After dozens of leaks, the Samsung Galaxy S10 phones have been formally announced and are ready to order. There's 4 different variants - the S10e, S10, S10+ and S10 5G. I'm not gonna bore everyone by going through all the specs, but there are some highlights. The chunky 5G model (6.7" screen!) obviously has 5G support and can be configured with 12GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The S10+ and 5G have two front cameras, the S10, S10+ and 5G have three rear cameras (regular, 2x zoom & wide-angle) and the 5G has a 4th rear camera for "time-of-flight" 3D depth sensing like the Face ID sensor on an iPhone. They've got fingerprint sensors under the screen, still has a 3.5mm headphone socket, support 802.11ax wi-fi and reverse charging. All of them except the 5G go on sale here on March 8 (the 5G is TBA price & date and will only be on Telstra) - they're in the same price range as the iPhone XS, aka, expensive.
Samsung also announced their folding phone, the Galaxy Fold. It's pretty much two Galaxy S10 phones stacked together (so it's a thick boy) and when you unfold them, you have a 7.3" display. CNET handily uploaded a 7 minute video of just the Galaxy Fold portion of Samsung's otherwise snoozefest of a presentation. I admire Samsung getting this tech to market, but it looks stupid when used in single screen mode and it's not gonna fit in a pocket (though maybe we crossed the point where phones need to fit in pockets back in 2016). It'll cost US$1,980 and come out April 26. Considering how soon it's going on sale, I'm surprised there were no hands on units available so journos could have a crack. Also announced - the Galaxy Watch Active (it can measure blood pressure!), Galaxy Buds (Samsung's version of AirPods) and a Bixby-powered Galaxy Home Speaker (Samsung's HomePod).
The cardiology department at Cabrini Hospital in Melbourne has been hit by a cryptolocker that encrypted the medical records of 15,000 patients. Cabrini must not have had backups, because after 3 weeks of fucking around they apparently paid the hackers their ransom in order to get the files back. Despite this, "some of the scrambled files have not been recovered" and "some patients were told that their files had been lost but were not given any explanation. Others have turned up for appointments for which the hospital had no record". Toyota Australia has also been infected with a cryptolocker, with "all employees unable to access their emails" and car deliveries impacted as dealers are having trouble contacting head office. Pretty piss poor form for a fancy private hospital like Cabrini and a big cashed up company like Toyota.
Perverts are watching YouTube videos of kids innocently swimming, showing off their new clothes and doing gymnastics, then leaving warped comments with notes on the "good stuff" for other pervs to enjoy. YouTube's algorithm makes it worse by digging up similar videos making it easy for people into kiddie porn to get their rocks off. Matt Watson made a 20-min video exposing this trend on YouTube and not long after, Disney, Nestle and Epic (aka Fortnite) pulled their advertising from YouTube because they're freaked out their ads will appear on videos with these comments. Only once advertisers reacted, did YouTube delete a bunch of accounts and disabled comments on some videos highlighted in Matt's video. YouTube needs to be way more proactive here, the optics are horrible.
The Australian Digital Health Agency told a Senate estimates hearing yesterday that 2.5 million Australians have opted out of My Health Record - approximately 10% of those eligible. Apparently that opt-out rate is within government expectations, despite only 1.9% of people opting-out during a smaller trial involving 1m people. When asked how the 10% opt-out rate compares to other systems around the world, the ADHA boss said there was not any international comparisons he could point to because Australia is "leading the field", hahah, cheeky. 10% sounds like a lot, and could be significant versus overseas experiences, but 90% represents a vast, vast, majority of people enrolled in the system.
A bloke on the OCAU forums (yeah baby, old school) has posted about his attempt to get rid of his ratshit NBN connection and replace it with 4G internet via an Optus tower close to his home. To throw a spanner in the works, he lives around some beautiful hills and valleys that make for a challenging radio environment. Ultimately he stuck two Yagi antennas on a pole on his roof and stuffed a Netgear Nighthawk M1 modem into an actively cooled waterproof box. Speeds are around 60-100 down/20mbit up and he pays Optus $125/m for 400GB & unmetered Netflix/Fetch/Stan/iView. $125 is more than a citizen in an industrialised country should be paying for sub-100mbit internet, but it's a shitload better than the FTTN that constantly dropped out and barely got above 20mbit he had before.
Over in the USA they have a thing called Turo, where you can rent out your car to randos - it's Airbnb for cars really. Anyways, this guy has a fleet of PHEVs/EVs he rents out on the platform (Fiat 500e, Tesla Model 3, Chevy Volt, Prius Prime and BMW i3 Rex) and wrote an article about how people treat the EVs on InsideEVs. Besides the usual people are pigs and treat the car like a rolling garbage bin, it's fascinating to see how people who aren't into cars or EVs treat them. The charger plugs are never put back where they belong, put the heater on max as they're used to it taking time to warm up as the engine warms up, don't realise how long it takes to charge an EV over a 120V/240V socket and expect it to take like 10 minutes (it takes over 12 hours), being totally confused by public charging networks and people running out of electricity and needing a tow.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
Aussie Broadband is the best ISP I've used since Internode's glory days. Their CEO gives talks at AUSNOG about their network and they even have network utilisation charts for every NBN POI. Their pricing isn't the cheapest, but if you want an ISP that's fast & reliable, give them a shot. Use my affiliate link or my referral code (1001031) and we both get $50 credit on our next bill.
The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Join us on Slack and chat with other Sizzle subscribers.
The Sizzle acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures, and to elders both past and present.
This email was sent to *|EMAIL|*
why did I get this? | unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences