### Issue 2065 - Thursday 11th April, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- Media industry goons want the USA to block websites like Australia does
- Russia wants to make its own PlayStation
- Twitter's botched URL rename is a prime example of their incompetence
- A look back at the amazing technology PARC & SRI gave us
- Cheap 12v solar blanket, Massdrop 6XX headphones, pre-paid SIMs, iPhone 12 mini, Tidal, UniFi Dream Machine P ro, LG 31.5" 4K monitor, WD 2TB SSD

## The News

### Media industry goons want the USA to block websites like Australia does

Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin has said they're going to "work with Congress to establish and enforce a site-blocking legislation in the United States" - i.e: the same system Village Roadshow and Foxtel use via the Federal Court to get torrent sites and pirate stream services blackholed by Australian ISP DNS servers. Rivkin even mentioned that 60 countries, including "many of America's closest allies" (that's us!) do it. As Mike Masnick at TechDirt explains, it is a violation of the USA's First Amendment (something we don't have) and failed when the MPA tried this 12 years ago.

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### Russia wants to make its own PlayStation

According to a Russian newspaper, the Kremlin has ordered VK Group (kinda like Russia's Meta & Google?) to "consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles", along with the "creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users". Very difficult, but so crazy as a long term goal considering the sanctions placed on Russia that don't allow Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft to sell consoles there. What's wild is that the Kremlin wants this done by June 2024. Sure, good luck with that.

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### Twitter's botched URL rename is a prime example of their incompetence

X did a dumb thing again. Someone decided to re-write all the URLs in posts containing twitter.com to be x.com, but did it in such a basic manner that even URLs that simply contained the word twitter.com, but are not twitter.com were renamed. For example, fedetwitter.com was renamed to fedex.com and carfatwitter.com would display as carfax.com, but actually goes to carfatwitter.com when clicked. A bunch of people purchased some common domains for lulz and X changed their mind about renaming the displayed URLs, but it would have been a phisher's paradise for the 2-3 days this worked.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### A look back at the amazing technology PARC & SRI gave us

When you think of milestones in computing, Xerox's PARC laboratory and their work on GUIs, Ethernet, laser printing and object orientated programming spring to mind immediately. The other major achiever would be SRI International, most famously known for Siri (which Apple acquired), but they also hosted Douglas Engelbart, who was responsible for some of the foundational aspects of personal computing like a mouse, networked computers, hypertext and more in the Mother of All Demos. The New York Times has a nice overview of these two research giants now that PARC is donating its lab and assets to SRI.

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## Bargains

- VoltX 12V 160W Foldable Solar Panel Portable Blanket - $138.62 from Amazon
- Massdrop X Sennheiser HD 6XX Open Back Dynamic Headphones - $275 from Drop
- Konec (Telstra MVNO) 90-day pre-paid SIM with 50GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $30 at Big W
- Optus Flex Plus 365-day pre-paid, 260GB 5G data, unlimited calls & SMS - $220 from Optus
- CatchConnect 90-day SIM with 20GB data - $20 from Catch
- iPhone 12 mini 64GB/128GB/256GB - $659/$739/$919 from Amaysim
- All Tidal music streaming plans now include hi-res audio - $12.99/m via Tidal
- Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro - $691.62 from Sydneytec's eBay store
- LG Ultrafine Ergo 32UN88A 4K UHD IPS Monitor 31.5" - $577 from Amazon
- Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD - $225.62 from Amazon UK

## Image Of The Day

Die Hackerbibel - Teil 2 (retroGfx / Internet Archive)

## The End

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