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18 December, 2015
26 November, 2015
Appster, Australia’s fastest growing product development and strategy app, was co-founded by Mark McDonald and Josiah Humphrey, both 23, in August 2011 with just $3,000. The pair have since gone on to join the 2015 BRW Young Rich List, with Appster’s revenue now surpassing $20 million. The start-up now has around 300 staff and develops apps for more than 200 companies worldwide, and has offices in India and the US.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career
20 November, 2015
19 November, 2015
To hackers, spies, and cyber-criminals these days, calling Tor “secure” is a bit laughable. There are so many exploits and workarounds, along with unavoidable weaknesses to side-channel attacks performed in the physical world, that in some cases the false sense of cyber-security can end up making relaxed use of Tor less secure than paranoid use of the regular internet.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Privacy
Some of the nation’s top companies including Telstra, Westpac, Cisco and Deloitte plan to use education to ramp up their future cyber security defences by joining a cloud-based internet platform allowing students to live a day in the life of the nation’s STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) leaders.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Education,
ICT Career
17 November, 2015
12 November, 2015
Passwords are supposed to be secret, like the name of your childhood pet. In contrast, you carry your fingers around with you out in the open nearly everywhere you go. Passwords also need to be revocable. In the case that your password does get revealed, it’s great to be able to simply pick another one. You don’t want to have to revoke your fingers. Finally, and this is the kicker, you want your password to be hashable, in order to protect the password database itself from theft.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Privacy
10 November, 2015
09 November, 2015
A driverless future faces enormous challenges. There’s guaranteeing safety, reworking insurance liability, collision avoidance, and upgrading road infrastructure. Yet at Saturday’s demonstration it became clearer how driverless vehicles may roll out in Australia.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
research
05 November, 2015
02 November, 2015
The Victorian government has pulled off arguably its biggest case of event theft since the Grand Prix, announcing that it will be home to Australia’s biggest start-up conference, SydStart, from 2016. Victorian minister for small business, innovation and trade Philip Dalidakis told The Australian that the event, now to be called StartCon
Labels:
Social
Seventy-seven years after Stanford University graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began tinkering in a garage, the company that became the foundation for Silicon Valley is breaking up. On Sunday the computer colossus is being divided into HP Enterprise, focusing on software and business services, and HP Inc, which will keep the personal computer and printer operations.
Labels:
History
26 October, 2015
Brisbane-based young entrepreneur Monica Davis has taken time out from her undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland to commercialise an app she hopes will deliver food to battlers while cutting the volume of organic waste going to landfill. The 20-year-old says she deferred her studies in business management and information technology this year to work full time on the app, Rumbl, which her team developed to connect retail outlets with surplus food to customers.
25 October, 2015
Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California have published a paper with a novel solution for creating passwords that are both extremely hard to crack and relatively easy to remember: randomly-generated poems.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Privacy
21 October, 2015
How playing video games can teach your kids to read. In 2008, Pew Internet Research found that more than one third of gamers regularly read game-related texts as part of their gameplay, including game reviews, strategy websites, fan fiction and forum discussions. For many young people, reading isn't replaced by video games, but an integral part of what it means to participate and play. Kids who play games display behaviours that, in other contexts, teachers and parents regard as the Holy Grail; for example, information seeking, community building, group organisation, computational thinking, solving problems and managing emotions. James Gee, a linguistics and literacy researcher, said that language isn't the only communication system available, and that many types of visual images and symbols have specific significances. He recommends we think of literacy in terms of semiotic domains - any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities to communicate meaning, e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artefacts.
16 October, 2015
15 October, 2015
14 October, 2015
Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs has described new data retention laws as “neither necessary nor proportionate” to protect against security threats and called on Australian corporations to exercise greater social responsibility. Speaking to the Global Integrity Summit in Brisbane, Ms Triggs also talked up the need for a bill of rights in Australia and criticised the abandonment of the Information Commissioner role. She said there was a strong chance of the metadata legislation being misused and while countries needed to access information to fight crime, the data retention provisions did not have enough checks and balances.
Labels:
Catholic Worldview,
Ethical,
Privacy
06 October, 2015
Watch dreamtime stories from the Yanyuwa people of the Northern Territory vividly animated in these stunning videos, ranging from 2 to 20 minutes in length. Learn why the dance of the Brolga is the most graceful, about the Tiger Shark’s travels, and why complaining about your leader isn’t always a good idea.
Labels:
3D,
Indigenous
24 September, 2015
In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled that Warner/Chappell never had the right to charge for the use of the "Happy Birthday To You" song. Warner had been enforcing a copyright since 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group, the successor to Clayton F. Summy Co., which claimed the original disputed copyright. Judge George H. King ruled that a copyright filed by the Summy Co. in 1935 granted only the rights to specific piano arrangements of the music, not the actual song.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html
Labels:
Intellectual Property
22 September, 2015
The Loebner prize for artificial intelligence is a $100,000 award for the person or team that creates a computer that can hold a conversation with a human in such a way that the person can’t identify whether they’re talking to a computer or another person – an implementation of the Turing test.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
research,
Robotics
21 September, 2015
The Environmental Protection Agency issued the German automaker a notice of violation and accused the company of using software known as a "defeat device" in four-cylinder Volkswagen and Audi vehicles from model years 2009-15. The device is programmed to detect when the car is undergoing official emissions testing. Only during such tests are the cars' full emissions control systems turned on. During normal driving situations, the controls are turned off, allowing the cars to spew as much as 40 times as much pollution as the legal standard required under the Clean Air Act, the EPA said.
Google’s Rachel Potvin came pretty close to an answer Monday at an engineering conference in Silicon Valley. She estimates that the software needed to run all of Google’s Internet services—from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps—spans some 2 billion lines of code. By comparison, Microsoft’s Windows operating system—one of the most complex software tools ever built for a single computer, a project under development since the 1980s—is likely in the realm of 50 million lines.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Numeracy
Some of the most popular Chinese names in Apple’s App Store were found to be infected with malicious software in what is being described as a first-of-its-kind security breach, exposing a rare vulnerability in Apple’s mobile platform, according to multiple researchers. The applications were infected after software developers were lured into using an unauthorised and compromised version of Apple’s developer tool kit, according to researchers at Alibaba Mobile Security
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety
17 September, 2015
A new mobile device announced by Telstra on Wednesday will theoretically deliver download speeds of up to 600 megabits per second in select areas - up to six times faster than what the Turnbull government's fibre-to-the-node network will be able to deliver under its current design. The Telstra WiFi 4GX Advanced III mobile broadband hotspot, created by Netgear, is the latest super-fast mobile broadband device to join Telstra's product range and uses "3 band Carrier Aggregation technology".
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research
16 September, 2015
15 September, 2015
10 September, 2015
Wooranna Park Primary takes the lead in computer coding for kids. “One main misconception about teaching kids about computers is people assume teachers have to know everything before they can teach it,” Mr Nolan said. “Actually the kids teach me as much as I teach them. That’s the model we pursue: there’s a lot of self-directed learning.”
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability
08 September, 2015
Sixty per cent of Australian students are training for jobs that will not exist in the future or will be transformed by automation, according to a new report by the Foundation for Young Australians. She says today's students will be affected by three key economic drivers: automation, globalisation and collaboration.
This is not exactly the promised future of robotics, which is increasingly being applied to help humans with manufacturing, health care, humanitarian aid and getting around. But Cavalcanti and Oehrlein, 29-year-old co-founders of MegaBots, are hoping to fulfil another human desire: ferocious, gladiator-style entertainment.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Robotics
Fitness instructors, beauty therapists, nannies and other service providers will be in demand, as will people in the high-skilled information and technology field. People in specialist professions including doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, urban planners and accountants will remain in high demand and they will make greater use of technology to help them do their jobs. Yoga instructors, photographers, social media specialists and other creative workers in the digital media, film and TV, fashion and design, are also expected to be highly sought after, says the study, commissioned by the National Broadband Network.
07 September, 2015
06 September, 2015
02 September, 2015
Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and chip maker Intel have joined forces to solve the mystery of why the world’s bee population is nose diving, a trend that could have potentially disastrous consequences for global food security. The Global Initiative for Honey Bee Health project has seen scientists superglue tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to the backs of 15,000 bees
Australian information technology graduates face a pincer movement in the labour market, outflanked by skilled migrants on one hand and offshore contractors on the other. Demographer Bob Birrell has painted a gloomy picture of job prospects in IT, saying student numbers have ballooned despite tepid employment opportunities. Meanwhile, companies based overseas — particularly India — are cornering the market for globally outsourced services.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
ICT Career,
Social
28 August, 2015
24 August, 2015
19 August, 2015
ILLEGAL downloaders can sleep easier tonight with the Australian Federal Court ruling that the names and addresses of pirates of Dallas Buyers Club will not be shared. The court ruled this morning that unless Dallas Buyers Club (DBC) LLC pays a $600,000 bond it will not be able to obtain the names and addresses of Australians accused of illegally uploading the movie.
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins is in the ninth year of the “most fun adventure she’s ever been on”. But the Perth native is not slowing down, releasing Canva for Work, a bold play at the highly competitive global design software market. The Sydney-based design start-up, which now boasts four million users, more than 30 million designs and over 200,000 registered companies
17 August, 2015
Her neurosurgeon, Marc Coughlan, said the success of the operation — in which a small titanium implant was 3-D printed so it fitted exactly into the contours of a misshapen vertebra in Ms Gorvin’s spine — could have major implications for a wide range of surgical procedures.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
ICT Capability
13 August, 2015
GOOGLE HAS A new owner: a holding company called Alphabet, run by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Alphabet owns a few other things, too: Namely, every company ever created or acquired under the tech giant’s many-tentacled purview. You could say Google got a rebranding of the highest magnitude, but that’s not quite accurate. Alphabet is a holding company, and Google is just one child held within its new parent’s staggeringly powerful arms. Their purposes are different, their corporate structures different. And their logos? Those are different, too
Labels:
Graphic Design
Their sport isn't basketball or hockey but League of Legends, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) and the most popular computer game in the world. There are 67 million monthly active participants in the game around the globe – almost three times as many people as live in Australia.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Game
Earlier this summer, the League held a nonpublic trial race inside the abandoned Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers. Six pilots standing on the power plant floor controlled their drones as they flew down the warehouse’s hallways and through open windows. There are typically five to seven participants per race. Racers wear virtual-reality goggles that make it feel as if they are in the “cockpit” of the drone, which translates to video content.
11 August, 2015
10 August, 2015
07 August, 2015
Hello robo-lawyer Computers are replacing many functions once performed by lawyers, especially young lawyers who have traditionally done the case grunt work. NSW Chief Justice Tom Bathurst told an Australian Bar Association meeting in July that the future may include not just "paperless courts, but people-less courts, too". While Bathurst did not predict lawyers would become extinct, he warned: "The reality is that technology, either directly or indirectly, will cut into many areas of barristers' work."
06 August, 2015
05 August, 2015
04 August, 2015
Developing the technologies though was not enough to save Kodak and Nokia. Being wedded to older business models meant their managements weren’t able, despite their best efforts, to adapt the companies to their marketplaces that were dramatically altered by the new machines. “There’s no guarantee that any of these efforts will enable companies to thrive in an age of rapid technological advance,” warns McKinsey. “But in a world in which business models and strategies grow old quickly, leaders must constantly think about ways to rejuvenate their enterprises.”
27 July, 2015
Nike and Apple have agreed to settle in a class action lawsuit alleging that the two sold the Nike FuelBand fitness tracker in spite of knowing that the device’s biometrics measurements were inaccurate. As a result, Nike will pay out $2.4 million in claims to people who bought the FuelBand between January 2012 and June 2015
24 July, 2015
22 July, 2015
A fully -automated machine is being developed by a Perth company that could erect the brick frame of a house in merely two days. "Hadrian" the robot can work 24 hours a day, every day of the year, compared with the lengthy process of building a home with human capabilities, which could take weeks.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Ethical,
Robotics,
Social,
Sustainability
Could you tell if a story was written by a robot? Students at Dartmouth to discover if authors and musicians will be replaced by machines Judges won't know if songs played are computer-generated or by humans $5,000 in prize money up for grabs if students manage to fool experts Variation on the Turing Test, which honours British scientist Alan Turing
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Ethical,
research,
Robotics
21 July, 2015
The first on-road trials of driverless cars in the Southern Hemisphere will take place in Adelaide's southern suburbs in November. Volvo will conduct the testing in conjunction with Flinders University, Carnegie Mellon University, the RAA and Cohda Wireless and Bosch, which has engineers in Australia developing driverless technology.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
research,
Social
20 July, 2015
Cartoon-making is coming to the masses, thanks to a range of software. Adobe has you in its sights with its new Character Animator, which has made its debut with the 2015 edition of its Creative Cloud suite. “The ability to animate a character in real time with accurate body and facial movement and lip synch was previously reserved for high-end film companies with very expensive tracking equipment,” Adobe Australia-Pacific principal evangelist Paul Burnett tells Life. “Now anyone can simply create a character and quickly build a realistic synched animation on a laptop computer.”
Labels:
3D,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability
02 July, 2015
29 June, 2015
Electrically powered quadcopters typically fly 15-20 minutes but Singapore-based Horizon Energy Systems’s (HES) CEO Taras Wankewycz is hoping that his team of fuel cell scientists and engineers will change all that. Horizon Energy Systems’s hydrogen-powered hycopter can already fly for two hours, and Mr Wankewycz is hopeful of four hours by year’s end.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
ICT Capability,
research,
Robotics
The approach is not to simply put lectures and course work online, as is typical of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Rather, Carrasquel will use a blended learning approach that largely replaces formal lectures with videos and optional mini-lectures, and uses an online software application called Classroom Salon to identify concepts that need to be reinforced by instructors in small group meetings with students. “As we teach a wider diversity of students, with different backgrounds, we can no longer teach to ‘the middle,’” Carrasquel said. “When you do that, you’re not aiming at the 20 percent of the top students or the 20 percent at the bottom.”
Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial Services Group said MYbank, which has registered capital of four billion yuan ($836 million), is ready to issue loans of under five million yuan to small businesses, entrepreneurs and consumers. Still, people can’t open accounts with MYbank yet because of regulatory concerns over facial-recognition technology it wants to use to verify identities.
25 June, 2015
Netflix, Hulu and a host of other content streaming services block non-US users from viewing their content. As a result, many people residing outside of the United States seek to circumvent such restrictions by using services that advertise "free" and "open" web proxies capable of routing browser traffic through US-based computers and networks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, new research suggests that most of these "free" offerings are anything but, and actively seek to weaken browser security and privacy.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Privacy
22 June, 2015
Further evidence is emerging that Samsung did not respond adequately to information about a serious security flaw affecting approximately 600 million of its smartphones, including its latest flagship Galaxy S6, despite being notified of the issue several months ago.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
Ethical
16 June, 2015
South Korea’s Team KAIST wins the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/06/koreas-team-kaist-wins-the-2015-darpa-robotics-challenge/
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Asia Connection,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
research,
Robotics
E-sports has become huge business over the past five years, with professional video gaming tournaments offering more prize money than some of sport’s biggest events. This year’s Defence of the Ancients (DOTA) 2 prize pool is currently sitting at nearly $US10.8 million and is expected to be up to $US15 million by the time the tournament actually starts.
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Game,
ICT Career
15 June, 2015
Well, the government’s crackdown on the illegal practice has passed a crucial hurdle, which may make the practice much more difficult. A cross-party Senate committee has given the tick of approval to a law that would give power to big companies to block sites that offer pirated content, such as popular torrenting site KickassTorrents and streaming service Project Free TV.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Personal / Social Capability,
Privacy
11 June, 2015
A scar, half an inch wide, stretched from just above the elbow and up over his shoulder. "Our company paid for full medical expenses, so he had an operation," explained his coach, Kang Doh Kyung. "[He] is the best player in StarCraft and has won everything in this field and is still going strong." Repetitive strain had injured Mr Lee's muscles, deforming them and making surgery the only option to save his illustrious career.
04 June, 2015
02 June, 2015
01 June, 2015
Mr Wozniak said he was a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights organisation for digital equipment in the US, and he wanted humans to be “so much more important than technology”. “When I was brought up, our constitution gave us a place called the home, and your home could not be violated without court orders or warrants,” he told the forum. “My communication with my friends should be part of the private area that I own. “I would say to the Australian government that there are a lot of examples where (data retention) hasn’t been fruitful. There might be some secrets I don’t know about, but it has not been fruitful in uncovering terrorists, which is what it’s claimed to be all about.”
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
25 May, 2015
THE MODERN MOBILE era began in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone. But Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, the mobile web, or even the app store. It wasn’t even the first to sell a smartphone to the everyday consumer. In 2002, T-Mobile launched the Sidekick, a smartphone that featured a full keyboard, an email client, a custom mobile web browser
Labels:
History
24 May, 2015
By its nature, computer technology evolves and develops with great rapidity, and the need to conserve superseded software and hardware is behind the launch of the Computer Archaeology Laboratory at Flinders at Tonsley. The Laboratory was officially opened yesterday by Mr Marty Gauvin, CEO of data centre company Tier 5 and a member of Flinders University’s council.
21 May, 2015
Chinese firm Huawei today announces its IoT OS at an event in Beijing. The company predicts that within a decade there will be 100 billion connected devices and it is keen for its ultra-lightweight operating system to be at the heart of the infrastructure. Based on Linux, LiteOS weighs in at a mere 10KB -- smaller than a Word document -- but manages to pack in support for zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
research
18 May, 2015
A security researcher hijacked an airplane's engines after hacking its in-flight entertainment systems, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Chris Roberts, a well-known US security researcher, told FBI agents in February that he'd hacked in-flight entertainment systems on over a dozen flights and on one occasion hijacked an aircraft's thrust management computer and briefly altered its course.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical
Yesterday Bill Shorten in his budget reply speech said all kids needed to learn to code. This week 7000 students are doing that courtesy of Microsoft. And Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has a similar message: “We need to expose more students to coding so they are inspired to create, build and develop new technologies rather than just being passive users of it
12 May, 2015
Programming languages don’t die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms.
08 May, 2015
After several years of speculation — really since the thing first hit Kickstarter in 2012 — Oculus VR has finally announced a consumer version of its Oculus Rift PC-based virtual reality headset. The first units will begin shipping to buyers in the first quarter of 2016, with preorders starting “later this year.”
The advantages of using a NFC, or for that matter any kind of RFID technology, are that you don’t need to implant any batteries — all the power is included in the device that interrogates the chip. In Seth’s case, that device is a nearby Android phone. The pretext for his first major demo is a hacking scenario where his NFC sends a message to the phone that contains a link to a Web page that downloads a file. If the file is then installed, an app then connects to a remote server and allows control of the device.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability
06 May, 2015
While it seems like software developers have taken over the world, one arena where they’re still relatively rare is politics. As I wrote last year, for example, it’s still hard to find people in the U.S. Congress who have backgrounds as programmers. However, it turns out that at least one country in the world, Singapore, has a former programmer as a prime minister, and he’s actually shared some code to demonstrate his chops.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
ICT Capability
03 May, 2015
Nearly half of the jobs in Australia are at high risk of "digital disruption" in the next 20 years, and our education system is not equipping students with the skills needed to adapt, a new report warns. PricewaterhouseCoopers chief executive Luke Sayers is calling for a national summit on the issue, saying universities need to start producing far more people literate in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects (STEM) to help the workforce adapt to a rapidly changing global economy.
02 May, 2015
30 April, 2015
Even now, some trends are evident. Advances in disruptive technologies like mobile computing, the Cloud, big data/analytics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, social media, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are driving the changes and these will continue to be areas of huge opportunity.
one of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents said the US National Security Agency had hacked into Huawei’s email archive and internal communications. In an interview with The Australian, Huawei Enterprise Solutions Architect Paul Cooney said Huawei and its Australian clients had moved on to forge positive business relationships. This had seen Huawei build key national 4G infrastructure for Optus and Vodafone.
28 April, 2015
09 April, 2015
Online copyright infringers could find themselves dragged to court after the country’s biggest telecommunications companies agreed to implement a “three-strikes” warning scheme to crack down on copyright pirates. Telcos including Telstra, Optus, iiNet and Vodafone have agreed to implement the new scheme
Labels:
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Privacy
With 1.7 million participants spending 10 million hours online and 1.1 billion “participant-logged events”, the creators of edX, the massive open online course platform created by Harvard and MIT, have learned a thing or two since they launched their first courses in 2012.
Labels:
Education,
Intercultural Understanding,
research
08 April, 2015
07 April, 2015
02 April, 2015
AN OLD AVIATORS’ joke goes like this: In the future, airline cockpit crews will consist of one pilot and a dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog, the dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches any of the controls. Today, we’re just about there. Autonomous unmanned aircraft have been flying for a long time now, fighting our wars and patrolling our borders. On paper, at least, we already have the technology to take the humans out of the cockpit and prevent tragedies like last week’s Germanwings crash in the French Alps
01 April, 2015
CHILDREN who play video games in moderation are less aggressive, more sociable, have fewer emotional problems and do better at school than their peers, research by the University of Oxford suggests. Those playing video games for more than three hours a day, however, are hyperactive, get into fights and switch off at school, no matter what the type of game.
30 March, 2015
Super Mario 64 is still an amazing game, but nearly 20 years after it first launched on the Nintendo 64, it looks pretty dated. But with a little love, it can look amazing. Computer science student Erik Roystan Ross recently decided to remake the first level of the game while experimenting with the Unity game engine
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
History
Content ID is an automated system created by YouTube. It lets copyright owners identify and automatically take action against uploads containing their content. If a match is found—regardless of context—the copyright holder decides whether that video is blocked, muted (in the case of song used as background music in an original video), or monetized with ads of its choosing.
Labels:
Ethical,
Intellectual Property,
Sustainability
26 March, 2015
24 March, 2015
22 March, 2015
The goal of ATRIAS isn't just to create a walking robot, but to create one that is better at reacting and recovering from unexpected obstacles. As you can see from the video below, ATRIAS holds its own against a barrage of dodge balls, failing only when its emergency shut-off button is accidentally struck by a ball. With a little more engineering, it seems easy to imagine ATRIAS making one heck of a goalie some day.
21 March, 2015
On March 19, the second day of the Hewlett-Packard Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) sponsored Pwn2Own hacking challenge at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, B.C., security researchers were able to successfully exploit Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Career,
research,
Sustainability
Marketers—or anyone who’s inspired to snoop—simply insert a transparent 1×1 image into an email. When that email is opened, the image pings the server it originated from with information like the time, your location, and the device you’re using. It’s a read receipt on steroids that you never signed up for.
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/ugly-mail/
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
The illusion is one of Apple’s latest innovations: the Taptic Engine. Relying on a technique pioneered in research labs 20 years ago, it uses an electromagnetic motor to trick your fingers into feeling things that aren’t actually there. The motor’s precisely tuned oscillation makes it feel like you’re depressing a mechanical button, when you’re really just mashing your finger against a stationary piece of glass.
Labels:
History,
Intellectual Property
20 March, 2015
18 March, 2015
17 March, 2015
We launched it more than 20 years ago, using the venerable — but simple to master — PageMaker program, dreamed up by online design pioneer Paul Brainerd and later acquired by Adobe. Adobe beefed up PageMaker with many new and more sophisticated features, and renamed it InDesign.
Labels:
Graphic Design,
History,
Sustainability
16 March, 2015
WHEN THE US Embassy in Beijing started tweeting data from an air-quality monitor, no one could have anticipated its far-reaching consequences: It triggered profound change in China’s environmental policy, advanced air-quality science in some of the world’s most polluted cities, and prompted similar efforts in neighboring countries.
Yihao Zhang at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and a few pals who have created an algorithm that clones facial expressions and pastes them onto other faces. The work raises the prospect of accurately reproducing facial movements and expressions on avatars, cartoon characters and more or less any face.
Labels:
3D,
Asia Connection,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability,
research
14 March, 2015
Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com. job searching akamai Akamai CSO takes a creative approach to finding security pros Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai, doesn't try to hire perfect candidates. Here’s why. READ NOW Sunday will mark the 30th anniversary of that registration.
Labels:
History
Online censorship is rife. In many countries, notably China, citizens are prevented from accessing certain websites at the behest of their government. To help provide access to information and unbiased news, freedom of information organization Reporters Without Borders has set up mirrors to nine censored websites so they can be accessed from 11 countries that blocked them.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game released in 2011 by Square Enix, and developed by Eidos Montréal and Nixxes for the PC version. It uses a modified version of the Crystal engine made by Crystal Dynamics and was one of the earliest games to support DirectX 11. It featured great graphics at the time (still looks good!), and it was as beautiful as light-weight: even low-budget video cards could run the game smoothly. I was curious about the rendering process, so I spent a few hours reverse-engineering the game, playing with Renderdoc. Here are the results of my investigation.
Labels:
3D,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability,
research
13 March, 2015
A verdict saying Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke copied Marvin Gaye’s music to create their hit song “Blurred Lines” could ripple across the music industry, potentially changing how artists work and opening the door to new copyright claims. An eight-person jury determined Tuesday that Williams and Thicke copied elements of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up” and ordered the pair to pay nearly $7.4 million to the late R&B legend’s three children.
Labels:
Intellectual Property
12 March, 2015
AS MOORE’S LAW has packed more and more transistors onto a single memory chip, scientists have fretted for years that electric charges that “leak” out from those tiny components might cause unpredictable errors in neighboring semiconductors. But now a team of Google researchers has demonstrated a more unexpected problem with that electromagnetic leakage: hackers can use it to purposefully corrupt portions of some laptops’ memory, and even to bypass the security protections of those computers.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
research
11 March, 2015
Why It’s Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry
https://medium.com/matter/why-it-s-almost-impossible-to-teach-a-robot-to-do-your-laundry-2a4a3efb3775
08 March, 2015
07 March, 2015
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the 30-year-old Facebook CEO revealed what he looks for in a prospective employee. And the answer is simple. "I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person," Mr Zuckerberg told the audience.
Labels:
Personal / Social Capability
Telstra has become the first Australian telco to offer its subscribers similar access that law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have to their private phone metadata, backflipping on its previous position of refusing them access to it. Starting April 1, Telstra will give their customers access to a limited set of their "metadata" for a fee — information about who they've called, the time, location and duration. It does not include the content of a communication, such as the detail of what you said or wrote in an email or SMS.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
06 March, 2015
Samsung’s Galaxy S6, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday, looks like a really nice upgrade from the disappointing Galaxy S5 — which apart from a screen and camera resolution bump and some software refinements, was basically a GS4, and missed sales projections by up to 40 percent as a result.
01 March, 2015
23 February, 2015
ISPs will hand pirates over to the movie houses, potentially without a court fight, under Australia's proposed piracy code. As of September 1, Australian internet service providers will be forced to send warning notices to alleged movie pirates, under a draft Copyright Notice Scheme industry code unveiled on Friday.
Software reverse engineering, the art of pulling programs apart to figure out how they work, is what makes it possible for sophisticated hackers to scour code for exploitable bugs. It’s also what allows those same hackers’ dangerous malware to be deconstructed and neutered. Now a new encryption trick could make both those tasks much, much harder.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Intellectual Property
15 February, 2015
12 February, 2015
10 February, 2015
08 February, 2015
04 February, 2015
03 February, 2015
31 January, 2015
26 January, 2015
Tucked away in the Sydney inner-city suburb of Ultimo is one of Australia's largest game developers, yet most Aussie gamers have no idea it even exists. BigWorld Technology is a team of over 100 talented coders, testers and designers, and is responsible for the technology that powers World of Tanks, a free-to-play title with more than 100 million registered player accounts, making it one of the biggest games in the world.
Labels:
ICT Career
20 January, 2015
18 January, 2015
China's Xiaomi is taking on Apple at its own game, as the world's third-biggest smartphone maker and most valuable tech start-up unveils the flagship Mi Note, its challenger to the smartphone king's iPhone 6 Plus. Chief Executive Lei Jun introduced the Mi Note in Beijing with a breakdown of the large-screen phone's technical features, with multiple comparisons to Apple's equivalent. At 2299 yuan ($452) for a model with 16 gigabytes of memory, the Mi Note will retail for almost two-thirds less than the iPhone 6 Plus.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Intellectual Property
14 January, 2015
Created by French company sen.se, Mother is one of thousands of devices on display at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It is the biggest technology event of its kind in the world and the big trend this year was internet-enabled objects, also known as the Internet of Things, or IoT. Think wearable health and fitness devices like the FitBit, smart home automation systems, Wi-Fi enabled coffee machines and "connected cars".
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Privacy
This week at CES, Mercedes-Benz unveiled their latest concept car with technology plucked from the pages of science fiction – including one of our latest prototypes. Embedded into the console, Leap Motion’s Meadowhawk modules allow drivers to access an experimental natural user interface.
Labels:
research
13 January, 2015
12 January, 2015
10 January, 2015
Which tools the spies can't crack The Tor network, which was developed for surfing the web anonymously, is considered to be a "major" problem, as is Truecrypt, a program for encrypting files on computers. A combination of Tor, the instant messaging system CSpace, and a system for internet telephony called ZRTP is categorised as "catastrophic" for the NSA and its partners, resulting in a "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications".
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Privacy
Meet the ultimate mobile phone data extractor, a $40,000 Israeli-made machine manufactured by Cellebrite and used by private investigator Navid Sobbi's business National Surveillance and Intelligence and numerous law-enforcement agencies around the word. The machine can crack passwords and extract varying degrees of data from almost every smartphone on the market bar a number of Blackberry models and the iPhone 5 and above.
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