56416573
submission
littlekorea writes:
Australia's weather bureau has racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system, based on Red Hat Linux, MySQL and Java, that was originally scheduled to cost somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. The Bureau's supplier, an ASX-listed IT services provider SMS Management and Technology, did a good job of embedding itself in the bureau, with all changes having to be made by the original consultant that built it. Smells fishy?
55740369
submission
littlekorea writes:
Data analysts in the US and Australia have come up with alternative means to predict the world's largest music vote, Triple J's Hottest 100. The Warmest 100 was close to spot on last year after analysts mined data from social posts auto-generated during the voting process. This year, with that avenue shut off, they relied on data extracted using the Instagram API , among others, and hope to achieve similar results.
54818423
submission
littlekorea writes:
A series of servers produced by Dell, air-gapped Windows XP PCs and switches and routers produced by Cisco, Huawei and Juniper count among the huge list of computing devices compromised by the NSA, according to crypto-expert and digital freedom fighter Jacob Applebaum. Revealing a trove of new NSA documents at his 30c3 address, Applebaum spoke about why the NSA's program might lead to broader adoption of open source tools and gave a hot tip on how to know if your machines have been owned.
51058027
submission
littlekorea writes:
The world's largest web-scale users of MySQL have committed to one further upgrade to the Oracle-controlled database — but Facebook and Twitter are also eyeing off more open options from MariaDB and cheaper options from the NoSQL community. Who will pay for MySQL enterprise licenses into the future?
44908749
submission
littlekorea writes:
Mining companies are developing new systems for automating blasting of iron ore using the same open source physics engines adapted for games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. The same engine that determines 3D collision detection and soft body/rigid body dynamics in gaming will be applied to building 3D blast movement models — which will predict where blasted materials will land and distinguish between ore and waste.
42609255
submission
littlekorea writes:
A data analyst has successfully predicted the top ten songs of the world's biggest song contest — the Triple J Hottest 100 — by extrapolating voting intentions fans had posted on Twitter and Facebook. Nick Drewe's Warmest 100 list closely mimicked the Hottest 100 results, predicting the top three in correct order and predicting 92 of the most popular 100 songs.
39763317
submission
littlekorea writes:
Australia's telcos have declared that SMS technology should not be used by banks to verify identities for online banking transactions, in a bid to wash their hands of culpability for phone porting hacks. But three of Australia's largest four banks insist they will continue to use SMS messages to carry authentication codes for transactions.
39747441
submission
littlekorea writes:
The Australian Government has officially abandoned plans to legislate a mandatory internet filter. The news ends a four-year campaign by the ruling party to implement legislation that would have compelled ISPs to block a list of URLs dictated by Australia's telecommunications regulator, the ACMA. ISPs have instead been told to block a list of known child pornography sites maintained by INTERPOL.
37631301
submission
littlekorea writes:
A new study has urged CIOs to consider open source over proprietary software or public cloud services when replacing legacy gear. But the study's author warns that open source won't be a cure-all for some companies.
28734203
submission
27795212
submission
littlekorea writes:
Web surfers in Europe might soon be asked to 'flag' for law enforcement follow-up any web content they suspect incites terrorism, under an plan a group of EU governments has put to the internet industry. The plan asks for ISPs, search engines, web hosts and everyday users to play a larger role in identifying suspect content. Google already has a similar feature on YouTube — will we see it in the browser?
27247174
submission
littlekorea writes:
Australia's telecommunications regulator has ruled that one of the country's largest broadcasters, Channel 7, did not breach the industry code of conduct by lifting photos of deceased persons and minors from social networking site Facebook. Significantly, the regulator noted that it doesn't have the legal authority to crack down on broadcasters that lift material tagged as 'private', looking to the Attorney General to provide some legal clarity.
25663538
submission
littlekorea writes:
The growth in peer-to-peer file sharing surged in response to efforts by the content industry to litigate over the past decade, according to a new study by a researcher at Melbourne's Monash University. Dr Rebecca Giblin explains why 'physical world' assumptions don't apply to the online world.
23462472
submission
littlekorea writes:
Cables leaked by Wikileaks have revealed that the US Government actively pressured the EU Competition Commissioner to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The cable reveals that the US went to great lengths to discover how the competition commissioner felt about the 'pro-competitive' nature of open source software and whether this would represent a threat to the US$7.4 billion deal.
22109442
submission
littlekorea writes:
The online music services of Apple and Google are likely to be challenged by a Sydney-based company that has been granted three new patents around file hashing and deduplication. The patents are being managed by Kevin Bermeister, of Altnet/Kazaa fame, who believes that the technology behind P2P music services has been commercialised by the music industry without licence.
