All of next week, I'm be on a road tip to Canberra and Sydney. The Sizzle will still be sent out daily, but instead of five news items, there will only be three and instead of three links in the Cool Shit section, there will only be one. Kinda like a Sizzle Lite. Full-fat Sizzle will return on the 30th of May.
NEWS
AFP raid ALP offices and staff member's homes over NBN leaks
Huge news overnight that the AFP have raided Senator Conroy's office and the homes of Labor party staff members, in connection with leaks out of the NBN to the media. Yep, during an election, our federal police have raided political party offices and the homes of party members - sounds like the sort of shit that happens in some broken South East Asian sham democracy, not Australia. Raids by police over matters of trivial consequence. Nobody's life was at risk by these leaks, no international diplomacy damage, not even the scarcest of economic risks. Imagine what the AFP would do if something actually important was leaked that was actually against the national interest?
Discuss
More Chromebooks than Macs sold in the USA last quarter
Here's an interesting state - in Q1 2016, there were more Chromebooks sold than Macs. IDC reckons this is because of their huge popularity in K-12 schools across the USA. Also in Chromebook news, Google is bringing the Play Store to Chrome OS, making the entire Android back catalog available on Chrome OS.
Discuss
Cryptolocker creators call it quits & release a decryption tool
The makers of the TeslaCrpyt ransomware/cryptolocker have given up their naughty ways and released an app called TeslaDecoder to unlock any data that was encrypted. I guess they cashed in, figured there's no point playing the game any more lest they be caught by law enforcement, and will ride off into the sunset with their dirty Bitcoins.
Discuss
Chuck shit from Reddit all over the Internet with its new embeddable content feature
Reddit threads are now embeddable. Like how you can chuck a Tweet on a webpage, you can now place comments, posts and stuff into anywhere there's HTML. News.com.au is gonna have a field day!
Discuss
Pics of Uber's first public self-driving car trials
Uber has unveiled the fruits of its self driving car efforts so far. A Ford Fusion decked out with loads of cameras will cruise the streets of Pittsburgh in an attempt to phase out meatbag drivers. I wonder what all those cameras (I can count 9!) do exactly?
Discuss
COOL SHIT
Get started with software defined radios on the cheap
Do you want to receive messages from Inmarsat satellites? What about the NOAA weather satellites? Maybe some fun planespotting using ADS-B is more your thing. RTL-SDR.com has loads of info and tutorials on how to use those magical cheap RTL2832U TV tuners as a beaut software defined radio. Deliciously nerdy fun for a weekend indoors - well, a little bit outdoors to get your antenna going, but you can run a cable inside, no need to actually be in the sun for too long.
Discuss
Excellent way to fuck with people leeching your internet
Bit of an oldie, but still a nice laugh. Some guy noticed his neighbours leeching his wi-fi. Instead of encrypting it (it was a more innocent time) and securing his network, he decided to play a little trick on the unsuspecting leechers. He used iptables to force all the traffic to flow via a transparent Squid proxy which runs a perl script that turns all the text upside down, hahah. What a brilliant mindfuck. Could set up a wi-fi access point off a rasperry pi in a public place and run this! See the looks on their faces when they get upside down internet!
Discuss
Every Steve Jobs video you'd ever care to watch
The Steve Jobs Archive is a collection of chronologically sorted videos about Steve Jobs. There's dozens, maybe even 100 videos of various things to do with Steve Jobs, spread across 42 chapters. Like a video of Steve and his wife at the Palo Alto Apple Store on the day of the iPhone launch and Steve talking at Lund University in Sweden back in 1995. If there's a video even remotely connected to Steve Jobs, it is here.
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!