### Issue 1600 - Thursday 5th May, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- El Salvador's national Bitcoin wallet appears to be a dud
- Financial licence holders on notice, ASIC will come knocking if you get hacked
- Heroku mass resets passwords & API tokens, Foone got Microsoft to open source 3D Movie Maker, local pricing & dates for new LG OLED TVs
- The many telephones of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
- Cheap Belong SIM, LG 4K monitor, Civ 6 for Switch, Telstra mobile plan, Sonos soundbars, YubiKeys, iPhones & Pixels, refurb Fetch Mini

## The News

### El Salvador's national Bitcoin wallet appears to be a dud

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US has found El Salvador's national Bitcoin wallet - Chivo - is a "flop". According to the study's survey, the "median active user does not send or receive a single Bitcoin payment a month nor make any Chivo ATM withdrawals" and El Savador's central bank reports that only "1.6% of all remittances were received in bitcoins via digital wallets in February 2022". One of the study's authors said "the average user did not see an incentive to keep using Bitcoin rather than dollars". To make matters worse, "users are not actually holding U.S. dollars in their Chivo wallet but rather stable-dollar coins that could be backed by either the Salvadoran government or a private company".

### Financial licence holders on notice, ASIC will come knocking if you get hacked

Financial advisor RI Advice was hacked pretty badly in 2017, with an attacker "setting up VPNs, peer-to-peer file sharing, and crypto-miners, along with a variety of hacking tools" on their servers, compromising the financial details of all their clients. It was so bad, the ASIC took them to court arguing RI Advice's piss poor cybersecurity was a breach of its license obligations. This week the Federal Court agreed with ASIC. The punishment isn't that bad (pay ASIC's legal costs, undertake security training, implement security recommendations), but it does set a precedent for other financial licence holders that if your IT security isn't up to scratch, ASIC will hold you responsible - so get your shit together.

### Heroku mass resets passwords & API tokens, Foone got Microsoft to open source 3D Movie Maker, local pricing & dates for new LG OLED TVs

- Heroku sent out emails to a large chunk of users, telling them their password and API access tokens are getting reset today in response to security incident that was made public place a month ago. God speed to everyone updating their API tokens on projects they forgot about because of this.
- A month ago, popular Twitter user Foone asked Microsoft to open source the code to its 1995 program 3D Movie Maker. Microsoft listened and you can grab it off Github right now, but it looks like a pain in the arse to build. I don't remember this program at all, but people still use it to make crude movies.
- LG has announced Australian product codes, release dates and RRPs for their latest generation of OLED TVs (and non-OLEDs, but who cares). I would ignore the RRP prices, as you've gotta be a massive rube to pay that, but the release dates might be of interest to those in the market for a new TV. I would like that 97" unit.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### The many telephones of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

A huge nerd has analysed the weird looking phones Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has going on. Much of it is Soviet era stuff, like the "extremely large telephone, which is ivory-colored and has a rather small display" that contains "80 direct line buttons, so the president can make a call to almost anyone by pressing just a single button". Zelenskyy also has a TEMPEST-shielded Cisco DX80 videoconferencing system to prevent electromagnetic emanations and a dedicated Cisco 7975G to talk to the Whitehouse securely. Very interesting.

## Bargains

- $25 Belong pre-paid SIM - $5 at The Good Guys
- LG 32UN880-B UltraFine 32" 4K monitor - $899 from Amazon
- Civ 6 Platinum Edition for Nintendo Switch - $23.38 from the Nintendo eShop
- Get a $400 JB gift card if you sign up for a $69/m 100GB/m Telstra plan on a 12m contract (works out to $35.67/m)
- Sonos Beam or Arc soundbars - $594.15/$1274.15 from The Good Guys
- 54% off dual packs of various YubiKey 2FA dongles (ends at 5PM)
- iPhone 12 64GB, Pixel 6 128GB, Pixel 6 Pro 128GB - $949/$849/$1099 from Telstra
- Refurbished Fetch Mini set-top box - $49 from Fetch's eBay store

## The End

📻 Baby - The Drones

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