Old mate Bevan Slattery (founder of NextDC, Megaport and Superloop & more) is back with a new startup called HyperOne - a huge plan to spend $1.5b building 20,000km+ of fibre optic cable across Australia capable of carrying over 10 petabits (yes, PETAbits) per second, creating a huge private backbone network for businesses to tap into. There would be over 1,000 "on-ramps" for regional and remote areas of Australia to connect to, presumably at a way lower price than the incumbents like Telstra and Optus that charge a fortune because they're usually the only option outside metro areas. HyperOne will also double the amount of international cable landing stations in Australia. It's a big project, but Bevan's track record proves that if anyone can get this kinda thing going, it's him.
One of Trump's biggest brain farts, getting Oracle to buy TikTok's US operations with a deadline of November 12th, but never actually happened or was enforced, has been "shelved". The Biden administration is developing "a comprehensive approach to securing US data that addresses the full range of threats we face" from Chinese apps, but I get the feeling it's not a top priority for them. A top priority for Huawei however, is reversing Trump's ban on its business operating in the USA and interacting with US suppliers by declaring it a national security threat. The Department of Commerce is reviewing all of Trump's decisions so watch this space. Huawei might be allowed to sell phones using Android again at least! Using Huawei for 5G or other telco network infrastructure needs a bit more caution I reckon.
Two big info sec fuckups lately. First is from a water treatment plant in Florida that allowed remote control of the chemicals added to that water. They allowed it to be accessed via TeamViewer, with "all computers shared the same password for remote access and appeared to be connected directly to the Internet without any type of firewall protection installed". Unsurprisingly someone got in and was gonna poison the water! It was pure luck that someone happened to be there at the time, noticed weird shit going on and intervened. Totally seperate, but equally as worrying is researcher Alex Birsan discovering that "if he could find the names of the private packages used by companies (a task that turned out to be very easy in most cases), he could upload his own code to one of the public repositories with the same name, and the companies’ automated systems would use his code instead". This got his code into Apple, Microsoft, PayPal and 30 others. Oof.
90 year old Aaron Epstein has been a customer of AT&T since the 60s, but his current internet connection shits him so much that he spent US$10,000 on two ads in the Wall Street Journal directly aimed at AT&T's CEO, letting loose in public how pissed off he is. Despite living in the very metropolitan area of North Hollywood in Los Angeles, the maximum connection speed he can get is 3.5 Mbps, but AT&T can't even deliver that reliably, with his connection often running below 1.5 Mbps. Someone from AT&T got in touch, but nothing has been done about his lame internet connection yet. Many of us feel your pain Mr. Epstein! You could change AT&T with NBN and North Hollywood with almost every suburb in Australia and repeat the same story.
📻 Typhoons - Royal Blood
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