In This Issue

News

Microsoft got the juicy gig to upgrade the Pentagon’s decrepit tech

Microsoft just landed a US$10b contract from the Department of Defense. Amazon, IBM, Oracle and Google were all fighting for the contract to modernise the Pentagon's tech and make it all talk to one another, but in the end Microsoft will be the ones rolling around in US blood dollars. Everyone thought Amazon would get the gig (despite Amazon's employees really not wanting it) as they provide cloud services to the CIA, but Trump hates Jeff Bezos because Bezos owns the Washington Post newspaper that like to shit on Trump (rightfully) every chance they get, so even though the DoD is supposed to be independent from the President, they smartly figured they better not choose Amazon or they'll have Trump giving them grief for years.

ARM decided they’re not American and can keep selling to Huawei

Huawei received some good news today - ARM will continue to supply it with instruction sets and design software it uses in Kirin smartphone SoCs and Ascend AI chips. ARM was apparently unsure if their v8 and v9 architectures were US or UK designed, because if they were US designed, they wouldn't be able to supply Huawei with support and updates due to the USA's national security trade ban with certain Chinese companies. ARM is uncertain about future architecture sets though, as more and more of their design takes place in both the UK and USA. So this is one less thing Huawei has to worry about. Their phones still don't have access to Google services though. I doubt they'll get access back any time soon either.

Department of Home Affairs is keen for facial recognition porn access

In a submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, the Department of Home Affairs suggested that the Face Verification Service it is working on (the one where all our drivers licence photos are stored by the Federal Government and that got shit on by the PJCI last week) could also be used as a way to "prevent a child using their parent's driver licence to get around any age verification" - e.g: wanna access the porno? Put your dick away, turn on your webcam and let us verify your face with the government database. This is far off from actually happening (both technically and actual time-frame), but it's the future our government is planning for.

Not News

Hardly anyone donates to the Pirate Bay

Considering how popular the Pirate Bay is and how many people use it, you'd think they'd have a healthy income stream of donations from grateful users, right? Well, no, no they don't. We have proof of this stinginess thanks to the Bitcoin blockchain. TorrentFreak looked at the donations flowing into the Pirate Bay's Bitcoin wallet and saw that they got only 0.49 Bitcoin between late 2017 and September 2019. 0.49 Bitcoin is currently worth A$5,358. Did anyone expect people who are illegally downloading content to donate a few BTC to the nerds taking a risk hosting the gear? The real money is in private usenet indexers that you gotta pay to use. I bet those robin hood individuals are making a mint.

Bargains

🎶 Do You Realise?? - The Flaming Lips

😁 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.

The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong 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.​