Episode 576 – Aussie Tech Heads Shownotes

posted in: Show Notes

Govt opens Sydney cyber threat sharing centre

The federal government has officially opened a new public-private cyber threat sharing centre in Sydney, its fourth to go live across the country

The centre, located on Sussex Street in Sydney, has been operating since December last year.

 

Brisbane won the rights to host the inaugural joint cyber security centre (JCSC) in late 2016.

Since then, further centres have opened in Melbourne and Perth. An Adelaide JCSC is due to open later this year.

 

The facilities co-locate government, business, and academic cyber security experts to share data and advice IT security threats, assisted by an information-sharing portal.

Cyber minister Angus Taylor today said 101 organisations were participating in the threat sharing centres nationally.

 

 

 

Autonomous cars to be trialled across Sydney’s busiest roads

NSW government is forging ahead with trials of driverless cars across Sydney

driverless cars will be trialled across the Lane Cove tunnel, Hills M2 Motorway, Westlink M7, M5, Eastern Distributor, Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

The trials will continue until October this year, occurring at different times of day and under different conditions.

Tests of a highly automated ‘smart shuttle’ have been underway since last year at a closed section of Sydney’s Olympic Park.

 

The announcement came as Uber put its North American autonomous driving trials on hold following the death of a woman in Arizona.

 

Woman dies in Arizona after being hit by autonomous Uber

The accident in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe marked the first fatality from a self-driving vehicle, which are being tested around the globe, and could derail efforts to fast-track the introduction of the new technology.

 

The vehicle was in autonomous mode with an operator behind the wheel at the time of the accident

 

a female walking outside of the crosswalk crossed the road from west to east when she was struck by the Uber vehicle,” police said in a statement.

The woman later died from her injuries in a hospital,

 

 

Toll deploys driverless forklifts to shift pallets

Toll has deployed a fleet of 10 driverless forklifts at its new “next generation” e-commerce fulfilment centre in Prestons Sydney NSW

 

Toll has fitted the 33,830sqm facility out with 15,600sqm of automation equipment able to pick process and pack 375,000 items a day.

 

Six are larger, double-tyre vehicles capable of shifting two pallets at a time, while the remaining four can move single pallets at a time.

The driverless forklifts – built by Dematic – are used to move pallets from the manual areas of the warehouse to the automated areas. Facility workers have given each vehicle a superhero moniker.

Safety sensors on the vehicle exterior detect when a person enters the forklift’s operating area and alerts the vehicle to come to a complete stop.

 

 

 

Google adds top Aussie sports info to Google Search, Assistant and Home

If you’re a fan of AFL, NRL or Australian rugby, you can now check live scores, match results, upcoming fixtures, and ladders for your favourite footy codes, just by asking Google in just about any way you want.

 

Google A/NZ’s marketing director, Aisling Finch concludes by stating: “Your Assistant is always learning, so it will understand your preferred team nicknames and the sports you care about over time.

“You can also ask your Assistant to tell you an AFL joke, or make season predictions by asking ‘Ok Google, who’s going to win the flag?’ And after the siren sounds on full time, say ‘Talk like a footballer’ to get a classic post-match commentary full of the footy cliches we all know and secretly love.

“Whether you are celebrating a win or lamenting a loss, we hope these updates offer some useful and fun ways help you keep up to date and get your game on!”

You can also use Google Search and Google Assistant on iOS, Android devices and on Google Home to tell you about ICC and IPL Cricket, Soccer (including A-League for Australia), ATP and WTA tennis tournaments, PGA, LPGA, European Tour, PGA Tour Champions and Web.com tour Golf matches, as well as US sports like NBA, NFL and others.  

 

Telstra and Samsung go gangbusters with 1.03Gbps S9/9+ speeds in ‘Aussie first’

Claimed as an Australian first, Telstra says it has “recorded smartphone speeds in excess of 1 gigabit per second on a commercial network using the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+”.

 

Kevin Teoh, Telstra’s head of Mobiles, said: “This is the first time in Australia that speeds in excess of 1Gbps have been demonstrated on a commercial network with a commercial smartphone.

“While customers using these phones on Telstra’s 4GX service will typically see download speeds in the range of 5-300Mbps – tests like these show that, from time to time, Galaxy S9 and S9+ owners may see significantly higher speeds in Telstra’s gigabit-enabled coverage areas.

*****doesnt mean much when alot of australia adsl speeds and mobile speeds less than 50

 

Cairns to introduce mind-boggling three-dimensional pedestrian crossing

 

Enormous blocks, seemingly floating above the road surface, look ready to do some serious damage to your car.

 

Cairns looks set to create Australia’s first “floating” pedestrian zebra crossing in a bid to slow down the speed of perplexed motorists.

On Wednesday, Cairns Regional Council signed off on $30,000 of taxpayers’ money to paint a “three-dimensional” zebra crossing outside a hotel and shopping complex in the CBD of the north Queensland tourist hub, reported the Cairns Post.

The concept is said to have originated in India’s capital of New Delhi, with the idea then spreading to parts of Europe including Iceland.

 

JASON

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https://ausdroid.net/2018/03/21/google-introduce-new-way-subscribe-websites-subscribe-google/

Sometimes it is onerous to subscribe to websites for premium content, having to enter and re-enter your passwords, user names and credit card numbers each time, and then you need to sign in on each device you own. Today Google have introduced a way to streamline this subscription process with the introduction of Subscribe with Google.

 

With Subscribe with Google you will no longer have to make up user names, passwords, nor enter credit card details into the website. All you need to do is subscribe and choose the Subscribe with Google option. The subscription can be charged to any credit card that you have used with Google in the past.

 

The billing process is handled by Google and when you want to access that content you just use “Sign in with Google” option and your subscription and preferences are there for you to use.

The idea behind Subscribe with Google is to make it easier for you to access premium content and to remove the paywall impedance from publishers that can limit subscription numbers. Not only does it make it easier but it also improves your Google searches with your subscribed sources showing up in their own module on the Google Search results page.

https://itwire.com/security/82151-facebook-security-chief-stamos-quits-over-fake-news.html

Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos has quit and will leave the company in August — the second time he has left a high-profile company after a short stint — over alleged Russian troll activity on the social media giant’s site.

 

The New York Times  said Stamos had resigned over differences with senior management over how to handle these issues.

In recent days, Facebook has had to battle claims that data breaches led to information about 50 million of its users being siphoned off by Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that worked on Donald Trump’s election campaign.

 

The company has contested this, saying that the data exfiltration was due to a feature in an app.

 

In 2015, Stamos quit his post at Yahoo! after a little less than a year. The search company, which was bought by Verizon last year, had suffered three major data leaks which it disclosed in 2016 and 2017.

https://www.thewrap.com/delete-facebook-twitter-cambridge-analytica/

People are jumping on Twitter to announce their breakup with Facebook.

 

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook is trending on Monday after the New York Times reported this weekend that the data of 50 million users had been unknowingly leaked and purchased to aid President Trump’s successful 2016 bid for the presidency.

 

Twitter was littered with users sharing the hashtag

Facebook is under fire after data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica received $15 million from Republican donor Robert Mercer ahead of the 2014 midterm elections to pay Cambridge Professor Aleksandr Kogan for data on millions of users. Kogan had paid about 270,000 people to fill out a survey built on Facebook’s developer tools — allowing him to pull information on “liked” pages, as well as look at the “friends” of users that opted into his app. The data was leveraged by Cambridge Analytica to target voters with specific personality profiles.

 

Pulling that information was kosher, but selling it to a third-party, like Cambridge Analytica, violated Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook has since tightened its agreement, barring app developers from looking at friends’ profiles. Facebook said on Saturday that “Kogan lied to us” by passing data collected from his app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said that when it learned of the violation in 2015, it removed Kogan’s app.

 

https://ausdroid.net/2018/03/17/wear-os-google-brings-official-support-google-pay-wrist-supported-devices/

The change of name from Android Wear to Wear OS this week has brought another welcome addition: Official support for watches.

 

While Android Pay (Google Pay) was able to be used on watches with NFC such as the Huawei Watch 2, users always had to manually enable the Android Pay app through Google Pay. It seems it was unoficially official if you catch our drift. From now though it appears it’s officially official, with the Wear OS by Google social media accounts announcing the support for Google Pay on your wrist (if it has NFC) is is now available in Canada, Spain and of course Australia.

 

If you don’t have Google Pay installed, you can now install it and it won’t disable after some uses.