Technology

If you&ve been keeping up with watchmaker MB-F you&ll be familiar with their Horological Machine series, watches that are similar in construction but wildly different when it comes to design. This watch, the HM9, is called the Flow and hearkens back to roadsters, jets and 1950s space ships.

The watch, limited to a run of 33 pieces, shows the time on a small forward-facing face in one of the cones. The other two cones contain dual balance wheels. The balance wheel is what causes the watch to tick and controls the energy released by the main spring. Interestingly, MB-F added two to this watch in an effort to ensure accuracy. &The twin balance wheels of the HM9 engine feed two sets of chronometric data to a central differential for an averaged reading,& they wrote. &The balances are individually impulsed and spatially separated to ensure that they beat at their own independent cadences of 2.5Hz (18,000bph) each. This is important to ensure a meaningful average, just as how a statistically robust mathematical average should be derived from discrete points of information.&

There are two versions, called the Road and Air, and they cost a mere $182,000 (tax not included). Considering nearly every piece of this is made by hand — from the case to the curved crystal to the intricate movement — you&re essentially paying a team of craftsman a yearly wage just to build your watch.

While itno Apple Watch, the MB-F HM9 is a unique and weird little timepiece. While itobviously not for everyone, with enough cash and a little luck you can easily join a fairly exclusive club of HM9 owners.

Google is rolling back its ban on cryptocurrency advertisements & following a similar move made by Facebook earlier this summer, CNBC reports. Google in March was among the first of the major platforms to announce it would no longer run ban cryptocurrency ads, due to an abundance of caution around an industry where thereso much potential for consumer harm.

Facebook, Twitter, and even Snapchat had also banned cryptocurrency ads, for similar reasons.

But Facebook moved away from its blanket ban this June, when it said it would no longer ban all cryptocurrency ads, but would rather allow those from &pre-approved advertisers& instead. It excluded ads that promoted binary options and initial coin offerings (ICOs), however.

Google is now following suit with its own policy change. The update was announced today, we&ve confirmed.

Googlepolicy still bans ICOs, wallets and trading advice, CNBC reports, citing Googleupdated policy page which points to a list of banned products.

But the October 2018 policy update says that ®ulatedcryptocurrency exchanges& will be allowed to advertise in the U.S. and Japan.

To do so, advertisers will have to be certified with Google for the specific country where their ads will run, a process that begins in October. The policy will apply to all accounts that advertise these types of financial products, Google says.

Banning cryptocurrency ads on the part of the major platforms was a good step in terms of consumer protection, due to the amount of fraud and spam in the industry. According to the FTC, consumers lost$532 million to cryptocurrency-related scams in the first two months of 2018. An agency official alsowarnedthat consumers could lose more than $3 billion by the end of the year, because of these problems.

But for ad-dependent platforms like Facebook and Google, thereso much money to be made here. Itclear they wanted to find a way to let some of these advertisers back in. Google parent Alphabet makes around 86% of its total revenue from ads, CNBC noted, and booked over $54 billion in ad revenue in the first half of the year.

Google has not yet responded to a request for comment.

If you've ventured into one of the many JB Hi-FI stores around Australia over the last few days, you may have noticed huge banners detailing numerous SIM-only plans available on the retailer's new mobile service, JB Hi-Fi Mobile. 

The service, which offers exclusive data-heavy BYO mobile plans on the Telstra Network, aims to give JB Hi-Fi customers