Austral, an ASX listed company that builds patrol vessels and frigates for the Australian Navy, has been hacked. According to Austral, "some staff email addresses and mobile phone numbers" were accessed, as well as ship drawings, but they say the drawings aren't related to national security. Austral hasn't said how they were hacked, or who did it, but they did say in their statement to the market that, "the offender purported to offer certain materials for sale on the internet and engage in extortion". While nothing defence related was accessed, it's not a good look hey? I bet the Chinese and Russians are savvier than this extortionist hacker.
Remember how Smugmug bought Flickr off Yahoo/Verizon a few months ago and everyone was excited Flickr would be taken care of? Well if you've got over 1,000 photos and you're not a paid customer, they're gonna delete everything past the newest 1,000 unless you cough up for a Pro account by the 8th of Jan 2019. Flickr used to offer 1TB of free storage, so that's a lot of photos about to be snuffed out of existence. That's also a lot of photos where there may not be any other copies left lying around. This could get really ugly. I hope Archive Team manage to download all the photos they can before Flickr presses delete.
Apple's announced their financial results for Q4 FY 2018 and guess what? Record profits. Revenue was up 20% compared to the same quarter last year, reaching a US$62.9b. What's most interesting about this result is that a massive growth in revenue happened despite iPhone sales remaining relatively flat. Apple sold 0.4% more iPhones than last year, yet iPhone revenue was up 29%. This is also the last time Apple will tell us how many iPhones, iPads and Macs it has sold each quarter. From now on, all we'll know is how much money they made from each product category. Why? Anandtech reckons "with device sales declining, they will be taking heat, despite the company continuing to increase revenue".
Thousands of Google employees across the world stopped work this morning to demand more action from Google regarding its pathetic handling of sexual harassment. Google's Sydney-based staff joined their Californian colleagues in solidarity. The protesters have 5 pretty sensible demands of Google: 1. An end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination for all current and future employees, 2. A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity, 3. A publicly disclosed sexual-harassment transparency report, 4. A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously, 5. Elevate the Chief Diversity Officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the Board of Directors. Appoint an Employee Representative to the Board. I hope Google don't fuck around and just implement these changes ASAP, anything else would be an insult to all their women employees.
Elon Musk's been on Twitter hyping up a new Autopilot feature coming soon to Tesla cars - upgraded Summon mode. You probably remember Summon as that feature that makes your $150,000 car crawl in or out of tight spots without you having to be in the vehicle. Now it'll be able to "drive around a parking lot, find an empty spot, read signs to confirm it’s valid & park", "drive to your phone location & follow you like a pet if you hold down summon button on Tesla app" and "drive it from your phone remotely like a big RC car if in line of sight". The update will arrive in 6 weeks to all Teslas with v2 of the Autopilot hardware (everything post-2016 I think). I have my doubts it can actually self-drive around a parking lot safely and find a spot. Who's gonna be first to try this at Chadstone during the Christmas sales?
I've been sitting on this for a few days, waiting for the right time to bring it to your attention. Friday arvo sounds about right, so here goes - AI & machine learning has been deployed to to perfect the cock sucking technique of a cock sucking robot: "we analyze a dataset containing over 108 hours of pornographic video, annotated at each frame with the position of the lips along the shaft of the penis. We use quantization techniques to discover sixteen distinct motions, and using these motions we design and evaluate a system that procedurally generates realistic movement sequences using deep learning. We quantitatively show that this system is superior to simple Markov Chain techniques". What a time to be alive.
My backup application of choice, Arq, now has an easier to use version - Arq Cloud. With the normal version of Arq you have to set up your own backup destination. AWS (S3/Glacier), Azure, B2, Google, SFTP, whatever, Arq supports heaps and does it smoothly. But setting that up is a bit beyond a lot of people, so to make the process easier, Arq has their own storage solution (probably S3 or B2 rebranded) that makes it super easy to back up your files to the cloud. Just point Arq at the directories you want backed up and it'll store data at the rate of US$5.99/m for every terabyte. It's a proper incremental, versioned backup too. Mac users who find Arq too confusing should check this out.
That's it, see ya Wednesday!
--Anthony
Aussie Broadband is the best ISP I've used since Internode's glory days. Their CEO gives talks at AUSNOG about their network and they even have network utilisation charts for every NBN POI. Their pricing isn't the cheapest, but if you want an ISP that's fast & reliable, give them a shot. Use my affiliate link and we both get $50 credit on our next bill.
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