Issue 609 Wednesday, 4th April 2018 In This Issue Guns and hackers in YouTube shooting Bank customers left with empty accounts in glitch Facebook’s really trying for forgiveness Spotify’s first glimpse at the stock market What's the one thing the world needs? Beer in space Introducing the vigilante botnet the world needs Giving the middle finger to adverts Worry no more about extra long podcasts News Guns and hackers in YouTube shooting The news coming from YouTube this morning was too huge to ignore. Employees in North California have described fleeing for their lives after a shooting at their headquarters. The female suspect was found dead inside the building with ‘self-inflicted’ wounds. Four people were taken to hospital for their injuries. Despite reports that it stemmed from a domestic dispute, suggest she was angry about age restrictions on the site. But the question will be raised time and time again - why is it so damn easy to get your hands on a gun?! Also sickening, was the news that someone actually hacked a YouTube employees account to spread fake news during the shooting. Tweets were sent out claiming to be from a product manager and Twitter’s CEO himself stepped up to personally assure the team he would handle the posts. Bank customers left with empty accounts in glitch Commonwealth Bank has faced a few tiny issues today, with customers across the entire country unable to access details through the online NetBank service, as well as the CommBank app and CommBiz. The issue began around 8am and affected the credit cards and loan services, supposedly completely wiping all balances from their accounts! It also affected BPAY, meaning a number of payments were delayed. This comes a week after it was announced that a number of CBA executives would be leaving the firm. CBA has been under fire over the last month thanks to the Royal Commission looking at banking misconduct. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting closer and closer to keeping my money under the mattress. Facebook’s really trying for forgiveness I can’t help but feel that Facebook’s latest appearance in the news is just them shouting ‘Hey, look at us, we care about your safety!’ The social media giant has announced they’ve just deleted 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook Pages, and 65 Instagram accounts belonging to the Internet Research Agency in Russia. Not only have they shared these figures with us, but they’ve also given examples of the kind of content the group was posting. This isn’t the only attempt at proving they care about our data (y’know, after they gave it all away). This week, child company Instagram decided to cut the amount of data its third-party apps are able to pull. It did it without telling anyone and now a whole bunch of app developers are pissed off. The change has meant that apps are reaching its data limit and losing functionality. Unlike Facebook with the Russians, Insta has remained pretty quiet on the matter. Apple steps up AI by taking Google exec Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering has announced his switch over to Apple. John Giannandrea was in charge of artificial intelligence, but will now be reporting directly to Tim Cooke himself leading Apple’s "machine learning and A.I. strategy". The term machine learning makes me a little nervous (thank you Will Smith and iRobot), but Apple’s efforts with AI seem to be behind everyone else’s. Giannandrea has been at Google since 2010, but don't worry, apparently his role will be passed on to a 19-year-old called Jeff. What's the one thing the world needs? Beer in space Possibly the most welcome news today… if you spend much time in space. An Australian brewery and space engineering company are teaming up to send beer up to the astronauts! Sydney-based 4 Pines Brewing Company and Saber Astronautics are in the final stages of testing a prototype of the bottle. Could this be a late April fool? Is this some half-arsed attempt to get into The Sizzle? No. This project has been going on for seven years now. And the next step? Actually sending a team to go up and test this beer in zero-gravity. If they’re accepting volunteers, I’m not hard to find. Not News, But Still Cool Introducing the vigilante botnet the world needs When you think of a botnet, you think of a bunch of devices infected with malware that are used to mine Bitcoin, commit DDoS attacks or act as a supply of fresh proxies to cover a hacker's tracks. Hajime is what I guess you could call a reverse botnet - it goes around finding insecure IoT devices and instead of turning the device into another pawn in a hacker's game, it actually fixes the issues that lead to the device getting hacked in the first place. It even uses BitTorrent to distribute itself around the internet, avoiding takedowns from ISPs so it can keep doing its good deeds. Hajime, thank you. Giving the middle finger to adverts I'm gonna be lazy and just copy and paste the description for AdNauseam: "AdNauseam is a lightweight browser extension that blends software tool and artware intervention to fight back against tracking by advertising networks. AdNauseam works like an ad-blocker (it is built atop uBlock-Origin) to silently simulate clicks on each blocked ad, confusing trackers as to one's real interests. At the same time, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas" - I love this concept. Worry no more about extra long podcasts Do you produce a podcast? Is it one of those long ranty podcasts where the conversation never stops? Do everyone a favour and add in chapters, so we can skip the bits we find boring. Forecast is an app that makes adding chapters to an MP3 really easy. You feed it a WAV file, fill in the time stamps of the chapters, give the chapter a title, even a link and image if you want and it does the rest. Chapters are good, embrace them. --Rebecca Anthony is currently on holiday and is spending two months travelling to Tokyo, Dusseldorf, Zurich, Geneva, London, Dallas and Los Angeles. While he is gone, Rebecca Pike, Jacob Bates and Joshua Withers will be supplying you with the freshest news. Anthony will be back writing The Sizzle on the 12th of June!