The tech news machine is slowing down for the holidays, so that means there's less stuff you need to care about and less stuff for me to put into the Sizzle. As a result, I'm gonna take it easy the next few weeks and so should you. Here's the Sizzle Schedule for the holidays:
12th Dec to 23rd Dec - Sizzle Light
24th Dec to 5th Jan - just one Sizzle sent on the 30th of Dec
6th Jan - normal Sizzle resumes (CES kicks the year off)
NEWS
Remember when the PM said every home hooked up to the NBN by 2016?
The Shadow Communications Minister has gleefully reminded the proletariat that the NBN has failed to deliver on its promise of a cheaper network, rolled out faster. During the 2013 election Malcolm Turnbull promised that by the end of 2016 all premises will be hooked up with some form of internet access delivering at least 25mbit. That changed to 2020 as soon as they won the election, but still - here we are at the end of 2016 and the NBN is at best, a marginal improvement over what we had before. Meanwhile, only 44% of people who can get the NBN, have actually bothered to do so.
Discuss
Trump corralling US tech industry heavyweights to his New York lair
Donald Trump is apparently meeting with a bunch of US tech executives at Trump Tower in New York, to discuss what the new administration wants out of the tech industry, or something - I don't really know what goes down at these sorts of things. The official invite list is secret, but leaks have ferreted out, with the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Oracle rumoured to be attending. Oh to be a fly on the wall in that room.
Discuss
Nasty vulnerability found in some modern Netgear routers
Got a Netgear R6400, R7000 or R8000 router? Listen up, as Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team has unveiled a pretty serious flaw with them. A simple attack (literally just entering a URL with a command string attached) can allow anyone to run any command they like on your router. This is obviously bad - there's almost no limit as to what an attacker can't do, as all the commands issued via the URL are run as the root user. Netgear has no fix yet, but there's a temporary workaround here.
Discuss
COOL SHIT
Damn, the Surface Studio isn't that good
Arstechnica has the most detailed review of the Surface Studio I've seen yet. To be very blunt, it's a poor man's Wacom. The reviewer found it difficult to get comfortable and didn't find the stylus input as good as a Wacom unit. The Dial thingo, which looks amazing in the demos, just doesn't work as well in real life, sliding off the screen often. Then there's the fact Microsoft used laptop parts and an old school magnetic disk in a desktop machine, so performance is a little lacking. Looks like the Surface Studio was too good to be true.
Discuss
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 Nice Day To Go To The Pub, by Cosmic Psychos. Like The Sizzle? Like it on Facebook!