### Issue 2118 - Thursday 27th June, 2024

Sending today's Sizzle to everyone on the list, even those who grabbed a free trial but haven't paid for a subscription yet, as a little reminder of what you're missing out on! If you'd like to become a paid subscriber and get news like this every day, just visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get started. BTW, if you work in IT there's also a high chance you can claim The Sizzle as a tax deduction.

## In Today's Issue

- Rabbit R1 is not only a dud product, it's also a huge security risk made by incompetent programmers
- Still 283,000 active 3G devices despite network shutdowns on 31st of Aug & 1st Sept
- Figma gets big update, Paramount bulk deletes websites of popular old content, 7NEWS YouTube hacked
- Not many Snapdragon Elite X SoC benchmarks yet, but looks good so far
- Cheap 16GB Optane SSD, 256GB SD card, 36W GaN USB-C charger, Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro

## The News

### Rabbit R1 is not only a dud product, it's also a huge security risk made by incompetent programmers

Remember that Teenage Engineering designed Rabbit R1 AI assistant thing that ended up being pretty useless? It's also a security risk! According to "members of a community focused on jailbreaking and reverse engineering" the device, "Rabbit left critical API keys hardcoded and exposed in its code" and allows anyone who saw it to "use various services, including text-to-speech services and email sending services, as if they were the company" - including the raw data sent back and forth between everyone's Rabbit devices and the various APIs the device uses. To top it off, Rabbit "has known that we have had their ElevenLabs API key for a month, but they have taken no action to rotate the API keys". There's a bit more detail in this blog post from Rabbitude. Very amateur and naive from Rabbit. More money than brains, clearly.

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### Still 283,000 active 3G devices despite network shutdowns on 31st of Aug & 1st Sept

Comms minister has put out a fresh press release warning people about the imminent Optus (1st Sept) & Telstra (31st Aug) 3G network shutdowns. It mentions a little website the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association set up where you can enter a device's IMEI and check if it'll work after the 3G network is turned off. You can also text the number 3 to the phone number 3498 and get an automatic response to let you know if your device is okay or not. It also mentions there's still around 283,000 devices on the 3G network that'll cease to operate, won't even be able to call 000. That's worrying as is, but even more worrying to me are the vast tracts of regional Australia, not even remote Australia, where 3G is all you get. What happens then? I haven't seen any info regarding how quickly the 3G spectrum will be transitioned to LTE.

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### Figma gets big update, Paramount bulk deletes websites of popular old content, 7NEWS YouTube hacked

- Figma got a "major UI redesign, new generative AI tools to help people more easily make projects, and built-in slideshow functionality". The slideshow stuff looks great. RIP Keynote & Powerpoint.
- Paramount nuked the web archives of Comedy Central, MTV News and more in an attempt to get people to sign up for Paramount+, but most of the content they removed isn't even on Paramount+. Goddamn fools!
- 7NEWS's YouTube channel got hacked and all its live streams were replaced with "an AI-generated Musk exhorting viewers to deposit Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, or Bitcoin to a particular website" and all its videos removed. Oh well.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Not many Snapdragon Elite X SoC benchmarks yet, but looks good so far

The new ARM-based Surface Pro 11th-gen and Surface Laptop 7th-gen are in stock at JB Hi-Fi, but there's suspiciously very few benchmarks of the new Snapdragon Elite X SoC on the ol' WWW. NotebookCheck ran Cinebench on the X1E-84-100 and found it is slightly faster than Apple's M3 Pro and about the same as the Ryzen 7745HX - a much more power hungry CPU. Tom's Guide benchmarked the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 and in a run of Civ 6 at 1080p, wasn't able to crack more than 20fps, whereas the M3 MacBook Air was capable of over 40fps. The MacBook also trounced the Surface Pro 11 in battery life - 12hrs vs 15hrs. I imagine an M4-based MacBook would widen the gap even further and as long as Apple keeps giving TSMC unholy amounts of cash, it'll probably stay that way, but at least non-Apple users can get a taste of what the Mac has been delivering since 2020.

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## Bargains

- Intel Optane 16GB NVMe SSD - $8.80 from Mu Ji's eBay store
- PNY 256GB EliteX-PRO60 V60 UHS-II SDXC Flash Memory Card - $74.71 from Amazon Germany
- Otto Geometric 36W GaN Dual USB-C Wall Charger - $10 at Officeworks
- Google Pixel 8 5G 128GB or Pixel 8 Pro 128GB - $597/$797 after $200 trade-in bonus at JB Hi-Fi

## Image Of The Day

Technopolis Volume 1 - August 1982 (RevengeOfTheHubz / Internet Archive)

## The End

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