The Australian National Audit Office buried a report on Friday afternoon the revealed seven government departments and entities have not fully implemented mandatory cybersecurity risk mitigation strategies that were put in place eight years ago. The mandatory strategies are considered to be the absolute essentials for cybersecurity, such as whitelisting, patching, and restricting admin privileges. Two departments self-reported that they had fully implemented the strategies but were found to have not actually done so – the Attorney-Generals department and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

In the midst of ongoing chip shortages due to the pandemic causing supply constraints, a Japanese chip maker has announced a fire at one of its facilities has stopped production. Renesas says a plant near Tokyo, Japan, had to halt operations due to a fire incident. Renasas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata says an estimated month of downtime required to fix the facility will cost the company 17 billion yen, around $200M. Two-thirds of the chips manufactured at the plant are used by the automotive industry, a further setback where shortages have already been taking a toll.

Zoom, the video conferencing tool that became a verb in 2020, has announced it is releasing a software developer kit to allow other developers to build Zoom video services into their own apps. Zoom believes its video service has proven itself worthy over the past year and everything from games to online stores could benefit from integrating its SDK instead of building their own video systems from scratch.

Facebook says it removed 1.3 billion accounts between October and December last year along with 12 million pieces of COVID-19 misinformation published to the site. In a release of information on its efforts ahead of a US government hearing on the issues in coming days, the company also claimed it now has over 35,000 people working on the misinformation problem. And yet, it keeps happening.

Also at Facebook, the company's attempts to stop a $15 billion class action lawsuit have been rebuffed at the US Supreme Court. The class action is a claim against illegal tracking of users via Facebook Like buttons based on the way they worked between 2010 and 2011. Facebook was trying to limit the scope of the action before it goes ahead but this refusal will see the case move forward.

Still in the courts, Apple is facing its own class action suit over its butterfly style keyboards in MacBooks released between 2015 and 2019. The case argues the company knew minor fixes and modifications to the slimmer style of keyboard design were not an actual solution to an inherently defective product. The case, which began in 2018, has now been certified by a judge in California. Apple no longer uses the butterfly keyboard design.

In video games, feel good hit of the pandemic, Fall Guys, has released a new season and it's a crazy looking neon '80s space themed experience. If you've put Fall Guys to bed the new styles in this season look well worth a look. But maybe you're still busy with Loop Hero, in which case, good luck taking a break from that.

And in esports, Riot Games' Valorant has teamed up with Red Bull to launch a university esports tournament, the Campus Clutch. The event will take place in 35 countries, with qualifier events in Australia during April to find the team to represent the nation at a global final later in the year. Pandemic pending, no doubt.

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