Issue 294 - Monday, 12th December 2016 - Nice Day To Have A Schnitzel

In this issue

News

Not News, But Still Cool

  • Remember when the PM said every home hooked up to the NBN by 2016?
  • Trump corralling US tech industry heavyweights to his New York lair
  • Nasty vulnerability found in some modern Netgear routers
  • Damn, the Surface Studio isn't that good

NEWS

Remember when the PM said every home hooked up to the NBN by 2016? The Shadow Communications Minister has gleefully reminded the proletariat that the NBN has failed to deliver on its promise of a cheaper network, rolled out faster. During the 2013 election Malcolm Turnbull promised that by the end of 2016 all premises will be hooked up with some form of internet access delivering at least 25mbit. That changed to 2020 as soon as they won the election, but still - here we are at the end of 2016 and the NBN is at best, a marginal improvement over what we had before. Meanwhile, only 44% of people who can get the NBN, have actually bothered to do so. Discuss

Trump corralling US tech industry heavyweights to his New York lair Donald Trump is apparently meeting with a bunch of US tech executives at Trump Tower in New York, to discuss what the new administration wants out of the tech industry, or something - I don't really know what goes down at these sorts of things. The official invite list is secret, but leaks have ferreted out, with the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Oracle rumoured to be attending. Oh to be a fly on the wall in that room. Discuss

Nasty vulnerability found in some modern Netgear routers Got a Netgear R6400, R7000 or R8000 router? Listen up, as Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team has unveiled a pretty serious flaw with them. A simple attack (literally just entering a URL with a command string attached) can allow anyone to run any command they like on your router. This is obviously bad - there's almost no limit as to what an attacker can't do, as all the commands issued via the URL are run as the root user. Netgear has no fix yet, but there's a temporary workaround here. Discuss

COOL SHIT

Damn, the Surface Studio isn't that good Arstechnica has the most detailed review of the Surface Studio I've seen yet. To be very blunt, it's a poor man's Wacom. The reviewer found it difficult to get comfortable and didn't find the stylus input as good as a Wacom unit. The Dial thingo, which looks amazing in the demos, just doesn't work as well in real life, sliding off the screen often. Then there's the fact Microsoft used laptop parts and an old school magnetic disk in a desktop machine, so performance is a little lacking. Looks like the Surface Studio was too good to be true. Discuss

Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony

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