Issue 1493 - Monday 15th November, 2021

In Today's Issue

The News

Flaw in FBI's website allowed pople to send emails pretending to be the FBI

Someone's been using the FBI's infrastructure to send 100% legit looking email headers pretending to be the FBI. Fortunately, the hacker, Pompompurin, didn't do anything malicious with this access and just sent out a nonsense looking email. Their aim was to point out a glaring flaw in an FBI system that allowed them to send emails from the FBI's infrastructure simply by editing a browser request. It's since been fixed, but damn, coulda done a bit of damage with this. Some tasty ransoms or social engineering that's for sure.

EU wants to make it mandatory scan all phones, messages and photos for "suspected content"

You thought Apple's built-in scanner for kiddie porn was bad? The EU is currently discussing something called "chat control", which would "oblige providers of messenger services such as Whatsapp and email services to automatically search encrypted and unencrypted communications, private messages and attached photos for suspected content and report it to the police". For encrypted messages, "the EU Commission wants all smartphones to search messages and photos for allegedly suspicious content before they are sent via encrypted messaging services". Keep an eye on this dumpster fire.

Three pieces of Tesla-related news

A bit of Tesla related news today. First up, they've sold over 10,000 cars in Australia during 2021 so far. To put that in perspective, for 2020 Lexus sold about 8,800 cars, BMW 23,500 and Mercedes 36,233. In the USA, supply shortages are getting so bad, Tesla is delivering vehicles without USB ports or wireless phone charging and aren't giving customers a heads up prior to delivery (BMW aren't shipping touch-screens on some cars). Also in the US, there appears to be the first reported first major accident (no deaths or injuries) involving a Tesla part of the beta test program for "full self driving".

Something I Saw On The Internet

Cryptocurrency mining isn't helping the semi-conductor shortage

Like many of you, I am pissed off that I can't buy a nice GPU for a holiday gaming rig because of semiconductor shortages and cryptocurrency miners hogging all the little stock there is. Matt Ranger investigated how much of an impact cryptocurrency has on the shortage - approximately 1/5th of all new GPUs are dedicated to mining ETH. I also didn't know that Bitmain, who design chips specifically for mining and not much else, are along with AMD, Apple, Intel, MediaTek, Nvidia and Qualcomm, pay top dollar for access to TSMC's industry leading 5nm process. Not only is Nvidia getting squeezed because of a general shortage, Bitmain's useless chips are wasting at least 4% of TSMC's precious capacity too.

Bargains

The End

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😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.

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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.