Medibank's IT crew have had a very shit week. They first noticed "unusual activity on its network" on October 13th. On October 17th they put out a media release saying there is "no evidence that any customer data has been removed from our IT environment". Yesterday they informed us they've "received messages from a group that wishes to negotiate regarding their alleged removal of customer data" and the ASX halted trading of their shares. According to the SMH, hackers are threatening to contact 1000 of the "most media persons" in their database "criteria is: most followers, politicians, actors, bloggers, LGBT activists, drug addictive people, etc" and "email them their information". Sucks to be an Optus customer with Medibank private health insurance!
It's that time of the decade again - Intel's got a new version of Thunderbolt. Intel reckon "Next-Gen Thunderbolt" (aka Thunderbolt 5, but Intel isn't calling it Thunderbolt 5 for some reason) will be capable of up to 80Gb/s of bandwidth and has a mode that'll allow "dynamic re-balancing" so you can have up to 120Gb/s for transmission and 40Gb/s for receiving, making it capable of dual 8K displays running at 60Hz. Intel also showed off USB4 v2 (why not call it USB 5???), which can also supports up to 80Gb/s and also carry DisplayPort 2.1 signals across 4x PCIe 4.0 lanes, so I'm not quite sure what Thunderbolt 5 brings to the party except perhaps one less layer of abstraction? Modern external I/O is very fast and very confusing.
The Internet Archive's Jason Scott and a merry band of anonymous hackers on Discord have created DiscMaster - a website "that is sifting through the CDs and floppy disks in the Internet Archive and making it all into a searchable database". It makes all those ISO and IMG and BIN files explorable on the web, no downloads required, unlocking the gems inside. To sweeten the deal even further, DiscMaster can play, convert and display all those weird and old media formats right in your browser. It's one thing to collect and hoard all this data, but it's another to make it available in a way that's easy to browse and accessible to people. The difficulty of that should not be understated. Now the fun bit is wading through it all and curating the interesting stuff. Go check it out.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke and student unveiling computer under Coles 'Apples for the Students' programme Coburg North Primary School, 1991 - Credit: State Library of Victoria
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