NEWS
Android Pay goes live in Australia with 20 banks onboard
Customers with 20 Australian banks can now use Android Pay instead of their sad, pathetic plastic cards. Here's a list of the banks supporting it in Australia. ANZ is the only one of the big 4 right now, with Westpac coming soon. NAB & Commonwealth aren't playing along. It works pretty much like Apple Pay - just get an Android phone running Android 4.4 or higher and has NFC hardware, hover it over a card reader with NFC and away you go. You can even add rewards cards to Android Pay, it just makes a copy of the barcode that can be scanned instead (I'm not handing my phone over to the cashier for them to scan though).
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Valve releases statement about CS:GO enabling kids to gamble
After Bloomberg's article about kids using CS:GO as a gambling den came out a few weeks ago, Valve has released a statement saying it's not their fault people do these naughty things with their game and isn't planning to do anything to stop them leeching money off children via their creation. Maybe they're just covering their arses due to the two lawsuits in progress from rightfully pissed off parents, but it still stinks for a company who most of admire for not being shitheels.
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Spotify is gonna have two streaming radio stations
Spotify have thrown another idea down the bottomless pit that is their balance sheet, launching two radio shows, Apple Music/Beats 1 style. One show, called AM/PM will have people talking about the music they listen to in the morning, then music they listen to in the evening. THe other show, Secret Genius, goes behind the scenes with artists and assorted musical types to discuss how songs are made. Hopefully Spotify don't do an Apple and make it easier to listen to these things later like a podcast because I'm not gonna be awake at 5am to listen to a musician I like give half a shit to some dweeb on a not-real radio station about their "process". Buzzfeed has a semi-interesting article on how the playlists at these streaming services are made.
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Apple's reality TV show about apps isn't an April Fools joke
So that reality TV show Apple is producing is real. There's a casting call for participants who want to potentially embrass themselves worldwide via Apple's media tentacles. The show is called "Planet for the Apps" and "will give app creators the chance to break through and share their ideas with the world” and “taps into what is driving culture today." - I can't wait to hate everyone on this show for being ambitious and smart and ignorant of how stupid their ideas are.
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Season 2 of Mr. Robot starts today
Mr. Robot is back for season 2 today! Presto has the first two episodes up now or you can leech it off wherever you leech TV shows from. There's also one of those weird "aftershow" shows for Mr. Robot called Hacking Robot, that spends 45 minutes talking about a 45 minute TV show. Leech that from the same joint you downloaded Mr. Robot from! Prob wanna watch season 1 before watching season 2 though, otherwise it's gonna make no sense.
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COOL SHIT
Qantas is hosting a hackathon
Qantas is hosting a hackathon at their HQ (sorry, the Qantas Centre of Service Excellence) in Mascot from the 5th to the 7th of August. Sign up now if you wanna pay $10 to work for free at one of Australia's largest companies, who just made almost a billion dollars profit! I can't see any obvious detail on what happens to the stuff you create during the Hackathon (who owns the IP? Them or you? What restrictions are there on what you can do with the app after the hackathon?), nor what the prize is. Pretty pissweak and I love Qantas.
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Facebook shows off a datacentre and a smartphone testing lab
Facebook has let a few journalists into a datacentre in Oregon and a device testing lab. Facebook actually does quite interesting things with its datacentres as part of the Open Compute Project which it started, so it's a little more interesting than your garden variety room with computers in it. The device testing lab is also cool as Facebook has to support soooo many different handsets, running on various version of operating systems. They have close to 2000 smartphones in a server rack to test on.
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Review of a 10 gigabit ethernet switch
Here's a review of a 10 gigabit ethernet switch. Useful for when 1 gigabit just isn't enough for you. $1000 for an 8 port switch is expensive, but when you got the need for speed, it isn't that costly. This Netgear one in particular is silent, so you can chuck it in your study or small office, unlike the older ones that had tiny high speed fans (the worst type of fan) that made it impossible to be in the same room with. Maybe you didn't know such a thing existed. Now you do and you're welcome.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from Go, by The Chemical Brothers. Like The Sizzle? Tell your friends!