Mentioned in today’s edition: Meta, Theranos, NBN Co, Nvidia, MacBook Neo, VLC, Satoshi Nakamoto and Nintendo Wii. Plus, deals on Noble Audio headphones, MSI motherboards and Apple iPad Pros.

Early Kindle devices will be cut off from Amazon's book stores as the company sunsets its support (Verge). From May 20, Amazon will stop letting people with Kindle models launched in 2012 or before from borrowing, buying, or even downloading new content to the devices via its Kindle Store. Those devices will also be stopped from registering, which essentially bricks them. Users will be offered a small discount and credit towards a new Kindle and, crucially, can still manually download books from elsewhere and fang them to their Kindles.

The Sizzle: I was first tipped off to this by former colleague Katie Notopoulos who began to grieve the nerfing of her beloved Kindle 5, which has side buttons for turning pages rather than touch screens. Although she acknowledges you can still put epubs on there, usually by ripping DRM and uploading it, "for that amount of hassle I might as well read a physical book". eBook readers are the funny technology that feel like a completed product? You know I love a marginal increase on a gadget as much as anyone but the advances in displays, etc., really don't change the core appeal of being able to read books on the go. 14 years of support is pretty good, but, Amazon, do you really need people to buy a new Kindle? Is there so much back-end hassle with supporting this that isn't made up for by the amount you make on each purchase? It's stuff like this that reminds you about the unshakeable reliability of analogue stuff. Do you have an old Kindle, or another piece of tech, that just still works? Let me know!

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One of the most interesting subplots of the NBN, now that it's getting to its fully actualised state as a fibre network, is the ongoing cost and profitability of the government-owned company that's also just supposed to be basic infrastructure. The Australian consumer watchdog is considering hitting NBN Co over the knuckles for overly rosy forecasts of income that it's using to justify spending more on its rollout (The Oz, $). NBN Co has responded to this by saying that it's been good at forecasting revenue in the past and that it expects to squeeze more money from people over time. Obviously, I don't love the idea that we'll be spending more on internet -- but if it's a marginal increase for an increasingly improved product that is essential to modern life, that seems OK? 

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Who's the fella behind Bitcoin? The real identity of the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto is a mystery but a few people have had a crack at solving — including, now, the New York Times' (and guy behind the Theranos story) John Carreyrou. He put out a long first person read that claims Satoshi is well-known British cryptographer-turned-Bitcoin guy Adam Back. I read the article, which largely relies on things like language analysis of an old mailing list, last night and came away convinced. But in the light of day today, I'm less sure. A lot of Carreyrou's evidence could be cherry-picking. 

Anyway! It's a good read and I'd be curious to hear what you think. 

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Australia:

Rest of World:

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One of the most appreciated art forms at the Sizzle HQ is "putting [software] on [device]" so, of course, I was always going to love Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii. But what I really love is the spirit behind this. Not only did the author do a great write-up of what appears to be a very technically sophisticated effort, it also appears they did part of it... on a plane.

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Electronics

Computing

Mobile

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