### Issue 2141 - Tuesday 30th July, 2024

## In Today's Issue

- ACCC is OK with expanding NBN tax to fixed wireless 5G services
- PsiQuantum gets bag of cash to build quantum computer in Chicago
- Secure Boot is totally stuffed
- Lenovo's got a version of the ThinkPad T14s with a Snapdragon SoC
- Cheap Boost Mobile, Reolink & Nest smart doorbells, Sonos Arc & Sub combo

## The News

### ACCC is OK with expanding NBN tax to fixed wireless 5G services

The ACCC has opened the door to a NBN tax on 4G and 5G fixed wireless services. It raised the topic in a submission to a review of the regional broadband scheme, an $8/m levy on "NBN-like" services (i.e: fixed line services that offer more than 25mbit) to help fund NBN's "loss-making non-commercial fixed wireless and satellite services". For a long time it considered fixed wireless equivalent to fixed line services, but it's changed its opinion now that 5G services are pretty common, fast and relatively reliable. Now that the ACCC has given the idea its blessing, it's up to the government to legislate it if they decide it's worth the social capital to ruffle those jimmies.

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### PsiQuantum gets bag of cash to build quantum computer in Chicago

Looks like the rubes in federal & QLD's governments got shafted by USA-based PsiQuantum after giving them almost $1b in funding over Aussie companies. The $1b was supposed to make sure PsiQuantum builds their still very theoretical quantum computer in Brisbane, but it came out over the weekend that they're gonna be doing the same thing in Chicago after the Illinois state government announced US$500m of incentives for PsiQuantum to be the anchor tenant in a quantum computing corporate park. As the linked article ponders, "the Illinois Government will want to see a return on its investment. Does it now have a commitment that the world's first fault tolerant quantum computer will be built in Chicago? Isn't that precisely what was promised to Brisbane?".

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### Secure Boot is totally stuffed

Security firm Binarly discovered that "Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro". This is due to "someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers published what's known as a platform key, the cryptographic key that forms the root-of-trust anchor between the hardware device and the firmware that runs on it", on GitHub in 2022. The key was only protected by a 4-character password that Binary quickly cracked. That was bad enough, but they also discovered a set of test keys used in production devices from Aopen, Foremelife, Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo as well as Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. This all means that if someone wanted to install a God-mode UEFI persistent rootkit on a device, it was probably and still is, trivial for them to do so. Awesome.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Lenovo's got a version of the ThinkPad T14s with a Snapdragon SoC

My favourite laptops of all time, besides the current generation MacBook Pro, are the Thinkpad T-series. I've owned many over the years and they're always great. Robust design, great keyboard, spare parts galore, user upgradeable RAM & SSD, easy to open up and blow dust out/reapply thermal paste and cheap on the second hand market. I bring this up as I only just realised that Lenovo's got a T14s variant using a Snarpdragon X Elite CPU thanks to YouTube's algo shoving a video about it in my feed. It's still "coming soon" in Australia, but it's on sale in the US and China now, so shouldn't be too long until it's on sale here. ThinkPad T-series design with the battery life and performance of an ARM CPU? Yes please.

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## Bargains

- Boost Mobile 365-day SIM with 260GB data, unlimited calls & SMS - $217 after cashback via Cashrewards
- Reolink Smart 2K+ Wired PoE Video Doorbell with Chime - $113.04 from Reolink
- Google Nest Doorbell (Battery) - $192.88 from Amazon
- Sonos Arc & Sub Gen 3 Bundle - $2198 from JB Hi-Fi

## Image Of The Day

World Expo 88, 1988 (National Library of Australia)

## The End

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