### Issue 1583 - Thursday 7th April, 2022

## In Today's Issue

- Australian startup Fast raised $165m in 2019, is now dead
- Telstra kicks off network wide SMS spam filtering
- Greens EV plan, Meta wants to be like Roblox, Amazon's Starlink competitor, Jack Dorsey reflects on the pain he's caused us, Royal Mint ordered to make an NFT
- Aussie Broadband's AUSNOG 2021 presentation is a nice glimpse into the joy and pain of running a large ISP
- Cheap Edifier S1000MKII bookshelf speakers, Razer Blade 14 laptop, LEGO Millennium Falcon, Fitbit Charge 4, Xiaomi Mi Band 6

## The News

### Australian startup Fast raised $165m in 2019, is now dead

Australian-led startup Fast has shat the bed and no longer exists. The premise of the business was to "provide online shoppers with a single payment profile which could be used, instantly, across participating e-commerce retailers", copying Amazon's 1-Click ordering process now that Amazon's patent expired. They raised over $165m from investors (led by eCommerce giant Stripe) since 2019, but only managed $790,000 revenue last year. Fast was spending $10,000,000 a month and hired 400 employees in 2021. In a tweet announcing the closure, founder Domm Holland said that "sometimes trailblazers don't make it all the way to the mountaintop" as his staff were shown the door.

### Telstra kicks off network wide SMS spam filtering

Telstra and Telstra MVNO customers should get a welcome reduction in the number of nonsense spam SMS hitting their phones, as they've turned on network wide filtering after a successful 3-month trial with their employees. The "automatic machine scanning picks out suspicious content such as malicious links and combines this with other patterns and characteristics like the time, sender, the number of messages sent and the recipient". You can opt out by sending an SMS to 0438214682 with the words FILTER OFF. I've had heaps of these lately and they're very annoying, good to see Telstra do something about it.

### Greens EV plan, Meta wants to be like Roblox, Amazon's Starlink competitor, Jack Dorsey reflects on the pain he's caused us, Royal Mint ordered to make an NFT

- The Greens announced a nice plan to give $15,000 rebates for EV purchases, a fund to reboot car manufacturing in Australia and $2b for a publicly owned fast charging network. It'll probably never happen, but we can dream.
- Info leaked to the Financial Times reckon that Facebook wants to create a currency similar to Roblox, allow posting & sharing of NFTs that'll let you into certain groups and "social tokens" or "reputation tokens", earned for good contributions.
- Amazon's competitor to Starlink, Project Kuiper, has progressed a step further. They've signed deals to launch 83 low-earth satellites with basically every rocket company except SpaceX. Two prototypes are due for launch later this year.
- Twitter's founder (now sadly diseased with Bitcoin brain), Jack Dorsey, tweeted this week that "centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it". Ok, cool, thanks mate?
- The UK's treasury minister has asked the Royal Mint to make an NFT. Doing so would be "an emblem of the forward-looking approach". This is a PR stunt, but the UK government is also working on regulating stablecoins and DAOs.

## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Aussie Broadband's AUSNOG 2021 presentation is a nice glimpse into the joy and pain of running a large ISP

AUSNOG 2021 is taking place right now (I know it's 2022, go whinge at AUSNOG) which means lots of juicy network related info from Phil Britt - the boss of Aussie Broadband. His presentation this year (PDF) detailed their massive project to roll their own fibre network around the country and hooking it up to all 121 of NBN's POIs. It's fascinating to see such a large telco (closing in on the 4th biggest ISP in Australia) justify why they do the things they do. Lots of cool photos and maps in the presentation too. Thank you Brody for sharing this with me and the other nerds on The Sizzle's Slack channel!

## Bargains

- Edifier S1000MKII bookshelf speakers - $399.99 from Amazon
- Razer Blade 14 laptop (Ryzen 9 5900HX, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 165Hz display, RTX3070) - $2499 from Microsoft's eBay store
- LEGO UCS Millennium Falcon 75192 - $1039.20 from Target
- Fitbit Charge 4 - $119 from Amazon
- Xiaomi Mi Band 6 - $48.13 from Xiaomi's eBay store

## The End

📻 Ramble - Silverchair

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