Report into hack of Australian Parliament will probably never be made public
Latest version of Firefox is much snappier for Mac users
SpaceX’s satellite internet that doesn’t suck will go live mid-2020
Xiaomi Mi Band 4 review
Cheap Pixelmator Pro, .au domain names, Circles.life 12m pre-paid offer
Remember earlier this year when a "sophisticated state actor" breached the internal networks of the Liberal, ALP and National parties, along with the Parliamentary network? A report on the incident has been handed to Senate president Scott Ryan, who confirmed having received it in Senate Estimates earlier this week. When asked about the contents of the report, he said he's waiting for a "layperson's briefing" as he understood only "80 to 90% of it". When asked when the report will be released to the public, he said "I am not convinced that publishing the report I have received, even in redacted form, will be helpful". Probably because it'll make China look bad and we don't want to upset China too much as it'll be bad for our economy.
Version 70 of Firefox has been made public and it includes some rather nice features. Mac users will be happy to know that Firefox now uses the Core Animation framework to render web pages, lowering CPU usage dramatically, which in turn lowers power consumption. If you've been avoiding Firefox for this reason, give it a crack. Social tracking protection is now enabled by default, blocking cross-site tracking cookies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from following you around the web. It'll also give you a report of all the crap that's been blocked. There's a faster Javascript interpreter and Windows users with just integrated Intel graphics will enjoy GPU hardware acceleration of page rendering turned on by default. Death to Chrome, long live Firefox!
Elon Musk has sent two tweets via SpaceX's Starlink satellites. According to SpaceX president & COO Gwynne Shotwell (i.e: the person who does all the hard work at SpaceX that stops it going off the rails like Tesla) Elon's got a Starlink terminal at his house and went on to say that they're confident people in the USA will be able to purchase a Starlink connection in mid-2020. The US Air Force Research Laboratory has been testing Starlink on a military plane and was able to achieve 610Mbps in flight. Impressive. Also in billionaire space news, Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos's penis extension) managed to get Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to join it in building equipment to help NASA get humans back on the moon in 2024. Shit is getting serious now!
Ausdroid has a nice review of the Xiaomi MiBand 4. If you've never seen one before, it's like a Fitbit on steroids with a colour screen that costs half as much. It'll log your movement activity, do heart rate stuff, is waterproof, can show notifications, has a clock on it, will last around 20 days before needing a recharge and costs only $59. It doesn't log activity as accurately as some of the fitness devices from Garmin or the Apple Watch as it doesn't have GPS built in, but it's only $59! Looks like a really handy device if all you want on your wrist are notifications and some basic activity tracking but don't want to spend the big bucks on an Apple Watch or suffer through the turds that are Android-based smartwatches.
Pixelmator Pro - $30.99 from the Mac App Store (usually $60+)
Circles.life (Optus MVNO) offering 20GB/m pre-paid plans for $18/m
Zuver has $1 .com.au/.net.au/.id.au domain names on sale
🎶 Miss Modular - Stereolab
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