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Seafood chowder data leak, Waymo coming to Australia and Grokipedia

Plus: Your own personal e-ink public transport display

Author

Cam Wilson
October 28, 2025

Edition 2448

Banger edition today so I thought I would free it up. If you want more like this, sign up for as little as $5 per month for a whole year here.

The News

Looks like we got another ‘seafood chowder’ data leak

Media outlets are breathlessly reporting on a data dump of 183 million old email credentials as if it’s the next Y2K (NYPost). This story traces back to research done by firm Synthient, which scraped the “stealer ecosystem” on Telegram, forums and social media platforms for dumps of stolen usernames and passwords for platforms like Gmail (Synthient). This trove was given to Australian gem Troy Hunt, who found that the vast majority of these credentials were already in his database on HaveIBeenPwned … so not really news. And yet!

The Sizzle: Have you heard why you should never order the seafood chowder? A whispered restaurant industry “secret” is that that all chefs will take all the unused, almost expired seafood produce that they can’t sell, whack it in a pot and — hey, presto! It’s reborn as the seafood chowder. This is the same thing, except with email credentials. In fairness, I don’t think this was the fault of Synthient or Hunt, but of sensationalist outlets who just want to drive clicks. Other outlets have been more responsible but really it’s a waste of time drawing attention to it at all, IMO.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Looks like we’re about to get self-driving taxis in Australia

Self-driving taxi company Waymo is starting the process of getting approvals to drive its autonomous vehicles in NSW (Crikey, $). I found out that the Alphabet-owned company, which started off as a Google project, has reached out to Transport NSW to get the permits necessary to run a trial. It’s also picked up lobbyists to represent it in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. Notably, Australia’s road rules for autonomous vehicles remain undecided with the federal government now pushing the deadline to sort it out back to 2027 (Information Age).

The Sizzle: After Waymo announced it would expand to London and Tokyo, there was a lot of gossip around Australian tech circles that Sydney would be one of its next stops. It seems like there’s quite a bit of paperwork that needs to be done before the trial gets underway, assuming it gets approved, but one thing that Waymo seems to have going for it is that its cars seem pretty safe. Much safer than Tesla, which is facing inquiries from US traffic investigators over its “Mad Max Mode” for being — you guessed it — insanely unsafe (Engadget).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Elon Musk’s non-woke Wikipedia is mostly Wikipedia

Speaking of bad Elon ideas, Musk has launched “v.01” of his far-right version of Wikipedia, Grokipedia (WIRED, $). The encyclopedia website is filled with 900,000 articles written by the world’s richest man’s very racist AI chatbot, Grok. It appears much of the content is lifted almost directly from Wikipedia. When it deviates, it’s usually to either gas up Elon Musk (Bluesky) or to cite weirdo right-wing propaganda (Bluesky)

The Sizzle: I had a look at Grokipedia’s coverage of hot button Australian topics like Anthony Albanese, COVID-19 in Australia and the Voice to Parliament referendum. None of it seemed too insane. My guess is because whatever reference point Musk et al. have are using to guide Grok and Grokipedia (like checking if he’s tweeted on the topic) don’t have any information on Australian topics.

Anyway! It’s telling that all of these AI companies with their gazillions of dollars and their complaints about Wikipedia being “woke” still depend on the good, hard work of unpaid Wikipedia volunteers.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Your own personal e-ink public transport display

A few weeks back, I wrote about the wonders of e-ink public transport screens around Sydney. Well, one Redditor dared to ask, what if you brought that into your own home?

u/WasteLocksmith5011 shared to r/Sydney a picture of a set-up that uses a Raspberry Pi and a 7.3’’ e-ink display to run their own “public transport dashboard”. Pretty neat!

I have to admit I did chuckle at the top comment: “All that effort with the tech, then used a butter knife to cut the frame border to size”.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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