### Issue 1551 - Monday 21st February, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- OpenSea uses hit with phishing attacks, powerless to do anything
- Telstra and TPG sign 10-year deal to share parts of each other's networks
- Google tries out widgets on google.com homepage
- Bitcoin miners unnecessarily extend the life of yet another coal power plant
- Cheap Logitech keyboard for iPad, 77" LG OLED, Oculus Quest 2, Dell monitors, DJI gimbal, Adobe Creative Cloud, Synology DS920+ NAS, Woolworths & Optus prepaid SIMs, Intel 12th-gen CPUs

## The News

### OpenSea uses hit with phishing attacks, powerless to do anything

Someone's doing a small but lucrative phishing attack on the premier NFT marketplace, OpenSea. According to OpenSea's boss, 32 users are confirmed as having had their NFTs stolen, which were then sold for US$1.7m. There's some tweets going around they're worth $200m, but I have no idea where that figure was pulled from. Just goes to show that despite the crypto boosters crowing that it's more secure than traditional finance, it's just as vulnerable. Hopefully OpenSea institute a pool of funds to reimburse users after this sort of thing, then try and hunt down who stole the NFTs to replenish the fund pool.

### Telstra and TPG sign 10-year deal to share parts of each other's networks

Telstra and TPG have signed a 10-year multi-operator core network deal that'll share portions of each other's networks. TPG (aka Vodafone ) gets access to 3,700 "mobile network assets" that'll increase 4G and 5G coverage in regional and urban fringe areas and decommission 725 of its sites that are presumably redundant now. Telstra gets "access to equipment already on 169 TPG mobile sites, 4G and 5G spectrum owned by TPG, and the ability to deploy its own equipment on the sites". Telstra is still keeping "one million square kilometres of coverage for itself as a 'competitive advantage' as no other operators have infrastructure there".

### Google tries out widgets on google.com homepage

Google is experimenting with the layout of their homepage. For decades google.com has been sacrosanct in that there's nothing except a logo, input box, two buttons and the occasional public service announcement. Something's changed over in Mountain View as they've decided to slap in some customisable widgets on google.com, like weather, stocks, "COVID news" and more. I dunno who still visits google.com instead of using the address bar just to type in a query directly, but it's cute seeing Google do what Yahoo and Lycos and all the old school search engines used to do back in the day. Wait long enough and all computing paradigms come back into fashion!

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Bitcoin miners unnecessarily extend the life of yet another coal power plant

There's plenty of reasons to loathe cryptocurrency, but the biggest reason to hate that whole scene is their shamelessness in bailing out filthy old coal power plants that would have otherwise closed down. The latest example is in Montana, where a 115MW coal plant that was struggling financially and set to shut down, was given a lifeline by Bitcoin mining outfit Marathon who built a data centre next to the plant and agreed to purchase all the power the plant can put out. 206,000t of CO2 was emitted in a single quarter in 2022 just for some stupid fucking Bitcoin. To put that into perspective, a 2020 Toyota Camry (4cyl petrol) has 1.36t of annual tailpipe CO2 emissions.

## Bargains

- Logitech Combo Touch for iPad 12.9" (5th Gen) - $249 from Amazon
- LG C1 77" OLED77C1PTB 4K TV - $5390 + delivery from VideoPro
- Oculus Quest 2 128GB - $479 from Amazon
- Heaps of Dell monitors 20% off in their latest eBay sale (use my affiliate link please!)
- DJI OM 5 Mobile Gimbal - $199 + $6 shipping (or free click & collect) from Bing Lee
- 24% off Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps subscription until the 1st of March ($58.29/m instead of $76.99/m)
- Synology DiskStation DS920+ 4-bay NAS - $729 from Shopping Express
- Woolworths Mobile (Telstra MVNO) 365-day SIM with 100GB data, unlimited calls & SMS, eSIM support - $150 from Woolworths
- Optus pre-paid 365-day SIM with 100GB data, unlimited calls & SMS, eSIM support and 5G - $150 from Optus
- Intel Core i9-12900K - $799.20, i9-12900KF - $779.40, i5-12600K - $399.60, i5-12600KF - $377.10, all from Shopping Express

## The End

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