Huge USA telco AT&T suffered a leak of call and SMS metadata for all its customers between May 1st 2022 and October 31st 2022. That's a huge list of every phone number every single AT&T customer called in that 6 month period. If this data became public, you could look up someone's phone number and get a list of who they called - I don't think I need to explain why this is a Bad Thing. This leak happened because AT&T was sending this data to a service called Snowflake and Snowflake did a very bad job securing that data. The only thing standing between the public and this database was a username and password. Not even basic MFA, a VPN, ACLs or anything like that. Really does boggle the mind how mindlessly all this data is stored, AT&T absolutely know better than this.
The EU has pointed its regulation laser away from Apple and is beaming it directly into Elon Musk's eyes over X's multiple breaches of the Digital Services Act. The EU's three beefs are the blue checkmarks to verify a user is who they say they are is bullshit and doesn't work, there's no transparency around who is placing ads on X as is required by the DSA and that X cut off researchers from gathering data via the API and even web scraping. This also makes X the first company to be found non-compliant with the DSA and unless X can change the EU's mind, will be fined up to 6% X's worldwide turnover until the EU is happy.
Aussie Broadband has launched a new brand, Buddy Telco - a "new digital-first challenger brand aimed at disrupting the value-seeking NBN market in Australia, targeting 4 million households out of the estimated total addressable NBN market of approximately 8.3 million". They claim plan pricing will be "highly competitive, supported by the self-serve model, lower cost to serve, and the benefits of automation and AI". Buddy's 1000/50 pricing is $99/m, $30 a month cheaper than Aussie Broadband, but with the same typical evening speeds. Will be interesting to see what any practical differences exist once they start on-boarding customers.
Goldman Sachs released a report on the state of AI investment and their view is that "the technology isn't designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs, which may not decline as many expect". Even if you assume that AI will get to the point eventually where the benefits are obvious - those benefits being making employees more productive little machines - the insane amounts of electricity (not cheap while we transition to renewables and supply is constrained) and processing power (extremely not cheap as TSMC has everyone by the balls) required makes AI as we know it economically unrealistic - pretty similar to what Sequoia was saying last week.
Mondo 2000, Issue 14, 1995 (Famicoman / Internet Archive)
📻 Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot - Remastered Version
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