Mentioned in today’s edition: Vibecoding, Royal Darwin Hospital, Google Fitbit Air, NextDC, Anthropic, Apple Watch and Skoda. Plus, deals on Apple AirPods, DJI drones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

The News

Cloud developer platform Vercel popped

Popular vibecoding cloud platform Vercel has been breached, and someone has listed the company's data for sale on a hacking forum (BleepingComputer). Overnight, Vercel said that a "limited" number of its customers had been affected when a hacker used a third-party tool's Google Workspace OAuth access to get into their internal systems (Vercel). Someone claiming to be part of the formidable ShinyHunters group listed some internal data on a popular hacking forum and is asking for a $2m ransom. 

The Sizzle: Top software companies are usually pretty straight up when it comes to disclosures about breaches. Vercel, to its credit, has been pretty quick and upfront about what's happened. But there's one part about its CEO's response to the hack that is super annoying:

Guillermo Rauch began on X by saying "Vercel stores all customer environment variables fully encrypted at rest. We have numerous defense-in-depth mechanisms to protect core systems and customer data", before going on to say that some of the data was not encrypted. I get you want to calm people down, but leading with “we’re actually very safe” when you got hacked reads as obfuscation and defensiveness. You should be leading with how you got hacked and who’s affected. I’m not really interested in hearing about how good your alarm system is if you were robbed because you left the back door open. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Hey ChatGPT, how much medicine does this guy need? Make no mistakes.

Darwin's busiest hospital is struggling so much with capacity that unsupervised younger nurses are reportedly using ChatGPT to figure out how much medication they should give to people (ABC News). Whistleblowers at the Royal Darwin Hospital have told the ABC that they're so understaffed and undertrained that they fear patients are suffering. One alarm bell? Junior staff are resorting to YouTube and ChatGPT for information on basic procedures: 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Google's new screenless fitness tracker makes me want to ditch my constantly buzzing Apple Watch

Google is coming out with its own screenless fitness tracker to compete with products like the popular Whoop band (9to5Google). There's nothing too groundbreaking about the Fitbit Air — which is going to lean heavily on a subscription-based health software model — but it is an excuse to talk about how a few Sizzlers, including myself, are souring on their Apple Watches. I've personally found myself fed up with getting my notifications mirrored to a buzz on my wrist. I mean, my phone is in reach most of the time and, when it's not, it's usually because I don't want to be distracted. Without those notifications, the only part that I like is the health tracking — which begs the question, why not have a simpler health tracker without the distractions?

(Curious to hear if anyone else has become more anti-Apple Watch too?)

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Oh, Also

Sometimes technology is just a really good bicycle bell

As much as I love my noise-cancelling headphones, I always turn off the ANC when I'm going for a run. One thing I hadn't considered is how noise-cancelling might be a problem for people riding bikes. At least it was, until Skoda — sorry Škoda — engineered the DuoBell which "outsmarts" noise-cancelling by adding an additional resonator which alters the tone in a way that makes it harder to block. Very cool (until it leads to an arms race between bell and headphone manufacturers!)

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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