NEWS
MalwareTech arrested in US for alleged involvement with Kronos malware
Remember that guy who single handedly saved us from the impending doomsday cryptolocker worm WannaCry? Marcus Hutchins, aka MalwareTech, was heralded as a good guy British hackerbloke, but now, he's in a US prison, arrested on his way out of the US after attending the Blackhat conference in Vegas. He appeared in court on charges of being the creator of the Kronos malware, according to an indictment filed in Wisconsin. It's a bit messy as to what's going on, but using info found in the AlphaBay dark web market bust, the Feds gained info that leads them to believe MalwareTech was deeply involved with the creation of malware that was running rampant stealing people's bank details and listed for sale on AlphaBay for anyone with a few grand of BTC to "invest". Will be interesting to see what happens here, as most people seem to think the FBI has confused legit info sec research with actual involvement in criminal activity.
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Uber gave its drivers cars it knew were faulty, only cared once they caught fire
Uber borrowed cash from Goldman Sachs (that's what I call arsehole synergy) to buy 1,000 Honda Vezel SUVs that were recalled in Singapore because they have electrical faults. Uber knew the cars were duds, but the price was too good to refuse, so it bought em, didn't repair em (that'd cost $$), leased em out to Uber drivers in Singapore and didn't think they've done anything wrong until one of those defective SUVs caught fire in a Singapore street. Uber has now, of course, said they're on top of it, they're really sorry and that it'll never happen again. But it will, that's just how those scumfucks at Uber operate.
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CBA's smart ATMs facilitated huge money laundering operations
The Commonwealth Bank seems to have taken a page out of Uber's "roll it out then apologise later" ethos with its smart ATMs that let you deposit cash then instantly transfer it wherever you like. AUSTRAC, the Australian regulator responsible for monitoring dodgy transactions said that CBA allowed over 53,000 deposits worth over $10,000 each and didn't follow the appropriate anti-money laundering procedures normally required for cash transactions worth over $10,000. AUSTRAC reckons at least $77m was funnelled offshore and because CBA didn't record who did these deposits, law enforcement doesn't know either and the crims were able to turn their dirty cash into clean cash.
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OnePlus officially selling its devices in Australia end of the month
The cheapskate's favourite smartphone brand, OnePlus, have told Gizmodo AU that they plan to officially sell their cheap, high spec phones in Australia. OnePlus are aware that loads of Aussies buy OnePlus devices off less than reputable websites overseas, which results in a poor customer experience due to a total lack of post-purchase support and in the case of some store, preloaded malware! A soft launch (e.g: probably just the official website shipping to AU) will begin around the end of the month. After that, OnePlus will have "fan events" in Melb & Syd to see what they should do next.
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A few sentences of random news that didn't deserve their own paragraph
Look there's fuck all news today beyond items that really don't need more than a sentence to do them justice, so here's a random assortment of things I thought there interesting, but don't need much explanation. GoPro aren't losing as much money as they used to. The Mayor of London announced funding for 1500 EV charging points in residential areas across 25 London boroughs. Facebook has kicked their machine learning skills up a notch to give language translations a more natural feel and to detect and alert dumb meatbag users of fake news. The use of MyHealth Record is now officially be opt-out instead of opt-in for every Australian.
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COOL SHIT
BiglyBT - a torrent client for Windows that doesn't suck
When a good BitTorrent client becomes popular, it's often ruined by ads. Some company buys the program, shoves it full of shit to increase revenue and then it sits there, languishing until it's just full of malware and only noobs download it. That happened to uTorrent and it happened to Vuze - both popular torrent clients, now pieces of shit. A group of Vuze's core developers have forked a new BitTorrent client off an old Vuze codebase and are calling it BiglyBT. They plan to keep it ad-free, open source and away from commercial interests - as a Torrent client should be.
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Baby Driver boosted sales of iPods on eBay AU almost 1000%
Seen Baby Driver at the cinema yet? Top shelf film, you should go watch it. The main character, Baby (yes, the same Baby that is the Driver in the title of the movie), loves his iPods. He's got more than one, he's always wearing them, different iPods have different genres of music on em. It was all very cool and reminded me of the days 10+ years ago when I had an iPod and took it with me everywhere and it kinda made me want to own an iPod again. Looks like I wasn't alone, as sales of iPods on eBay Australia increased 929% since the movie came out and a further 52% when Apple announced they'll stop selling iPods. Pro-tip: Facebook buy & sell groups have loads and the noobs don't know what their old shit is worth, get on it if you want a nice iPod nano to rock out with.
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New Nissan LEAF coming soon and I am pumped because I can't afford a Model 3
Here's what we know so far about the upcoming 2nd gen Nissan LEAF electric car. As the reveal date gets closer (September 6), Nissan has been doing that absolutely fucking annoying marketing tactic of releasing a crumb of info every few weeks in order build hype. Today's morsel is a side profile silhouette and claims that the new LEAF is very aerodynamic so you get better range. A few weeks ago Nissan let us know about "e-Pedal", allowing the LEAF to be driven with a single pedal thanks to regenerative braking (basically every non-shit EV has this). Before that, it was ProPilot, Nissan's first stab at autonomous driving and a glimpse of the interior. There's also been a few spy shots, with the best ones being these series of pics from France which shows a RHD LEAF with ~300km range and these latest ones from a hotel window showing an uncovered LEAF in the process of shooting what looks like a TV commercial. Good news is that Nissan Australia has said that they are totally on-board and can't wait to sell it here. Fuck yeah.
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Here endeth the sizzle (until Monday!)
--Anthony
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