### Issue 1914 - Monday 21st August, 2023

A good friend of mine and a long time on/off Sizzle subscriber, Justin Gibson, died on Sunday morning. I've known him for a solid decade as a friend of a friend, but in the last few years we became very close and it was practically part of my work day routine to chat with the dude on Slack while we both ignored our jobs. He loved The Sizzle and in the periods when he did subscribe, would regularly comment on how he learned something or thought a thing I wrote was funny or interesting. I think he'd get a little ego boost being mentioned here (but he'd never tell anyone that).

This isn't the place for a eulogy for someone most of you would consider a stranger, so I mostly bring him up to firstly remember him here as it's my special space and something dominating my life right now, but mostly as a wider reminder to all of us to take the time to meet up with our internet mates more often and never discount how strong those connections are. When you can't shoot those people a message and get a response back, it'll be just as much of a loss as someone you saw in person every day. I miss you Muadgib.

## In Today's Issue

- AuDA got hacked, calls in the pros to investigate
- Robotaxis are a pain in San Francisco's arse
- GST scam went viral on TikTok to the tune of $4.6b
- Heads up, WD and SanDisk external SSDs have issues
- Cheap Kindles, Edifier speaker, Xbox controllers, Chromecast, Seagate SSD, Sony headunit, Mac Studio, HP SFF PC, Focal headphones

## The News

### AuDA got hacked, calls in the pros to investigate

AuDA - the mob that are responsible for all of Australia's top level domains (i.e: everything .au, like .com.au, .net.au, .org.au and so on) - released a statement on Sunday that they've called in the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the Department of Home Affairs and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to "investigate" the claims of a hacker who says they have "15GB of [the] organisation's data which includes powers of attorney & legal docs, passports, personal data, medical reports, loan repayment, death certificates, customer bank accounts details, etc". This seems like internal employee information, not information on domain owners, but if the hackers were able to get this stuff, could other systems be at risk that we don't know about?

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### Robotaxis are a pain in San Francisco's arse

Over in San Francisco, a Cruise (GM) robotaxi crashed into a fire truck on its way to an emergency, injuring the passenger. This took place less than a week after the Californian government allowed robotaxi services to operate 24/7 across the entirety of San Francisco. As a result, GM has "agreed to a 50% reduction and will have no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night". Also in the same week, a photo of a Cruise robotaxi driving into wet concrete and a video of a 3-way standoff between robotaxis at an intersection have been doing the rounds on social media. Oh, and people are having sex in the robotaxis, of course. As much as I want a driverless car to be real, there's a huge issue with how they interact in the messy reality of humanity.

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### GST scam went viral on TikTok to the tune of $4.6b

The AFR is reporting on the ATO's Operation Protego - a "crime wave" of people grabbing ABNs, lodging false business activity statements on MyGov and claiming around $4.6b in GST refunds without the ATO doing any sort of verification to see if they're entitled to it. To make it even funnier, people are out there on TikTok spreading news of this scam! In public, with no shame! Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as the ATO noticed ($4.6b sliding out the back door tends to get noticed, lol) and is starting to arrest people, with four drug addicts from Mildura who spent their GST money on "some stupid shit" the first batch to face the consequences for their actions. I know this is pretty loose "tech" news, but it's funny, makes the government look stupid and involves TikTok, so in The Sizzle it goes.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Heads up, WD and SanDisk external SSDs have issues

SanDisk/Western Digital's external SSDs appear to be duds. There's now 3 lawsuits over in the USA claiming that "SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable", even after firmware updates designed to fix the problem. Both Arstechnica and The Verge have experienced this issue where the drive just becomes unrecognisable by the host computer, seemingly at random. Of course, you want backups so your data isn't toast, but lots of people use these disks as storage for raw video files off a camera, that is then backed up once copied onto a computer. Probably worth staying away from these disks if you seem them cheap in the near future while WD sorts their shit out.

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## Bargains

- Kindle Paperwhite 11th-gen 16GB - $217 at Officeworks
- Kindle Oasis 8GB/16GB Wi-Fi or 16GB LTE - $364/$414/$494 from Amazon
- Edifier S1000W wi-fi enabled (AirPlay 2, Spotify, Tidal) active bookshelf speakers - $419.99
- Xbox Series X/S wireless controller - $69.95 from Amazon
- Chromecast with Google TV 4K - $67 from Amazon
- Seagate FireCuda 530 1TB NVMe SSD with heatsink - $105.59 from Amazon UK
- Sony XAV-AX1000 Apple Carplay Head Unit - $339 after Sony cashback from Supercheap Auto
- Apple Mac Studio (M1 Max, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD) - $2496 from Officeworks
- Refurb HP EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF PC (i5-8500, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) - $233.10 from UN Tech
- Focal Clear open back headphones - $799 from Addicted to Audio
- Focal Bathys noise cancelling headphones - $649 from Addicted to Audio

## Image Of The Day

Justin Gibson, the king of pub trivia (thanks for the photo Chris)

## The End

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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.