### Issue 1560 - Friday 4th March, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Samsung's "Game Optimizing Service" fiddles with numbers to make benchmarks better than they are
- Google confirms that founder of Sci-Hub is under some form of FBI investigation
- Support for Ukraine still piling in against Russian invasion
- Crabs are mesmerised by undersea electrical cables
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap Ryzen 5 5600X, Yamaha soundbar, Sennheiser headphones, MagSafe charger, FIFA 22 for PS5, Dell 17" laptop backpack, Cities Skylines

## The News

### Samsung's "Game Optimizing Service" fiddles with numbers to make benchmarks better than they are

Samsung has been busted cheating on smartphone benchmarks again. Apparently Samsung's "Game Optimizing Service" would throttle the performance of other apps when a benchmark app, like Geekbench for example, was running. This frees up more resources so the benchmark runs better and looks better in reviews and comparisons to other devices - to the tune over 35% to 45%. Samsung was caught out by users of a South Korean forum that found their benchmark scores changed if they changed the name of the benchmarking app. Up to 10,000 apps were listed in Samsung's "optimisation" app as whitelisted for throttling should a benchmark app be active.

### Google confirms that founder of Sci-Hub is under some form of FBI investigation

Sci-Hub is really fucking excellent. It opens up the world of scientific research to everyone, providing acess to papers without having to pay thousands for journal access. It sucks then to see that Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, appears to be under investigation by the FBI. Google has confirmed to Alexandra that "Google received and responded to legal process issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation compelling the release of information related to your Google account". It's unknown what the investigation is about, but her critics (the grubs at the publishing companies of these journals) have spread baseless rumours that she's a Russian spy and Sci-Hub is a ruse to "steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors".

### Support for Ukraine still piling in against Russian invasion

- Sabre and Amadeus, the two main airline reservation systems (also called a GDS, global distribution system) have cut off Aeroloft, Russia's main airline. This means the airline can't sell tickets, even domestically.
- Roscosmos is no longer selling rocket engines to the USA, with the dude in charge saying "let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don't know what". The two rockets impacted are Northrop Grumman’s Antares and ULA's Atlas V.
- Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher developer, as well as the operator of the GOG online store, Polish based CD Projekt Red is ending sales in Russia and Belarus.
- Spotify has closed its Russia office and removed RT and Sputnik content on its platform. They are keeping Spotify active in Russia because "it's critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to allow for the global flow of information".
- The Ukrainian vice prime minister tweeted that they've "decided to cancel airdrop" (a promotional event for a new blockchain-based service) and "will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon".
- ICANN told the Ukrainian deputy prime minister that despite the situation, they will not cut off Russia's top-level domains, root DNS servers and SSL certs. Their reasons are outlined in this letter.
- People are booking Ukrainian Airbnbs and paying for them, but not using the room as a way to financially support people currently in the shit. Airbnb is waiving all fees too.
- Reddit has joined everyone else in banning users from posting links to Sputnik and RT News. It also appears that they've banned all links ending in .ru.
- The BBC has fired up its shortwave transmitters to beam the World Service in English for four hours a day across Ukraine and into parts of Russia.
- According to Reuters (I haven't seen it anywhere else), the Ukrainian "IT Army" has been fucking with GLONASS, Russia's global navigation system, like GPS, Galileo and BeiDou.
- Google has "suspended all advertising in Russia after the country's internet regulator demanded that the company stop showing what it considered ads displaying false information about Russia's invasion of Ukraine".

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Crabs are mesmerised by undersea electrical cables

Research done by Heriot-Watt University in Scotland has found that brown crabs are addicted to undersea AC power cables - like the ones used to get power generated by off-shore wind turbines back to land. Apparently they're so entranced by the relatively low magnetic field these high voltage power cables emit (5% of the strength of a fridge door magnet), they "just sit still". The electromagnetism itself doesn't harm the crabs, but if they don't move, that means they're not eating or looking for a mate. I don't know if this is an actual problem, but it's so weird I couldn't help but share it.

## Friday Forum Update

Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.

- jurgen wants to replace 1Password, but isn't sure what with.
- andyb kicks off a discussion about Namecheap's decision to stop domain registration services for Russians.
- It was a quiet week on the forum, so let's post some of our favourite tech related memes in this thread.
- Digging up a thread from a few months ago - do you use a cheap VPS for anything interesting?
- I'm always interested in your ideas for ways to get more people to subscribe to The Sizzle - something I've been ignoring lately and need to get back on top of.

## Bargains

- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU - $319 from Shopping Express
- Yamaha ATS-1090 Soundbar - $229 from Amazon
- Sennheiser HD 560S Headphones - $241.78 from Amazon
- Apple MagSafe Charger - $58.50 from Amazon
- FIFA 22 Standard Plus Edition for PS5 - $39 from Amazon
- Dell Gaming Lite Backpack 17 - $18.60 from Dell
- Cities: Skylines is free on the Epic Game store next week

## The End

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