### Issue 1538 - Wednesday 2nd February, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Tesla recalls 54,000 cars in US because Autopilot rolls through stop signs illegally
- Home Affairs ploughs on with national facial recognition database despite no law allowing it
- Telstra to spend $1.6b upgrading national fibre network to match HyperOne's build in progress
- Ubiquiti based free to air TV repeater station
- Cheap Kindle, AppleCare, Telstra & Vodafone prepaid, Red Alert 3, AirPods Max

## The News

### Tesla recalls 54,000 cars in US because Autopilot rolls through stop signs illegally

Tesla has issued a recall of ~54,000 of its cars after the NHTSA alerted Tesla that a feature in its "Full Self Driving" software was breaking a road rule. The USA has bizarre 4-way stop sign intersections (install a roundabout you idiots) and instead of coming to a complete stop at this intersection like you're supposed to, the software was programmed to do a "rolling stop" instead at ~9km/h depending on a few variables. Apparently Americans largely disobey these stop signs, despite the law being you gotta stop. Tesla will release a firmware update eventually to fix this. Elon Musk took to Twitter and called the journalist of the linked article "a lobbyist", without providing any evidence. Less legally risky than calling him a pedo without any evidence I guess.

### Home Affairs ploughs on with national facial recognition database despite no law allowing it

The National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution is a dystopian project the Department of Home Affairs has been pushing for a few years now, but couldn't do it because the laws to make it happen don't exist yet. That isn't stopping the plucky little government department, as they've released a market tender to find a business willing to operate it. The law required to give government agencies permission to use all our drivers licence photos for non-drivers licence related activities was introduced into Parliament in 2018, but a committee knocked it back saying it needs more privacy protections. No new amendments have been submitted since, let alone a law passed, but they're building the damn system anyways. Shameless.

### Telstra to spend $1.6b upgrading national fibre network to match HyperOne's build in progress

Telstra/InfraCo has announced a chunk of new domestic fibre infrastructure. They will spend $1.6b to build "state-of-the-art inter-city dual fibre paths" that will "enable express connectivity between capital cities up to 55Tbps per fibre pair capacity (over six times today's typical capacity of 8.8Tbps per fibre pair)". Essentially a giant upgrade of its fibre network, probably to compete with Bevan Slattery's HyperOne, which is doing the same thing and should be finished a bit before Telstra's upgrade. The $1.6b spend will also support ViaSat-3 (3x Ka-band geostationary satellites), with Telstra getting the gig to support Australian ground-stations and interconnects for the project.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Ubiquiti based free to air TV repeater station

Over on the Ubiquiti forums, hjerald1 set up a remote free to air TV antenna "repeater" station using Ubiquiti point-to-point hardware. Because they live in a valley, TV signals don't reach their house. Instead of building an impossibly high tower for a TV antenna to live on, put the antenna on top of the hill, then stuck a HD Homerun in a weatherproof box along with a 100W solar panel, two 12V batteries, a Ubiquiti SolarPoint controller and a NBE-5AC-Gen2, pointed back to another NBE-5AC-Gen2 connected to their LAN. Works perfectly. Probably much cheaper than running a coax cable and amplifiers from the hill to their house.

## Bargains

- Kindle Paperwhite 8GB (11th-gen/2021 model) - $199 at JB Hi-Fi
- 20% off AppleCare+ for Macs & eligible iPads on the Apple Education Store
- Telstra 365-day prepaid SIM with 225GB data - $250 from Telstra
- Vodafone 365-day prepaid SIM with 150GB data - $125 from Woolworths
- Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 - $7.48 on Steam
- Apple AirPods Max (green, silver, pink, grey) - $689, $699, $729, $749 + delivery from Umart

## The End

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