The price of Bitcoin spiked in the last 24 hours, but unlike most other spikes we know why this one happened - Tesla told their investors that they're holding over US$1.5b worth of the cryptocurrency and that they "expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis". According to their SEC filing, Tesla simply thought Bitcoin was a good investment and changed its policies in early 2021 to allow it to invest its cash reserve "in certain alternative reserve assets including digital assets, gold bullion, gold exchange-traded funds and other assets". I get the feeling Musky boy is doing this just to impress the memelords he is so fond of.
Google has taken down an app called Barcode Scanner which had 10 million downloads because of "customers complaining that ads were opening out of nowhere on their default browser". Apparently the developer deliberately installed a persistent adware trojan. Meanwhile, app developer Kosta Eleftheriou has discovered dozens of scam apps on Apple's App Store that generate millions of dollars a year. Shitty devs poorly clone popular apps, juice the App Store rankings by buying loads of fake reviews, slap in overpriced subscriptions and go unnoticed by Apple whilst raking in cash. You'd think that one benefit of having an overlord like Google or Apple controlling every piece of software loaded on our devices is that the software wouldn't try and fuck you.
Looks like the Therapeutic Goods Administration is getting close to approving the Apple Watch's ECG feature. The irregular rhythm notifications feature has been added to the TGA's register for use here, which works hand in hand with the ECG feature, so you'd assume that the whole kit is coming soon. Also in things other countries have before us, SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet is now available to pre-order for Australians. It'll be $139 a month for unlimited data (during the beta at least), $709 for the dish and router, plus $100 to ship it to you. As a reminder, real world speeds have been around 50-150mb/s and latency between 20ms-40ms. Shitloads better than NBN's Skymuster. If you sign up for this lemme know, keen to see how it works here!
📻 Bambi - Prince
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