# In This Issue

- Mozilla says goodbye to 250 employees as they work to find new revenue streams away from Google

- Government turns off internet in Belarus during an election, falsely calls it a DDoS

- News, news, news, news, news

- Keyboard latency can go to hell

- Cheap Kingston 1TB SSD, Nokia mesh wi-fi, Q Acoustics floorstanding speakers, blue office chair

# News

#### Mozilla says goodbye to 250 employees as they work to find new revenue streams away from Google

Mozilla has sacked 250 people as part of a re-organisation to find new ways of making money that aren't Google search engine referrals. In a blog post, Mozilla's CEO said that the business is now focussed on "products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech", like the Lockwise password manager, Send file sharing service, Pocket bookmarking app and a Mozilla branded VPN. I use and enjoy Firefox on all my devices, plus pay for Pocket, but always thought it was hypocritical for Mozilla to go on about privacy yet take money from Google. I really hope they can continue making solid internet-related products people can use with a relatively clean conscience.

#### Government turns off internet in Belarus during an election, falsely calls it a DDoS

Belarus turned off the internet during their recent election. The government blamed multiple DDoS attacks for "problems with equipment" but internet connectivity tracking group NetBlocks reckons there aren't any signs of huge chunks of traffic entering Belarus lately. The outages "appear to be the result of a brute-force blocking strategy at the network layer, rather than a more refined filtering system at the application layer" like what we've seen in other countries. Some interesting discussion on Hacker News from people trying to communicate with their Belarusian buddies, trying to find ways past the blockags. Unfortunately with so few points of connectivity in a country like Belarus, silencing the internet there is relatively easy.

#### News, news, news, news, news

- The Xbox Series X is set to go on sale in November, price still unknown. It's a weird launch as there won't be any "new" games for it, just a bunch of remastered titles that'll look nicer on the new console.

- Twitter has turned on the ability to restrict who can reply to your tweets, on an individual tweet basis. Just want to vent and not deal with replies? You can do that now.

- Nvidia has announced a GeForce related event for September 1st where they're likely to release a new bunch of gaming graphics cards based on the Ampere GPU released in May.

- Xiaomi's got a new flagship phone to celebrate their "Decade of Innovation". The Mi 10 Ultra is a souped up version of the Mi 10 with an even fancier camera, 120W charging, 120Hz display and more.

- NSW is gonna add a feature to the Service NSW app to let "users scan a QR code to check-in at a hospitality venue, replacing the existing pen and paper approach". Sounds useful.

# Not News

#### Keyboard latency can go to hell

As someone that types for a living, I absolutely can't stand latency between my keypress and the letters appearing on the screen. I type better than I can talk, so like talking, any latency totally kills my flow. Pavel Fatin also hates typing latency and has made a Java app to measure input latency in various text editors. I ran it on my stupidly fast for what I use it for iMac Pro (a glorified typewriter most of the time) with Sublime Text and it tells me the average latency is 10.7ms. Not bad I guess. I tried it again in TextEdit and it was even better at 6.1ms. I don't really know what to do with this information, but the companion article explaining the impact of text input latency on concentration and typing speed was interesting.

# Bargains

- Kingston A2000 1TB NVMe SSD - $159 at Centrecom

- Nokia Wi-Fi Beacon mesh wi-fi router 2-pack/3-pack - $295/$393 from Amazon AU

- Q Acoustics 3050i floorstanding speakers - $999 at RIO Sound and Vision

- Retro Mesh Office Chair in blue - $198 from Epic Office Furniture

🎶 Redhead - Magic Dirt

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