Larry and Sergey quit as CEOs of Alphabet
Lots of AWS related stuff happened at re:Invent this week
Elon Musk fronts jury in his pedo defamation case
Cherry sell keyboards that encrypt what you’re typing along the wire
Cheap Yubikeys, refurb Samsung S10, Mac app bundle, 200GB Sandisk microSD, Logitech vertical ergonomic mouse, Telstra burner phones
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down as co-CEOs of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Sundar Pichai will be the boss of both Alphabet and Google. Larry and Sergey will remain as Google employees and are still on the Alphabet board, but won't be involved in day to day stuff. They said in a statement that Alphabet is well established and that Google is over 20 years old now, so it's good time for them to step back and let someone else run the joint. Perfect timing to exit the building, with all the scrutiny about Google's business model (ads! tech bro insensitivity!) really piling up. Why not take your billions of dollars and fuck off to your nerd cave full of sycophants? I'd do it if I was them. Have fun carrying the bag now Sundar.
Amazon held its big re:Invent conference in Las Vegas again and as usual, unleashed a massive pile of new stuff you can pay per hour or per request for. I couldn't find a single article outlining them all, so I'm going to link to the AWS News Blog instead. Here's what I thought was interesting: real-time speech recognition designed for medical transcriptions, a musical keyboard as a machine learning educational aid, Graviton2 powered EC2 instances (a new version of Amazon's custom ARM SoC), some sort of quantum computing test platform and a way to bring all your ancient Windows server apps that only run on obsolete platforms to a modern version of Windows. If AWS is your job you should dig way deeper into the re:Invent 2019 stuff than what's in The Sizzle (your local AWS user group is a good start).
Elon Musk has appeared in a Los Angeles court this morning telling a jury that his tweets insinuating that Vernon Unsworth (one of the cave divers that rescued those Thai kids) is a paedophile were simply an insult, not a definitive statement that Vernon's a kiddie fiddler. Musk argues that Vernon's inital comments about the shitty useless submarine Musk tried to push on the resucers was an "an unprovoked attack on what was a good-natured attempt to help the kids" and was "wrong and insulting, and so I insulted him back", choosing the remark "pedo guy" because he thought Vernon "was just some random creepy guy". This is just day one - there’s more Elon Musk bullshit to come!
Did you know encrypted keyboards are a thing? I didn't! Cherry's new "Secure Board 1.0" keyboard doesn't use their fancy mechanical switches, but is instead designed to be hackerproof. I'm talking serious hackers here, not just script kiddies. It's got a unique feature that "verifies authenticity of the keyboard to its host PC with a special certificate and encrypts every key stroke when used in Secure Mode". The point of this is to make it impossible for keyloggers to intercept passwords by installing a sneaky piece of hardware between the keyboard and the USB port of the computer. The only catch is that it only works on Linux at the moment, but a Windows version of the required drivers and software to make the encrypted stuff work is under development.
Yubikey 5ci (the one with USB-C and Lightning) - $100 at Umart, they have cheaper Yubikeys too
Refurbished Samsung Galaxy S10 128GB with 20 month Samsung warranty - $779
2020 Limited Edition Mac Bundle (Parallels, PDF Expert, TextExpander & more) - $53 from StackSocial
200GB Sandisk Ultra microSD card - $29.95 from Shopping Square’s eBay store
Logitech MX Vertical ergonomic mouse - $98 at Harvey Norman
Telstra 3G Cruise T126 prepaid phone - $9 at JB Hi-Fi
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🎶 I Will Lick Your Arsehole - Regurgitator
😁 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.