I've started a little side-hustle helping people set up Discourse forums because it's nice to see online communities grow outside of the walled gardens of Big Tech companies - plus I could use the extra cash.
If your club, business, group or whatever wants a nice forum like The Sizzle's, or the Australia Computer Museum Society's, but needs someone to do all the technical back-end work, please visit https://discourse.decryption.net.au and get in touch!
Montana's law banning TikTok passed and will come into effect 1st of Jan 2024 to "protect Montanans' personal and private data from being harvested by the Chinese Communist party". TikTok itself plus Apple and Google can be fined up to US$10,000 a day "each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok", but ISPs are spared having to block TikTok's website or access to it because they whinged/lobbied that it would be too hard to do. The state is already facing a lawsuit on behalf of users of TikTok in Montana, pretty much saying that it's unconstitutional and that Montana has no power to actually create laws like this. Oh and of course, it'll be trivially easy to fire up a VPN, pretend to be in California and use TikTok all you like.
The Australian Stock Exchange's hare-brained plan to replace the venerable CHESS system with a blockchain based platform is officially dead. Back in November, a report the ASX commissioned found that after seven years of waiting for New York based company called Digital Asset to make something usable, they'd have to do a major overhaul to get anything remotely close to production ready using blockchain, so they stopped work and had a think about what to do next. The plan now is to "go down the more conventional route, that is without the focus on DLT (or) blockchain" and "use a more conventional technology than in the original solution in order to achieve the business outcomes".
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin scored a "firm-fixed price" US$3.4b contract to develop a "a human landing system for the agency's Artemis V mission to the Moon". The lander is named "Blue Moon" and will be used to shuttle humans between the Gateway space station that'll orbit the moon (yes there's gonna be a space station orbiting the moon - stage one to launch November 2024) and the lunar surface "no earlier than September 2029". This is different to SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System, which will be used in Artemis III and IV and also dock with Gateway before moving on to the moon. Jeff was salty he lost that gig and sued NASA over it, so maybe this is NASA appeasing him so there's at least some competitive tension for SpaceX.
I think most of us had a hunch this was happening, but two reports have detailed how cheap Android devices are pre-loaded with persistent malware at the factory. Report one is from Trend Micro, who found that "as 8.9 million phones comprising as many as 50 different brands" (who they didn't name, but I assume are AliExpress/Temu/Wish type brands) that come pre-installed with the Guerrilla malware platform. Report two, by Daniel Milisic, found a similar setup but on a bunch of Android based TV set top boxes. They're different malware platforms, but do the same thing - use the device they're installed on to act as proxies for which to funnel malicious traffic through (or even resell as VPNs), take over social media accounts (for spamming/fraud) and click on ads to install apps and claim the ad revenue.
In a room lined with pyramids of foam plastic that absorbs radio energy, engineer Charles A. Haas inspects a model of the Telestar experimental communications satellite at the Bell Telephone Co., lab in Hillside N.J., February 1962. (AP Photo)
📻 Heal - Weed
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.