### Issue 1808 - Monday 20th March, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- USA wants TikTok to sell itself again, FBI investigates TikTok journalist spying
- SETI@Home calls it quits, no longer crunching new data to find aliens
- Latitude still haven't plugged their data leak, Midjourney v5 looks good, some modern Samsung Exynos modems remotely exploitable
- A Sizzler's view of the tech hypefest, SXSW
- Cheap Topping headphone amp & DAC, Apple Pencil, Toshiba 4TB portable HDD, Crucial SSD, Telstra pre-paid, Apple gift cards, Google Pixel, Kayo, Fethead mic booster, F1 22, Garmin bike computer, refurb iPhones, Doom, refurb HP AIO PC, Orange Box, Portal Bundle, Kubernetes cert exams

## The News

### USA wants TikTok to sell itself again, FBI investigates TikTok journalist spying

Remember when Donald Trump tried to force TikTok to sell itself to a US company? The Biden administration is doing the same thing. According to the New York Times, ByteDance/TikTok has been trying to convince the White House to accept some sort of "an agreement with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data", but the government is demanding a sale (dunno if they mean a sale to a US company or just a not-China company) or else it will ban it from the USA entirely. Related to this, Forbes is reporting "a source in position to know", that the FBI is investigating TikTok over allegations ByteDance used the app to "access U.S. journalists' location information". New Zealand isn't taking any chances, joining the US, UK and others in banning TikTok on government devices.

### SETI@Home calls it quits, no longer crunching new data to find aliens

Bit of a sad one for nerds of a certain age - SETI@Home is going into hibernation. If you don't remember, it was a project that distributed chunks of radio telescope data to volunteer computers with the aim of finding anything interesting that might be aliens trying to communicate with us. A post on their website says that "we are no longer distributing tasks. The SETI@home message boards will continue to operate, and we'll continue working on the back-end data analysis. Maybe we'll even find ET! Thanks to everyone for your support over the years. We encourage you to keep crunching for science". I loved running SETI@Home on my computer as a screensaver back in the early 2000s. I hope they find something one day.

### Latitude still haven't plugged their data leak, Midjourney v5 looks good, some modern Samsung Exynos modems remotely exploitable

- Latitude Financial provided a mild update about their data breach. In addition to drivers licences, 5% of the 330,000 customers had their passports and/or medicare cards nicked too. The situation is still "active" (wtf dudes, turn the damn computers off), the AFP are involved and and that the "scope of what was thought to have been stolen might grow".
- AI-generated art platform that you access via Discord (no I'm not joking), Midjourney, is now up to version 5. It's still not perfect but holy shit it's getting better a rapid pace. Check out the linked article for images comparing the same prompt with each version. Generating non-fucked up hands is a big feature of this release. Here's some more demos.
- Google found a serious bug that allows "an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number" in Samsung's Exynos range of smartphone modems. No patch at the moment, so turn off Wi-Fi calling and VoLTE if you're concerned..

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### A Sizzler's view of the tech hypefest, SXSW

Sizzle subscriber Phil Whitehouse attended SXSW over in Austin last week and wrote an interesting blog post about what he saw there. Unlike previous years, he reckons the "crash of crypto, the unfulfilled promises of NFTs and VR, the mass layoffs and the Twitter purchase by Elon Musk took a lot of wind out of sails before the event, and then the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (on day one of SXSW!) was a cautionary tale for anyone trying to make a quick buck". He writes some stuff about GPT-4, brain computer interfaces, climate repair/carbon removal and one of my favourite boondoggles, Hyperloop. SXSW is coming to Sydney this year (October 15-22), I was inspired to attend and do a write-up or two of what I see thanks to Phil's post but then saw that a ticket is $1,300!

## Bargains

- Topping DX3 Pro+ headphone amp & DAC - $254.15 from Amazon
- Apple Pencil (2nd-gen) - $169 from Amazon or JB Hi-Fi
- Toshiba Canvio Advance V10 4TB portable HDD - $99 + shipping from SaveOnIT
- Crucial P3 4TB PCIe Gen 3 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD - $338.02 from Amazon USA
- Telstra $300 pre-paid SIM (200GB dta, 365-day expiry) - $249.79 from OzTechBiz
- Apple gift cards are still 15% off at GiftCards.com.au
- Google Pixel 6a - $549 from Google
- Google Pixel 7 128GB/256GB - $799/$929 from Google
- $10 a month off Kayo Sports if you link sign up via Qantas Frequent Flyer (new customers only)
- Triton Audio Fethead mic preamp/booster - $99.50 from Amazon UK
- F1 22 for PS4/PS5 - $15.99/$17.59 from the PlayStation store
- Garmin Edge 130 Plus bike computer - $244 from Highly Tuned Athletes
- Refurb iPhone SE 2020 or iPhone XR - $249/$309 from Coles
- DOOM (2016) or DOOM franchise bundle for PC - $8.73/$50.52 on Steam
- Refurb HP EliteOne 800 G5 all-in-one PC (23.8" 1080p, i7-9700, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, webcam) - $549 from Maxtradinggroup's eBay store
- The Orange Box or Portal Bundle - $2.95/$2.18 on Steam
- Certified Kubernetes Exams (CKA, CKAD, CKS) - $440ea from The Linux Foundation

## Image Of The Day

Yellow pages directory - copies various aspects - 4 August 1986 - computer screen displaying online version (National Archives of Australia)

## The End

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