### Issue 1579 - Friday 1st April, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Ubiquiti sues Brian Krebs over 2021 data breach article
- A Facebook bug boosted stuff that should have been demoted, for 6 months
- Government rules out special R&D tax incentive for software development
- Fire up the Archive Team Warrior!
- Friday Forum Update
- Cheap Edifer bookshelf speakers, Tenda smart plug, Huawei Band 6, 400GB SanDisk microSD, Kingston A2000 1TB SSD, WD Gold 16TB HDD

## The News

### Ubiquiti sues Brian Krebs over 2021 data breach article

Remember last year when a Ubiquiti employee stole data from his employer to extort them, then went to Brian Krebs as a whistleblower about the incident that employee created? Ubiquiti is now suing Mr. Krebs for publishing an article about the extortion attempt, but didn't mention that the previous article he wrote using this "whistleblower" information was in fact an extortionist. It's very confusing, but Ubiquiti are basically very salty about the reputational damage of Kreb's articles about the data breach and want him to pay them damages of US$425,000.

### A Facebook bug boosted stuff that should have been demoted, for 6 months

Facebook has apparently been suffering a "bug" for the last six months with the News Feed, where "posts that would usually be demoted by the company's algorithms being boosted by as much as 30% instead" - Facebook is calling this a "massive ranking failure". The type of content getting free rein included "probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country's invasion of Ukraine". Shit happens, hey?

### Government rules out special R&D tax incentive for software development

Australian software-based startups have struggled to claim the R&D tax incentive (RDTI) as many software development activities don't cleanly come under the "experiment or experiments being carried out for the purpose of generating new knowledge" criteria, so startup lobbyists have been begging the government to create a new program tailored for software. Unfortunately for them, a review of the RDTI by the Board of Taxation has decided against this, arguing that it current setup achieves government's policy objective of "stimulating the economy by encouraging companies to develop innovative ideas and activities".

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Fire up the Archive Team Warrior!

We've all used the Wayback Machine at some point to look back at an old website, so if you know how to use Docker you should give back and run the Archive Team Warrior. When a website (usually with lots of user generated content) announces it's shutting down, your instance is activated and starts helping to download the site and send it back to the Internet Archive for safe keeping. I have a few cheap VPSes (all are under $10/yr) running around the world that do nothing but run instances of the Archive Team Warrior Docker container. If there's a heaven, I expect this pure and noble act to score me big points when the Big Man decides if I should be let in.

## 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.

- wolfjay is after a compact PC for gaming and Plex related purposes
- SCuffy kicked off discussion about the 2022 federal budget from a tech perspective
- funcitonretrun and I had a bit of a love-fest about Gough Lui's blog
- joshuawithers wants a domain registrar that doesn't suck
- LiamJM plans to buy a laptop whilst overseas and wants to know of any gotchas doing so

## Bargains

- Edifier P17 passive (needs an amp) bookshelf speakers - $65 from Amazon
- Tenda Smart WiFi Plug - $9.95 + shipping (buy 4x and get free shipping) from Shopping Square
- Huawei Band 6 smartwatch - $58 from Amazon UK
- SanDisk Ultra 400GB microSD card - $61.09 from Amazon
- Kingston A2000 1TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD - $123.71
- WD Gold 16TB SATA HDD - $449.97 from Amazon US

## The End

📻 Dance - Art vs Science

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