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OCAU News |
Tuesday Morning
(5 Comments)
(link) Tuesday, 10-February-2015 00:41:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The data retention laws loom ever closer, with some of the pressure seeming to come from copyright holders. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has written to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten urging Labor to expedite through parliament new powers which force telecommunications companies to store metadata for two years. The laws, which have yet to be debated in the lower house, are designed to give ASIO more scope to identify terrorism but are opposed by civil libertarians and privacy campaigners.
If you've got a Chromecast (as reviewed by Sciby here), there's some free Google Play credit for you. Actually, I checked the offers page and there were 4 waiting for my one, so it's worth checking. Google is sending out the generous freebie to encourage folks to rent a movie (or maybe two) for Valentine's Day next week.
Radio Shack has long been absent from Australian shores, but it seems it's not doing too well in the USA, either. Long-running electronics company RadioShack, which filed for bankruptcy last week, will see the closure of 1,784 stores across North America by March 31, the company confirmed in court documents. Bizarrely, one rumour is that Amazon might buy some stores from them.
Microsoft have trademarked "Windows 365", which has people speculating. Last spring, the idea of 'Windows 365' popped up several times and the logic behind it was that Microsoft would soon offer a subscription based Windows service. Much like Office 365, the rumors hedged that Microsoft would charge an annual fee for the OS instead of a typical one-time fee that is generally quite expensive. But, seeing that Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will be free, for anyone upgrading from Windows 7 or 8, 'Windows 365' did not materialize in the way that many had speculated.
Here's an oddball one: the Raspberry Pi can be crashed by a camera flash. What’s going on here is pretty weird. Any cameras with a Xenon flash trigger a reaction in a chip on the Raspberry Pi. One of the chips on the exposed computer’s circuit board seems to be sensitive to light and poorly shielded, so when the camera’s flash triggers, it causes the entire device to crash.
Apple's smart watch is on the way (and various other products exist already), which has prompted some UK universities to ban watches during exams. Smart watches can be used to send and receive text messages, access the internet, make notes and perform calculations which otherwise might not be permitted in examination halls. Indeed, it will be almost impossible for test proctors to confirm whether a student is just checking the time or using his wearable to provide an unfair advantage over other students.
Here's an interesting article about Arthur C. Clarke's predictions for 2014. This week, AT&T released another Clarke video from its archives that was recorded at a conference in 1976. In a brief interview, Clarke expands on his vision of the time we're living in now, with a focus on communication. He nails almost everything, from the Internet and email to smartphones, Google and even smartwatches.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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