# The Sizzle

### Issue 355 - Monday, 20th March 2017

- A malicious tweet gave this guy an epileptic fit and almost killed him
- Uber's new president gets the fuck outta there before the stink rubs off
- 500 Startups will put their AU base in Melbourne
- Hacker manages to escape a VMware Workstation VM
- Intel's very fast SSD

- More Usborne 80s computer books have been uploaded
- Google Glass is apparently popular on the assembly lines of America
- Keep your hands warm whilst using the computer with this mini space heater

NEWS

A malicious tweet gave this guy an epileptic fit and almost killed him
So this is pretty wild - a guy in the USA has been charged with cyberstalking because he sent a seizure-inducing tweet to a journalist. Yeah, a tweet that gives you a seizure. Old mate "@jew_goldstein" (ugh) found out that Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald has epilepsy and thought "yeah, I'll fuck this guy up by sending him a flashy GIF on Twitter". Unfortunately, it worked. Kurt's wife found him having a seizure in his study at home and Kurt was left "incapacitated" for several days and couldn't speak properly for weeks.
Discuss

Uber's new president gets the fuck outta there before the stink rubs off
The president of Uber has quit after less than a year because he's embarrassed to be associated with such a shitshow of a company. Jeff Jones was at Uber for only 6 months and today resigned with this pretty blunt message: "It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business". Doesn't a genius to read between the lines here. Uber is so packed full of shitcunts that don't want to change, that this guy just said fuck it, and left the manbabies to slowly crumble into irrelevance. I mean, I assume, I dunno. That's what I'd do if I was Jeff.
Discuss

500 Startups will put their AU base in Melbourne
Victoria has sucked off another bunch of venture capitalists, giving part of a $60m fund designed to entice startups to base themselves Melbourne instead of Sydney, to 500 Startups - an organisation I can only describe as a business casino where rich people throw 500 pieces of shit at the wall, using their money as glue and seeing what sticks. It's a big deal in the Silicon Valley scene. Whatever the Victorian government threw at 500 Startups, it's worth it to ensure Sydney is deprived of something. I'm all for that.
Discuss

Hacker manages to escape a VMware Workstation VM
This year's Pwn2Own competition had a very fancy hack that's gained a bit of attention. A Chinese group of hackers managed to escape a virtual machine in VMware Workstation - something that really isn't supposed to happen. From the article: "We used a JavaScript engine bug within Microsoft Edge to achieve the code execution inside the Edge sandbox, and we used a Windows 10 kernel bug to escape from it and fully compromise the guest machine. Then we exploited a hardware simulation bug within VMware to escape from the guest operating system to the host one. All started from and only by a controlled a website." Now that's how you fight a cyberwar ladies and gentlemen!
Discuss

Intel's very fast SSD
Intel has announced its first Optane-based SSD. Optane, if you recall, is Intel's balls to the wall 3D XPoint memory tech, that works like traditional NAND storage (i.e: an SSD) but with close to the latency of DRAM (i.e: DDR3/DDR4 RAM). The Optane SSD DC P4800X is a PCIe card or U.2 drive that gives you storage with an insane 10 microseconds of latency. To compare, the very best NAND based SSDs have latency in the 20-30 microsecond range. Imagine having 1TB of RAM as storage, that's the sort of thing we're talking about here. Very cool. The 375GB version of this is out now and costs a cool US$1520. Which to be honest, isn't that expensive for the type of performance possible.
Discuss

COOL SHIT

More Usborne 80s computer books have been uploaded
Some of you who were kids in the 80s, growing up with computers will probably remember the Usborne computer books. A few months ago they released a couple of their old books as free PDFs and I mentioned that here and it was quite popular. Well good news - they've released even more! There's also modern books so kids of today can learn about computers in the same delightful way we did. Those aren't free, but they still look pretty good for the kiddies.
Discuss

Google Glass is apparently popular on the assembly lines of America
Google Glass is back! In a factory in suburban Atlanta. AGCO makes farm equipment like tractors and sprayers and stuff and the employees on the factory floor can't get enough of the Google Glass goodness. Employees (well the ones they spoke to for this article) say it's way more efficient than using a tablet or a computer as they don't have to move around or stop what they're doing to pull up info and can be directed about what to do next without losing the visual context of the problem in-front of them.
Discuss

Keep your hands warm whilst using the computer with this mini space heater
As summer winds down in Australia and we enter the much more tolerable winter months, the problem of sweaty arsecracks goes away, but the issue of cold computer hands comes back. Someone decided this is no longer tolerable and has started a crowd-funding campaign to make a little space heater that attaches to your keyboard and keeps your hands warm. The Heatbuff will cost ya 499 Danish Krone (around AU$100) if it actually gets made after the crowd-funding campaign is over in 18 days. I'm sure there's something like this on Aliexpress for like $5. Sure, it could kill you, but it's way cheaper.
Discuss

Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony

The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Like The Sizzle? Like it on Facebook!

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