After two years of back and forth between ISPs and NBN, the ACCC has finally approved the NBN Special Access Undertaking - a lengthy document that "sets the rules for how broadband providers will access the NBN over the coming decades and will apply until 2040". According to the ACCC's executive summary of the SAU (the full 368 page SAU is on NBN's website if you're keen), the most popular 50 Mbps wholesale plan price will go up immediately, but the 25 Mbps and 100 Mbps plans will go down a bit. From now until FY2023, wholesale pricing increases will be capped by the Consumer Price Index or 5%, whichever is greater - so expect 5% annual increases to your internet plans as ISPs pass this cost on to us. Awesome.
The High Court has declared that Victoria's zero and low emission vehicles road-user charge is invalid because they determined it to be an excise and only the Commonwealth can do that. Here's the High Court's statement and here's the full decision. The decision was released about 30 min ago so the Victorian government hasn't made a statement yet, but you'd assume it puts an end to VicRoads collecting the fee from all ZLEV drivers and hopefully, a refund on the money they illegally collected. It also means that the federal government now has to hurry up and come up with a replacement for the fuel excise at a national level - like it should have done years ago when hybrids and fuel efficient vehicles were already chipping away at fuel excise revenue.
You may have seen info floating around the internet that Signal has a zero-day vulnerability that allows for remote device takeovers and the best way to mitigate it is to turn off link previews. Signal posted to Twitter that "after responsible investigation *we have no evidence that suggests this vulnerability is real* nor has any additional info been shared via our official reporting channels. We also checked with people across US Government, since the copy-paste report claimed USG as a source. Those we spoke to have no info suggesting this is a valid claim". No harm in disabling link previews as a precaution, but just goes to show how bullshit can spread quickly.
The Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra (The Australian National University)
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