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Treasurer Joe Hockey has confirmed a so-called "netflix tax" on digital downloads. The second measure, Mr Hockey said, was designed to level the playing field on the GST by extending the consumption tax to digital products and would deliver an anticipated $350 million in additional revenue, which will flow through to the states. Some of the digital purchases that could be affected by the changes include room rental service Airbnb, car-sharing service Uber, movie download service Netflix, and some Google products. Some digital download services available in Australia, such as Apple's iTunes and Google's Play store, already pay GST. More info here.
There's also a new interactive cyber safety program to keep kids safer online. Online Safety, It Starts With You! is a free course for primary schools to help teach students from Year 1 to 6 how to be safe online. Developed using cyber safety resources from the Australian Federal Police and leading insights from ICT education experts and Disney, the program will help teachers introduce cyber safety into Australian schools. Online Safety, It Starts with You! is available to download for free from iTunes U here.
The New Yorker have an interesting article about the birth of MP3 sharing and the early warez scene back in the 1990s. In 1996, a Scene member with the screen name NetFraCk started a new crew, the world’s first MP3 piracy group: Compress ’Da Audio, or CDA, which used the newly available MP3 standard, a format that could shrink music files by more than ninety per cent. On August 10, 1996, CDA released to IRC the Scene’s first “officially” pirated MP3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica. Within weeks, there were numerous rival crews and thousands of pirated songs.
Microsoft have confirmed there will be no Windows 11. Microsoft says that Windows 10 will be its final release of the iconic operating system that's installed on over 90% of computers. "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10," said Jerry Nixon, Microsoft's developer evangelist, at the Ignite tech conference. Instead of releasing an entirely new and different version of its desktop OS every few years, Microsoft is taking an Apple-like approach to subsequent Windows releases, standardizing on Windows 10 as its Cupertino-based rival has done with OS X. Under this new strategy, Microsoft will deliver regular improvements to Windows through software updates.
An antivirus developer has been caught cheating. Chinese anti-virus developer Tencent will lose its certifications after it was found to have submitted products with optimisations designed to improve their ratings in independent third-party testing. Tencent is the second Chinese security vendor to be caught cheating recently. Last week, rival anti-virus developer Qihoo 360 was stripped of its awards after it was found to have submitted products for testing with its default detection engine disabled, instead using BitDefender for improved results.
Here's a video from LinusTechTips showing an 18 core Xeon. Intel Xeon 2699 v3, the 18 core MONSTER - we got two for our new rendering machine, but how does one perform on a normal X99 motherboard?
AMD meanwhile revealed roadmap info including CPUs based on its new Zen core. AMD this afternoon kicked off is first Financial Analyst Day in three years. During the hiatus, AMD has had a change of leadership (former CEO Rory Reed parted ways and was replaced by Dr. Lisa Su) and the company has seen its market share erode in the processor and GPU markets — the downturn in the PC market has been especially tough for AMD. Details on HotHardware and Tech Report.
NASA are paying up to USD $5000 for the best ideas about how to survive on Mars, thanks aftahours. If you’re interested, your idea for a surface system should be “technically achievable, economically sustainable, and minimize reliance on support from Earth”. NASA’s aiming for humans to step onto the surface of Mars some time in the 2030s. It officially launched its “Next Giant Leap” programme in December last year, taking the wraps off the next-generation Orion spacecraft and announcing that the Space Launch System (SLS) launching it will be the largest rocket ever built.
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