The US government has thrown two indictments at Huawei overnight. The first is related to Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou and how she was involved in "selling US technology to Iran in violation of US sanctions laws" and the other indictment outlines how Huawei stole "cell phone testing technology from T-Mobile". T-Mobile has a robot called Tappy that would simulate real-world smartphone use and spot problems before they hit customers. Huawei wanted to do the same but instead of developing their own system, they tried to sneak in to T-Mobile's lab and stole parts of it, hahaha. Oh and allegedly, Huawei had a bonus program to reward employees who could steal confidential info from competitors.
I dunno if it's a coincidence or not, but the same day the US DoJ throws charges at Huawei and its CFO, TPG decides to call it quits on rolling out a mobile network in Australia. That's right, TPG has decided not to go ahead with being a mobile carrier. They're saying that because the Australian government has blocked any Huawei 5G devices entering Australia, that its plan to upgrade its existing 4G infrastructure to 5G when the time is right, has been made impossible, so there's no point continuing. Some people reckon that's a very convenient excuse to stop building a network while the ACCC is pondering if it will allow TPG and Vodafone to merge.
Someone found an embarrassing bug in Apple's Facetime on the latest version of iOS, which allows a person access to audio and video from your device *before* you answer the call. Technically you could use it to spy on someone without them knowing. You simply call someone, then add yourself to the call and this makes Facetime connect to the other device, even though on the other device it still appears as ringing. Here's a 2 minute video of the bug that makes way more sense than my explanation. I don't know how many people let their iPad or iPhone ring without answering/ignoring it, but it's a shit bug none the less. Apple reckons a fix is coming "this week" and in the meantime, has disabled FaceTime Group calling.
Remember how Public Transport Victoria said a few months ago that they're goinn to launch a trial of an app that'll let you use a smartphone on public transport instead of a Myki card? Well, that trial is now live and taking applicants. They want 4,000 Android users to sign up to give the app a test run. The app will use the NFC capabilities of the smartphone to emulate a ticket. Just open the app, slap your phone on a reader and off you go. You can even top up via the app. Unless you've got an iPhone. Apple and PTV have apparently been unable to come to an agreement. I'm guessing it's due to Apple wanting you to do all NFC stuff via Apple Wallet but PTV want you to open their app every time.
Facebook is planning to merge messaging between Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger. "Each service will continue to operate as a standalone app, but according to the Times, Facebook is rebuilding the underlying infrastructure so that people who might use only one of Facebook’s properties could communicate with others within the company’s ecosystem. All of the apps will support end-to-end encryption as well. Facebook has yet to provide a timeline for when this will happen". Gotta increase that engagement! Honestly, what a mess this would be. They're gonna be just as bad as Google and their ten thousand different ways to chat to someone.
If you don't follow me on Twitter you may not know this, but I got an electric car a month ago! It's a Hyundai Ioniq and I've written up a post for Drive Zero (you can catch all my unpaid EV ranting over there by the way) all about it. The post is more of an FAQ than a story really, answering all the questions I get about it, like "where do you charge it?", "how much does it cost to charge?", "how far can you go?" and stuff like that. The bottom line is that I like the car as it's pretty much the same as any modern Hyundai, but I wish it had more range (350km would be the sweet spot imho) and didn't cost so much to buy (I'll break even on the 5 year TCO versus a Hybrid).
Steam has released a version of Steam Link for the Raspberry Pi! This means you can grab that Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ you're not using, plug it in to your network, plug it in to your TV and play games from your PC on your TV without having to plug the TV into your PC. It basically streams the video from your PC over the network (you want to use Ethernet if possible) to your TV and the controller (Xbox or PS4 controllers work) or keyboard & mouse you've got hooked up to the Raspberry Pi lets you interact with the game. I haven't used the Pi in particular for Steam Link, but I have used Steam's official (but now discontinued) device and it was pretty smooth for a game like Civ (never tried an FPS).
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
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