Hey everyone,
We have decided to jump in early and give a quick Technology News Update.
NBN
Start-up “MyRepublic” has been dubbed a Telstra-killer, and now the Singaporean company, set to shake up Australian broadband, has taken well deserved shots at the NBN.
MyRepublic is due to launch its broadband service next year providing super-fast broadband at a cheaper price than existing local providers.
In an interview with Fairfax media, co-founder Malcolm Rodrigues said the NBN service, for lack of a better word, is “shit” (sorry about the language), and predicting it would cause Australia to fall behind.
Nine thousand staff are currently working to roll out what will be one of the largest infrastructure projects in Australia, with a goal of servicing every home and business in Australia by 2020.
I don’t know what [the government] is doing on the other policy fronts but on this they’ve completely stuffed it.
Mr Rodrigues said.
More and more Australians will leave the country looking for jobs and you’ll continue to be a resource based economy — the hope of building IT jobs and a digital economy will kind of be more difficult to achieve.
Mr Rodrigues criticised the use of fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technology, which the Coalition government ordered after taking over the project from the Labor party when they led as the Government.
He said MyRepublic would deliver speeds 100 megabits per second, and criticised the slower speeds offered by the NBN.
On FTTN we’ll market 100Mbps and when people come over we’ll say “sorry, thank your government [because] you’re on a shit (sorry again) network and the most you can get is 20-30Mbps, but we will continue to lobby your government to turn it into a fibre-to-the-home one and as soon as you get there we’ll get you a free upgrade to fibre”.
The NBN has said its trials have so far delivered positive results and says speeds from trials have been “extremely encouraging”.
The Liberal party have already snapped back saying the criticism from MyRepublic was unfair and inaccurate, defending their decision to use FTTN.
Our early experience is very positive and speeds will be very strong speeds. This company is coming from Singapore which is a very small market, smaller than Sydney. We’re doing a far, far bigger network here and we’ve got to explore different avenues to deliver better broadband to far more people.
Tony Brown said, who is the project’s public affairs manager.
Mr Brown said predictions that the NBN would deliver speeds of 20-30Mbps at most we’re “absolutely inaccurate”, and he said there was “very, very little demand” for such high speeds.
The trial speed we’re getting are way higher than that, most subscribers are getting 100Mbps and even those further out are getting well above 50. The idea is not accurate.
Let us point out a few things here, despite the fact we don’t like being all political,
The Digital Age is getting stronger and stronger to the point where many will have no choice but to be enveloped by it. Australia does not have unlimited resources of which is already been reflected by the decline in the resource sector that unfortunately cannot be blamed on things like “The Carbon Tax” alone.
The past is over and done with. When we had dial-up and used Floppy Disks to save content, anybody remember that? Many, including Governments, IT Experts, Economy Experts, whatever had said to everyone 30 years ago or so, “These technologies would be enough for 30-50 years or more”. Think about that for a second as you are looking at your computer screen attached to a computer running Broadband and using a Hard Drive, Flash Drive, Solid State Drive, Cloud Storage or whatever.
Internet is apart of our lives, it enriches your experiences around you, including entertainment, education, business convenience, government applications, designing and innovating older technologies and much more. 100Mbps or the NBN alone keeps getting dubbed as “Good for Porn and Gamers only”, criticizing the needs of the average Australians “unrealistic”. Yet the big part of Australian society is those who grew up not using advanced technology and feel that they are just fine having the old ways continue into the future, therefore the younger generation can put up with it also.
The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix” saying cannot be applied to societies thinking or we would not be where we are today. Those thinking internet is a waste of time have to realize that countries cannot live in the short term and if the short term solution doesn’t fix/causes long term problems, we will deal with it when it comes around, despite not possibly being around to fix it.
We all must face the music that Information & Communications Technology needs to accommodate needs starting now, for the future, even if the future speeds are around now. Remember, technology is here to stay… Unless something makes us go back to the Stone Age, in which case, “we will deal with it when it comes around, despite not possibly being around to fix it” 😉
Actually, the title of this segment should really be Alphabet.
Google announced a corporate restructuring, forming an umbrella company called Alphabet and naming a new CEO to the core business of Google.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will run Alphabet (Larry as CEO and Sergey as president).
On the new site, Larry highlights a few things about the ideas of Google that you could say led to this new Company, under “G is for Google”.
Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.
We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.
We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.
They also said that Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google.
Sundar has worked at Google since 2004, most recently as product chief. he did very well when giving the keynote at Google’s annual developers conference earlier this year.
Alphabet will operate as the parent company for a number of smaller companies, including Google. Other departments spinning off into their own sub-companies include Life Sciences, the Google X lab, Wing (drones), and Google Ventures and Google Capital.
We are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products — the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.
Alphabet will continue to trade under the GOOGL and GOOG ticker symbols when the change kicks in later this year.
Oh, by the way, when going to the Alphabet website, if you are a fan of the hit comedy show “Silicon Valley” (Don’t know the show? WATCH IT!), as you read a certain sentence, you will be able to find a Easter Egg link. Larry decided to bring some humour to the URL name being “abc.xyz” in connection to Hooli’s XYZ division in the show.
Our Clue is:
Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort >’.‘< We are also stoked…
Mozilla Firefox
Those of you running Firefox as your web browser should update it ASAP.
Yet another reason to install an ad-blocker on your web browser.
Mozilla Firefox users are this week being urged to update to the latest version after an exploit was found being used, which allowed files from users computers via an ad, without leaving a trace behind of the hack, be taken in an instant.
In a blog post that Mozilla made, said the ad, found on a Russian news website, was “serving up a Firefox exploit” which allowed code to be run on a user’s computer to search files, which were then uploaded to a server in Ukraine.
The exploit affects Windows and Linux users; Mac users weren’t specifically targeted this time around, but the company warned Mac users “would not be immune” should a hacker decide to target them using the same vulnerability.
And the worst part is, if you’re targeted you’ll have no way of knowing, because the exploit leaves no trace it has been run on your computer.
If you use ad-blocking software, however, you “may have been protected” from the malicious exploit depending on the type of software you use and the level of filtering, Mozilla has advised.
The vulnerability relates to Firefox’s PDF viewer, so products without a PDF viewer, such as Firefox for Android mobile devices, were not at risk.
Mozilla is urging anyone using Firefox on Windows or Linux to install the latest Firefox version 39.0.3 for personal users and Firefox ESR 38.1.1 for enterprise — which include a patch for the vulnerability.
Mozilla has also advised users to change passwords and keys for files potentially affected by the exploit, which seemed to be crafted to steal files on computers used by software and website developers.
Windows 10 is a good example for strongly pushing automated updates as it usually takes a long time for someone to bother updating, leaving them vulnerable for long periods of time.
That’s all for now guys. If any other big updates occur, we shall post them, otherwise we shall see you on Technology News August 2015.
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