Slack As A Service

ABC and SBS added to Mandatory News Code

The ABC and SBS have been added to the draft code of the federal government’s bill, that seeks to force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for their content
Labor, the Greens and several crossbenchers suggested the ABC and SBS should be added to the ranks of Australian news publishers to benefit from the code
If passed, the legislation would force Google and Facebook to share revenue from news links with news publishers or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
Google was quick to create a new video of that woman on the bus explaining why the code was a bad idea…

YouTube has suspended the conservative news outlet One America News Network from posting new videos for a week and from making money off of its existing videos after it promoted a sham cure for Covid-19.
The video was removed under YouTube’s policies to prevent the spread of Covid-19 misinformation, which prohibit saying there is a guaranteed cure to the virus.
OANN has been suspended for “repeated violations” of this policy, said a YouTube spokeswoman, Ivy Choi.
OANN has had remarkable growth following the US election, as many Trump voters and Trump himself accused Fox of costing him the election
In the Trump orbit, Fox News has become too left leaning…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Salesforce is in “advanced stages” of purchasing Slack, the wildly popular workplace collaboration tool
The companies could reach a deal within days—in time for Salesforce to report its third-quarter financial results on Tuesday
Slack is currently valued at 17b, and resisted selling to Microsoft four years ago. Microsoft went on to make Teams, a Slack-like competitor.
With Microsoft out of the bidding, and Apple not interested, Salesforce could be the only company with both the cash on hand and the reason to purchase Slack
While Slack has the name recognition of Zoom during lockdown, its stock has only modestly improved, while other remote work tools around it have skyrocketed
This might suggest that Slack has exhausted its pool of paying customers

Microsoft’s Phil Spencer has been doing the media rounds hinting at upcoming features of the Xbox X.
Specter hinted at new Smart Tv apps, that would allow users to play Xbox games over the company’s Xcloud service, with just a controller
It cements Xbox’s current strategy of “play anywhere”, that see’s its games library and the library of EA titles, available on Xbox, PC and Smartphones.
And while Phil said the Xbox is the most powerful console on the market, a story from The Verge says PS5 games are noticeably better than their Xbox counterparts
While the Xbox 4k and ray tracing is generally superior, it seems to come at the cost of frame rates.
Using games like Assassin’s Creed, Dirt and Call of Duty, the Xbox consistently slowed down the frame rate, with some screen tearing visible.
But if you want a PS5, you’re out of luck, with Sony confirming the console is sold out worldwide. PlayStation’s Jim Ryan has a fascinating interview on developing the console during covid lockdown, which involved engineers hooking up microscopes to zoom calls…