### Issue 1558 - Wednesday 2nd March, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Tasmania's mainland comms cut yesterday, QLD & NSW floods hit NBN services
- Australian Information Industry Association's wishlist for the 2022/2023 federal budget
- Fuck Russia
- AMD's latest mobile CPUs are good, but Intel's are better, kinda, it depends
- Cheap Catch Connect, Apple Watch SE, Sonos kit, Xiaomi Pad 5, 8TB Ironwolf HDD, Ryzen 5 5600X CPU

## The News

### Tasmania's mainland comms cut yesterday, QLD & NSW floods hit NBN services

You probably already knew this, but Tasmania's telecommunications took a massive hit yesterday as two of its main fibre optic cables to the mainland were damaged. Issues started at around 1:30pm yesterday and according to Telstra, one of its cables was damaged by civil works in Melbourne and another cable had an issue at the landing station in Victoria. It was all restored by 7:07pm. Meanwhile, up north in NSW and QLD, flooding has impacted over 57,000 premises on the NBN network, with the most affected areas being the Sunshine Coast, Gympie, Maryborough and the Greater Brisbane Area. Considering the extent of the flooding, that's not too bad I reckon.

### Australian Information Industry Association's wishlist for the 2022/2023 federal budget

The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) has submitted 24-policy recommendations to the federal government ahead of the upcoming budget, with the aim of making sure the government meets its goal of Australia being a "leading digital economy" by 2030 and a top 3 digital government by 2025 (lol as if). Some of the things the AIIA want to see include: a National AI Commercialisation Hub, a "Digital Restart Fund to procure Australian innovative unproven solutions", reform of the school curriculum to include more digital skills and "conducting digital inclusion and literacy campaigns". Will be interesting to see if any of this stuff ends up in election campaigns - do voters give a shit?

### Fuck Russia

- Apple has cut off Russia from buying new products (no Macs, iPhones, etc, from their online store and cut off supply to resellers) and removed RT News and Sputnik News from the Russian App Store, but the App Store itself is still active.
- Meta turned on "encrypted Instagram direct messages in Russia and Ukraine", is "demoting Facebook posts by Russian state media outlets worldwide" and will "demote Facebook posts from users who link to Russian state media".
- Apparently a Finnish Citizen's Initiative, kinda like a super petition where people vote online to ask the government to do something, to get them to join NATO was hit by DDoS attacks. What a coincidence.
- The Ukrainian government wants ICANN to shut down Russia's root DNS servers, revoke .ru and associated domains, as well as their SSL certificates. This Twitter thread explains why it's probably a bad idea.
- DuckDuckGo has "paused" its partnership with Russian search engine Yandex, which it used instead of Bing in Russia and Turkey. DuckDuckGo hasn't made it public, but said so in a US House committee hearing.
- The US government is leaning on Lenovo and SMIC (China's largest and most advanced semi-conductor manufacturer) to stop selling gear to Russia, using the threat of cutting off these companies from US markets.
- Russia is salty that Wikipedia is presenting facts instead of its propaganda, so of course, they're threatening to block it. Wikipedia's "2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" article is a great source of news about this topic.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### AMD's latest mobile CPUs are good, but Intel's are better, kinda, it depends

Anandtech has a full review of AMD's latest mobile CPU - the 6000 series Ryzen. It uses the latest Zen3+ architecture (Zen 3 with a few power mods, a better GPU) and is built on a cutting edge 6nm process by TSMC. The Ryzen 9 6900HS can scale all the way from 15W TDP all the way to 80W TDP if the power and cooling available allow it. It looks like the 6900HS performs around the same, sometimes faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X desktop CPU, but when compared to Intel's 12th-gen mobile CPUs can't match them at the higher TDPs (i.e 45W+). Seems to me that Intel is pick if you need balls to the wall performance in a laptop (and thickness/heat to match), but AMD's Zen3+ is ideal if you want a thinner, cooler laptop.

## Bargains

- Catch Connect 365-day SIM, 85GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $89 from Catch
- Apple Watch SE 40mm/44mm - $377/$427 from Amazon
- Kayo Basic - $15/month for Telstra customers
- Sonos Arc, Sonos Sub Gen 3 and 2x Sonos One SL speakers - $2760 from Harvey Norman
- Xiaomi Pad 5 (Snapdragon 860 SoC, 6GB RAM, 128GB storage) - $475 from Aliexpress
- Seagate IronWolf 8TB SATA HDD - $265.60 from Futu's eBay store (affiliate link)
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU - $335.35 from Scorptec's eBay store (affiliate link)

## The End

📻 Hunned Bandz - Tanukichan

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