Every business mentioned in Bloomberg's Chinese spy chip bombshell last week has come out and said Bloomberg is talking shit. Apple published a blog post and testified before the US Congress saying nothing like what Bloomberg has described has come to their attention. Amazon published a similar blog post, titled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Erroneous Article", denying everything Bloomberg alleged. Supermicro said nothing happened and if it did, they haven't been dropped as a supplier because of it anyways. The US (via Homeland Security) & UK (via GCHQ) governments have backed up all the company claims, saying that they have "no reason to doubt the statements from the companies named in the story". The government always tells the truth and never tries to cover up international spying attempts. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket just successfully took off, launched the SAOCOM 1A satellite, then landed on solid ground at the Vandenberg Air Force base kinda half way between Los Angeles & San Francisco. This is the 30th time they've landed the first stage of the rocket and the first time they've recovered the rocket from the same place they launched it. Give Elon all the crap you want about Tesla (much of it can be justified), but the SpaceX team seems to be doing really, really well. NASA announced that the first humans to fly on-board a Falcon 9 rocket will do so in a trip to the International Space Station in June 2019. No more paying Russia to take Americans into space! Boeing will do the same with its Starliner craft in August 2019.
The federal government has been chatting to various ISPs about its desire to block overseas gambling websites and the Communications Alliance (lobby group for heaps of ISPs) appears to be okay with it. This idea to block gambling sites has come about via the 2018 Black Economy Taskforce Final Paper, where it reports that overseas gambling sites being a prime way for Aussie crims to launder money. By legally forcing ISPs to block access to these sites, the government is hoping to add another hurdle for people wanting to sneak out the proceeds of crime. Of course, it's a piece of piss to access blocked websites (TOR, VPNs, proxies) so really it's just stopping the dumb criminals and punters who want better odds than the AU bookies offer.
The NSW police's "integrated policing operating system" is over 24 years old and needs an urgent upgrade. They've been looking for someone to do it since mid-2015, but are yet to find a partner to help them build this vital to operation system that will need to support "5,000 concurrent users at a minimum and be capable of processing, recording, reporting and analysing operational policing information for core police functions". To speed the process up, they're now changing their approach from DIY to off the shelf, seeking a vendor to sell them a product, or products, they can install and have someone else develop and support. Over the next 2-weeks, suppliers will be short listed and invited to pitch their wares to NSW police.
It wouldn't be a daylight savings changeover without a bizarre Apple software bug and this year's is with the new Infograph face on the Series 4 Apple Watch. According to 9 to 5 Mac, "it seems the large Activity complication on the Infograph Modular face is not handling the loss of an hour elegantly, and instead causing the entire device to crash and reboot" and that " the large Activity complication simply cannot handle drawing its graph with one of those twenty four hour missing", causing the Watch to "reboot itself repeatedly, as long as the Infograph Modular face is active with the Activity complication". I think it's fixed itself by now, but if your shiny new Apple Watch was playing up yesterday, that's probably why.
802.11ax is the next generation of wi-fi tech and the Wi-Fi Alliance has decided to give it some next generation branding. No longer will we sound like supreme dorks talking about 802.11-something-or-other, but instead wi-fi will simply be called Wi-Fi. The current 802.11ac wi-fi standard will be Wi-Fi 5, 802.11n is Wi-Fi 4 and so on. When 802.11ax based products start coming out in 2019, they will have Wi-Fi 6 slapped across their marketing and packaging. 6 is bigger than 5, so that's how you know the new wi-fi is faster. Makes sense to me. Aruba, Aerohive Networks, Netgear, CEVA, Marvell Semiconductor, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Intel are all on-board with this new naming convention. I kinda wish HDMI would have done the same thing and USB would clean up their nomenclature (USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, haha).
Curtis McHale has shared how he uses his 9.7" iPad Pro with a keyboard attached for web development. Blink Shell is his choice to SSH in to a remote server (a Digital Ocean VPS) to use Vim, where the actual development work happens. He likes Blink mainly because it supports Mosh, an alternative to SSH that's designed for resuming connections and the ability to remap keys (like ESC). Ergo Web Tools (a web browser with a code inspector & Javascript console) and Coda (for file transfers & quick code edits) round out his setup. It's not a bad setup if you can get away with it I guess. I envy those who can use an iPad and not feel cramped or anxious that there's a task you'll need to do you didn't think of that can't be done.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
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