### Issue 2170 - Monday 9th September, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- SA releases report on how it might ban kids under 13 from using social media
- Telegram CEO makes first statement after leaving custody, makes changes to platform
- GPT-fabricated research papers, Larry Ellison is the boss of Channel 10 now, fresh spy-agency level data exfil technique
- Build PCs? You'll find this comparison of 90+ thermal pastes kinda interesting
- Cheap TCL TV, Bose earbuds, Ryzen CPUs, Moto G84 phone, Anker MagGo battery, Samsung microSDs, Boost Mobile, DJI Neo drone

## The News

### SA releases report on how it might ban kids under 13 from using social media

South Australia released a report that'll form the basis of a consultation paper that will potentially lead to a law forcing social media companies to ban kids under 13, or face fines/lawsuits. The report is 276 pages and I haven't read all of it, but I did look for info on how they plan to actually enforce a ban. The report looks at what other platforms do, talks a lot about the eSafety Commissioner's still in progress investigation into "age assurance" technologies, but doesn't suggest or recommend any particular method. That's just nerd shit anyways, we can deal with the technical practicalities of trying to prove every social media user's age after we've had a press conference saying "we've done something about that thing our focus groups said bothers you".

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### Telegram CEO makes first statement after leaving custody, makes changes to platform

In his first post since being released from custody in France, Telegram's CEO said that he was told "I may be personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn't receive responses from Telegram" and that "Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard". In this post Telegram outlines some changes like disabling the People Nearby and media uploads to Telegraph features that were used by 0.1% to 0.001% of Telegram users to do dodgy stuff. Amazing how quick things can happen when you put people in jail.

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### GPT-fabricated research papers, Larry Ellison is the boss of Channel 10 now, fresh spy-agency level data exfil technique

- A bunch of Swedish researchers reckon "GPT-fabricated, questionable papers were found and listed as regular results on the Google Scholar results page" and that "GPT-fabricated, questionable papers are disseminated online, permeating the research infrastructure for scholarly communication, often in multiple copies". Is this bad? It sounds bad.
- Apropos of nothing, but Larry Ellison, "the world's fourth-richest man and co-founder of software firm Oracle" is the new controlling shareholder of Network Ten. Larry didn't set out to buy Ten, but now owns a chunk of it because Ten is owned by Paramount and Larry and his son David owns Skydance Media, which through a series of deals and investments, I think now owns Paramount. I reckon Larry Ellison doesn't even know what Network Ten is or where it's located.
- Another day, another bunch of freaks have found a way to exfiltrate data out of an air-gapped computer. This one requires an attacker to plant malware on the computer first (i.e: some spy agency level shit) then uses a software defined radio to pick up on "rapidly switching electric signals (On-Off Keying "OOK") within the RAM, a process that isn't actively monitored by security products and cannot be flagged or stopped". Crazy stuff, if Mr. Robot was still on TV I bet they'd have used this somehow in an episode.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Build PCs? You'll find this comparison of 90+ thermal pastes kinda interesting

Tom's Hardware compared 90 thermal pastes to find the best one. No wait, come back, it's interesting!! The type of thermal paste you use can make a big difference to how loud the fans ramp up on your gaming rig or how high your fancy new CPU can crank its clock speed up to, so choosing a decent paste is worth a quick read. The best non "liquid metal" thermal paste (which is a pain to apply due to being electrically conductive, also expensive) is the Honeywell PTM7950. It's a thermal pad that changes from a solid to a liquid when under heat, is super easy to apply the right amount due to being a pad and doesn't cost that much.

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## Bargains

- TCL 65" C855 4K QD Mini-LED TV - $1748 + delivery (free to a lot of areas) from Appliance Central
- Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds - $314.10 from Amazon
- AMD Ryzen 7 5700X or 5700G AM4 CPUs - $158.90/$187.72 from Amazon USA
- Motorola Moto G84 5G smartphone - $280 from Mobileciti's eBay store
- Anker 321 MagGo Battery - $36.11 from Amazon
- Samsung EVO Select 1TB microSD or Pro Ultimate 512GB microSD - $100.33/$81.74 from Amazon Germany
- Boost Mobile 365-day SIM with 260GB, unlimited calls & SMS - $220 after cashback from TopCashback
- DJI Neo or DJI Neo Fly More Combo - $279/$489 from digiDirect's eBay store

## Image Of The Day

Theory of Computation II class, 1966, University of Melbourne (The University of Melbourne Engineering and Information Technology Collection)

## The End

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