NEWS
Mike Quigley unloads on NBN - NBN tells him to piss off Following on from Sunday's episode of Background Briefing about the NBN, founding NBN CEO, Mike Quigley has come out of retirement and penned an extremely detailed analysis of how the NBN's cost blowouts are purely as a result of the faulty mixed technology approach NBN is taking. Unfortunately, NBN hasn't taken kindly to this criticism, with NBN's head of PR flaming Quigley on Twitter, saying he should stay retired and his opinions are unwanted. What a piss weak, fragile glass jaw NBN has. Slight critique from anyone, even from experts, is shot down as hate or at the very least, ignored. Defensiveness is generally a sign of insecurity. I wonder what people at NBN would have to feel insecure about?
The metadata slippery slope begins, with horse racing integrity commission asking for warrantless access The Victorian minister for Racing (how sad is it that we have a minister for racing), has written to the Federal Attorney-General, begging for the Victorian Racing Integrity Commissioner to be given access to that wonderful honeypot of metadata info. The law regarding metadata access at least tried to limit it to larger government agencies (ASIO, state police forces, etc.), leaving everyone else to get a warrant to access the treasure trove of info about the entire nations citizens. This letter essentially says "we can't be fucked getting a warrant or our cases are so flimsy a warrant won't be issued". The slippery metadata slope has begun already.
HP is now HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, casting away the printer & PC anchor About a year ago, HP announced they're going to split the PC hardware and printer part of their business out from the enterprise part which does a lot of IT outsourcing, data storage, networking, servers, enterpisey-type software sort of stuff. That split is now in effect. The printer & computer hardware part of HP is now called "HP Inc." and the other bit is "Hewlett-Packard Enterprise", both with their own NYSE stock ticker symbols. Why are they doing this? Primarily because of the fact PC and printer sales are tanking hard and HP has no smartphone or tablet products. This was causing a huge drag on the overall company's financials. By splitting the shit part of HP out, the "good" part of HP looks way way nicer and can continue on into the future unencumbered by having to sell printers and computers the market is trending away from. Discarding Palm's wonderful WebOS was such a bad idea HP. You could have been a contender but now you're just another managed services company that happens to sell hardware that fewer people are buying every year.
Official Plex client arrives on the new Apple TV Plex for the new Apple TV is here! Going by screenshots on the Plex blog, it looks fantastic too. It's free to download and unlike the PS4/Xbone versions, you don't need to be a Plex Pass subscriber unless you want access to premium features - features I don't know about as I don't own an Apple TV and none of the blog posts about Plex's Apple TV release go into detail about them. Either way, it looks like this is the flagship Plex client on any device and for a lot of people justifies the purchase of the Apple TV.
iOS 9.1 jailbreak found, $1m bounty awarded iOS 9.1 has been jailbroken, if you're into that sort of thing. Zerodium, some startup offering 0-day vulns to companies, put up a $1 million bounty on an iOS 9.1 jailbreak that works remotely, i.e: send a message to an iOS device, or access a website through a browser and jailbreak that way. Quite impressive actually. That $1m was claimed by an unknown group, announced by Zerodium on Twitter. What Zerodium do with this info, we don't know. Their business is selling these sort of exploits to others, so they may blackmail Apple into giving them more cash in order not to release it, or maybe hand it over to some nation state. Get your tin foil hats out everyone!
COOL SHIT
Anandtech's nerd-fest iPhone 6s and 6 Plus review is live Anandtech has published their usual in-depth review of the latest iPhone, going in to way more detail about the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus's hardware than any other website. Basically, the iPhone 6s has the fastest camera focusing & shot taken time, fastest GPU and CPU, fastest 256KB random read & write storage and the best low light and video camera. In the areas it wasn't the best, it was generally 2nd behind the Samsung Galaxy S6. It's amazing how Apple has become the premier SoC designer just in the space of just a few years. I guess having billions of dollars in cold hard cash can help.
I want one of these Czur book scanners I generally don't link to crowfunding campaigns but this one for a great looking book scanner is too good not to mention. Imagine all the world's books, digitised and searchable. Books full of centuries of history, information and stories are just sitting around in libraries and homes, gathering dust, maybe never to be seen again as they're thrown out or lost. But we can digitise those books, forever keeping that period of human knowledge alive. Just personally, there's hundreds of books at my parents place that simply aren't available as eBooks or online anywhere. Using a book scanner like the Czur seems like an awesome way to get this stuff online easily and for a relatively low cost. I want one.
Procreate 3 is out - the best iOS drawing app is ready for the iPad Pro Procreate 3 is on the app store now and holy shit, what an app. If anyone ever tells you that you can't use a tablet for creating stuff, show them Procreate and ignore any other comments regarding technology that doofus dribbles out of their mouth. On the iPad Pro, this is going to be amazing. People are already creating beautiful pieces of art with it and there's a thriving community of users, so I can't wait to see what people achieve with the iPad Pro and it's stylus. The best thing is, Procreate only costs $10. My wife (who can draw) is damn excited about Procreate and the new iPad Pro.
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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