This might be paywalled, but Crikey got back a few FOIs and discovered that the Australian Federal Police were (and possibly still are) using Auror - a facial recognition based "retail crime intelligence and loss prevention platform" that Bunnings and Woolworths are using in their stores to identify shoppers. Over 100 AFP staff used Auror and one AFP employee said in the FOI'd emails that Auror is "a great intel gathering system for me. I've found some incidents are placed on Auror but not reported to police". The only problem is, the AFP never did a security review of Auror and never had a formal agreement with Auror over its use.
LG is looking to squeeze more money out of its customers by turning its TV business into a "media and entertainment service provider" business. It'll expand its "content, services and advertisements" across its webOS platform that runs on over 200 million TVs around the world. LG plans to expand webOS to non-LG TVs and even "non-TV hardware" over the next five years. LG will also subscriptions to some of its more modern appliances in the ThinQ UP range (fridges, ovens, dishwashers, etc), that'll unlock features via the ThinQ app. Very much like what BMW and Tesla does with their cars. Nobody likes this. Please stop.
A drone light show before the Matilda's friendly match against France at Marvel Stadium on Saturday night went wrong, with 350 out of 500 drones dropping into the Yarra river mid-show. The drones are owned by Australian Traffic Network (what are they doing operating drone light shows??) and apparently "did exactly what they should've done with any technical glitch and they auto-rotated and landed" but did so over water, plunging to their death. Now there's a team of divers trying to find them all, as 350 lithium batteries are probably a bad idea to leave at the bottom of a river for eternity.
LiFi has its own IEEE standard now - 802.11bb and a company called PureLiFi is flogging a little module that allows devices to send and receive an optical signal at speeds at up to a gigabit between 20-300cm. Being light based, you need line of sight with no obstructions. Not sure what I'd use it for, but this article on Arstechnica quotes LiFi's lead developer saying it's good for "classrooms, medical, and industrial scenarios" and "ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter" than radios, particularly in congested areas. Cool, good luck to LiFi, will be interesting to see what people do with 802.11bb in various gadgets.
Alan Bond (yeah that Alan Bond) worked with Softime Australia and state Departments of Education to distribute this educational software package, "Cook's Endeavour", to schools across the country in 1989 (Jongleur / Internet Archive)
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