### Issue 1399 - Friday 2nd July, 2021

## In Today's Issue

- Looks like an Aussie telco is injecting ads into 2FA SMSes
- Richard Branson is going into space days before Jeff Bezos planned to
- ABC puts iView accounts on hold, the price of .com domains goes up, gigabit NBN speeds not quite gigabit, Instagram reacts to TikTok & Optus has an outage
- I'm not weird for getting excited about a card reader, you're the weird one for not getting excited!
- Cheap Tenda Nova mesh wi-fi, Alienware 38" monitor, 65" LG OLED TV, free 6x4 photos, Sennheiser HD 560S headphones, Google Nest Hub, TP-Link wi-fi plug

## The News

### Looks like an Aussie telco is injecting ads into 2FA SMSes

Australian developer Chris Lacy got a 2FA SMS from Google when logging in to an account and within that SMS was an advertisement for a VPN service, along with a URL! Natural instinct is to blame Google because hey, Google love ads, but Google has come out and denied it would do such a thing. The Google Messages app on his Android smartphone even flagged the message as spam. The most likely explanation is the telco Chris is using injected the ad into the SMS. Unfortunately Chris isn't saying which carrier he is with (name and shame!!) but it's pretty ratshit to see an Aussie telco appending ads to messages, let alone 2FA ones.

### Richard Branson is going into space days before Jeff Bezos planned to

Richard Branson reckons he will be going into space on July 11th, a few days before Jeff Bezos. Branson, along with two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and four mission specialists, will fly into space on the VSS Unity - a "suborbital spaceplane" Virgin Galactic has been working on for a while. Meanwhile, Bezos announced that he will be taking Wally Funk, one of the Mercury 13 (a bunch of women selected by NASA to be astronauts in the 50s and 60s but never did the deed) and now 81 years old, with him into space on July 20th. Someone let Elon Musk know, maybe he'll jump in a SpaceX capsule on July 10th just to piss the two other dudes off.

### ABC puts iView accounts on hold, the price of .com domains goes up, gigabit NBN speeds not quite gigabit, Instagram reacts to TikTok & Optus has an outage

The ABC's plan to make having an account to use iView mandatory is on hold while they "work with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to ensure we are industry leaders in terms of the use of personal data". Verisign is increasing the price of .com domain names from US$7.85 to US$8.39 as of September 1st. It's a small increase, but registrars will pass on the cost as their margins are usually sweet fuck all. The ACCC reckons most users on gigabit NBN plans see average speeds of between 608 and 745Mbps. A handful of users are only getting around 100 Mbps because their in-home equipment sucks (shitty routers, or shitty wi-fi). Instagram's boss posted on Twitter (??) that the company no would be "embracing video more broadly", starting with "full screen, immersive, entertaining, mobile-first video" - i.e: TikTok is scaring us. Optus shit the bed today. Between 10:30am and 2:30pm most Optus internet connections were down and at this stage some 3G connections (things like EFTPOS terminals, vending machines etc. still use it!) still aren't working.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### I'm not weird for getting excited about a card reader, you're the weird one for not getting excited!

SanDisk's latest professional level card reader, the Pro is fucken sweet. It looks like a tiny little NAS, with 4x bays for slide-in card readers that hooks up to your computer over Thunderbolt. It lets you mix and match different types of cards - CFast, CFexpress, Red's Mini-Mags, CF, microSD, and SD are supported. Thanks to the massive Thunderbolt bandwidth you can import from all 4 at once with no loss of speed, the limit is your storage device's write speed. Yank the card readers out of the dock and they're standalone USB-C 10gbit units. No prices yet, but if you dump a lot of media on a regular basis, you want this.

## Bargains

- Tenda Nova MW12 tri-band mesh wi-fi 3-pack - $235 at Officeworks
- Alienware 38" AW3821DW 3840x1600 IPS gaming monitor - $1299 from Dell's eBay store
- 65" LG OLED65G1PTA - $4195 at The Good Guys
- 50x free 6x4 photo prints at Harvey Norman
- Sennheiser HD 560S headphones - $249 from Sennheiser Australia
- Google Nest Hub 1st-gen - $78 at Harvey Norman
- TP-Link KP115 wi-fi smart plug with energy monitoring - $22.46 at Bunnings & Amazon

## The End

📻 Ground Zero - Bam Bam

😎 The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon.

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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.​