Good morning, friends, hope you enjoyed your weekend. Let’s dive into some tech news to start the week off with.
1. NSW scraps EV incentives
New South Wales is scrapping its rebates for the purchase of new electric cars, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. NSW offered a $3,000 incentive, plus free stamp duty, to buyers of the first 25,000 electric cars sold with a ‘dutiable value’ of less than $68,750. The scheme kicked off back in September 2021. Per the SMH report, some of the funds saved from cutting this incentive will be redirected to rolling out more charging stations in commuter car parks and apartment blocks. Side note, those in Queensland have the best EV rebates – $6,000.
2. Did Samsung accidentally leak itself?
Samsung may have given away its “one more thing” too soon. Korean Samsung users found icons depicting what looks like a ring you’d wear on your finger in the Galaxy Wearable app this week. The discovery since sparked discussions about whether this means the Samsung Galaxy Ring will debut next year. I hope they do because I’d rather sleep with a ring than a smartwatch to track my metrics. Read more about it over here.
3. 1.24M Dymocks customers affected in breach
Last week, we heard from Dymocks itself that it had fallen victim to a data breach, but over the weekend, it confirmed that things were a bit worse than it appeared. 1.24 million customer contact records have be impacted by the breach, and they’re all up for grabs on the Dark Web. According to the book giant, there hasn’t been any unauthorised access to its systems, rather one of its third-party partner’s systems was the point of access.
4. Apparently WhatsApp isn’t going to spam you with ads
Over to Reuters and Meta’s WhatsApp has denied the app was exploring advertisements to boost revenue. The Tweet embedded below really sums the whole thing up.
5. Just Musk things
Ending with a report from Futurism today that opens with: Way back in 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk would frequently give his engineers an earful after his car company’s infamous Autopilot driver assistance tech nearly got him killed during test drives on multiple occasions — though there’s a chance its dangerous behaviour may have been due to Musk’s stubbornness on how the technology should be built. That whole chunk was lifted from the report covering what Walter Isaacson just wrote, but it’s a short article that’s worth a read for the TL;DR.
BONUS ITEM: This is just a little bit incredible.
See you tomorrow.
Image: AP Photo/Patrick Sison