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Rent sites expose millions of Australian documents, Musk v Bezos in space and Nvidia's AI deal backdown

Plus: Running a server off a floppy disk works about as well as you might suspect

Author

Cam Wilson
February 02, 2026

Edition 2492

Hi all, hope you had a beautiful weekend! Thanks for all the nice and thoughtful replies to Friday's digression. I'm working my way through all of them.

Amazon, Waymo, Apple, Bill Gates, Motorola, Bitcoin, Jensen Huang, Google One and Snapchat. Plus, deals on Sennheiser headphones, Dreame robot vacuums and Xiaomi monitors.

The News

Who would've thought that real estate platforms wouldn't treat Australians' data with care?

Millions of documents given by Australians to real estate agents are exposed because of the platforms' shoddy security (Guardian). Friend of the Sizzle, Josh Taylor, was contacted by a researcher who found that seven online rental platforms were storing info like ID docs, lease agreements, payslips and more without even the most trivial amount of security. Some could even be scanned (and cached) by web crawlers. Before going to Josh, the researcher went to the companies behind the platforms which, in many cases, still haven't secured the files.

The Sizzle: Whenever I talk about why we need some kind of digital identification scheme, real estate agents are my go-to example of the problem. We have a broken system where every few years when you need to move house, you're required to give enough information to completely steal your identity (passport, pay information, character references, rights to your firstborn) to six real estate agencies just so a guy called Tyson can arbitrarily decide you're not the right "vibe" for the owners. And you think that guy is going to take good care of your data when platforms like this don't? Yeah, we need something better. 

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Elon Musk's space stuff is going better than Jeff Bezos' (which could be bad for the NBN)

After news of the SpaceX-xAI proposed merger broke, a follow-up report from Reuters says that Elon Musk's space company wants to launch solar-powered AI data centres. SpaceX has asked the US' Federal Communications Commission for approval for "1 million" satellites... something that even the fairly straight-laced news agency notes is unlikely considering that there are only 15,000 satellites, total, currently. Meanwhile, Amazon's Starlink competitor Leo seems to be experiencing some problems. Bloomberg reports that it is also asking the FCC for an extension on a deadline to have 1,600 satellites in orbit due to a rocket shortage until mid-2027. It only has 180 in space so far -- not great news for plans to start working with NBN from the middle of this year!

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Nvidia backs away from weird circular OpenAI deal

Remember in September last year when a bunch of tech companies announced these bizarre circular AI deals that had everyone saying "bubble"? The headliner was Nvidia investing "as much as" US$100b into OpenAI so it could build data centres which meant buying billions of dollars of chips from... Nvidia? Well, if that wasn't weird enough, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang now says the agreement was never "finalized". Which is a nice way of saying "ha ha everyone we were crossing our fingers behind our back when we announced this". Extremely sketchy behaviour from these two companies and not a great sign for the economics of the AI industry ATM.

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

Running a server off a floppy disk works about as well as you might suspect

Here at the Sizzle, we love a "I ran [X] on a [Y]" story. The weirder or more ill-suited the Y is for X, the better. So, naturally, I was very excited to click on a link that promised to show "a website... served by a single floppy disk connected to a Pentium computer". Unfortunately, it didn't load for me because, well, you can probably imagine the capacity of such a set-up. Thankfully, here's an archived version which does feel a bit like cheating but it's still worth a look. 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.

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