The White House issued a statement today, formally blaming the Russian military for NotPetya, that nasty data deletion worm, that along with all its variants, ruined the lives of sys admins and hopefully ended the careers of a few CIOs around the world. The UK's NCSC and Australia agrees with the USA. The statement simply said that the Russians were using NotPetya to "destabilise" Ukraine and that the "reckless and indiscriminate cyber-attack will be met with international consequences". Dunno what the consequences the USA will impose on Russia though - a full scale ground invasion via Finland perhaps? That'd be good for the ol' military industrial complex.
People are really, really, really upset about Snapchat's latest redesign. A petition managed to get 1 million people asking Snapchat to roll the changes back has fallen on deaf ears. Evan Spiegel reckons that "even the frustrations we're seeing really validate those changes. It'll take time for people to adjust, but for me using it for a couple months I feel way more attached to the service". I haven't used Snapchat in ages, but I assume someone moved the emoji icon and changed where you access the thing that makes you look like a dog? No wonder people are upset!
Oh look, another Unicode bug that causes every Apple operating system to crash. "The bug, induced by sending a specific character in the Indian language Telugu, causes certain apps on iPhones, iPads, and Macs to freeze up and become unresponsive. Messages, Safari, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other apps that accept text input are all affected". If you use the character in iMessage, it will cause iMessage to freeze every time it loads, haha. Apple said a fix will come soon. What's going on here? How can this happen again?
In an article in the WSJ (paywalled, here's an alternative link), people close to Peter Thiel him say that he's leaving San Francisco and going to Los Angeles because he has "grown more disaffected by what he sees as the intolerant, left-leaning politics of the San Francisco Bay Area, and increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for tech businesses amid greater risk of regulation". He's even thinking of leaving Facebook's board because of his relationship with Donald Trump and the rest of Facebook's, particularly Mark Zuckerberg's, disdain of the stupidest President the USA has ever had. Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out Pete.
BMW's Australian boss has said that unless Australian governments take EVs seriously, BMW won't bring future EV models to Australia, leaving us with crappier cars as BMW pours more of its efforts into EVs instead of ICE vehicles. Ditto Jaguar's CEO, who thinks Australia "will squander billions of dollars of potential economic benefits" by not supporting early adopters of EVs. Even the Australian Chief Scientist reckons we really missing out when it comes to electric cars. Meanwhile, over in the USA, Southern California Edison customers and employees can get US$10,000 off a brand new BMW i3.
The creators of Monument Valley have a new iOS game - Florence. Not a single zombie, BFG, dragon, wizard or fast car in it and that's a nice thing sometimes. Florence is more of a visual novel than a game really and according to the review on Press Start, "encapsulates the rollercoaster ride that is young love, breaking free of routine and the pursuit of happiness". Excellent ratings on the App Store too. I downloaded Florence, just to check it out and ended up playing the entire thing. My mate Raj over at Reckoner likes it too. If you're after something to occupy you for about 30 minutes, it's $4.49 very well spent, just to appreciate the creativity. There's even a few nice Melbourne touches in it.
That's it, see ya Monday!
--Anthony
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
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