In This Issue

News

Riot Games will pay out over $10m to 1,000 women employees they abused

Riot Games (responsible for League of Legends) will pay US$10m to current and former women employees that were sexually harassed and discriminated against at the company. Around 1,000 employees will receive compenstion for the abuse they suffered since November 2014 and now. Riot will also install a chief diversity officer and get its shit together regarding reporting crap like this. This payout is a result of a lawsuit where mutliple women said they "were treated as outsiders and passed over for promotions based on their gender". A full investigation of Riot's bro-culture bullshit was exposed in a Kotaku article from earlier this year.

Add activating a SIM card to the list of things your face will be scanned for in China

Starting Sunday, anyone who registers a SIM in China has to undergo a face scan. I haven't seen anything in English that explains how this works in practice, but I'm gonna assume you install an app on your smartphone to do it as part of the activation process, or you do it at the point of purchase. China's reasoning for doing this is to make it harder for people to be anonymous online. They want to be able to know exactly who's behind every IP address at all times. I assume having the face scan along with the IP and IMSI means you can pinpoint dissidents in record time. When will Peter Dutton float the idea of having to upload a selfie along with your drivers licence or passport when activating an Australian SIM?

Russia makes law saying all consumer electronics must come pre-installed with Russian apps

We love to get all hot and bothered about China's weirdo internet, but Russia is doing some equally, if not more crazy shit too. Earlier this week they passed a law that will require all consumer electronics (smartphones, laptops, TVs, etc) to have Russian apps pre-installed. The list of apps isn't available yet, but expect it to be stuff like Yandex apps on devices as well as Google/Apple apps. Even wackier is the Russian government making a "Great Russian Encyclopaedia" because Vladimr Putin said that it would help people find "reliable information that is constantly updated on the basis of scientifically verified sources of knowledge" - something apparently, Wikipedia isn't good enough for.

Not News

Aussie Broadband keeps finding bugs in Cisco firmware

Aussie Broadband has been yet again stung by a bug in Cisco firmware, the 5th one they’ve discovered in 18 months. This time it's caused their rollout of IPV6 to halt as the latest firmware for some of their Cisco gear has introduced a bug where handing out IPV6 DHCP leases has a memory leak that inevitably crashes the system and the only way to fix it is to reboot the server once a fortnight. Cisco patched that bug recently but the patch introduced a new one that breaks PPPoE. To Aussie's credit I haven't noticed any downtime, but fuck me what an annoying shit of an issue. The last patch took two months to fix, so it wasn't exactly silver platter service from Cisco either.

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😁 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.​