### Issue 1298 - Friday 5th February, 2021

## In Today's Issue

- Australian government confirms it won't incentivise EV uptake
- More Google employees quit in protest of their colleauges being sacked unfairly
- Miscellaneous tech news
- Two weekend projects if you are so inclined - AirPlay screen mirroring & Signal TLS proxy
- Cheap SanDisk microSD & SD cards, 4 months free Apple Music, Surface 7 Pro, Last of Us Part II collectors edition, Cygnett 10Ah battery, Dell 32" 4K monitor, Sonos Move speaker, Shopping Express CNY $288 bundle promo

## The News

### Australian government confirms it won't incentivise EV uptake

Environment minister Angus Taylor has confirmed that the federal government will not do a damn thing to incentivise electric car adoption in Australia. Despite being one of the key technologies the government wants to use to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, the government reckons any subsidies would be too expensive and give a poor return on investment per tonne of CO2 reduced. As is usual for this government, they fucked the numbers up. Did they really think they unconvered a secret flaw when countries like the USA, UK and the entire EU decided years ago that EV incentives are great bang for buck in reducing CO2 emissions? Fucking idiots.

### More Google employees quit in protest of their colleauges being sacked unfairly

Two Google engineers have quit in protest of Google's sacking of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and diversity recruiter April Christina Curley. David Baker quit because "we (Google) cannot say we believe in making a more understanding, informed world, and then ignore how our products amplify biases" - which he reckons is displayed by firing two people for speaking the truth. Vinesh Kannan left because the firings of Timnit and April "crossed a personal red line I wrote down when I started the job". It really doesn't reflect well on Google when well paid, highly skilled people decide to leave one of the most influential global businesses because when they look at how the sausage is made, it scares them.

### Miscellaneous tech news

- The Myanmar government has blocked Facebook as the locals are using it to protest against the recent coup. Probably should have been blocked there many years ago, for an entirely different reason.
- Synology is gonna start selling its own branded HDDs (made by Toshiba) and locking its enterprise units to only use Synology branded drives, to ensure reliability and performance. The home and SOHO ones will be able to use any drive.
- Google has a new submarine cable that crosses Atlantic Ocean between the USA and France. This cable is a bit special as it's the fastest cable to cross the Atlantic, at 250 terabits per second. That's a fat pipe if I've ever seen one.
- Parler's CEO got sacked by its board. They didn't say why, but I imagine it's because the site was kicked off every hosting service weeks ago and hasn't been able to get its shit together on a new host yet.
- Bang & Olufsen has a new fancy speaker that is modular. After a few years when AirPlay 2 and Spotify and Chromecast support inevitably break, instead of tossing the speaker and buying a new one, just swap the processing board with a new modern one.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Two weekend projects if you are so inclined - AirPlay screen mirroring & Signal TLS proxy

Those poor bastards in Iran have had the secure chat app Signal blocked by their government. To help people communicate freely, the Signal folks have set up a really easy TLS proxy docker container that you can install on your VPS/home server/whatever that'll allow Iranians to use Signal. You just need a server that can talk on port 80 & 443 and a domain name of some sort. Totally unrelated, but still deep in nerd territory, is RPiPlay - an "open-source implementation of an AirPlay mirroring server for the Raspberry Pi" that'll even run on a Pi Zero (though a Pi B+ is smoother). Looks pretty easy to install too if you're handy with the command line. I'll be giving both of these a crack this weekend.

## Bargains

- SanDisk 400gb microSD card - $69.28 from Amazon
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB/128GB SD cards - $25.65/$51.07 from Amazon
- 4 months free Apple Music for new customers
- Microsoft Surface 7 Pro, various configs on sale from the Microsoft Store
- The Last of Us Part II PS4 collectors edition - $199 from EB Games
- Cygnett 10,000mAh USB power bank - $28 at Harvey Norman
- Dell S3221QS curved 32" 4K monitor - $487.60 from Dell
- Sonos Move wireless portable speaker - $583 delivered from VideoPro
- Shopping Express has a Chinese New Year promo for various stuff like Samsung QVO 2TB SSD, Tenda Nova MW3, TP-Link WiFi Bulbs

## The End

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