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19 December, 2017
Software is Increasingly Complex. That Can Be Dangerous. The Apollo 11 moonshot was done with about 145,000 lines of code and a lot less computing power than your printer. Today’s Microsoft Windows contains some 50 million lines of code. A Boeing 787 runs on 7 million lines of code, but a modern car actually runs on 10-100 million lines of code. Google’s infrastructure is estimated to have 2 billion lines of code. It takes an army of programmers to build and maintain these systems, but it is increasingly harder to code and test every permutation of what machines and users might do.
A new patent filing from Sony highlights how the Japanese tech conglomerate may be using blockchain as part of an education platform. In August, Sony announced that it was working with IBM to build a suite of educational services, which would use the tech in part to secure student records and form part of a system for sharing that data between agreed-upon parties.
Labels:
Blockchain
24 November, 2017
21 November, 2017
Are computer science and computer programming the same thing? The answer is no. Think about it this way: computer science is the study of all things related to computers. That means understanding everything from hardware, chips, circuits, processors and storage, to programming languages and theory. “Computer science requires computer programming but it’s possible to learn how to program, and be good at it, without a foundation in computer science,” says engineering manager Stefania Sicurelli. She studied art, worked in animation, then learnt programming and computer science through web development boot camps. “Just like driving a car, you can make a computer do things without fully understanding what’s happening under the bonnet.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
UP to 500 jobs are expected to be created in South Australia over the next three years through a dedicated video game industry hub backed by $2 million in State Government funding. The funding announcement, made by Premier Jay Weatherill on Monday, comes after The Advertiser first revealed plans for an industry space to raise the profile and professionalism of SA’s gaming, animation and software development community.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career
Home to more than 70 businesses, including start-ups, and now attracting about 1000 workers and 6500 students annually, the site is being developed as a collaborative working and living space for students, researchers and businesses. German optical and optoelectronics firm Zeiss will move from Lonsdale to Tonsley in April next year, taking up the largest spot — about 4000sq m — under what’s known as the Main Assembly Building. Siemens, Signostics, Micro-X, Flinders University, TAFE SA, Zen Energy Systems, Radical Torque Solutions and the State Drill Core Reference Library are on site. Retail food outlets and cafes are also on site — but there is more room to grow. The growth has followed a $253 million investment commitment by the State Government to redevelop the automotive manufacturing site formerly used by Chrysler and Mitsubishi.
20 November, 2017
15 November, 2017
At WIRED's suggestion, Malik asked his wife to re-register her face to see what would happen. After Sherwani freshly programmed her face into the phone, it no longer allowed Ammar access. To further test it, Sherwani tried registering her face again a few hours later, to replicate the indoor, nighttime lighting conditions in which she first set up her iPhone X. The problem returned; Ammar unlocked the phone on his third try this time. It worked again on his sixth try. At that point, Malik says, the phone's AI seemed to learn Ammar's features, and he could consistently unlock it again and again.
Labels:
3D,
Artificial Intelligence,
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Privacy
10 November, 2017
08 November, 2017
The world’s largest technology conference is under way in San Francisco, with 170,000 people descending on Dreamforce to hear from speakers including Michelle Obama and Ashton Kutcher — and Salesforce’s vision for the fourth industrial revolution.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Social,
Sustainability,
Women in IT
01 November, 2017
Nvidia’s artificial intelligence can produce images of fake celebrities that look scarily real. As this technology improves, there are obvious potential benefits for companies in the creative industries. For example advertising, movies and video games could be seriously aided by the use of AI image production. Soon it might not be so clear if the pretty woman selling you shampoo is actually real or not. But on the flip side, it does raise questions about how such technology could be used in the era of fake news.
30 October, 2017
26 October, 2017
A COUPLE YEARS ago, Apple went on a shopping spree. It snatched up PrimeSense, maker of some of the best 3-D sensors on the market, as well Perceptio, Metaio, and Faceshift, companies that developed image recognition, augmented reality, and motion capture technology, respectively. It’s not unusual for Cupertino to buy other companies’ technology in order to bolster its own. But at the time, it was hard to know exactly what Apple planned to do with its haul. It wasn’t until last month, at the company’s annual talent show, that the culmination of years of acquisitions and research began to make sense: Apple was building the iPhone X.
Labels:
3D,
Graphic Design,
History,
ICT Capability
23 October, 2017
20 October, 2017
19 October, 2017
The extent of the Krack fallout remains to be seen. Security analysts say it’s a tricky vulnerability to take advantage of, and major platforms like iOS, macOS, and Windows are either unaffected or have already been patched. But given the millions of routers and other IoT devices that will likely never see a fix, the true cost of Krack could play out for years.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Sustainability
Pharmacy retailer Chemist Warehouse and Mexican food outlet Guzman y Gomez are the first retailers used to test Google parent Alphabet’s new drone delivery system being trialled this week in Australia. Alphabet’s research arm X (formerly Google X) says it is testing its drone delivery technology with households at Royalla in NSW, near the border with the ACT.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Robotics
17 October, 2017
A newly-discovered security flaw affects virtually every Wi-Fi device, and could render your home network as readable to hackers as the free Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. Belgian Researcher Mathy Vanhoef has detailed a method of breaking WPA2, the security protocol used by the large majority of routers and devices to secure internet connections. By utilising the flaw, which Mr Vanhoef is calling KRACK (for Key Reinstallation Attack), malicious actors could potentially eavesdrop on the traffic of any access point they were physically near.
Labels:
Cybersafety
GitHub, which builds a product that rivals Australian golden child start-up Atlassian's Bitbucket software development platform, unveiled a suite of new features that will make the internet safer and software developers' lives less stressful at its GitHub Universe 2017 conference. Called the "dependency graph", it ensures that developers whose code is dependant on other, open source projects are given the chance to update their work immediately whenever a security breach, bug or performance issue is uncovered.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
Robots that battle inside the virtual world of RoboSumo are controlled by machine-learning software, not humans. Unlike computer characters in typical videogames, they weren’t pre-programmed to wrestle; instead they had to “learn” the sport by trial and error. The game was created by nonprofit research lab OpenAI, cofounded by Elon Musk, to show how forcing AI systems to compete can spur them to become more intelligent
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Game,
research
The sight of Mr Zuckerberg using VR to survey the devastation of an island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria may have been meant to convey Facebook's empathy with the victims. The fact that he was there in the form of a cartoon seemed to many the perfect visual metaphor for the gulf in understanding between Silicon Valley and the real world.
Team KAIST from South Korea emerged as the winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in Pomona, Calif., after its robot, an adaptable humanoid called DRC-HUBO, beat out 22 other robots from five different countries, winning the US $2 million grand prize. The robot’s “transformer” ability to switch back and forth from a walking biped to a wheeled machine proved key to its victory.
Labels:
Robotics
29 September, 2017
Nvidia’s CEO Declares Moore’s Law Dead. I’ve argued in the past Moore’s Law isn’t dead so much as its transformed. Rather than focusing strictly on increasing transistor counts and clock speeds, companies now focus on power efficiency and component integration. The explosion of specialized processors for handling AI and deep learning workloads is partly a reaction to the fact that CPUs don’t scale the way they used to.
26 September, 2017
25 September, 2017
Following a unanimous vote by the Chicago Public School Board of Education, computer science will become a graduation requirement for all high school students in what is the nation’s third largest school district. Starting with next school year’s class of freshmen (class of 2020), students in Chicago Public Schools will be required to complete curriculum around computer science before graduating.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
Women in IT
Today, we’re on the verge of another revolution, as artificial intelligence and machine learning turn the graphic design field on its head again. The vision is, to quote one project’s slogan, “websites that just make themselves.” Software will evaluate your text content, line of business, and imagery, and spit out finished pages without your having to lift a finger. These kinds of automated tools will arrive on the web first, but print design will change, too, as design-software makers inject machine learning into their layout tools and apps.
SHARES in MGM Wireless surged almost 70 per cent today after the Adelaide software company announced the largest deal in its history. The agreement will see the West Australian Education Department roll out two MGM products — School Star and Outreach+ — across its 800-plus public schools from the beginning of term four this year. School Star, a Facebook-like app that allows access to only registered parents and carers, provides messaging technology for the purpose of announcements, absenteeism alerts, and other functions. It is integrated with Outreach+, a service that automatically switches to SMS if a parent hasn’t installed the app.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability
22 September, 2017
20 September, 2017
Hackers have proven just how urgently a gaping flaw in the global telecoms network, affecting what's known as Signalling System No. 7 (SS7), needs to be fixed. In a video demonstration, shown to Forbes ahead of publication today, benevolent hackers from Positive Technologies were able to take control of a Coinbase bitcoin wallet and start pilfering funds via the SS7 flaws.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
research
19 September, 2017
Last week, the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that malicious hackers had leaked the personal information of 143 million people in their system. That’s reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Yet the researchers say the technology may also be used to beat baddies at their own game.
Equifax “Chief Security Officer” Susan Mauldin has a bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts degree in music composition from the University of Georgia. Her LinkedIn professional profile lists no education related to technology or security. This is the person who was in charge of keeping your personal and financial data safe — and whose apparent failings have put 143 million of us at risk from identity theft and fraud. It was revealed this week that the massive data breach came due to a software vulnerability that was known about, and should have been patched, months earlier.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Privacy,
Women in IT
13 September, 2017
12 September, 2017
Pretty much every AV now in testing uses some combination of cameras, radars, and lidar laser systems. But now, an Israeli startup wants to add a new tool to the mix: heat-detecting infrared cameras that can pick out pedestrians from hundreds of feet away.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
research
09 September, 2017
AN ARTIST USES AN IPHONE TO VISUALIZE SOUNDS IN A.R. built his real time sound map using Apple’s ARKit and the coding toolkit OpenFrameworks. Like all apps built with ARKit, Lieberman’s uses SLAM—simultaneous localization and mapping—which leverages the phone’s sensors and camera to build a low-resolution map of a room’s boundaries and contours.
Labels:
3D,
Education,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability
Today, Neato Robotics is introducing a new flagship robot vacuum that we think offers one of the most significant advances we’ve seen in years: persistent, actionable maps. Like its predecessors, the D7 uses a lidar sensor to create a map of your house as it goes, but now, the robot will remember that map and allow you to interact with it. Neato is starting off simple with what you’ll be able to do (like defining no-go zones), but it’s an incredibly powerful feature that’s necessary for the future of all home robots.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
Robotics
07 September, 2017
"If they're too close, or too far apart, the 'entanglement' between quantum bits – which is what makes quantum computers so special – doesn't occur," Dr Tosi said. "This new idea allows us to fabricate multi-qubit processes with current technology." Andrea Morello, program manager of the UNSW-based ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology and one of the paper's authors, said the concept of pulling electrons from the nucleus builds on concepts raised by an earlier UNSW scientists Bruce Kane in a landmark 1998 Nature paper – just nobody had seen it.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews have thrown down the gauntlet to computer programmers to find a solution to a “simple” chess puzzle which could, in fact, take thousands of years to solve and net a $1m prize. Computer Scientist Professor Ian Gent and his colleagues, at the University of St Andrews, believe any program capable of solving the famous “Queens Puzzle” efficiently, would be so powerful, it would be capable of solving tasks currently considered impossible, such as decrypting the toughest security on the internet.
Labels:
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability,
Numeracy,
research
01 September, 2017
31 August, 2017
For the past few years, Google has pushed a particular technology for implementing augmented reality in phones. Known first as Project Tango and now as Tango, Google’s AR platform used to have specific requirements for its cameras that required specialized hardware. This reliance on custom sensors doomed Tango in the wider market, and only a handful of devices have supported the capability to date.
29 August, 2017
Tesla claiming the Model X P100D is the fastest-accelerating sport utility vehicle in history — zero to 100km/h in as quick as 3.1 seconds. The (in) famous Ludicrous Mode is alive and well, giving the driver a rollercoaster-esque feel of acceleration, and autopilot, while still in beta, is another standout feature from the Model S. Autopilot is more than a novelty; while it’s somewhat crazy and exhilarating to let the car drive itself on the freeway with minimum human intervention, after driving 10 hours between states, it’s clear how helpful that really is.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence,
ICT Capability,
Robotics
25 August, 2017
With so many different kinds of robots, how do you define what one is? It's a physical thing―engineers agree on that, at least. But ask three different roboticists to define a robot and you’ll get three different answers. This isn't a trivial semantic conundrum: Thinking about what a robot really is has implications for how humanity deals with the unfolding robo-revolution.
22 August, 2017
Students in NSW will not sit NAPLAN tests online until schools are confident they are ready to move from pen and paper, according to the Education Minister Rob Stokes, who said he supported the use of handwriting in exams and was "very aware" of the concerns of teachers. Mr Stokes' comments come as the NSW Teachers Federation began collecting feedback from teachers and principals about the school readiness tests, which are under way in thousands of schools across NSW to assess whether schools will be in a position to move to online NAPLAN testing from next year. But data collected by the NSW Department of Education show that the students who sat the school readiness test last week reported that they liked doing it on a computer. Of the 12,500 responses from students, more than 77 per cent were positive.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
Literacy,
Numeracy
21 August, 2017
Thousands of subscribers to the National Broadband Network will be refunded after the nation’s biggest telco launched an investigation into overcharging. In May, Telstra announced it would refund almost 8000 customers after it emerged they were being charged for internet speeds that could never be obtained under the fibre-to-the-node delivery system that was implemented by the federal Coalition in 2013. Optus yesterday said it was now “undertaking a similar process” and would work to ascertain how many customers had been affected and to refund those who had been short-changed.
Bregman's notion of a shorter work week is not designed to provide more time to sit on the couch massaging the remote control. "When I talk about the 15-hour work week, I'm talking about doing less paid work that we don't really care about so that we can do more things that are actually valuable," he said. "Whether it's volunteer work or caring for our kids or elderly. We need to update our idea of what work is." He said shortening the work week, in tandem with implementing a universal basic income, would offer people the freedom to decide what to do with their life while providing a level of financial security. Bregman said working fewer hours would reduce stress and workplace accidents. He also said countries with shorter working weeks had less income inequality and greater gender equality.
THE BIG PROMISE of driverless cars is that they'll save lives by preventing crashes. Computers don't fall asleep, get drunk, or glance at that tweet. Robocar technology could save tens, even hundreds, of thousands of lives each year. Such cars remain years away, of course, but you can find an autonomous vehicle saving lives on the road right now, in Colorado.
The Federal Court ruled in favour of film distributor Village Roadshow which brought legal proceedings against telco services to force them to block domain names for services used to illegally download movies and other programs. Federal Court Justice John Nicholas on Friday ordered internet providers, including Telstra, Optus, TPG and Vocus, to take "reasonable steps" to disable access to 42 websites that breach copyright laws, such as Pirate Bay, within 15 days.
Labels:
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Intellectual Property,
Sustainability
18 August, 2017
17 August, 2017
16 August, 2017
A DRIVERLESS bus will ferry passengers around Tonsley within months, and recharge at a solar garage, in two Adelaide firsts at Flinders University. A $320,000 solar garage will be built at the Tonsley campus, capable of recharging about six electric vehicles at once — including the new autonomous bus. The garage would be available for anyone to recharge their electric vehicles for free, and would also act as an education centre to spread awareness about green transport.
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
research,
Robotics,
Sustainability
14 August, 2017
This system is called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), or colloquially, the “world computer.” Code is run publicly, but users are pseudonymous. It’s like Amazon Web Services, except instead of Amazon as the seller and users as the buyer, users can play either role. No individual controls the system. That makes Ethereum something genuinely new—something unprecedented. Decentralized apps, or DApps, are programs that run on the world computer. “Run,” however, might not be the right word, because Ethereum-the-computer is dreadfully slow
Labels:
History,
ICT Capability,
research
Queensland Police are now actively operating the next-generation of crime fighting technology: Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR). In Queensland alone, the tech has been used to accurately scan number plates over 23 million times in the last 15 months. Fitted to police vehicles across the state, ANPR scanners have the ability to fight crime in ways previously the domain of science fiction.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Privacy
11 August, 2017
The new copycats: How Facebook squashes competition from start-ups
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups/news-story/3095f438b5880566c65b73c84453c79f
Labels:
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
Intellectual Property,
Social
10 August, 2017
Play Protect encompasses several features that were completely separate until now. There’s malware scanning, lost phone tracking and locking, and Chrome Safe Browsing. The anti-malware features leverage Google’s machine learning platform to monitor apps for suspicious behavior, removing them from your phone before they can cause damage. You may be perplexed, wondering if Android had built-in malware scanning before. Yes, it did, but Google was very bad at making that known.
Labels:
Cybersafety
Starcraft II has been a target for Alphabet’s DeepMind AI research for a while now – the UK AI company took on Blizzard’s sci-fi strategy game starting last year, and announced plans to create an open AI research environment based on the game to make it possible for others to contribute to the effort of creating a virtual agent who can best the top human StarCraft players in the world. The whole goal here is to come up with AI that can play StarCraft II better than any human can, in much the same way that DeepMind did with its AlphaGo software for playing the ancient physical board game of Go.
Deeplearning.ai is home to a series of online courses Ng says will help spread the benefits of recent advances in machine learning far beyond big tech companies such as Google and Baidu. The courses offer coders without an AI background training in how to use deep learning, the technique behind the current frenzy of investment in AI. “This sounds naive, but I want us to build a new AI-powered society,” Ng tells WIRED. “The only way to build this is if there are hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to do things like improve the water supply for your city or help resource allocation in developing economies.”
09 August, 2017
02 August, 2017
IN 2010, STEVE Jobs banished Adobe Flash from the iPhone. It was too insecure, Jobs wrote, too proprietary, too resource-intensive, too unaccommodating for a platform run by fingertips instead of mouse clicks. All of those gripes hold true. And now Adobe itself has finally conceded. The company announced Tuesday that it would “stop updating and distributing the Flash Player,” giving the end of 2020 as its end-of-life date.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Game,
Graphic Design,
History,
ICT Capability
About 7000 year 11 students will sit a new critical thinking exam this year, which has been developed as universities and employers stress jobs of the future will require more than the traditional subjects taught in the Higher School Certificate. The optional 90-minute online test includes 60 questions that assess logical reasoning and analytical reasoning skills, and students get a detailed report on how they performed in relation to their peers and the areas they need to improve.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education
28 July, 2017
The highly competitive entry tests for NSW selective schools will be overhauled as the state government moves to address concerns that wealthy families are gaming the system by engaging tutors for their children. "Parents can spend more than $20,000 a year on preparation for [opportunity class] or selective high school tests," NSW Department of Education secretary Mark Scott told the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children conference in Sydney on Friday.
You may need to impress a machine the next time you apply for a job. And be careful what you put online. These job-vetting machines may not like your blogs and social media posts. The fact these capabilities have been in the pipeline has been known for some time. But now they’re out there and companies are using them. IBM has told The Australian that several local firms are using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence skills to initially vet applicants for jobs. Watson narrows down the applicants list before humans move in to make final choices.
23 July, 2017
Australia will get its first taste of a global phenomenon today when the event centre at Sydney’s Star casino hosts one leg of the group stages of the Overwatch World Cup. Overwatch is a multiplayer online video game set on a dystopian Earth where two six-player teams take part in a series of skirmishes between 24 predefined characters called heroes.
Labels:
3D,
Game,
Intercultural Understanding,
Social
09 July, 2017
Mind you, the current system has plenty of flaws. Let’s face it: money is created by economists in the ivory towers of central banks and by licensed banks lending what has been deposited with them, which stays deposited at the same time as being lent, thereby multiplying. Money creation by banks is a privatised demand-driven system that periodically comes unstuck because banks either over-lend, or lend unwisely, so that the money gets lost and the original depositors’ savings evaporate — although these days most banks are “too big to fail”, and therefore implicitly guaranteed by taxpayers. The other problem with the current system is that although the value of money is fairly stable, it tends to devalue over time as a result of deliberate inflation. Central banks have been trying to get inflation up for a decade, in order to reduce the face value of the world’s excessive debt. Following the adoption of independent “price stability mandates” by central banks in the 1970s and 1980s, prices have been anything but stable: inflation has averaged 3.5-4 per cent per annum, dramatically reducing the value of money ($1000 40 years ago would now be worth a quarter of that). So those pushing for non-fiat money, that is money not controlled by central bankers and/or politicians, have a point: under the current system, governments debauch the currency for their own purposes and periodically banks blow it up through greed and incompetence. But the people trying to build an alternative system are basically anarchists. In fact, I’d say that global governments will soon need to declare that cryptocurrencies will never become legal tender, and legislate to that effect. You can play with them, and have fun trading and gambling, but actual money? Nah. That’s not to say blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies, is also a scam, far from it. In fact, it looks a truly revolutionary technology that is likely to change the world through mass disintermediation — but not disintermediation of government.
06 July, 2017
According to futurist Thomas Frey, in 14 years it will be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the internet. Frey’s prediction comes amid a boom in artificial intelligence research. Google is developing DeepMind, a complex piece of machine-learning software. IBM is developing Watson-powered robots. Amazon is developing drone delivery.
05 July, 2017
Named the ‘Red Belly Blockchain’, the new system being developed by the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies will allow secure and almost instantaneous digital transfer of virtual currencies across the world. “In recent testing, our blockchain achieved the best performance we have seen so far – with more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines,” said University of Sydney academic Dr Vincent Gramoli, who heads up the Concurrent Systems Research Group developing the technology. “In comparison, VISA’s network has a peak capacity of around 56,000 transactions per second and the Bitcoin network is limited to around seven transactions per second.”
A makerspace can be any place where students can get creative, whether a classroom, library or garden. It's not about the space, but the innovation mindset that the space promotes. In this article, we unpack everything you need to create your own collaborative makerspace at school.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability,
Literacy,
Numeracy,
Robotics,
Women in IT
03 July, 2017
Online retail giant Amazon has invented a new way of sending out its deliveries, filing a patent for ‘drone skyscrapers’. According to the designs the tower would have several launching spots where remotely operated drones would be loaded with a package and then take off. Amazon, which will be launching in Australia this year, is planning to use drones to deliver smaller packages and has already begun testing drone delivery
Labels:
ICT Capability,
research,
Robotics
Centrelink is using controversial high-tech phone-breaking devices to reveal secrets hidden by suspected fraudsters in their smart phones. The agency says it uses the technology in strict accordance with the law and only when it has obtained a warrant when investigating cases of serious fraud. But experts have warned the use of the 'Universal Forensic Extraction Devices' is jeopardising the communications security of Australians.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
28 June, 2017
A ransomware attack has struck computers across the globe, taking out servers at Russia's biggest oil company, disrupting operations at Ukrainian banks and shutting down computers at multinational shipping and advertising firms. An adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister said the virus got into computer systems via "phishing" emails written in Russian and Ukrainian, designed to lure employees into opening them. According to the state security agency, the emails contained infected Word documents or PDF files as attachments.
Labels:
Cybersafety
26 June, 2017
Google says its computers will soon stop reading the emails of its Gmail users to personalise their ads, a move that addresses a longstanding privacy concern about a product that is central to its growing corporate services business. The core unit of Alphabet has mined users’ emails for personal data to serve them more relevant ads since it launched Gmail in 2004, which almost immediately sparked privacy concerns.
21 June, 2017
The fact NBN Co has both “theoretical” speeds — the speeds it expects homes not yet connected will achieve — and actual speeds post-connection also raises questions as to the necessity of a $7 million federal government program to monitor connection speeds in 4000 homes. Industry experts interviewed by The Australian have raised concerns NBN Co has widespread detailed net speed information and is not releasing it publicly but only to retail telco providers, who may have financial incentives to suppress the information.
19 June, 2017
Experts believe the algorithms used to encrypt online messages will be useless in a decade or two, as computers become powerful enough to crack them. An alternative is to tag messages with light particles entangled with each other through the weird properties of quantum physics. However, until now, physicists have succeeded in transmitting entangled particles only about 100km. Over longer distances, light leaches out of the optical fibres used for ground-based telecommunications, which degrades the quantum signal.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
ICT Capability,
research
16 June, 2017
More than half of all students starting a bachelor degree at an Australian university are now admitted on a basis other than their Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR), despite this cohort having one of the highest dropout rates. Nearly 56 per cent of students commencing bachelor degrees were admitted based on criteria other than ATAR in 2015
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Literacy,
Numeracy
13 June, 2017
Microsoft and developer Mojang have announced a significant update to Minecraft that will let people play and create together regardless of whether they're using mobile phones, game consoles or PCs. Dubbed the "Better Together" update, the changes to the immensely popular game were announced at Microsoft's media briefing ahead of this week's E3 expo in Los Angeles. Once the update rolls out in the coming months, the newest versions of the game — including the Pocket Edition, Xbox One Edition, Nintendo Switch edition and more — will be renamed simply to Minecraft and will become functionally identical.
Sydney taxis will be able to turn off their meters as part of a radical package of reforms designed to help them compete with ridesharing firms such as Uber. Although new regulations haven’t been finalised, fare deregulation will mean the end of fixed taxi fare rates. Passengers will hunt for the lowest fare they can get with various taxi firms and Uber, when they book a ride by phone or through an app.
In mixed and augmented reality, Apple could be the winner. It wasn’t the most prominent announcement, but this week Apple released ARKit, development software that will let coders build augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad. Already the developer community is buzzing, with some early applications already completed. Very soon iPhone users will be able to sample augmented reality applications of better quality than Pokemon Go, which introduced the globe to the AR concept.
Labels:
3D,
Artificial Intelligence
05 June, 2017
The cocktail party problem refers to the challenge of following a single person’s speech in a room full of surrounding chatter and noise. With a little concentration, humans can focus in on what a particular person is saying. But when we want technology to separate the speech of a targeted person from the simultaneous conversations of others—as we do with hands-free telephony when a caller is in a car with kids in the back seat—the results leave much to be desired. Until now, that is, says Mitsubishi Electric. The company demonstrated its speech separation technology at its annual R&D Open House in Tokyo on 24 May. In one type of demonstration, two people spoke a sentence in different languages simultaneously into a single microphone.
31 May, 2017
30 May, 2017
There’s no doubt that some drone owners will see this as a company trying to crack down on what they’re allowed to do with a piece of hardware they purchased. As someone with pervasive concerns for how personal data is used and sold these days, I’m sympathetic to some of those arguments. Drones can serve incredibly valuable functions, from remote delivery or gathering footage as part of a story, to getting a view of a problem or unfolding situation that would be impossible to source in any other way. The flip side to this equation, of course, is that drone strikes and near-misses have skyrocketed in recent years. Some have argued that the FAA has overblown the risk of a drone strike, given the small size and lightweight design of most drones. But trying to quickly determine whether a drone is of a type that could cause plane damage while closing on the diminutive craft is clearly not an option.
29 May, 2017
27 May, 2017
The Law Society of NSW, the peak representative body for solicitors, this year released a report on the future of the legal profession that identified the need for future law graduates to be equipped with technological and business skills to meet changing employer demands. The report follows stark findings that only 74.1 per cent of law undergraduates looking for full-time employment were successful in finding jobs in 2015, compared with 88.4 per cent of graduates in 2005, according to a report by Graduate Careers Australia.
22 May, 2017
"In lessons involving direct instruction, teachers can teach 40 or 50 students as easily as 20," Mr Bowden said. "But with numeracy, for example, we know these 10 students need remedial work and one teacher can take them aside while a different teachers takes all the students who are on track. "It's a recognition that students learn at difference paces." Schools should either move all classes to a composite structure, or none, Associate Professor Linley Cornish said. "Schools only having some composite classes sets up a stigma, and parents start to think, 'should my child be in a different class, is my child being disadvantaged?'," she said.
As a keen, heavy investor in Bitcoin was quoted as saying last week: “I think that something has to replace the current monetary insanity. It may or may not be Bitcoin. I don’t know what it is. I’m worried about the system — the integrity of the system. You can’t navigate that by working within the system. You have to be outside the system. Bitcoin is outside the system.”
15 May, 2017
Blockchain’s public interface, at its most basic, is a string of shared data made up of a series of uniquely ordered alphabetical letters and numbers, timestamped and immutable. Yet, through this, blockchain can fundamentally change existing organisational structures, not merely as an evolutionary development, but potentially as a transformational technology. While it continues to develop, we need explore the opportunities that blockchain technology can offer and the consequences of not getting it right. We are living in a world where ‘for good’ has become zeitgeist and is often interpreted as 'social good'. However to set the scene of the discussion it is really important to note that 'for good' is not limited to non-profit activities or the third sector. There are incredibly varied views of what 'for good' means – for creative industries, it is transparency and fair distribution of royalties; for refugees, it is establishing or protecting identity; for charities, it is about accountability; and for government, it is about delivering better services to the public.
NAB-owned online bank UBank has launched Robochat, an AI-powered chatbot that’s here to help filling out home loan forms. Robochat exists as an upgrade to Ubank’s home loan live-chat service and is ready to answer most of your questions in mere seconds. For now, Robochat can only answer queries relevant to the home loan application, but in the future it might be able to pre-fill your forms or dole out tips and extra information, says Ubank’s head of digital, Jeremy Hubbard.
Labels:
Artificial Intelligence
The ransomware strain WannaCry (also known as WanaCrypt0r and WCry) that caused Friday’s barrage appears to be a new variant of a type that first appeared in late March. This new version has only gained steam since its initial barrage, with tens of thousands of infections in 74 countries so far today as of publication time. Its reach extends beyond the UK and Spain, into Russia, Taiwan, France, Japan, and dozens more countries. One reason WannaCry has proven so vicious? It seems to leverage a Windows vulnerability known as EternalBlue that allegedly originated with the NSA.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical
09 May, 2017
SINCE TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION became the norm for web services that care about securing your accounts, it’s started to feel like a security blanket, an extra layer keeping your data safe no matter whether your password is as strong as 8$&]$@I)9[P&4^s or as dumb as dadada. But a two-factor setup—which for most users requires a temporary code generated on, or sent to, your phone in addition to a password—isn’t an invincibility spell. Especially if that second factor is delivered via text message.
Labels:
Cybersafety
08 May, 2017
04 May, 2017
28 April, 2017
PISA report: The three measures by which Australia's students are ahead of Finland's. Australian students are twice as likely to say they expect to go to university as students in Finland, nearly 35 per cent more likely to say they want to be one of the best in their class, and three times as likely to have a paid job while they're at school, a global study into student wellbeing has found.
10 April, 2017
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has welcomed the Federal Government’s announcement today that it will fund a new broadband performance monitoring program to provide Australian consumers with accurate and independent information about broadband speeds.After appointing a qualified testing provider, the ACCC will commence the program in May 2017, and will provide comparative information for consumers during the second half of the year.
Sydney's Catholic schools will have selective entrance tests for the first time this year, with high schools across the diocese to offer places in selective streams for gifted and talented students. In a bid to stretch their brightest students and stop a drift to high-achieving public selective schools, Sydney Catholic Schools has been developing an external selection test with the Australian Council for Educational Research, which year 6 students will be able to sit in term three this year.
Labels:
Asia Connection,
Education,
Literacy,
Numeracy
06 April, 2017
05 April, 2017
A VIDEO game portraying the streets of Adelaide has drawn criticism from police, who say any representation of stations or officers could be breaking the law. But the young designer has said the game had been “misrepresented”. The game, called P Platers, is in the development stage. The open-world game give players to freedom to do what they want, which could include violence and is based on the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto series.
31 March, 2017
ON TUESDAY, THE House of Representatives voted to reverse regulations that would have stopped internet service providers from selling your web-browsing data without your explicit consent. It’s a disappointing setback for anyone who doesn’t want big telecoms profiting off of their personal data. So what to do? Try a Virtual Private Network. It won’t fix all your privacy problems, but a VPN’s a decent start.
29 March, 2017
The National Broadband Network has blamed Telstra for internet download speeds as low as 1/500th of what customers are paying for and claimed the telco giant has been selling super-fast plans in areas where those high speeds don’t exist. Tensions between the NBN Co, which is owned by the federal government, and internet retailers erupted yesterday after The Australian produced five case studies of Telstra customers reporting substandard internet speeds.
Labels:
Ethical,
ICT Capability,
research
28 March, 2017
"Don't teach your kids coding," says New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman. "Well – teach it if you want. But before you teach them coding, teach them digital civics: how to talk to one another on the internet, how to understand fact from fiction." The internet is a sewer "of untreated, unfiltered information," he told his audience of teachers and international education leaders at a conference in Dubai on the weekend, "and if we don't build the values filters so our children can interact in this environment, with real values ... we have a real problem."
22 March, 2017
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2017. 1 JavaScript 2 Java 3 Python 4 PHP 5 C# 5 C++ 7 CSS 7 Ruby 9 C 10 Objective-C 11 Scala 11 Shell 11 Swift 14 R 15 Go 15 Perl 17 TypeScript 18 PowerShell 19 Haskell 20 Clojure 20 CoffeeScript 20 Lua 20 Matlab
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
16 March, 2017
“The whole direction when you were sent to school is about getting to university, and the whole focus of year 11 and 12 is what mark you get. We’ve become a nation that’s testing people all the time, when we need to become a nation that’s skilling people,” she told news.com.au. Ms Westacott said the way the Australian school system was set up — with targets to complete a year 12 education — was misguided, and that kids should be free to make informed choices about continuing their education from year nine.
With every major US wireless carrier now offering unlimited data plans, consumers don't need to log on to a Wi-Fi network to avoid costly overage charges anymore, which threatens to render Wi-Fi obsolete. And with new competitive technologies crowding in, the future looks even dimmer.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
14 March, 2017
10 March, 2017
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has responded to a challenge from Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes, and doubled down on his company's pledge to help solve South Australia's energy crisis. "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free," Musk tweeted on Friday in response to earlier correspondence from the Sydney based software billionaire.
Founders entering the Techstars Adelaide accelerator will have access to two great start-up minds dedicated to helping them do more, faster.” The program, slated to kick off in July, will connect 10 start-ups from all over the world to a network of community founders, mentors, investors, and corporate partners including seven of the world’s top defence industry companies: BAE, Thales, Austal, SAAB, ASC, Rheinmetall and DCNS. “I’m looking for companies that will be of interest to the Australian military, but also have a broader purpose,” Mr Gold told News Corp. “I expect there’ll be some great South Australian companies, but we will almost certainly be bringing some companies here from around the world. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for founders who want to develop and commercialise technologies such as internet of things, big data, sensors, drones and robotics.”
09 March, 2017
THE NSA, IT seems, isn’t the only American spy agency hacking the world. Judging by a new, nearly 9,000-page trove of secrets from WikiLeaks, the CIA has developed its own surprisingly wide array of intrusion tools, too. On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released what it’s calling Vault 7, an unprecedented collection of internal CIA files—what appear to be a kind of web-based Wiki—that catalog the agency’s apparent hacking techniques. And while the hoards of security researchers poring through the documents have yet to find any actual code among its spilled secrets, it details surprising capabilities, from dozens of exploits targeting Android and iOS to advanced PC-compromise techniques and detailed attempts to hack Samsung smart TVs, turning them into silent listening devices.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
Privacy
06 March, 2017
Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement, or in some instances, had been outright banned, including Australia. The program, which involves a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from Uber's app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these to evade authorities in Australia, China, South Korea and Italy
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical
“We always look to apps that can be part of popular culture. We believe that young women are the early adopters of popular culture, so one of the things we saw was that when we met the company, it was dominated in its usage by young woman, by high school girls,” he told CNN. “And whenever we see that, and we’ve seen it before, whether it was MySpace or Facebook or Instagram, that is a good predictor of what’s going to become popular culture in the future.”
01 March, 2017
The Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition, a report which provides a technology forecast for educational institutions, suggests virtual reality (VR) will be adopted by classrooms within two to three years. Even though virtual reality has started to take off in sectors like news making, gaming and digital marketing, the education sector does not seem to have the range of great experiences that VR can offer. While there are no doubt other benefits to using this technology, I think that VR technologies will have a positive impact in the areas of inspiring wonder and curiosity, developing new creative skills and offering authentic “learn by doing” experiences. Judging from the work that is being done in education around VR though, I feel that the most powerful learning experiences are those that foster community and collaboration, and empower the user to empathise.
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
Graphic Design,
ICT Capability
A new provision is being inserted into the AANA Code of Ethics requiring advertising and marketing communication to be "clearly distinguishable as such to the relevant audience". Influencers must ensure any paid content is marked and cannot "camouflage the fact that it is advertising". The practice of businesses working with influencers has come under increasing scrutiny, with Media Watch investigating influencers such as chef Matt Moran, who was paid to send tweets recommending Kangaroo Island and failed to disclose the payment. More recently author and entrepreneur Zoe Foster Blake was criticised for posting a photo to Instagram of her fridge filled with YouFoodz products that she received for free.
Black Sage’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and spent a year enhancing their system so that it can now not only track drones but also bring them safely to the ground using radio-frequency-jamming technology. There is only one small hitch: Like almost every drone-interdiction technology in development, frequency jammers run afoul of several US laws, most of which were passed when people hadn’t dreamed of owning their own unmanned aircraft. Romero and Lamm’s solution to the mock terror in the stadium—a solution that they have shown can reliably counter the threats drones pose to targets as varied as prisons, airports, and arenas—is illegal here, which leaves the future of Black Sage’s technology, like the future of drones themselves, very much up in the air.
Labels:
Cybersafety,
Ethical,
ICT Capability
Last Friday, Google quietly announced that E2EMail, an extension for Chrome that would seamlessly encrypt and decrypt Gmail messages, was no longer a Google effort. Instead, the company has invited the outside developer community to adopt the project’s open-source code. Google was careful to emphasize in a blog post describing the change that it hasn’t given up work on its email encryption tool. But cryptographers and members of the privacy community see the move as confirmation that Google has officially backburnered a critical privacy and security initiative.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Cybersafety,
Privacy
27 February, 2017
While South Australia’s declining manufacturing sector is costing the state jobs, the crash repair industry is desperately trying to fill positions. The Motor Trade Association of South Australia’s chief executive, Paul Unerkov, said there was a lack of apprentices entering the industry. “Rapid automotive technology changes mean people coming into the industry, either from another trade or through an apprenticeship, require higher levels of literacy and numeracy, a strong work ethic and an ability to grasp technical concepts to successfully work in modern workshops.”
Labels:
Education,
ICT Capability,
Literacy,
Numeracy
24 February, 2017
TIKITU DE JAGER, a coder living in Greece, wanted to learn to program in iOS. So, like a lot of us do when we want to pick up a new skill, he started watching lessons online. At the outset everything was new, so he’d watch carefully and take notes. But as De Jager’s knowledge grew, he wanted to zip past familiar material. That’s when he started speeding up the videos. Now De Jager races along at 2X speed, slowing down only when he hits challenging stuff.
Labels:
Education
But for those suffering nostalgia for the ideal of secure, high-wage manufacturing in the rust belt – it's not going to happen. On one hand, manufacturing automation is not about to be reversed, while on the other, the US has lost the capability to feed, run and maintain many modern factories. The most commonly-given reason for Trump's "bringing the jobs back" chant being a lie is that most of the jobs weren't "stolen" by China and Mexico in the first place and they therefore can't be "brought back". There have been various studies attempting to allocate responsibility between automation and cheap foreign labour. The highest score I've seen for automation's role is a massive 85 per cent, as summarised by the Financial Times:
START-ups with a great idea but which lack a technical founder on their team have found a new home in Adelaide’s Moonshine Laboratory. Spun out of Adelaide marketing agency The Distillery, Moonshine has already welcomed two start-ups into the fold and has another in talks. Distillery principal Jason Neave said the aim was to fill a niche in Adelaide, which had a suite of start-up accelerators and support programs, but not one for companies that did not have a technical co-founder — think a programmer or computer scientist capable of building the product.
20 February, 2017
CSC Australia wins State Government contract, pledges 400 new jobs and Holden worker retraining. The new contract will also provide reskilling and job offers for up to 30 Holden workers, as the Elizabeth factory prepares for closure in October and the supply chain also shuts down.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Sustainability
14 February, 2017
It’s Siri for lawyers and accountants. Ask “Ailira” a question about Australian tax law and she will scan through millions of uploaded documents and use her artificial intelligence nous to deliver an answer. “Your tax agents will probably be gone within five years,” said a confident Mr Cartland, who added that their demise was already happening with the Australian Taxation Office pushing to automate tax returns, technology issues not withstanding.
13 February, 2017
The sale of so-called "fully loaded Kodi boxes" has been called a "top priority" by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact). The five traders were arrested in early morning raids. Fact said it believed the suspects had made in the region of £250,000 selling the devices online. Kodi is free software built by volunteers to bring videos, music, games and photographs together in one easy-to-use application.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Intellectual Property
09 February, 2017
Nintendo's engineers have embraced Unreal Engine Shigeru Miyamoto says that his engineers have ‘mastered’ the Unreal Engine.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/07/nintendos-engineers-have-embraced-unreal-engine/
Labels:
3D,
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Game,
ICT Capability,
Sustainability
08 February, 2017
What do Donald Trump, Nick Xenophon, Pauline Hanson and 83 per cent of Australians have in common? In a survey covering dozens of hot-button issues put to a representative sample of Australian voters, a desire to rely less on imports and to manufacture more at home stood out as the number one thing most people agreed on.
31 January, 2017
25 January, 2017
It’s not often that civil liberties advocates—along with other advocacy groups like the Sierra Club and Doctors Without Borders—find themselves on the same side of an issue as President Trump. But digital privacy and rights groups roundly criticized the TPP for restricting the freedom of information and lambasted what they say was the lack of transparency in the drafting of the deal. “The TPP would have been a bad deal for digital rights, so we welcome its demise,” says Jeremy Malcolm, senior global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver’s vision problems.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
Robotics
20 January, 2017
13 January, 2017
Game-playing AI has found solutions to some versions of poker. But heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold’em represents an especially complex challenge with 10160 possible plays at different stages of the game (possibly more than the number of atoms in the universe). Such complexity exists because this two-player version of poker allows for unrestricted bet sizes. To deal with such a game, many AI rely on a technique called counterfactual regret minimization (CFR). Typical CFR algorithms try to solve games such as poker through several steps at each decision point. First, they come up with counterfactual values representing different game outcomes. Second, they apply a regret minimization approach to see which strategy leads to the best outcome. And third, they typically average the most recent strategy with all past strategies.
12 January, 2017
ATLASSIAN CO-FOUNDER MIKE Cannon-Brookes describes Trello as a simple online application. But simple doesn’t have to mean cheap: His company just agreed to acquire the web-based project management app for $425 million—a ridiculous-sounding amount of money that may well be worth paying. “Simple products can be deceptive in their simplicity,” Cannon-Brookes says.
Labels:
ICT Capability
09 January, 2017
Our team at USC has conducted the largest analyses1 of STEM depictions in motion pictures to date. We examined 129 G-, PG-, and PG-13-rated top-grossing films from 2006 to 2011. Only 26 females with STEM jobs were depicted on screen across 5,839 speaking characters. Of those 26 females, consider the following disturbing trends: Only three were African-American—two in life or physical sciences, one engineer. Only one woman was depicted as a mathematician. She was white, shown in a low-cut, tight-fitting Santa suit, and was shown estimating the production time for toys on the North Pole’s assembly line. This problem goes beyond American films. In a follow-up study, we assessed 120 movies released between 2010 and 2013 in 10 top international film markets. Out of 5,799 characters, 121 held a STEM job. Of these characters, only 14 were female and there were no mathematicians. No females in STEM were African-American.
Labels:
ICT Capability,
ICT Career,
Women in IT
05 January, 2017
Lego A/S pulled back the curtains Wednesday on an update to its classic building toy at the CES tech confab in Las Vegas. Dubbed Lego Boost, the new kits bring brick creations to life with simple motors and sensors while teaching the basics of programming. Unlike Lego’s more-complex Mindstorms systems, which are used in schools to teach robotics, the Boost system was designed for children as young as age 7, and feels closer to the classic brick experience.
Labels:
Critical + Creative Thinking,
Education,
Game,
ICT Capability
Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work are also becoming increasingly competent. One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer,” starting by January 2017.
A new French law establishing workers’ “right to disconnect” goes into effect today. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails. The goals of the law include making sure employees are fairly paid for work, and preventing burnout by protecting private time.
02 January, 2017
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