Issue 608 Tuesday, 3rd April 2018

I thought it would be weird to slip into your inbox today without saying hi, so Hi! My name is Josh Withers and I'm one of the three mortals filling in for Anthony while he's re-formatting his personal C: drive.

In This Issue

  • NBN Co. flicks on a new fibre-to-the-something
  • Australians just as daft as the rest of the world
  • China's Heavenly Palace meets its maker in the Pacific
  • All the cool clouds gather over Canberra
  • Rumoured Apple rumours confirmed in rumour
  • Here's a new IP address for you to remember
  • April Fools ICYMI
  • Dust off that CD drive

    • News

    NBN Co. flicks on a new fibre-to-the-something

    As the Australian government continues to investigate how to deliver the NBN with less money but still win elections with it, NBN Co. slipped out a Great Thursday late-afternoon press release announcing that the first FTTC, fibre-to-the-curb, premises in Melbourne and Sydney were ready for connections. As exciting as it is for these homes, the more exciting prospect is the addition of two new terms to our brain, the other being G.fast which will surely become the HD of 2018.

    Australians just as daft as the rest of the world

    Great Australian house of pain, the ACCC, has began an inquiry into Australians' use of social media and digital platforms and it turns out that we are no more intelligent than the average Joe internationally and most of us don't know what data is – or who has ours. This is going to be one of those stories that will go on forever and ever, and ever, so the age-old adage still stands: Delete Facebook, lawyer up, hit the gym.

    China's 'Heavenly Palace' meets its maker in the Pacific

    China's great silver hope, the 10.4 metre space station named 'Heavenly Palace', came crashing back to earth somewhere in-between Samoa and French Polynesia on Monday. When it launched in 2011 it was symbolic of China's rise. Tiangong-1 joins 263 of its metal colleagues in the famous Spacecraft Cemetery in the southern Pacific Ocean, home to Russia's Mir space station, and is probably now symbolic of China's relationship with the US.

    All the cool clouds gather over Canberra

    Microsoft's Azure cloud platform has beaten Amazon's AWS to launching a Canberra-based data centre this morning but neither other-peoples-computers provider has reached 'protected' level certification. That level of data protection has only been issued to four local cloud providers and a selected number of metal filing cabinets on Gumtree.

    Rumoured Apple CPU rumours confirmed in rumour

    After hearing podcasters talk about it for the last two years Bloomberg's man on the rumour beat, Mark Gurmen, reports that Apple isn't finishing ruining the Mac platform completely and will ditch Intel CPUs and move to its own chipsets in 2020. This isn't a terrible idea if only because it keeps another external company out of Apple's production line and profit line but the Mac's biggest asset is its boring old reliability and stability that we've been enjoying ever since Steve Jobs invited Intel Inside. We're all experts at spending Tim Cooks' money but all I want for my Mac is FaceID and more of that sweet speed.

    Not News, But Still Cool

    Here's a new IP address for you to remember

    This paragraph may become one of those quotes that are embarrassingly wrong in a decade, but Cloudflare seems like the kind of company I could trust with my data. I personally don't do any business with them, but their free and paid business model seems trustworthy and transparent, so when they launched a new privacy-centric DNS service on April Fools' Day I read through to the end waiting for the gotcha-moment and instead I just opened up my Mac's System Preferences and changed my DNS servers to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 because the last thing everyone needs to know is how many times I search Google for Google.

    April Fools ICYMI

    The first day of April is a good day to stay off Twitter but two April Fools' moments I thought Sizzle readers might enjoy were the 501st Legion introducing a costume reference for shirtless Kylo Ren, and Australian online education provider courses.com.au launching a Diploma of Human Survival (AI) (SKYN37) provided by a little known RTO in 'Former Canberra' which I'd totally be taking if my little brother wasn't already a prepper.

    Dust off that CD drive

    Sizzle readers who identify with the terms 'unmarried' or 'hoarder' might want to look at those boxes of CDs we've been holding onto might want to make their way into your Dropbox. The salesperson at JB Hi-Fi never mentioned disc rot when he was hocking off spindles of 100 CDs for $20 but the nerds at Gizmodo have a good write-up reminding us that CDs and especially CD-Rs have a shelf life. Disc rot is how I lost my precious copies of TTD and the Weird Al back catalogue, I should've kept them in Dad's fridge.

    --Josh

    Anthony is currently on holiday and is spending two months travelling to Tokyo, Dusseldorf, Zurich, Geneva, London, Dallas and Los Angeles. While he is gone, Rebecca Pike, Jacob Bates and Joshua Withers will be supplying you with the freshest news. Anthony will be back writing The Sizzle on the 12th of June!