NEWS
Kickass Torrents the latest site to go on Australia's naughty list APRA AMCOS, the Australian music industry rights group, backed by Universal, Warner, Sony and so on, have joined Village and Foxtel going to court to get a torrent site banned in Australia. Using the site blocking law introduced by the government last year, APRA AMCOS wants KickassTorrents obliterated from Australian internet and has filed an application with the Federal Court to make it happen. We still haven't heard much about Foxtel and Village's site blocking attempts, so keep an eye on this to see how the ISPs react. Discuss
Apple announced WWDC 2016 details Apple's WWDC 2016 will go down between the 13th of June and 17th of June in San Francisco, but this year, split between the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and the traditional Moscone West conference centre. The ticket lottery is now open. For those of us who aren't developers embedded in the Apple ecosytem with money to burn on a WWDC ticket, flight, accommodation and spending money to San Francisco, the reason we care about this is the high probability of new Macs and details of what Apple will do with iOS 10. Discuss
Blackmagic unload a raft of new products at NAB 2016 & win fancy award Blackmagic are one of those companies that make gear so cool, I just want to buy it and use it for something later. Their range of cameras and broadcast AV equipment is well made and well priced. So it's no shock to me that they won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award for best design team of the year. What's even cooler, is that they did it, mostly, out of Port Melbourne. Blackmagic also released a bunch of new products at NAB - nothing that mindblowing this year, with the headline product being the Duplicator 4K - which encodes whatever video input you feed it, to H265 and writes it onto 20 SD cards simultaneously. They even made an Arduino Shield that's designed to interact with their cameras - how cool is that?! The entire list of new products are up on Blackmagic's press website and a video of the launch is available too. Discuss
Netflix announces financials of its first quarter of worldwide access After Netflix's global expansion, people assumed growth would go bananas. That hasn't happened and Netflix stock has dropped 10%. It probably didn't help that Amazon announced its own dedicated streaming service at the same time. Amongst the investor chat, Netflix's CEO also said this in regards to VPNs: "It’s a very small but quite vocal minority, it's really inconsequential to us." - if that's the case, it'd be nice if they stopped blocking a bunch of them then. Discuss
Bill "The Coach" Campbell passes away Bill Campbell isn't a household name when it comes to tech, but he's been the mentor of people who are. Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos all counted him as a confidant and someone they turned to for advice in running their influential behemoth companies. The man affectionately known around the Bay Area as "The Coach" died aged 75 from a long battle with brain cancer. Here's a video of Bill giving a eulogy for Steve Jobs at the Apple campus in 2011. Discuss
COOL SHIT
Lacie's Big12 direct attached storage system is huge Lacie has just announced an external 12 bay Thunderbolt 3.0 disk system. The Big12 is designed to store 48TB (12x 4TB), 72TB (12x 6TB) and 96TB (12x 8TB) of raw data plugged directly into your computer. In a RAID-5 config, you'll get transfer speeds of almost 2.4GB/sec. No pricing yet, but if the weak speeds of 10gbit Ethernet aren't good enough for you, this is the sort of thing you need. (P.S if you actually need this much storage and are grappling with how to manage it - lemme know, I do this shit for a living and can use the cash). Discuss
The 9.7" iPad Pro display is damn good DisplayMate are the ultimate example of computer display nerdery and their exhaustive tests sort the wheat from chaff when it comes to glowing pixels. They've just tested the iPad Pro 9.7" and absolutely love it. From the intro, "The iPad Pro 9.7 display is a Truly Impressive major enhancement on the iPad Air 2... and even on the recent iPad Pro 12.9 and iPad mini 4... and even every other mobile LCD display that we have ever tested... and note that I hand out compliments on displays very carefully. Here's why..." Good read if you wanna know what makes an LCD display great. Discuss
Rent out the spare capacity on your NAS Speaking of loads of storage, if you've got some storage spare, maybe you wanna rent it out for others to use? DriveShare lets you do that. You install an app, set a price for how much you want for your drive space and bandwidth and away you go. It ties into Storj, which is a "blockchain-based, end-to-end encrypted, distributed object storage" - so it works like Amazon S3 and the like, but instead of owning their own datacentre of servers, you're grabbing data off those DriveShare users. There's a few gotchas (you don't get paid in cash right now, the storage isn't as reliable or fast as S3/Google), but it's a fascinating prospect. Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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