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Facial recognition retail ban appealed, feds can't crack iPhone and an uncomfortable Bill Gates interview

Plus: What the pdfs tell us about the Epstein Files

Author

Cam Wilson
February 05, 2026

Edition 2495

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Good morning! An early Sizzle from me today because I am busy filming [redacted] today. Will let you know more on that when I can.

Mentioned in today’s edition: The FBI, Lockdown Mode, Signal, Bill Gates, Intel, Nvidia, Roblox, Ron DeSantis and facial recognition technology. Plus, deals on Bose headphones, Philips monitors and AMD CPUs.

The News

Facial recognition tech for retail doesn't breach privacy, a tribunal finds

Using facial recognition technology (FRT) on customers in stores to combat the "real and serious problem of violence and theft" is OK under Australian privacy law, a tribunal has found (The Oz, $). This came from Bunnings’ appeal to the Privacy Commissioner's finding that the retailer had violated Australians' privacy with its use of FRT in stores (Austlii). The Administrative Review Tribunal ruled that Bunnings' FRT was OK because its tech "minimised the intrusion on privacy", but it still fucked up by not having adequate signage or properly disclosing it via its privacy policy.

I'm told the Office of the Australian Information Commission (OAIC) hasn’t decided whether to appeal it.

The Sizzle: This is a pretty significant decision that undermines the fundamental thrust of OAIC's decision that the use of FRT did not justify how it intrudes on Australians' privacy. Yes, Bunnings still got pinged but mostly for paperwork reasons (sorry, of course doing a proper disclosure is important, but let's be honest, no one is reading these). Retailers will be cheering that they can mass surveil everyone who comes into their stores. Which, as I mentioned in the Sizzle earlier this year, is happening regardless of the rules. 

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Even the feds can't get into iPhones in lockdown mode

The FBI was unable to get into the iPhone of a Washington Post reporter because of its lockdown mode feature (404Media, $). Court filings show that, despite getting a very unorthodox warrant to get a journalist's phone to find out about their source, the Trump Administration could not actually break into the phone because of a feature launched in 2022 to stop intrusion using remote access spyware. It's very cool that Apple made a feature available to the average punter that defeats even the world's best equipped governments. However, cops were still able to get into the reporter's laptop — and thus her Signal, and therefore contacts with her sources — because she had left on either FaceID or fingerprint scanning (The Intercept) 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Well this was a weird interview with Bill Gates

The Australian Financial Review landed a rare opportunity to have an interview with Bill Gates, who is currently visiting Australia (AFR, $). It was a fairly wide-ranging chat. But there was one topic that was ruled out:

[Gates'] brief trip to Australia over the past week with his new partner, Paula Hurd, widow of the former Oracle chief executive Mark Hurd, happily coincided with the Australian Open.

Less happily, it also coincided with the release of more documents from the Epstein files that include the convicted paedophile referring to Gates amid the many important men he cultivated for money and influence.

It wasn’t the first time the association had become public. But Epstein’s latest salacious assertions, written in 2013, instantly ricocheted around the world – an inevitable aspect of the ubiquitous digital era pioneered by Gates.

They claimed Gates had caught sexually transmitted diseases from Russian girls and sought antibiotics from Epstein.

Gates’ support team politely tells me before the Financial Review’s interview that he won’t be commenting beyond the official statement through a spokesman last weekend.

“These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false,” the statement said. “The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”

AFR

The article then returns to being a fairly normal interview. I'm very sympathetic to its author/editors who prominently addressed the Epstein stuff but still had a chance to interview him otherwise... But what a bizarre, jarring experience to have to take a hard-right turn into addressing whether the founder of Microsoft sought to secretly dose his wife to allegedly cure an STI he gave her, and then to have to go back to talking about, uhh, AI. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

What the pdfs tell us about the Epstein Files

While we're on Epstein, I'm sure you've been reading through all of the coverage of the latest tranche of Department of Justice files and thinking to yourself "gee, I'd love to know more about the PDFs". Well, here's a fascinating article from the PDF Association (who knew that was a thing!) doing some forensic analysis on the Epstein PDFs themselves. Here's one particularly interesting bit: 

"There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages [...] It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction." Hmm?

Also, another mini-mystery solved from the documents: What's up with all those equal signs anyway? 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.

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