Mike Cannon-Brookes has won his war against AGL, gathering enough support in the media, public and with fellow shareholders to scuttle AGL's plan to dump its fossil fuel assets into a new company and keep the good stuff (retail, renewables). AGL's CEO and chairman resigned as a result. There's now a few empty board seats, allowing Mike and his cronies to jump in and do a review of AGL's business strategy. I assume that plan is a live broadcast of coal and gas power plants blown up via drone for our amusement, instead of spun off to moralless investors that'll keep burning gas and coal indefinitely. One of the rare occasions a billionaire does a good thing.
Chorus, New Zealand's equivalent of the NBN, is testing 25gbit/s services on the same fibre optic cables that are currently in the ground. By upgrading the access modules at the end of each cable to XGS-PON, our Kiwi mates can enjoy "21.4 Gbps throughput, tested simultaneously on the same strand of fibre that ran an 8 Gbps symmetric HyperFibre connection, and a 900/550 Mbps UFB link". They plan to bring it to retail in the next 2-3 years, so until then NZ will have to put up with 7700/7700 connections for NZ$275/m. I'm currently in the foetal position, with tears running down my face, demonically screaming the names of Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott so loud my neighbours are concerned.
There's a stronger whiff than usual that we might see something related to Apple's AR/VR headset at WWDC next week. They've filed a trademark for "realityOS" via one of their holding companies, which is the same method Apple uses to trademark the Californian locations for its macOS operating systems (i.e: macOS Big Sur, High Sierra, Monterey, etc). This is also the same name accidentally dropped in some App Store update logs earlier this year. Combined with the recent tactical drops of Apple's execs trying out a pre-production headset and a history of Apple's VR/AR project, I'm confident that we will see something at WWDC 2022 about a headset.
CloudSEK has stumbled across a cryptolocker called GoodWill that "propagates very unusual demands in exchange for the decryption key". Step one to get your data back is to "donate new clothes to the homeless, record the action, and post it on social media". Step two, "take five less fortunate children to Dominos, Pizza Hut or KFC for a treat, take pictures and videos, and post them on social media". The third and final act to get the decryption key, "provide financial assistance to anyone who needs urgent medical attention but cannot afford it, at a nearby hospital, record audio, and share it with the operators". It would have to be pretty fucking important data for me to go around luring street kids to KFC and posting it on social media. I don't want to end up in the rock spider wing of HM Prison Barwon.
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