# The Sizzle

### Issue 269 - Monday, 7th November 2016 - Don't Let Them Tell You The Future's Electric

- Macedonians spreading false pro-Trump stories on Facebook for the ad money
- USA on high cyber alert for when or if Russia cyber attacks the election
- Freeview launches on iOS and Android
- Google and Blizzard train DeepMind to play StarCraft
- SpaceX found out why their rocket exploded

- Singing robot fish responds to Amazon voice commands
- PiBakery gets your Raspberry Pi going without fiddling with Linux bullshit
- Transport Fever, a spiritual sequel to Transport Tycoon

NEWS

Macedonians spreading false pro-Trump stories on Facebook for the ad money
In the wake of the US election, BuzzFeed has revealed that Trump fans are reading and sharing totally made up bullshit stories that some kids in Macedonia are spreading. They're making real sounding blogs (i.e: USConservativeToday.com) finding 100% made up stories about the sort of shit Trump people would like (e.g: watch Bill Clinton's sex tape, Robert De Niro loves Trump, the Pope said not to vote for Hillary) and promote it on Facebook to drive traffic to their blogs where they make a bit of cash on ads. The internet was supposed to educate us all and enlighten us. Man, we totally over-estimated society.
Discuss

USA on high cyber alert for when or if Russia cyber attacks the election
Also related to the US election, the CIA is on standby to fuck up Russia's cybers if they decide to fuck with the US democracy. According to NBC, US cybersoliders (I made that word up) have managed to infiltrate Russian telecommunications networks, electricity grid and "Kremlin command systems", just sitting, biding their time, so that if the Russian bear pokes the US eagle, the counter offensive can begin.
Discuss

Freeview launches on iOS and Android
Freeview FV has launched on iOS and Android. It's a one-stop shop for watching Australian free to air TV over the Internet. Don't get too excited though - often things you want to watch live, like say, sport, are often blacked out due to rights restrictions on internet broadcasting. It's also pretty average quality and doesn't support streaming to a Chromecast or Apple TV. At least it's a nice, free TV guide (RIP OzTV).
Discuss

Google and Blizzard train DeepMind to play StarCraft
Google's DeepMind AI was superior than humans at Go and now it's being trained to play another popular Korean past-time, StarCraft. Google and Blizzard are working together to create the perfect StarCraft AI that will hopefully let AI in general learn to deal with visual and gameplay complexity and to expose any deficiencies in DeepMind's AI models. Basically, if DeepMind can learn to play StarCraft well, it can do many other complicated things well too.
Discuss

SpaceX found out why their rocket exploded
Remember the SpaceX rocket that exploded at launch back in September? It took SpaceX a few months to figure out what went wrong, but Elon Musk has announced that they finally found out what went wrong. Elon said, "it basically involves liquid helium, advanced carbon fiber composites, and solid oxygen. Oxygen so cold that it actually enters solid phase" - now that they think they've gotten to the bottom of that problem (which was according to them, the hardest problem they've ever had to solve), SpaceX will resume rocket launches in December.
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COOL SHIT

Singing robot fish responds to Amazon voice commands
Check out this Billy Bass Singing Fish (made famous by The Sopranos) that is hooked up with Amazon Alexa. It is the future of the internet of things. It is funny and it is good and I want this animatronic internet enabled fish that can tell me the weather. I will pay $49.99 for one and not a cent more.
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PiBakery gets your Raspberry Pi going without fiddling with Linux bullshit
PiBakery is a really cool interface for setting up a Rasbperry Pi. It's a GUI that has a flow-chart style representation of what your Pi should do on the first boot (e.g: config wi-fi, run this script, etc.) and what it should do every boot (e.g: run VNC, run certain apps), and then exports the config to an SD card with the latest version of Raspbian, ready to plug into your Pi.
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Transport Fever, a spiritual sequel to Transport Tycoon
Do you wish there was a reboot of the classic Transport Tycoon game? OpenTTD is great, but is it still too old for you? Well feast your eyes upon Transport Fever. It's a modern game inspired by Transport Tycoon where you make transport networks across cities, with planes, trains, trucks, buses and boats. It comes out tomorrow, so while you're waiting for it on Steam, there's loads of gameplay videos from the developer on YouTube. I can't wait to give this a shot.
Discuss

Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!)
--Anthony

The Sizzle is curated by Anthony "@decryption" Agius and emailed every weekday afternoon. Today's subject line is from The Big Three Killed My Baby, by The White Stripes. Like The Sizzle? Like it on Facebook!