Issue 1729 - Tuesday 8th November, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Tesla Superchargers funded by NSW govt will be open to all EVs

Good news for non-Tesla EV owners - the recently announced tranche of Supercharger fast EV charging sites that'll be funded by the NSW state government will be made available to all EVs, not just Tesla vehicles. This already happens in most of Europe and is currently in progress to be a thing in the USA, so it's not surprising it's happening here too. To pay you simply use the Tesla app. Here's a video of how it works in Europe. There's 86 fast charging sites (each one with a minimum of 2x 350kw and 2x 175kw, many of them are bigger) that'll be built thanks to $35m via round 1 of the Drive Electric NSW EV Fast Charging grant program and they should be ready for use by the end of 2024. Tesla will build 32 of those. Here's a map of all the sites, which was developed from NSW's Fast Charging Master Plan.

US DoJ arrested the thief of Silk Road's 50,000 Bitcoin

A dude living in the US state of Georgia called James Zhong, stole 50,000 Bitcoin from the Silk Road a decade ago with what appears to be a bug in the marketplace's withdrawal system. The DoJ provides an example of the bug: "on September 19, 2012, Zhong deposited 500 Bitcoin into a Silk Road wallet. Less than five seconds after making the initial deposit, Zhong executed five withdrawals of 500 Bitcoin in rapid succession — i.e., within the same second — resulting in a net gain of 2,000 Bitcoin". Apparently they found the 50,000 BTC (worth around A$1.6b now, A$5.3b at Bitcoin's peak last year, A$463,000 when he stole it in 2012) at Zhong's residence on a "circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin". Old mate plead guilty to wire fraud and could face up to 20 years in a federal prison.

TSMC cranks out 1nm semiconductors in the lab

The materials science wizards at TSMC, MIT and the National University of Taiwan discovered "a new set of materials that can create monolayer — or two-dimensional — transistors in a chip to scale the overall density by a factor matching the number of layers". By "using post-transition metal bismuth and some semi-conductive monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides to reduce the size of the gaps", they are able to produce "2D transistors much smaller than had been previously possible". It's still a long way off from going inside the guts of an iPhone (they're still messing around with various materials to see what works best) and TSMC is saying anything beyond the upcoming N3E "3-nm" node is in a "pathfinding" stage, but Taiwanese news sources are reporting that TSMC is already planning to build a 1-nm fab based on this research. Moore's law still has some life left in it, baby!

Something I Saw On The Internet

Use a Yubikey to store your SSH private key

Everyone tells me I should use SSH keys to log into my stuff, but I still use passwords because 1. I'm lazy and 2. scared I'll lose the file containing the key. This blog post explains how to put your SSH private key on a Yubikey. That's right, as of OpenSSH 8.2 you can keep the private key on a Yubikey two factor device dongle thingy, safe and sound. The cartoon anthropomorphised animals on the blog post mean you're getting top tier advice, the furries know their shit when it comes to computer security.

Bargains

Image Of The Day

Prototype 'gold box' cochlear implant or bionic ear, mixed materials, designed and made at the University of Melbourne Department of Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1979 (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences)

The End

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