NEWS
Jacob Appelbaum speaks
Jacob Appelbaum has given his first statement on the shit that's gone down surrounding him lately. He says the allegations of sexual harassment against him are a "calculated and targeted attack" and "I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false." - this comment on Hacker News (yeah I know) actually sums up the situation well - "Act as if the allegations are true and false at the same time".
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Podcast service Stitcher is now a Midroll product
French streaming media service Deezer is selling off Stitcher, which it purchased two years ago. The new owners of Stitcher, E.W Scripps, also owns Midroll - a podcast advertising network. Gruber and Arment have some opinions that I agree with, saving me having to do my own rant about the generally disgusting taint advertising brings to most media.
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Pentesters take over a Mitsubishi SUV pretty easily
Mitsubishi's Outlander plugin hybrid SUV has had its remote control capabilities pretty well owned. A group of penetration testers were able to easily connect to the vehicle's wi-fi access point and do things like turn off the alarm. Obviously, this is bad. Once someone is inside your car, they can do all sorts of stuff to fuck you over. They tried to talk to Mitsubishi about it, and were "greeted with disinterest", now they've gone public and Mitsubishi suddenly are very responsive, haha.
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Deputy PM reckons 25mbit internet is good enough for rural Australia
Barnaby Joyce, our deputy Prime Minister, said on Q&A last night that 25mbit internet is "good enough" for people in regional areas of Australia. Yep. 2.5MB/sec is fine, in 2016 and beyond. It's not really surprising that he'd say that, as it's not like he has any actual insight or knowledge on the topic of internet access and will just spew whatever verbal diarrhea possible to back up the party line, but it just shows how out of touch the people in charge are when it comes to this topic. Meanwhile, on a recent survey of issues important to voters, the NBN was voted the least important.
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Melbourne based Zero Latency make a cool VR experience for the Japanese
A Melbourne team is making big strides in "free roam" VR, having announced a partnership with Sega to make a warehouse-scale VR experience in Tokyo. In 2014, Zero Latency set up a warehouse in North Melbourne to demo their concept of wandering around in a room wearing a souped up Oculus Rift with other people who play a game together. Now they're going to Japan and playing with the big boys - pretty damn cool.
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COOL SHIT
Five year old CPU still holds up fine for gaming
Eurogamer has an interesting article on whether it's worth upgrading from an i5-2500K CPU to the current generation i5-6500. Surprisingly, the i5-2500K still keeps up with the new CPU in most scenarios. When overclocked and paired with fast RAM, it's as good or faster than the i5-6500. Not bad at all considering the i5-2500K was released five years ago!
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Your passwords are now at the mercy of 8 GTX1080s running Hashcat
Sagitta has made a computer with eight Nvidia GTX 1080s inside, designed to run Hashcat. Haschat, if you're unaware, is designed to "recover passwords" (aka crack passwords from hashed databases you stole from some unsecured server). There's some benchmarks up on Github, which may not mean much to you without some context, so all you need to know is that your 8 character password has never been weaker.
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9Now completes the FTA app set on the Apple TV
Hey, so Nine chucked up their 9Now app onto the Apple TV, making the entire set of free to air TV channels now available on Apple's set top box media centre playback device thing. Not all the apps offer live streams, but you can at least catch up on all your favourite TV shows instead of pirating them - mainly useful for the Australian stuff that doesn't seem to get uploaded to the usual places.
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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!