Issue 1510 - Wednesday 8th December, 2021

In Today's Issue

The News

Bloke claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto yet again avoids having to prove it

Craig Wright, the Australian dude who keeps claiming he is Satoshi Nakamoto (the creator of Bitcoin), has "won" a court case against him in Florida by the family of a deceased former business partner. Old mate is happy with the outcome despite having to hand over US$100m to the former business partner's family, because the case never got to the point where he had to prove he was actually the creator of Bitcoin - something he's never done in all these years he's claimed to be Satoshi. Unfortunately for the rest of society, it means he will keep on running his grift and $100m is just a speeding ticket on the highway to ponziville.

Telstra and Optus spend $2.1b on extra 5G spectrum, Optus announced mmWave trial

Telstra and Optus have snagged more juicy sub-1GHz spectrum in the latest ACMA auction. Twelve lots of 900MHz spectrum went to Optus for $1.48b and Telstra won four lots of 850MHz spectrum for $616m. TPG/Vodafone "elected not to bid, believing its existing holdings from the merger of TPG and Vodafone to be sufficient for its network plans". All this spectrum will be used to improve indoor 5G coverage. Meanwhile, Optus has announced a "proof-of-concept" of mmWave 5G at Oakleigh Inflatable World (lol why here??) that it plans to base a future "5G Max" home internet service on that is capable of multi-gigabit speeds.

Miscellaneous news

Something I Saw On The Internet

Nice documentary about Handspring, a Palm/3Com spinoff that invented the smartphone

The Verge made a documentary called "Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone" and as someone who was barely a teenager when this stuff went down, found Handspring's story quite interesting. We are all familiar with Palm and their legendary PDAs - Handspring is the scrappy startup that came about in the late 90s as Palm's owners (3Com at the time) kept kicking own goals with what the Handsprings folks correctly, but maybe prematurely, thought was the future of computing. Maybe people older than me will know, but were Handspring big in Australia? I don't recall seeing any of their devices around, but vividly remember Palm's devices.

Bargains

The End

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