Remember that Teenage Engineering designed Rabbit R1 AI assistant thing that ended up being pretty useless? It's also a security risk! According to "members of a community focused on jailbreaking and reverse engineering" the device, "Rabbit left critical API keys hardcoded and exposed in its code" and allows anyone who saw it to "use various services, including text-to-speech services and email sending services, as if they were the company" - including the raw data sent back and forth between everyone's Rabbit devices and the various APIs the device uses. To top it off, Rabbit "has known that we have had their ElevenLabs API key for a month, but they have taken no action to rotate the API keys". There's a bit more detail in this blog post from Rabbitude. Very amateur and naive from Rabbit. More money than brains, clearly.
Comms minister has put out a fresh press release warning people about the imminent Optus (1st Sept) & Telstra (31st Aug) 3G network shutdowns. It mentions a little website the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association set up where you can enter a device's IMEI and check if it'll work after the 3G network is turned off. You can also text the number 3 to the phone number 3498 and get an automatic response to let you know if your device is okay or not. It also mentions there's still around 283,000 devices on the 3G network that'll cease to operate, won't even be able to call 000. That's worrying as is, but even more worrying to me are the vast tracts of regional Australia, not even remote Australia, where 3G is all you get. What happens then? I haven't seen any info regarding how quickly the 3G spectrum will be transitioned to LTE.
The new ARM-based Surface Pro 11th-gen and Surface Laptop 7th-gen are in stock at JB Hi-Fi, but there's suspiciously very few benchmarks of the new Snapdragon Elite X SoC on the ol' WWW. NotebookCheck ran Cinebench on the X1E-84-100 and found it is slightly faster than Apple's M3 Pro and about the same as the Ryzen 7745HX - a much more power hungry CPU. Tom's Guide benchmarked the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 and in a run of Civ 6 at 1080p, wasn't able to crack more than 20fps, whereas the M3 MacBook Air was capable of over 40fps. The MacBook also trounced the Surface Pro 11 in battery life - 12hrs vs 15hrs. I imagine an M4-based MacBook would widen the gap even further and as long as Apple keeps giving TSMC unholy amounts of cash, it'll probably stay that way, but at least non-Apple users can get a taste of what the Mac has been delivering since 2020.
Technopolis Volume 1 - August 1982 (RevengeOfTheHubz / Internet Archive)
📻 Minor Byrd - You Am I
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