Just another reminder that Sizzlethon 2023 is still happening until mid-next week! You tell a friend about The Sizzle and I donate $1 to Ballarat's Child and Family Services (aka Cafs) for each person that uses your link to sign up for a free trial. The top referrer also gets a $100 JB Hi-Fi gift card, so if you think you can refer more than 4 people to The Sizzle, there's a good chance you'll win!
Apple told TechRadar and 9to5Mac today that it will support Rich Communication Services (RCS) text messaging in iOS, alongside iMessage, SMS and MMS in the Messages app. The full Apple quote is, "Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe the RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users". RCS requires carrier support (which now that iOS supports it, will come quickly) and only Google's proprietary implementation of RCS that Apple won't support is end-to-end encrypted, but it's better than nothing right now and gives the industry something to build on. I reckon Apple is hoping that finally supporting RCS is enough to placate the EU's Digital Markets Act instead of opening up iMessage.
As I write this, the Optus CEO and Managing Director of Networks are getting grilled by clueless Senators up in Canberra that you can wisely ignore, but as part of that process Optus submitted a document to the Senate with an account of what happened on the day. From 4am to 10am they didn't really know what was happening, but by 10:21am realised that "resetting and clearing routing connectivity on network elements which had disconnected themselves from the network" and "physically rebooting and reconnecting some network elements to restore connectivity" appeared to fix things, so that's what they did until everything was up and running at around 2PM. The document confirms that "the outage occurred due to approximately 90 PE routers automatically self-isolating in order to protect themselves from an overload of IP routing information" and was the result of "a software upgrade at one of the Singtel internet exchanges (known as STiX) in North America". There's still ACMA's and the Communications department's investigations too.
ESG Hound has a succinct article outlining all the things Elon Musk has gotten away lately with that anybody else would likely have been thrown in jail for - "Elon Musk is the Mr. Magoo of criminals, bumbling from one hilariously over-the-top and sloppy crime to another but always somehow landing on his feet, unmolested and unbothered, sporting a shit-eating grin", "the number of laws and regulations that Musk and his companies have broken is almost impressive. Nearly every agency Musk Inc. touches in his ever-expanding crime spree has let him walk". It really is amazing how he gets away with it while openly sympathising with anti-semitic conspiracy theories on a regular basis. But hey, the company he started makes fancy space rockets so he isn't that bad.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Dennis Ritchie, PhD, of Bell Labs, co-inventor of the UNIX operating system and father of the C programming language. (Alcatel-Lucent / Flickr)
📻 El Rodeo - Kyuss
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