NEWS
Android Pay gets wide acceptance with Australian banks, unlike Apple Pay Google has one-upped Apple in the mobile payments game in Australia, hooking up with ANZ, Westpac, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia, Bendigo Bank, Cuscal, ING DIRECT, Macquarie Bank, and St. George to offer contactless payments linked to your EFTPOS, Visa or Mastercard, from your Android device. Also launched is the ability to pay using Android Pay inside apps from a couple of Australian retailers like Catch of the Day, Eat Now, Menulog and others. That Nexus 5X just got a little more useful.
Dallas Buyers Club vs. iiNet is still going on and the judge is getting pissed off with 'em The Dallas Buyers Club vs. iiNet legal case is creeping closer to a conclusion, with the judge refusing to give DBC access to the 472 accounts that allegedly pirated the movie. The judge had earlier put restrictions on how DBC can contact the alleged pirates and the costs they can recoup (the price of the movie at retail and reasonable costs to obtain the customer's details), but DBC didn't like that and appealed the judge's decision, which didn't go well for them today. Either DBC plays by the judge's rules for recouping their costs, or they get nothing. What a bunch of ferrets.
Hideo Kojima leaves Konami to start his own game studio Hideo Kojima is the creative genius behind the Metal Gear Solid franchise (amongst other things). It's been a bit, erm, shit of late, but the original couple of games are absolute masterpieces. Unfortunately Hideo and Konami haven't been getting along too well and now Hideo has officially left Konami, opening a new game studio and taking some staff members with him. I hope this means the collaboration between Hideo and Guillermo del Toro happens, that would be so cool. I'd Kickstart the hell out of that.
Facebook slightly loosens its real name policy Facebook has had a policy of making sure you use your real name for a while now. If you didn't use your real, legal name, Facebook would shut your account down. After a lot of protesting from transgender people and victims of domestic abuse or other sorts of discrimination, Facebook has decided to ease off a little and somehow make it harder for people to report others using fake names (what the fuck? you can dob people in for using an alias?) and easier for people to verify that their alias is legit. Having a "real name" attached to an account on Facebook seems to be a big deal for them, I wonder why?
Julian Assange will be questioned by Swedish police inside the Ecuadorian embassy one day soon Julian Assange's time stuck inside the London's Ecuadorean embassy may soon be coming to an end. Swedish police have agreed to visit the embassy to question Assange over the alleged rape in 2010. Assange has been stuck in the embassy since 2012 as he fears that as soon as he steps outside, he will be extradited by UK police to Sweden, where from there, he will be extradited to the USA and the real bad stuff would happen.
COOL SHIT
Backblaze's B2 storage service goes public - store your data in the cloud for half a cent per GB I've mentioned Backblaze's S3-like storage service, B2, in the past - it's now out of private beta and ready for developers to integrate it into their apps. It's the cheapest place to stash data on the Internet, at only US$0.005/GB - that's half a cent. As soon as Arq backup adds support for B2 into their app, I'm moving my backups there.
Tom's Hardware release a handy "which GPU should I buy?" list Thinking of upgrading your gaming rig or building one over the holidays? Tom's Hardware has some great info on picking a graphics card. They've made a list of the cards they recommend for gaming at 720p, 1080p, and higher resolutions. They also ranked the cards from fastest to slowest, so you can see if the card you have now is gonna be much better than something new (e.g: if you have a GTX 780 already, prob don't bother upgrading to a GTX 970). Speaking of fast gaming PCs - over on Reckoner, Raj has outlined a pretty dope PC build he took on recently.
Pirate Bay co-founder, Peter Sunde, is not optimistic about the future of the Internet If you ever read the things I write here and go "fark, he's pretty cynical about whole IT industry and the Internet, isn't he?" well cop a load of Peter Sunde, one of the Pirate Bay founders, in this interview with Motherboard. Once a champion of the free Internet, he's resigned himself to the fact that he's lost the battle and that the population really doesn't give a stuff about this issue. The only way they're going to learn the folly of a corporate and walled garden Internet is to have it fail and crush them. Some heavy shit, man.
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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