Digital capitulation

18 Jun 2021 — 3 min read

Friday, June 18, 2021

We’re on holiday next week so we’ll be back with more Byteside Daily on June 29.

Big outage another CDN error: Yesterday afternoon, a major outage occurred that impacted a wide range of Australian institutions, including major banks and their mobile apps, Virgin Australia airlines, Australia Post and more. Soon after cyber attack theories had been raised, it was learned that CDN Akamai had a routing error that impacted around 500 of its customers. All up the incident caused disruptions for around six hours.

Labor gives up on digital liberty – again: The controversial Online Safety Bill will pass parliament with the Labor party once again claiming to be “not happy” but going to support it anyway. Since before the election in 2018, Labor has held a consistent position of claiming to be upset or disappointed or unhappy with legislation related to important digital protections like privacy, encryption and censorship, but to pass the laws anyway because they never want to open the door to an actual fight over civil liberties. What’s the point of an opposition again?

Aldi first to 100% renewables: In better local news, Aldi Australia has become the first major retailer in the country to power all its operations with 100% renewable power. The German supermarket chain’s local operation announced it has achieved the target six months ahead of schedule, using solar installed on its own premises as well as purchased power from wind farms and other renewable energy purchases. According to Renew Economy, Aldi is the 67th biggest user of electricity in Australia, with 555 stores and eight distribution centres. So this really is a great example to the nation on big business getting the right thing done.

China sends crew to new space station: Up in space, China has successfully sent a first crew to its new orbital space station with a team of three astronauts to the Tiangong station where they are setting up living quarters for the next three months. China has said it is open to future collaboration with other nations on its new station which is expected to be in orbit for over ten years. The ISS is scheduled to retire in 2024 though it can potentially be extended out to 2028.

Carrie Fisher gets her star: In entertainment news, Carrie Fisher is set to receive a posthumous Walk of Fame star which raises the question of how on Earth this didn’t happen during her lifetime? The easy answer is no one bought one for her to promote a film, which is how it usually happens. Other great names scheduled to be added to the walk in 2022 include Ewan McGregor, Willem Dafoe, Regina King, Francis Ford Coppola, Salma Hayek, and Bob Odenkirk.

WoW 9.1 gets a date: In videogames, Blizzard has announced World of Warcraft’s next major patch, Chains of Domination, will go live on June 30, with the next raid opening its doors on July 7. Players will also be able to unlock flying in the patch in that second week and then the next race for mythic world first will kick off on July 14.

Esports to watch this weekend: For those after some esports to watch this weekend, DOTA 2 is finally feeling the excitement again with the ESL One Summer tournament taking place. We’re into the thick of qualifying for The International which did not take place in 2020 so fans are ready and eager for things to get serious once again. Hearthstone also has its Masters Tour Dalaran taking place which you can catch on YouTube, and a reminder that we are just a few weeks away from Battle Arena Melbourne on the second weekend of July for the biggest FGC tournament in Australia.

Brain food

He warned Apple about the risks in China. Then they became reality.

Doug Guthrie, once one of America’s leading China bulls, started ringing the alarm on doing business there.

Nearly half of all ads on fake news sites come from Google, study finds

And it’s about a third for “low credibility” sites.

Cool

Bizarre deep-sea creature bristling with teeth 'totally unique', scientist says

It’s like a cryptid, but a real one!

On this day...

1981: The first ‘stealth fighter’, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, takes its first flight.

Trivia

Accounting for inflation, which videogame is the highest grossing of all time?