The ALP have said that if they win the federal election (probably in May 2022), they'll give NBN an extra $2.4b to do more fibre upgrades and won't privatise the NBN as it originally planned back when it was in government. Essentially the ALP will give NBN more money for the FTTN to FTTP upgrade program it's currently trying out. This will mean the vast majority of FTTN premises will be eligible for a fibre upgrade and 90% of Australians within the fixed-line footprint (not 90% of Australians! sneaky) will have access to gigabit internet by 2025. Sounds nice, lets see if they actually win.
IBM's going around saying it has a 127-qubit quantum processor. It's called "Eagle" and is the "first IBM quantum processor whose scale makes it impossible for a classical computer to reliably simulate". Impressive, but according to Arstechnica, "there are probably some interesting things you can do on it more easily than you could on a smaller processor, but we've not fundamentally reached the point when we can regularly do useful calculations that would be difficult to impossible on traditional computers". IBM reckons "we will be able to demonstrate quantum advantage to some use cases that have value within the next two years".
Something is very rotten over at Activision Blizzard, with new reports alleging that CEO Bobby Kotick lead a massive coverup of abuse, including not telling the board about alleged rapes he knew about. Employees have walked out again, demanding Kotick booted out of the company. This is on top of the lawsuit Activision Blizzard is currently facing from the Californian government saying "women did not receive fair compensation and were unable to advance on par with male counterparts" and the $18m it paid to settle "a separate workplace harassment and discrimination complaint from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission".
One of the first things I learned as an enthusiastic and optimistic network engineer 20 years ago (oh god I'm old) is that 127.0.0.1 is sacred. It's the loopback network address range and anything sent there is intended for local consumption only. Set and forget, that address range is out of bounds. Well the IETF is looking to change that, putting out a draft document aiming to reduce the local scope of 127.0.0.1 from the entire /8 range (i.e: 127.0.0.1 to 127.255.255.255) to the /16 range only (127.0.0.1 to 127.0.255.255), which would free up around 16 million IP addresses for the wider internet. Considering a single IPV4 address goes for around US$50 these days, that's US$800m of "value" just sitting there. Thanks Eliza for letting me know about this!
📻 Bull In The Heather - Sonic Youth
😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.
💬 Checked out the paid subscriber only forum? It's a tidy little place to discuss tech with like minded Aussies.
💳 Paid subscriber looking to manage your billing info or change email address? Visit the customer portal.
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.