Europe and the UK don’t follow the USA & Australia on outright banning Huawei for 5G builds
Facebook, Microsoft and Tesla cough up their latest quarterly financials
NBN agrees to stop white-anting RSPs for enterprise & government sales
NextDNS is Pi-Hole in the cloud with DNS over HTTP support
Cheap Google Pixel 3 & Amazon Echo Show 5 twin-pack
The EU and UK have decided that Huawei isn't as bad as countries like Australia and the USA have made them out to be and said it's okay for telcos there to build 5G networks with Huawei gear. The UK has imposed some strict rules on the use of Huawei kit, like "the company's share of the new market will be capped at 35% for each of Britain's four mobile phone operators, and it will be banned from core parts of the telecoms network and from sensitive sites, including nuclear and military facilities". That made the USA cranky, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling the UK to "relook at this as implementation moves forward". Meanwhile, the EU hasn't decreed an outright ban on Huawei, leaving it to the member states as to how they proceed and recommending using multiple 5G vendors where possible.
Facebook, Microsoft and Tesla told the market how they're going financially today. Facebook and Tesla are aren't anywhere near the scale of profits Apple has seen, but Microsoft isn't that far behind. They made US$11.6b profit off $36.9b of revenue, with the increase mostly attributed growth with Azure and Office subscriptions. Facebook beat analyst estimates, but operating margin has dropped 11%, expenses are up 51% and net income "only" grew 7% - basically Facebook is spending more than it has in the past to make a similar amount of money. User growth hasn't slowed though, with 2.5b people using Facebook at least once a month. Tesla's stock went bananas (again) after it made more revenue than expected and said production has already begun for the Model Y (an SUV variant of the Model 3), making it the world's most valuable car manufacturer despite selling hardly any cars compared to the likes of Toyota or Volkswagen.
NBN is supposed to strictly be a wholesale provider of internet access. RSPs (aka ISPs/retailers) are the ones who interact with and are responsible for getting users. That's how it works for home/small business accounts but for enterprise and government accounts, NBN has been going directly to the user, bypassing the RSPs. RSPs cracked the shits over this as E&G (enterprise & government) is where the big cash is, so to have their wholesaler lowball them over the juiciest contracts plus having the NBN overbuilding existing fibre networks to serve those customers was a massive slap in the face. NBN has heard the RSP complaints and will no longer directly contact users and will share any sales leads with retailers.
If you don't want to run a local instance of Pi-Hole or you want to use it on the go (e.g: on 4G) NextDNS supports blocking all the same adware crap Pi-Hole does, plus whitelists and blacklists and even specific legit services can be blocked (e.g: Instagram, Netflix, etc to keep kids/staff from burning time and bandwidth on em instead of studying/working). Same logs/analytics of usage and blockage as Pi-Hole as well. You can install the NextDNS app for easy config to ensure DNS-over-HTTPS works. The first 300,000 requests a month are free or you can pay US$1.99/m for unlimited use.
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