. Let’s get into the tech news.
1. X beats eSafety in court
Twitter (now X) has scored a win against the Australian eSafety Commissioner, with a temporary order of the social media platform to block footage of the Sydney stabbing lifted by a Judge in court, per The Australian. eSafety argued that, while X geo-blocked videos of the terrorist attack on social media, they were still visible to Australians with a VPN, and as such, the Commission handed X stronger, international takedown notices for the content. Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett’s reasons for the decision will be said at a later date. “In this matter which I heard on Friday, the orders of the court will be that the application to extend the interlocutory injunction granted on the 22nd of April 2024, as extended on the 24th of April, is refused, and that the cost of the application are reserved,” Justice Kennett said.
2. Digital driver’s licences are in
Digital driver’s licences are finally available in Victoria through the myVicRoads and Service Victoria apps, more than four years after going live in NSW and South Australia. Per 9news, 4.5 million Victorians can now access a digital driver’s licence, with learners and probationary licence holders needing to wait until 2025. Similarly, per InnovationAus, the Northern Territory is also set to trial digital driver’s licences before the end of 2025.
3. ChatGPT gets smarter
Bit of a day for OpenAI. OpenAI has released a new AI model, Chat GPT-4o, a free model that all users can access. The new model has improvements across video, audio, and text generation, with response times compared to human responses in a natural conversation. It’s improvements to voice mode are also quite impressive, able to keep up in a natural conversation (that is, at least, according to videos shared by OpenAI), and there’s no doubt that this was at least somewhat inspired by an AI-focused movie that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman namedropped on Twitter (X).
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— Sam Altman (@sama) May 13, 2024
4. Internet use is good, actually?
Per The Guardian, new research published in the Technology, Mind and Behaviour journal indicates that internet use can be associated with greater well-being.Though researchers are cautioning against a ‘one size fits all’ solution in internet use debates, 84.9 per cent of responses to the research indicated a positive impact on well-being from the internet, while 0.4 per cent were negative. “Our analysis is the first to test whether or not internet access, mobile internet access and regular use of the internet relates to wellbeing on a global level,” University of Oxford Professor Andrew Przybylski said.
5. Vision Pro to go global
Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset, which has been only available officially in the U.S. since it launched last year, may be about to go global. Per Bloomberg, the first non-U.S. markets that are likely to get the Vision Pro are Germany, France, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and China, with the tech giant training workers on the headset. Sources told Bloomberg that an international release could be marked at WWDC 2024 next month.
BONUS ITEM: I see things are going well for the ugliest car ever made.
Tesla’s head of Cybertruck manufacturing is out https://t.co/YMSQY4IlhB by @fredericlambert
— Electrek.co (@ElectrekCo) May 13, 2024
Have a lovely day.