### Issue 1895 - Tuesday 25th July, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Twitter rebrands customer facing product to X, matching corporate name
- AMD's range of Zen 2 CPUs impacted by Zenbleed vulnerability
- Devs can (kinda) order Apple Vision Pro kits, Spotify increases pricing, Centrelink calculator project cancelled
- Sony's new WF-1000XM5 wireless earbuds are excellent
- Cheap Logitech mouse & keyboard, Mini Metro game, Ultimate eGift cards, 1TB microSD card, Binge/Kayo gift cards, USB powerboard, Orico USB SSD enclosure

## The News

### Twitter rebrands customer facing product to X, matching corporate name

Twitter changed their corporate name to X a few months ago, but now they've changed the product name to be X too - kinda. All that appears to have changed is the app icon, a logo on the website and the partial removal of the signage at Twitter's, sorry, X's offices in San Francisco. Check out the CEO's pathetic series of tweets about the re-brand. It's verbal diarrhoea on a level you rarely see in public and attached to an individual - "transforming the global town square", "powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we're just beginning to imagine", "X will be the platform that can deliver, well... everything" - I feel ill. If you've forgotten, X is Elon's long held (and stupid) idea to create an "everything app" like WeChat in China. A silver lining is that Meta owns the trademark for the character X when it comes to social media. Please, for the love of all that is just and fair in the world, can Elon eat shit in a courtroom and a UFC octagon, at the hands of Mark Zuckerberg? Please, Lord, please.

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### AMD's range of Zen 2 CPUs impacted by Zenbleed vulnerability

Zenbleed is the latest computer vulnerability that'll have sysadmins across the world rushing to patch their servers. It's a flaw in the entire "Zen 2 product stack, from AMD's EPYC data center processors to the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, and can be exploited to steal sensitive data stored in the CPU, including encryption keys and login credentials. The attack can even be carried out remotely through JavaScript on a website". Like every good vulnerability, it has its own website, but all the stuff there goes way over my head. I found Cloudflare's explanation of what they're doing about it to be easier to digest. There's a microcode update from AMD, which has a performance hit, but if you're running any of the vulnerable CPUs, you'd be dumb not to.

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### Devs can (kinda) order Apple Vision Pro kits, Spotify increases pricing, Centrelink calculator project cancelled

- Apple Vision Pro developer kits are now available to order, however the conditions attached are extremely strict and Apple is hand picking who gets one.
- Spotify Premium is going up in price by $1/m, to $12.99/m. Not bad considering the great value it provides (IMHO), but hopefully there's a gift card sale at Woolies/Coles soon.
- Services Australia has cancelled a project to create a calculator for Centrelink entitlements, after spending $191m on it over 3 years. Incredible incompetency for such a basic thing the government needs.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Sony's new WF-1000XM5 wireless earbuds are excellent

Reviews of Sony's latest wireless earbuds, the WF-1000XM5, are live (Soundguys, The Verge, Wired, CNET, Techradar) and the general consensus is that they're excellent. For Android users, it's a no-brainer, these are the best wireless earbuds you can get now. Maybe the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II are on-par, maybe with better active noise cancellation, but the Sony XM5's have better audio quality according to most people and supports the high quality LDAC Bluetooth codec that the Bose do not. The million dollar question however, is what are they like compared to the AirPods Pro? It's line-ball for most criteria, but the AirPods have a slight edge due to the deep integration with iOS and stuff like Spatial Audio on Apple Music and they're actually slightly cheaper, at least at Sony's RRP.

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## Bargains

- Logitech M720 Triathlon wireless mouse - $40 from Amazon, Big W and The Good Guys
- Mini Metro for Android - $1.69 on Google Play Buy a $200 Ultimate eGift Card and get $20 Amazon credit
- Logitech MX Keys Mini for Mac - $85 from Amazon
- TeamGroup Go 1TB microSD card - $99.02 from Amazon USA 20x Everyday Rewards Points on Ultimate & Binge/Kayo gift cards at Woolworths
- Bauhn 8-way surge protected powerboard with 2x USB-A & 2x USB-C (total 20W output) - $29.99 from ALDI
- Orico M.2 NVMe SSD USB-C enclosure (10Gbps) - $25.98 from Amazon

## Image Of The Day

IBM makes and markets data processing systems which process facts and figures at great speed. It also provides the equipment which turns information into data which can be processed automatically by a computer. This booklet describes two such machines, the IBM 1412 Magnetic Character Reader and the IBM 1418 Optical Character Reader. (Jongleur / Internet Archive)

## The End

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