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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.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/games/e3-2017-minecraft-better-together-update-makes-game-more-accessible-than-ever-before-20170611-gwou9y.html

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.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/sydneys-taxis-take-the-fight-to-uber/news-story/af6efcd2d638b8ddb2fd0c9fd2048820

Plagiarism, speaking to Siri: HSC students go to great lengths to cheat in exams

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/plagiarism-speaking-to-siri-hsc-students-go-to-great-lengths-to-cheat-in-exams-20170608-gwnesk.html

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.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/apple-happy-not-to-be-burnt-by-rushing-products-to-market/news-story/ccc6bb798c5a177a679f73ee100f678a

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.

http://www.coindesk.com/crypto-utopia-defining-the-greater-good-in-a-blockchain-world/

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.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/ubank-taps-watson-to-power-home-loans/news-story/0fa41ef8b445a17f55d28890238d3f5d

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/ransomware-meltdown-experts-warned/

28 April, 2017

Lyrebird claims it can recreate any voice using just one minute of sample audio

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/24/15406882/ai-voice-synthesis-copy-human-speech-lyrebird

How long is too long for a web page to load in 2017? According to the data of about 10 billion user visits to online shopping sites, three seconds. After that, more than half of shoppers will have left the page.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/amazons-'secret-weapon'-how-website-experience-can-influence-shoppers-20170420-gvole2.html

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.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/the-three-measures-by-which-australian-students-are-ahead-of-finnish-ones-20170418-gvngxq.html

In the U.S., Flying Drones Out of Sight Is Still Out of Mind But the Federal Aviation Administration is allowing PrecisionHawk to test a system for managing small drones beyond visual line of sight

http://spectrum.ieee.org/video/robotics/drones/flying-drones-out-of-sight-for-the-faa

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.

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-to-monitor-australias-broadband-performance

YouTube: Only channels with 10K views can make money off ads Aiming to curb abusive accounts and copyright theft, YouTube is crimping a route to easy money by keeping ads off channels with fewer than 10,000 views.

https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-10k-views-ads-money-demonetized/

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.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/sydney-catholic-schools-offer-selective-entrance-tests-to-keep-best-and-brightest-20170404-gvdfeo.html

22 March, 2017

Meet SAM, or rather, SAM100 – short for Semi-Automated Mason. It’s a robot and it can lay between 800 to 1200 bricks a day – at a slower rate than a human brickie perhaps, but continuously, without stopping for things like lunch.

https://www.domain.com.au/news/the-future-of-construction-bricklaying-robot-sam100s-wall-building-prowess-20170317-gv0e42/

With the Internet of Things, we’re building a world-size robot. How are we going to control it?

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/01/the-internet-of-things-dangerous-future-bruce-schneier.html

China's police are now shooting down drones with radio-jamming rifles

http://mashable.com/2017/03/16/drone-rifles-china-police/#3UUmshffakq8

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

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/03/17/language-rankings-1-17/

Founder of Silicon Valley software company Happy Co stakes his future on Adelaide, looks to hire up to 100 staff in next two to three years

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/jobs/founder-of-silicon-valley-software-company-happy-co-stakes-his-future-on-adelaide-looks-to-hire-up-to-100-staff-in-next-two-to-three-years/news-story/8a8f3b7d73572e831d0d994b15c5560f

16 March, 2017

John Maeda: If You Want to Survive in Design, You Better Learn to Code

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/john-maeda-want-survive-design-better-learn-code/

58% of high-performance employees say they need more quiet work spaces

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/15/58-of-high-performance-employees-say-they-need-more-quiet-work-spaces.html

“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.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/work/business-leaders-push-to-remove-stigma-around-high-school-dropouts/news-story/737112875ab7b6c0578d040d21c02a9f

Millions of Smart Meters May Over-Inflate Readings by up to 600%. researchers say, introduced a large amount of noise in electrical current waveforms, which disrupt the smart meter sensors tasked with recording power consumption.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/millions-of-smart-meters-may-over-inflate-readings-by-up-to-600-percent/

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.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/innovation/world-without-wifi-looms-as-unlimited-plans-rise-20170312-guwfua.html

Want to Make It as a Biologist? Better Learn to Code

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/biologists-teaching-code-survive/

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.

http://www.afr.com/technology/teslas-elon-musk-pledges-to-fix-sas-power-crisis-in-100-days-or-its-free-20170310-guvf1x

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.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/techstars-goes-for-gold-in-adelaide/news-story/5bf33ddebfafd5635c41866ad3b45005

06 March, 2017

the Australian Digital Technologies curriculum asks students to learn to critically evaluate user interfaces, looking at functionality, usability, accessibility and aesthetics

https://blog.groklearning.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-evaluating-website-interfaces-with-your-class-b3dea3368e71#.o7cnlfcbe

Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.

http://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/

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

http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/how-uber-used-secret-greyball-tool-to-deceive-authorities-in-australia-20170303-guqm23.html

“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.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/the-aussie-rolling-in-snap-billions/news-story/692555204c919f65751c214c923487a6

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.

http://splash.abc.net.au/newsandarticles/blog/-/b/2450079/the-exciting-future-of-education-with-virtual-reality?WT.tsrc=Email&WT.mc_id=Innovation_Innovation-Splash|Secondary_email|20170301

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.

http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/trends/crackdown-on-social-media-influencers-20170227-gum64a.html

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/sky-net-illegal-drone-plan/

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/3-years-gmails-end-end-encryption-still-vapor/

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/learn-faster-by-speeding-up/

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:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/unskilled-and-unable-why-donald-trumps-great-jobs-promise-is-a-lie-20170222-guijx3.html

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.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/jobs/moonshine-laboratory-to-fill-a-gap-in-adelaides-start-up-ecosystem/news-story/f20dddc10681cf5aa750f3ba8ca33733

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/digital-rights-activists-glad-president-trump-killed-tpp/

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.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603289/the-tiny-robots-revolutionizing-eye-surgery/

Atlassian breaks diversity ceiling. Australian tech giant Atlassian says almost 60 per cent of its incoming graduates are women, as it welcomed the new employees at a ‘hack house’ event this week in Sydney.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/atlassian-breaks-diversity-ceiling/news-story/9dfd0ed948c2673d6decbd1447643775

Lawnmower Man, 'first' Virtual Reality film, to be remade - in Virtual Reality When The Lawnmower Man was released in 1992, Virtual Reality was the stuff of science fiction

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/lawnmower-man-first-virtual-reality-film-to-be-remade--in-virtual-reality-20170123-gtwrj1.html

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.

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/hidden-figures-diversity-wake-call-film/

Jonathan Russell has worked out an NBN hack that has given him one of the fastest home internet connections in the country. Here's what you do: you just take two national broadband network lines, plug them both into a router, and boom – 190 megabits-per-second download speeds.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-nbn-hack-to-get-even-faster-download-speeds-you-can-do-it-too-20170105-gtmea3.html

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.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/lego-bricks-come-alive-1483506122

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.

https://qz.com/875491/japanese-white-collar-workers-are-already-being-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence/

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.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/01/french-right-to-disconnect-law/

27 December, 2016

The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, which has important "symbolic value," according to the authorities. In addition, stream-ripping is mentioned as an emerging threat.

https://torrentfreak.com/us-government-targets-pirate-bay-and-other-piracy-havens-161221/

World’s largest hedge fund to replace managers with artificial intelligence

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/bridgewater-associates-ai-artificial-intelligence-management

Australians could have their private phone and email records used against them in civil litigation cases, with the federal government considering relaxing data retention laws. Critics say it would pave the way for phone and email records to be mined for material to be used in legal action following marriage breakdowns and business disputes.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australians-phone-and-email-records-could-be-used-in-civil-lawsuits-20161222-gtgdy6.html

I put the question to Telstra and was told the key is to ring the call centre and ask them to "submit a request for a service qualification test", if the cable is in your street and you believe you should be able to access it. Even if Telstra runs copper to your home, the cable access maps aren't updated after it's laid in your street so they don't acknowledge the existence of new dwellings.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/gadgets-on-the-go/the-trick-which-might-get-you-off-flaky-dsl-onto-telstra-cable-broadband-20161222-gtgsj1.html