NEWS
You can have a .blog URL soon
Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, has purchased the .blog TLD for around US$20m. Luckily, they're not making the TLD exclusive for Wordpress blogs. Anyone will be to buy whatevertheywant.blog, just like you buy a .com or whatever. Those with a trademark can get their .blog in August, the rest of us, October. Sign up on the .blog TLD website to get updates.
Discuss
Google adding another nail to Flash's coffin
Google is giving us a heads up that it plans on enabling a "HTML5 by default" feature within Chrome around the end of the year. This feature will make websites serve up a HTML5 version of content instead of Adobe Flash content (e.g: video players) by default and if there's no HTML5 version of the content available, make the user manually launch the Flash content. Very much like Safari's "click to load Flash".
Discuss
Careless researchers expose info on 70,000 OK Cupid users
A group of researchers scraped all loads of "public" info off OK Cupid's website for about 70,000 people, then uploaded that info to the Open Science Framework - unfortunately, they left in much of the identifying info. Not names, but definitely enough info based on the answers to the hundreds of questions OK Cupid asks, to identify people. No consent was given for the data to be used this way either. OK Cupid is a dating site so based on the type of questions asked and it's pretty obvious as to why people may not want their responses public.
Discuss
RunKeeper’s Android app leaks your location for days
RunKeeper has been accused by the Norwegian Consumer Council (like our ACCC) of continually tracking a user's location and sending that info to an advertising company called Kiip.me. People assumed their fitness app was only tracking their activity when the app was open and when they started a session - but even after stopping that session, as long as the app was open, even in the background, it was leaking out location info.
Discuss
John McAfee tried to make people think he hacked WhatsApp
John McAfee, noted Internet crazy man, is currently proclaiming he has found a way to read encrypted messages on Android phones. The headline talks about busting WhatsApp encryption, but this equally applies to any app running on Android, not just WhatsApp. McAfee got two brand new Android phones, did nothing to them except install an app they wrote and was able to intercept the supposedly end-to-end encrypted messages. Oh.. they installed an app. Okay, nothing to see here, just McAfee being McAfee.
Discuss
COOL SHIT
Those little GPS trackers inside footy player’s guernsey are big business
Fun little article up on Fairfax today about Catapault. If you watch the footy, you've probably seen those GPS trackers on player's backs. Catapault make those and are starting to sell heaps of them to professional sports teams outside of Australia. They operate a sportsperson software as a service really, with all sorts of data chucked in to an online platform where sports nerds can assess the player's performance. I didn't realise the software was so advanced - I'd love to log in to an AFL team's account and see what they know about players.
Discuss
Awesome pricing for one of the fastest SSDs available
If you're building a new PC rig (maybe to go with one of those sweet GTX1080's coming out soon), Samsung currently has a $30 cashback on the excellent 950 Pro NVMe PCIe SSD. Shopping Express is selling the 512GB model for $399 with free delivery - the cheapest in Australia. Use that cash back and the price is only $369! I remember when these were $500.
Discuss
Telstra couldn't have fucked up this iPhone 6s order any worse if they tried
I went into an inappropriate unjustified rage just reading this guy's story about how Telstra colossally fucked up his iPhone 6s online order. It's the nightmare of every first world citizen - having to deal with a large telecommunication company's arse backwards bureaucracy. Shudders down my spine as I read.
Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!