As transaction volumes increase the systems that supported early growth start to create drag rather than remove it. By the time the problem is visible, it is usually diagnosed as being rather extensive to resolve.

Matthew Nott has managed finance teams through these exact growth phases. He worked on the expansion of tea retailer T2 and the global scaling of skin, hair and body care brand Aesop, to the point at which it was acquired by L’Oreal in 2023 in a deal valued at US$2.53 billion.

Now, as chief financial officer at premium cycling brand MAAP, he oversees the financial operations of a company expanding across eight countries on the same platform.

There’s nothing quite like growth to expose operational gaps…

MAAP was founded in Melbourne in 2014 and now operates via eCommerce, wholesale, and a growing physical retail network. When Nott joined, the technology stack was divided. A financial platform operated in isolation from the inventory tool, and reconciling sales across channels was a manual, convoluted process.

Speaking during a panel session at SuiteConnect 2026, Oracle NetSuite’s annual customer conference, Nott described the moment high-growth businesses outrun their systems. For leaders navigating that transition, his view on what the technology needs to do was clear.

“[For any other businesses in a similar high-growth] stage, where you’re scaling up, you really want to think about ensuring that your technology is going to enable your growth and not hold it back,” he says.

“Often the times where a business has been growing for a period of time, and there’s a moment where the scale and the high growth starts to arise, you’ll quickly outgrow systems. You really need to be thinking about a tool. In our case [that involves] multi-entity, multi-currency, real-time data and reporting, consolidation, intercompany.”

MAAP’s Netsuite implementation, delivered in partnership with Annexa, brought all the company’s transactional data into a single system; financials, inventory, costing, and sales across every channel and subsidiary. Live feeds from e-commerce and point-of-sale now consolidate in real time across all eight operating countries.

“Those things from a Netsuite context are just a given, built in from the ground up, so that doesn’t become part of your decision making when you’re scaling, it’s an enabler for scaling,” Nott says.

The AI mandate

At the same event, NetSuite outlined its next-generation product direction, NetSuite Next. AI capabilities are being introduced continuously across the platform, with NetSuite Next bringing these advancements into a more unified, embedded experience within the ERP core. The solution is expected to be available within the next 12 months.

The release will introduce Ask Oracle, a contextual natural language assistant, alongside autonomous close capabilities designed to reduce month-end friction. AI agents will monitor financials throughout the period, flag anomalies, and handle reconciliations automatically. The goal is a zero-day close managed through AI operating in the background.

Nott expects to consume AI capabilities directly through core vendors rather than building separate models. He favours this integrated approach.

“We’re very much at the start of experimenting with AI … we’re really expecting to rely on our vendors and NetSuite as our core system to deliver a lot of these tools for us to then better use, as opposed to the potential for trying to stitch together your own agentic AI models and having a gigantic technology team to support that,” he says.

“We want to really keep the relationship with our customers pretty human. But even in that space, we think product visualisation and those things are incredibly useful in terms of speed to market.”

The announcement is welcome news for Australian-based ERP and NetSuite systems integrator Annexa, which had worked closely with MAAP on its integration.

“Customers have been coming to us for advice on how they can apply AI capabilities, particularly as they’re emerging across NetSuite and the wider technology ecosystem,” Annexa director Matthew Owens said during a separate webinar.

“There’s a huge amount of opportunity there, and a big part of our work now is helping teams identify where AI can genuinely improve business processes and how to introduce it safely into operational systems.”

Doing more with the same resources

Finance leaders are asking a consistent question across the industry. The focus has shifted from managing immediate scale to driving long-term efficiency without proportionally expanding headcount.

MAAP is continuing to grow, and Nott’s confidence in the current technology stack to support that expansion is high, and his attention has shifted to the question that sits behind it, how to extract more output from the same team as the business scales.

“We’re continuing to focus on growth, and we’re still in a high-growth phase. We’re wanting to open more stores in more countries and regions,” he says.

“The pleasing thing to me is that to do that within our current tech stack environment, the technology is in no way holding us back.

“The theme that I hear from a lot of other CFOs is, how are we going to do more with less? We’re not necessarily wanting to reduce our resources overall, but we just want them to be able to do more and allow them to grow and achieve more.

“These tools that are coming to market are constantly blowing me away with what they can do, so there’s a real preparation to take advantage of them.”

Getting the foundations right

The efficiency gains Nott described on the panel at SuiteConnect depend heavily on what happens before and after go-live. During a separate webinar discussing international growth strategy for retail brands, he was candid about where the complexity concentrates.

“The integration is the devil in the detail. The integration is the hardest part of the entire thing. That’s the area, one hundred percent, to be aware of and focus on,” Nott says.

Nott had worked with Matthew Owens, director of Annexa, in a previous role and brought him in when it came time to scope a solution for MAAP.

Managing multiple third-party logistics providers across different markets has been one of the more demanding elements of the build, with MAAP changing 3PL providers more than once since go-live, each move requiring new technical connections.

Annexa’s Owens understands what retailers need from a systems integrator at this stage of growth, noting that the conversation should start with commercial understanding rather than software features.

“It’s not so much about buying a bit of software and understanding the features of a module. It’s about, can the partner or the system integrators that I’m speaking with understand holistically how to run an online retail business? And how are you going to enable us to actually facilitate growth, expansion, integrations and do it in a way that’s going to be quick to market and sustainable to support?” he says.

“Getting the core system live is the big project, the big change. But equally important is how you sustain it. Do you have the right partnerships and people available when you need them? This is important not just for keeping the lights on but also for the bigger ticket innovation initiatives that retailers can take on” he says.

Annexa has supported a number of Australian retail and consumer brands through similar transitions.

For example, Aussie skincare brand Ultra Violette re-platformed its operations across five global markets in six months, moving from fragmented systems to a single integrated ERP built for scale.

Meanwhile, Davie Group, best known for The Oodie, overhauled its global fulfilment model, shifting from a 4PL structure to direct 3PL integrations embedded in NetSuite, unlocking real-time visibility and reducing fulfilment delays to under 24 hours.

Furthermore, Global biotech company Life Cykel’s move to NetSuite gave the business the operational visibility and control needed to enter the competitive US retail market, a step that fragmented legacy systems would have made significantly harder to execute with confidence.

For growing retail brands, the technology decisions made during periods of high growth tend to compound, in both directions. The right foundations enable speed, visibility, and efficiency at scale. The wrong ones cause operational drag that is expensive to diagnose and harder to unwind.

As embedded AI shifts from emerging capability to standard infrastructure, the businesses best placed to take advantage will be those that already have their data, systems, and integrations in order.

Annexa’s Owens says this positioning will really drive how effective AI can be from an embedded operation perspective.

“A big part of what’s changing right now in AI is how it’s starting to show up inside the systems that finance teams rely on every day,” he says. “That’s where it becomes more relevant, because it’s no longer sitting outside the business as a separate tool, it’s starting to influence the workflows and decisions happening inside core systems.”

At a glance

Industry: Retail and eCommerce

Business objectives

• Support rapid international growth across multiple markets.
• Remove manual finance and inventory reconciliation.
• Ensure systems enable scaling rather than constraining it.

Solution

• NetSuite was implemented as a single ERP platform bringing financials, inventory, costing and sales data into one system across every channel and subsidiary.
• Multi-entity, multi-currency capability and live feeds from eCommerce and point-of-sale enabling real-time consolidation across eight operating countries.
• Scalable platform design to support ongoing growth.

Business benefits

• Real-time visibility across eight operating countries.
• Reduced manual processes and reconciliation effort.
• Scalable platform supporting continued growth without increasing headcount.
• Stronger foundations for future AI-driven capabilities within core systems.

Contact details
Annexa
W: annexa.com.au / annexa.co.nz

The post Cyclical success underpins global growth appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap April 2026

28.04 Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth says her department is currently undertaking gap analysis to identify how current frameworks and institutions are interacting with the adoption of AI. Speaking at the AFR Workforce Summit, Rishworth noted the tripartite AI Employment and Workplaces Forum, which meets for the first time this week, bringing together government, employers and unions to ‘build a common understanding’ and translate themes of trust, capability, transparency, safety and productivity into actions and outcomes in workplaces.

27.04 NAB is building an AI science team to guide how AI tools are deployed across the business and the workforce’s transition. TheAussieCorporate says the team will shape which tasks are automated and which new roles are created to support them. The work includes designing systems to safely handle customer data, helping make staff decisions and streamlining back office processes.

23.04 The Australian government has signed a MoU with Microsoft which is promising to continue investment in local AI capability and cloud computing and align with the governments Expectations for Data Centres and AI Infrastructure Developers. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources says the MoU – the second under the National AI Plan – also outlines Microsoft’s intention to collaborate with government on AI safety and workforce capability, support delivery of the APS AI plan and help the government understand future infrastructure needs.

22.04 The OAIC has found that InspectRealEstate’s rent-tech platform, 2Apply, collected excessive information and did so by unfair means. The OAIC says the platform has agreed to adapt its personal information collection practices on a without-admissions basis. The decision requires IRE to cease collecting personal information just as prospective renters’ gender, student status, citizen status and visa expiry and details of previous living history.

21.04 Identity verification company Persona has announced an integration with ConnectID, the Australian digital identity exchange created by Australian Payments Plus. BiometricUpdate says the integration keeps data private, providing age verification that relies on data a financial institution has already collected from a user.

22.04 The eSafety commissioner has given legally enforceable transparency notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Stream amid concerns online games are being used to spread violent propaganda and radicalise young people and by sexual predators to groom children. eSafety says the notices require the providers to explain how they are identifying, preventing and responding to these harms, along with bullying and online hate.

21.04 A NSW Treasury staff member has been charged after allegedly downloading more than 5,600 government documents containing ‘confidential commercial and financial information’. NSW Government says the information covers multiple departments and projects. Police believe all the data has been located and is now secure, with no external compromise to the Treasury’s system.

16.04 Apple has granted Australian law enforcement access to user notification data for the first time. InformationAge reports a transparency report shows four push token identifiers were sought across two of the requests, with one push token request granted.

16.04 South32 Aluminium is suing Siemens alleging missing code in a programmable logic controller led to a steam turbine generator overheating and being ‘effectively destroyed’, ITnews reports.

15.04 Travel giant Booking.com has notified an unknown number of customers about a data breach which has seen hackers steal customer data. BBC reports some customers have contacted it saying they have already started receiving suspicious messages. Booking.com has declined to say how many people are affected or in what regions.

09.04 Canva has acquired Australian AI tool Simtheory and Australian marketing automation company Ortto for undisclosed sums. Canva says the deals will take it from a design tool to an ‘end-to-end’ work system and strengthen its AI capabilities, 9news reports.

09.04 Bendigo and Adelaide Bank will cut its tech and business operations teams after signing two major tech deals with Infosys and Genpact outsourcing some tech and business management capability. The cuts will save the business at least $65 million yoy, by the 2028 financial year AFR reports. It adds hundreds of roles are likely to be affected.

03.04 Artemis II astronauts experienced Microsoft Outlook failures shortly after launch, with Mission Control called in to remotely troubleshoot the issue. Commander Reid Wiseman reported that two instances of Outlook were running simultaneously on his Surface Pro, leaving both unresponsive, Mashable reports.

02.04 The ATO has launched an in-app security feature enabling users to confirm, in real-time, that they are speaking with the real ATO not a fraudster. Almost 7,500 ATO impersonation scams were reported in July 2025 alone, with impersonation scams peaking during tax time, the ATO says.

01.04 SpaceX has filed confidentially for an IPO according to reports, which say the company is committed to debuting in June, with Elon Musk aiming to raise US$50b-$75b. The NYTimes reports SpaceX values itself at more than $1 trillion and would be one of the most valuable companies to reach the stock market.

01.04 Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs from its 162,000-strong workforce, with 10,000 believed to have lost their job so far. Senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers and technical specialists are among those affected, the BBC reports. Around 10,000 people are believed to have lost their jobs so far. It is unknown if the cuts are related to Oracle’s heavy AI spend.

01.04 The Federal government has signed a new MoU with Anthropic to build on the national AI plan launched in late 2025.

AppWrap March 2026

31.03 eSafety has flagged Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for compliance issues with the Australian Social Media Minimum Age obligation and is gathering evidence to inform potential enforcement action, it says.

26.03 Meta and Google have lost a landmark US case, with a Los Angeles jury finding the two companies negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people. Reuters reports the jury found Meta liable for damages of US$4.2 million, with Google liable for $1.8m in the case of a US woman who sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

25.03 Delaying public disclosure of serious cyberattacks on critical infrastructure operators ‘to prevent disclosure from compromising national security’ is one of five changes proposed in a Department of Home Affairs consultation paper for amended Security of Critical Infrastructure (Soci) rules. Other reforms in the paper include changes to make it easier for the government to restrict multiple entities from using high-risk vendors or technology and clarity around the threshold for issuing a direction.

25.03 Canva has acquired Melbourne-based digital out of home advertising company Doohly in a $30m deal which adds outdoor advertising to its offering. The deal is the design company’s third acquisition this year and comes just a month after it bought US startup Mango.AI and the UK’s Cavalry notes StartupDaily.

24.03 Silicon Quantum Computing has secured $20m from the National Reconstruction Fund to support scaling of its quantum processing units and Watermelon machine learning system, SmartCompany reports.

19.03 The X Money payments service, Elon Musk’s attempt to build a ‘everything app’ will enter early public access in April. Musk’s ambitions for the embedding payments into X are broader than most Western tech companies, notes PaymentsIndustryIntelligence, with Musk talking about a system that could eventually encompass savings, payments, securities and other financial activity, reducing reliance on traditional banking channels. At launch X Money is expected to offer core wallet and payment functions, including the ability to move funds within the platform.

18.03 An attempt by the CEO of US videogame publisher Unknown Worlds to wriggle out of paying a US$250m performance has suffered a setback after the court documents showed Changhan Kim asked ChatGPT how to avoid paying the bonus. InformationAge reports Kim engaged the chatbot to draft a corporate takeover strategy, which involved stymieing the release of the highly anticipated Subnautica 2. Following ‘guidance’ from ChatGPT he also posted public ‘critical messages’ on the company website.

17.03 Google has reportedly paused plans for a $20b AI and data centre hub, warning the federal government that high taxes could cause the country to miss out on investment. DatacentreDynamics reports the company has told government it is concerned that if it set up such a hub in Australia, the ATO would consider it a ‘permanent establishment’ exposing it to a 30 percent corporate tax rate. Google is currently exploring where to establish the major APAC hub.

16.03 AI disruption is causing Australian software companies to make big job cuts, with private tech companies expected to follow in the footsteps of Atlassian and WiseTech with redundancy rounds, valuation cuts and a bottleneck for public listings, AFR reports.

12.03 Atlassian is cutting around 1,600 jobs – or 10 percent of its workforce. The company says the move is to ‘self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales’, while strengthening its financial profile, Forbes reports. The retrenchment will cost between $225m-$236m.

11.03 Professional body CA ANZ says it will investigate the failure of an external exam delivery platform after more than 1,300 students were locked out of one exam and another 60 experienced delays of up to 40 minutes on a second exam. CA ANZ blamed a failure in an external exam platform operated by a third-party provider.

11.03 US medtech giant Stryker has been hit by a major cyberattack, with an Iran-linked hacking group claiming responsibility, saying it is in retaliation for the killing of more than 170 people – mainly schoolgirls – in a strike on a school, and warning it marks the beginning of a new chapter in cyber warfare, Al Jazeera reports. The group says it has seized 50TB of Stryker data in the attack which it says has erased data from 200,000 devices.

10.03 Anthropic is opening a Sydney office and hiring a local team. The company says Australia ranks fourth globally in Claude.ai usage, relative to population, with strong demand from local business. It says it plans to deepen engagement with Australian institutions and collaborate on projects that advance the country’s national interests and priority sectors. It is also exploring opportunities to expand compute capacity in Australia ‘given our longstanding belief that democracies should lead in AI development’. The company is currently suing the US government over its claims that Anthropic is a ‘supply chain risk’. The row erupted after Anthropic refused to all US military to have unfettered use to its AI tools.

05.03 Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind is warning Australian organisations that a recent ruling allowing Bunnings to use facial recognition is not a green light for the technology. Kind, who says she has not filed an appeal of the Administrative Review Tribunal finding, which overturned her ruling against the technology, says the decision shows the law allows for the balancing of competing interests – privacy vs public safety – but entities will need to conduct a detailed risk assessment specific to their circumstances before deploying the technology. “Retailers should view the decision as a useful case study, rather than a green light for deployment of biometric technologies,” she says.

AppWrap February 2026

27.02 Commonwealth Bank has called in the police and corporate regulator over concerns $1b in home loans were obtained fraudulently, including with AI-created documents. AFR reports the bank reported itself to police and the regulator after a review of the compliance practices and customer lending documents, which stepped up following revelations about the Penthouse Syndicate, which allegedly defrauded NAB of around $150m. Increasingly sophisticated AI has made it easier to create authentic looking false documents and to steal identities.

26.02 Nvidia has posted blockbuster quarterly results of US$68.1 billion – up 73 percent year on year and well above analysts’ forecasts. Revenue from the data centre division, which sells the chips used to train and run AI models was up 75 percent yoy to $62.3 billion, the company says.

25.02 Australian logistics software company WiseTech is cutting around 2,000 jobs – nearly a third of its global workforce in a restructure focused on using genAI to increase efficiency in software engineering and support, Reuters reports.

25.02 Australian Peter Williams has been jailed for seven years for selling critical software and information related to cybersecurity to a broker with ties to the Russian government. Williams was working in the US. 9News reports the tools were cyber-exploit components which can be used to identify weaknesses in tech systems or infect them with viruses.

24.02 The federal government has scrapped a permanent AI advisory board appointed to develop AI guardrails. ABCnews reports the body, funded in the 2024 Budget, was scrapped only months after spending $188,000 and more than a year whittling down a list of experts to a shortlist of 12 nominees. The government says it will instead establish an AI safety institute early this year.

25.02 Commonwealth Bank is spending $90 million to get staff ‘AI-ready’. The bank says the program will help employees ‘build skills, find new opportunities and get ahead of the changing nature of work’. AI learning has already been delivered to 30,000+ staff.

24.02 The ASD has publicly released its Azul open-source malware analysis tool to help safely handle and analyse malware. Azul is designed for large-scale malware analysis and is designed to be highly scalable and store tens of millions of samples, ASD says, adding it can turn common analysis steps into analysis plugins which can be used as part of an automated workflow and assist in identifying variants of a malware family more efficiently.

18.02 Xero is restructuring with 250 jobs on the line – including in Australia. The company is creating around 280 roles in Canada as part of the restructure, BusinessDesk reports [paywalled].

18.02 YouTube suffered an outage from around 11.50am AEDT, with a spokesperson for Google saying an issue with the recommendations system prevented videos appearing.

18.02 The federal opposition has unveiled a new-look shadow ministry under Angus Taylor, with Victorian senator Sarah Henderson appointed shadow communications and digital safety minister. ABCnews reports Casey MP Aaron Violi has been promoted to the outer shadow ministry with a broad portfolio including science, technology, cyber security and the digital economy. Deputy Liberal Leader Jane Hume will be shadow minister for employment and industrial relations as well as productivity and deregulation.

18.02 Australian company Terram Astra has set its sights on a US$10m seed capital raise for a new sovereign ground-based infrastructure platform designed to strengthen communications resilience, defence readiness and space safety across the region. Manufacturers’ Monthly reports Terram Astra’s first hub is located near Alice Springs.

17.02 Highly sensitive Australian court files have been accessed by a foreign entity based in India, an ABCnews investigation has revealed, with Greens senator David Shoebridge saying access to the cases by foreign entities is ‘a national security risk’. The investigation showed Canada’s VIQ Solutions, which employs transcribers in Australia, has also subcontracted work to an Indian company specialising in automated voice-to-text technology, in breach of the VIQ contract. Thousands of court files were accessed by e24 staff with Indian email addresses.

16.02 Federal government entities are failing to report cyber incidents to the Australian Signals Directorate. InformationAge reports just 35 percent of the 200 government entities said they reported at least half of all cybersecurity incidents observed on their networks.

11.02 Service NSW has started testing a new system enabling residents to verify who they are in a single step when interacting with state government services online. ITnews reports initially the digital ID system will be used with a limited number of services, starting with a state toll rebate scheme.

06.02 Australian-founded AI data centre startup Firmus Technologies has secured another $100m to expand its local data centres. The funding, from ASX-listed Maas Group means the company, which is Singapore-based, has raised more than $900m in less than five months, StartupDaily reports.

06.02 CommBank says it has become the first bank to disclose how it is ideating, developing, deploying and managing AI at an organisational level, including ‘practical examples’ of AI in action across the business. Those examples include AI to protect against fraud and scams, strengthen cyber security, enhance customer experience and detect abuse in transaction descriptions.

05.02 Atlassian’s revenue for the quarter to December 31 was up 23 percent to US$1.58 billion, with cloud revenue growing 26 percent providing the company with its first $1b cloud revenue quarter. However, net loss also grew from $38.2m to $42.6m. Operating loss was down from $57.5m to $47.7m the company says. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes dubbed the quarter ‘fantastic’, adding: “We’re building a bloody great business.”

03.02 The federal government has rejected a bipartisan proposal which would have allowed a parliamentary committee to cancel large consultancy contracts, saying its own reforms are doing the job. A centralised register for conflicts of interest breaches has also been ruled out.

03.02 Australia’s STEM capability is facing a ‘severe crisis’ as a result of flatlining Commonwealth funded research, Science and Technology Australia says. In a pre-budget submission it says Stem research must stop being viewed as a cost and instead be seen as an investment. It says 47 percent of Stem professionals are considering leaving their current roles, with 33 percent planning to leave the sector altogether.

03.02 Xero says more than two million subscribers are using its full AI features, with more than 300,000 using its newer GenAI features. In a market update today the company claimed customers are saving around 22 hours a month using bank feeds and automated actions, with more than 12 percent using AI Insights.

03.02 Kiwi AI startup Teacher’s Buddy has raised $2.3m in trans-Tasman seed funding. The offering aims to reduce teacher workloads, helping with marking and student report writing and producing customised, differentiated curriculum-aligned teaching and assessment materials  The company says the funding was led by Auckland’s Soul Capital and Australia’s Giant Leap.

02.02 Victoria has set its sights on being Australia’s AI capital with the launch of an AI Mission Statement setting out the Allan government’s plans across six key pillars of investment attraction and adoption, data centres and digital infrastructure, local innovation, products and services, talent and workforce, ethical AI use and public sector adoption. The plan includes a $8.1 million Digital Jobs – AI Career Conversion program to safeguard jobs in industries at risk from AI, upskilling workers to transition into AI roles and become specialists in the technology.

AppWrap January 2026

27.01 Airwallex boss Jack Zhang says the fintech is at least two years away from a public listing, despite regular references to an IPO in 2026. Zhang’s comments, reported in StartupDaily, follow news last week that Austrac has ordered an audit of the company over AML/CTF concerns.

26.01 The APS plans a whole-of-government learning technology ecosystem following a co-design involving teams from 37 Commonwealth agencies. ITnews reports a core goal of the new system is to enable interoperability and integration across learning and development environments.

23.01 TikTok has finalised agreements with backers including Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati company MGX to establish a US joint venture. Each of the three backers will hold a 15 percent stake in the company. ByteDance keeps a 19.9 percent share. The BBC reports the content recommendation algorithm has been licensed to Oracle – headed by Trump ally Larry Ellison – which already oversees US user data under a previous arrangement set up over security concerns. The deal will enable TikTok to continue operating in the US, but is likely to continue to be scrutinised, with some Democrats voicing concerns about the ties between Trump and TikTok’s new investor group could limit what gets shared on the platform.

22.01 Australia’s financial intelligence unit, Austrac has ordered an external auditor be appointed to assess whether fintech – and unicorn – Airwallex is complying with anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing. Austrac says it has ‘concerns’ about potential non-compliance including that Airwallex’s transaction monitoring program has not been ‘attuned to the full range of risks it faces’ and the company hasn’t demonstrated an acceptable understanding of who its customers are and what reporting may be required. The auditor must report findings within 180 days of appointment.

20.91 AI projects to improve construction safety, enhance space safety and detect speech delays, are among the 174 projects winning funding in the latest round of Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) Ignite program. More than $72.5m in funding was allocated. The funding is for projects that build capability I nationally important sectors aligned with the National Reconstruction Fund’s priority areas, AEA says.

20.01 Gilmour Space has become Australia’s first space tech unicorn after raising $217m in a Series E funding round – its largest funding round to date. SpaceNews reports the round was led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund and retirement savings fund Hostplus along with several other investors.

20.01 A bill cracking down on hate speech has passed the House of Representatives and Senate at a special sitting late on Tuesday, a month after 15 were killed at Bondi Beach. It includes provision to ban groups deemed to spread hate, the BBC reports. The hate speech reforms were originally part of an omnibus bill along with gun reforms, but the two were split last week. The gun reform bill, which includes a buyback scheme, was also passed.

16.01 Social media companies removed access to around 4.7 million accounts for those under 16 in the first half of December, eSafety says.

16.01 Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxi business has held discussions with Chinese car maker Geely, and other electric car makers, as it looks to enter the Sydney market. AFR reports. Waymo is stepping up its efforts in Australia, with the appointment of a lobbyist and a search for an office now underway. It has yet to lodge an application to begin testing in the city.

13.01 Advertising is hitting the AI chatbots with ads starting to show up in Google’s ‘AI Mode’ in what the Washington Post says is likely to be just the beginning of more trial-and-error attempts this year. Google has been pushing a new type of ad in AI Mode to advertisers, OpenAI has also been looking at introducing advertising in ChatGPT and Perplexity attempted ads but pulled back last year – but has left the doors open to try again.

08.01 The DTA has warned against outright bans of IT suppliers and services companies for unethical behaviour warning such bans could introduce significant operational risks and unintended consequences. ITnews reports parliament is considering an exclusion regime preventing those engaging in unethical conduct from bidding for government work, in the wake of the PwC scandal. The DTA, however, says blanket bans could block access to tech advances or skilled resources.

The post Appwrap 2026: NAB’s AI science team, Persona’s ConnectID integration and federal govt AI moves appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

“Fundamentally, machine identities are now an organisation’s most powerful user, and unfortunately, the least controlled,” Raymond Dickinson, SailPoint New Zealand country manager, tells iStart.

Meanwhile, attackers are increasingly targeting them because they provide silent, powerful access into enterprise systems, Dickinson says.

“If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it.”

“Without strong machine identity governance, organisations unknowingly leave their highest privilege access points unprotected,” he says.

Modern businesses rely heavily on automation, cloud services and DevOps pipelines, all of which generate machine identities at scale. Every new integration spins up more service accounts and keys, often with excessive privileges – and that includes in the OT environment, not just IT. And unlike human identities, in many organisations there is no on-boarding or off-boarding process, no lifecycle management and no visibility into who owns them, or even where they are.

“When there is a lack of ownership, no one really cares about the thing, and you end up not putting in the right governance processes. If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. With machine identities, which often have excessive privileges, that’s a real concern.”

Dickinson points to the SolarWinds Orion breach in 2020 and a 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server breach as key examples – among many – of breaches using machine identities.

In the case of the SolarWinds breach, which triggered a supply chain incident affecting thousands of organisations including government, defence and enterprise, attackers

infiltrated the SolarWinds software build environment. They then used machine identities to sign malicious code with SolarWinds’ legitimate code signing certificates, abuse automated build service accounts and push compromised software to 18,000+ organisations.

Similarly, the Microsoft Exchange Server breach exploited unmanaged service accounts and OAuth tokens to maintain insider access.

The incidents underscore a harsh reality for organisations: Machine identities are low hanging fruit for attackers. Once a breach occurs, reports suggest hackers actively hunt for these accounts because they know they are rarely monitored.

A business problem

Dickinson stresses that unmanaged machine identities are not just a technology problem, they’re a business risk, creating significant operational, financial, compliance and cybersecurity exposure. “Getting boardroom support on machine identity is always a challenge, but the conversation is about securing them as a business risk decision, not a technology decision.”

For boards and executives, the conversation needs to start and finish with risk: Protecting revenue, ensuring business continuity, meeting regulatory obligations, reducing operational costs and enabling safe AI adoption.

As organisations adopt AI and automation, the stakes rise even higher. Without strong machine identity governance, organisations risk undermining the very technologies designed to drive efficiency and innovation. (And a side note here: An AI agent, which performs multiple tasks rather than a single defined task, is different from a machine identity as defined in the market today.)

Good governance 101

So, what does good machine identity governance look like?

According to Dickinson, it’s very similar to human identity governance and the first step is gaining visibility.

“You have to have full visibility into all machine accounts and know exactly where they all are.”

A discovery scan can identify every machine across an organisation – service accounts, API keys, certificates, bots and workloads. Expect a shock. Dickinson says most organisations underestimate their machine identity volumes by five to 10x.

Assigning ownership and purpose for each identity follows.

Automating the lifecycle – from creation through modifying, rotating and retiring identities – is also needed, along with enforcing least privilege – just as you’d do with a human worker.

“It’s very common for these machine accounts to be given the holy grail of all access even though they don’t need that level of access, simply because giving them domain level access is an easy thing to do.”

Securing credentials and ensuring robust certificate management is key to good machine identity governance, along with continuous monitoring and anomaly detection.

And, Dickinson warns, there needs to be good integration across cloud, DevOps and automation workflows.

“Don’t just think about your on-prem, you have to think about cloud. And you’ve got to look at where a lot of these are created – in the DevOps process – and make sure they are all picked up in the early stages and follow good governance.”

Rounding out Dickinson’s list of ‘key fundamentals’ is having strong auditable compliance and certification processes to enable tracking and logging of what is happening.

“Once you start putting all these key fundamentals in, it reduces risk, supports automation better and prepares government agencies and enterprises for the next step, which is really around the AI-driven operations side.”

He warns too, that it’s not a quick fix. Full governance can take one to three years, requiring collaboration between IT, identity teams and business stakeholders. The payoff, though, is resilience, safer automation and readiness for future technology.

The post Why machine identities are your biggest cybersecurity blindspot appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap December 2025

17.12 CSIRO says up to 350 planned job cuts will continue despite news it will receive $233m in federal funding in the mid-year budget. The government says the funding will enable CSIRO to continue expanding its work in areas including AI, agricultural productivity, critical minerals, climate change adaptation and biosecurity, ABCnews reports.

17.12 The federal government is investing $225m to support whole-of-government AI use. ITnews reports the bulk of funding – $166.4m – will be spent expanding the GovAI platform and on the design, build and pilot of a secure AI assistant, GovAI Chat.

16.12 The ACT Bar Association is partnering with a local tech firm to provide formal training for barristers in the use of AI, in what InformationAge says is believed to be an Australian first. The program, which will run for 18 months, will kick off in early 2026 and provide barristers with information on how AI can be used safety and responsibility. It follows high profile incidents where courts received fabricated or incorrectly-cited information generated by AI.

15.12 The ASX is ‘resetting’ its Accelerate transformation program and says it is committed to continuing tech investments to ensure future-ready market infrastructure, following a damning review by ASIC. It says it has committed to a strategic package of actions and a $150m capital charge.

13.12 Reddit has launched a High Court challenge against Australia’s under-16s social media ban, arguing that the policy has serious implications for privacy and political rights, the BBC reports. Reddit says the law forces intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolates teens engaging in age-appropriate community experiences and creates an illogical patchwork of which platforms are, and aren’t, included.

12.12 Time magazine has named ‘the architects of AI’ as it’s 2025 Person of the Year. It says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other tech titans have ‘grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate and our livelihoods’.

10.12 Australia’s under-16s social media ban has come into force with companies including Instagram, Facebook, X, SnapChat, TikTok, Reddit and YouTube now required to take reasonable steps to prevent children opening social media accounts. The BBC reports many other countries are watching carefully.

10.12 Services Australia could be in line to receive new powers enabling it to compel third-parties to share information about a data breach or compromise event involving Centrelink or Medicare identifiers. ITnews reports the agency has told a federal auditor it has seen a sharp rise in notifiable data breaches primarily involving incidents where customers have provided information and myGov sign-in credentials to parties impersonating the agency. Third-parties holding caches of personal data present an attack vendor. The auditor has recommended new powers to compel breached third parties to inform Services Australia of incidents involving the government identifiers.

08.12 Australia’s National AI plan is big on ambitions, but light on details according to law firm White & Case which says while the objectives are ‘commendable and logical’ there are no meaningful details about how the objectives will be assessed and no measures or markers have been set against which progress can be judged.

03.12 The government is tempering expectations around the under-16s social media ban, warning that it will take ‘some time’ before most children’s accounts are removed from the major platform, and nor will tech giants be immediately fined, InformationAge reports. Newer apps currently gaining traction as potential workarounds, such as Lemon8 and Yope, may also be captured by the ban, which comes into effect on 10 December.

02.12 OpenAI has declared ‘code red’ in a push to improve the quality of ChatGPT amid pressure from competitors. Ars Technica says other OpenAI products will be delayed as a result, along with advertising plans. Google released Gemini 3 last month, with the model outperforming ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests.

01.12 The ASX is facing fresh pressure after an outage on its announcement platform forced about 80 stocks to be placed in a trading halt. Reuters reports the ASX did not believe the outage was a cybersecurity event.

AppWrap November 2025

29.11 Airbus has issued a recall for thousands of A320 jets due to data corruption risks from solar flares. The company says a significant number of A320 family of aircraft needed immediate software updates amid concerns that ‘intense solar radiation’ could corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls, ABCnews reports. Jetstar was among those with planes grounded. Qantas and Virgin, which have A320s in their fleet said their services were not disrupted.

28.11 Japanese beer giant Asahi has revealed more than 1.5 million customers’ private details may have been leaked in a September cyberattack which crippled the company’s factory operations in Japan. The BBC reports that names, gender, addresses and contact information of more than 1.52 million customers is regarded as being at risk of possible leakage, along with data from current and former employees and family members and external contacts.

27.11 A bill adding ‘digital asset’ and ‘tokenised custody’ platforms as financial products, requiring operators to hold an Australian financial services license and met standards set by ASIC, has been introduced to parliament. InnovationAus reports smaller platforms holding less than $5,000 per customer and overseeing less than $10m in transactions would be exempt.

27.11 A parliamentary inquiry will be held into plans to cut hundreds more jobs at CSIRO. The inquiry into the cutting of up to 350 research roles, which was announced last week, will look at the rationale behind them, along with impacts of the funding cuts, the importance of public funding for science and CSIRO’s future funding and resourcing needs RegionCanberra reports.

27.11 The under-16s social media ban is facing a legal challenge in the High Court with two teenagers taking the federal government to court arguing the ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with free political communication. The teens are backed by the Digital Freedom Project, which has not disclosed where its funding come from, the Conversation says.

26.11 Wiise has unveiled what it says is Australia’s first ERP solution with direct integration to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, to streamline compliance and accelerate claims processing. Wiise says 45 NDIS providers have already adopted the platform, ITwire reports.

26.11 NSW will start rolling out digital birth certificates, initially to those aged 16-21, from March 2026. Access will be via the Service NSW app with the digital birth certificates initially only accepted at Service NSW centres to apply for select NSW government transactions. However, Biometric Update reports use cases are expected to expand.

26.11 Copper thieves have been blamed for an Optus outage which left more than 14,000 customers in Victoria’s south-east without mobile calls or data, the SMH says. The telco is currently in the midst of a Senate inquiry into a September triple-0 outage linked to the deaths of two people. Optus was fined $12m in 2024 for a one-day outage in 2023. In the latest case the thieves damaged a fibre line while stealing copper wiring from poles.

26.11 US President Trump has signed an executive order instructing the country’s 17 national laboratories, AI companies and universities to pool government data on a single platform and create AI models using the government’s scientific data. Genesis Mission aims to ‘double the productivity and impact of American research and innovation within a decade’, Nature reports. The Department of Energy has been charged with creating the platform, with companies including Microsoft, IBM, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as collaborators.

25.11 Anthropic has launched its Claude Opus 4.5 AI offering, with a 67 percent price cut signalling its intention to become a production-ready enterprise tool, InfoWorld reports. The new pricing brings Anthropic closer to OpenAI and Google while maintaining a premium position and comes hard on the heels of Google’s launch of Gemini 3 and OpenAI’s release of GPT-5.1.

20.11 A US Republican politician has called on Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant to testify in a committee hearing, alleging her actions ‘directly threatens American speech’ and accusing her of being a zealot, 9news reports. Jim Jordan claims Inman Grant has colluded with pro-censorship entities in the US, and noted attempts to get X to remove videos of a Sydney church stabbing.

23.11 The Bureau of Meteorology has revealed its controversial new website cost $96.5 million, not the $4.1m originally claimed. ABCnews reports the agency’s new boss has been asked to closely examine how the site redesign went so wrong. The site was widely panned when it launched a month ago and the federal government ordered BoM to fix the site, which has since reverted to the old version of the radar map, with other changes made to the site and more to be rolled out.

18.11 The government is moving ahead with a digital duty of care for big tech with public consultations opening after earlier delays to the proposed legislation. InformationAge says a survey has opened enabling Australians to have a say on how the digital duty of care, which would apply to companies including Google, Meta, TikTok and X and aims to legally force companies to actively shield users from harm, will work.

18.11 A Sydney resident has died after trying to call triple zero on an incompatible Samsung devices and having the call fail. TPG says early investigations suggest the Samsung devices’ software was incompatible with making triple-zero calls on the TPG network. The Guardian reports that TPG, Optus and Telstra sent out advisories in October about some older devices.

18.11 CSIRO plans to cut up to 350 research roles to ‘achieve [a] sharpened research focus’, which will see the organisation focus on a number of key areas and deprioritise other research areas. Among the areas identified as key are applying advanced tech including AI, quantum, sensing, robotics and manufacturing, increasing farm productivity through technological solutions, supporting a clean, affordable energy transition and climate change, CSIRO says.

13.11 Sydney MSP Increment has taken out the Data Security and Compliance category in Microsoft’s global Partner of the Year Awards, with Melbourne-based Engage Squared taking out the global award for Modern Workplace for Frontline Workers. At a regional level Data#3 claimed Partner of the Year for Australia, Microsoft says.

13.11 Queensland is spending $40m on critical system upgrades to harden cyber security while also planning to make it easier for state and local agencies to buy security technology, ITnews reports.

13.11 OpenAI is challenging a court order requiring it to turn over 20 million anonymised ChatGPT chat logs to the New York Times and other plaintiffs suing over alleged copyright infringement, arguing it would expose users’ private conversations. OpenAI says the logs are complete conversations and as such more likely to expose private information, ArsTechnica reports.

10.11 Brisbane’s Veronika Bilek, founder of online payment company EftLab has been named Payments Expert of the Year at the APAC Payments Awards. ShaBass Pay, a real-time payments platform for Australia’s small businesses was named Best Payments Startup Innovation, with Hnry taking out Best B2B Payment Experience.

08.10 AI stocks lost more than US$820 billion this week as the Nasdaq experienced its worst week since April’s ‘Liberation Day’ plunge, NBC News reports. Shares in Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Plantir, Oracle and Meta all tumbled. Experts have been warning of an ‘AI correction’.

07.11 Meta projected 10 percent of its revenue in 2024 – or US$16 billion – to come from ads for scams and banned goods, according to documents seen by Reuters, which says the social media company internally estimates its platforms show 15 billion scam ads a day.

07.10 Google plans to build an AI data centre on Australia’s Christmas Island after signing a cloud deal with the Department of Defence. Reuters reports Google is in ‘advanced talks’ to lease land near the island’s airport for the data centre. Alphabet says the project is part of work to deliver subsea cable infrastructure. It disputes that it is building a ‘large artificial intelligence data centre’ and says further details will be shared ‘soon’.

06.10 Microsoft is offering refunds to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family forced to upgrade to 365 with Copilot a year ago. Customers were not given an clear option for opting out. Those not wanting Copilot can now opt out by 31 December and receive a refund for the additional cost charged since their first renewal date after 30 November 2024, Microsoft says. The offer comes after Australia’s competition watchdog, the ACCC, began legal proceedings against Microsoft alleging the company mislead 2.7m Australian companies by telling them that they had to accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices or cancel their subscription.

05.10 Amazon has fired warning shots at AI agents being used on its site, taking legal action against AI startup Perplexity AI. Amazon has accused Perplexity of covertly accessing customer accounts through its Comet browser and associated AI agent, and disguising AI activity as human browsing. It’s alleging the action poses security threats and that the company hasn’t been transparent in identifying the agents’ activities, the Guardian reports. Perplexity has hit back accusing Amazon of bullying.

04.10 A third-party software developer working on a government website made private documents publicly available online and on search engines, resulting in two separate occasions of unauthorised disclosure. The case study is disclosed in the OAIC’s Jan-Jun data breach notifications statistics. The disclosure happened when a software developer ran a script on the website, without authorisation of the agency. The documents were deleted and removed from public view on search engines, with type files reset to private, and affected individuals were notified, OAIC says.

04.10 The OAIC received 532 data breach notifications in the first half of 2025, down 10 percent on the previous six months when notifications reached record levels. Malicious or criminal attacks remained the largest source of data breaches (59 percent or 308 notification). Cybersecurity incidents continued to be the largest source of such breaches. Incidents involving human error saw a significant increase, accounting for 37 percent of all data breaches, the OAIC says. The health sector had the most reported data breaches (18 percent) followed by the finance sector (14 percent) and government agencies (13 percent).

06.10 The password for the Louvre’s video surveillance system has been revealed as… Louvre. The security blunder was revealed in the wake of the US$102 million jewel heist, ABC says. There’s no indication the thieves accessed the system.

03.11 The Critical Technology Projects Board has been quietly shuttered by the Fair Work Ombudsman after less than four years operation. ITnews says the board has been formally retired as its functions are now performed by other governance bodies.

03.11 Optus held 11 ‘crisis’ meetings and waited almost a day before it told the government and public its triple-0 outage caused three deaths, ABCnews reports. The ACMA and Communications Minister Anika Wells were not told until Friday afternoon – after staff learned the previous evening that hundreds of calls had been affected and there had been deaths. Senior Optus execs knew on Friday morning after an email was sent advising them at midnight. CEO Stephen Rue, who is before a Senate inquiry, blamed staff below him for failing to alert him sooner and says steps have been taken to improve processes.

01.11 The APEC summit has wrapped up with a joint declaration including an agreement for a five-year AI initiative to advance secure, accessible and reliable AI across APEC economies and ensure AI benefits are spread across whole populations. InnovationAus reports this year’s summit stood out for its depth of focus on tech issues from AI to semiconductors, data centres and other cloud infrastructure.

03.11 Kiwi robotics company Syos Aerospace is expanding to Australia and will establish production in the country to capitalise on demand for sovereign produced uncrewed vehicles, particularly maritime and interceptor drones. The company has UK operations and will look to Asean and APAC markets for further growth, The Post reports.

AppWrap October 2025

31.10 The Bureau of Metorology has reverted to its previous rain radar after a torrent of complaints and backlash over its new $4.1m website, ABCnews reports. The BoM was ordered by the federal government to fix the website after many found it difficult to use.

29.10 An Australian man, working in the US for a US defence contractor, has pleaded guilty to theft of trade secrets after stealing information, including on national security-focused software which was meant to be sold exclusively to the US government and allies. The information was sold to a Russian broker who claims their client includes the Russian government, the Guardian reports.

30.10 Australia appears to have been spared the worst of a Microsoft Azure outage, possibly due to the hour the outage hit. 9news reports effects appeared to be mostly limited to Microsoft services.

30.10 Google parent Alphabet has recorded its first US$100 billion revenue quarter, with Google Cloud – which includes AI services – Search and YouTube all seeing double-digit growth. Entrepreneur reports the $102.3 billion was well ahead of analysts estimates and double the $50 billion logged just five years ago.

29.10 Microsoft’s net income took a US$3.2 billion hit in Q1 2026 on the back of its OpenAI investment. The company’s latest financials show it has invested US$13 billion into OpenAI, with $11.6 billion of that since the end of September, CNBC reports. Net income still rose to US$27.7 billion, with cloud revenues up 26 percent yoy to more than $49b.

27.10 Recommendations for federal agencies to disclose AI use are going largely unheeded according to University of Sydney research. The researchers say they found just 45 percent compliance across 224 agencies, with many buried deep within agency sites. Among agencies for which publishing a statement was recommended, rather than required, few were found they report in The Conversation. The team also struggled to find statements for many of those for whom reporting is a requirement, rather than recommendation.

27.10 Cybersecurity experts say the popular tactic of seeking injunctions to prevent publication of data stolen in data breaches is putting people at greater risk of cybercrime. InformationAge reports experts saying the injunctions fail to offer protection to consumers and victims of data leaks and ‘disempower’ them from self-help. One cybersecurity company says the injunctions prevent it from alerting clients of information appearing on the dark web, because the only party that can provide guidance on the exposure is the one losing the data in the first place. Hackers also tend not to care about injunctions.

24.10 A bug in automation software has been blamed for the AWS outage which brought down thousands of sites and applications. The bug in DynamoDB’s automated DNS management system was an empty DNS record for an AWS region, which failed to automatically repair, The Guardian reports.

23.10 Origin Energy has warned more than 700 customers that their credit and debit card information may have been compromised after an employee stole records and attempted to email them to themselves in July. The ex-employee has signed a declaration saying the file has been deleted, but Origin says it can’t guarantee customers’ details are safe and has advised them to regularly check card statements for irregular activity. Customers will receive a year of free credit monitoring support AFR reports.

23.10 Four AI ‘companion’ chatbot companies have been ordered by eSafety to explain what measures they have in place to protect children from exposure to harmful material. The makers of character.ai, Nomi, Chai and Chub have all been served notice, eSafety says.

22.10 Tech Council of Australia chief executive Damian Kassabgi is exiting the role after just 16 months. He will remain in the role until a replacement is found. AFR reports his departure comes amid discontent by some members ‘underwhelmed’ by his notably lower public profile than former CEO Kate Pounder and a seeming lack of policy direction during his tenure.

21.10 A major AWS outage has knocked thousands of online services, including banking, and websites offline. AWS reported an issue on its Health Dashboard last night. By 5am this morning services were gradually coming back online, but AWS acknowledged there were still ‘significant errors’ affecting some services. The company says the root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of its network load balances, with the issue originating within the EC2 internal network. Users have reported issues with their Alexa speakers, Ring doorbells, and sites including Facebook, Snapcaht, Zoom, Reddit, Duolingo, TVNZ and Spark.

19.10 Jessica Hunter has been appointed Australia’s Ambassador for Cyber Affairs and Critical Technology, taking over from Brendan Dowling. Hunter will steer international engagement under the 2023-2030 Cyber Security Strategy, Senator Penny Wong says.

19.10 Vocus has confirmed a hack on its network, affecting about 1600 Dodo and iPrimus home internet and mobile customers. The company says it detected ‘suspicious activity’ in its systems on Friday and progressively suspended email services temporarily for Dodo and iPrimus customers and retricted email services for Commander customers. Unauthorised access was identified in 1,600 accounts , leading to unauthorised SIM swaps on 34 Dodo mobile accounts. 7news reports customers regained access by Sunday morning but had to call service providers to change passwords. Support is being offered through IDCare.

17.10 Canva is promising AI agents which can carry out design, marketing and sales tasks in its first phase of agentic tools. InformationAge reports Canva says the agents will work a ‘proper teammates’ alongside human users, but did not confirm whether the agents would be available to users without a paid subscription.

16.10 Crypto ATMs could be banned in Australia with Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke seeing to hand Austrac new powers to restrict or prohibit certain high-risk products, services or delivery channels. Austrac says it is ‘ready to use’ the new powers and says crypto transactions are becoming integrated into money laundering with crypto ATMs presenting even more risks. Australia has 2000 crypto ATMs. The Crypto Taskforce estimates almost 150,000 transactions occur annually with about $275m moved through the machines annually.

14.10 Noosa Council has lost nearly $2 million after falling victim to a ‘sophisticated’ scam using AI to imitate personalities. The scam occurred in December 2004 but was kept quiet as it was investigated. ABCnews reports while $2.3 million was initially lost, around $400,000 has since been recovered. The council only became aware of the scam after it was contacted by authorities. No details are being provided about the scam.

13.10 Cybersecurity minister Tony Burke says Qantas will be held accountable after personal information of 5.7 million customers was released onto the dark web last week, 9News reports. The leak follows the July hack of a Saleforce system, with hackers calling the IT desks of 40 companies and posing as legitimate employees to access the information.

10.10 Billionaire tech investor and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel says the ‘antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science’ pointing to critics of AI, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Greta Thunberg. Thiel has been garnering plenty of attention with his off-the-record lectures about Armageddon and the antichrist. The Guardian has substantial quoted passages of his ‘lectures’.

10.10 Three researchers who paved the way for quantum computing have won the Noble Prize in Physics. Quantum physicists John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis observed ‘distinct quantum behaviours of a macroscopic physical variable’ in 1985 and their groundbreaking work led to achievements in constructing prototype quantum computers, The Conversation says.

09.10 Australian Catholic University, which used an AI detector tool, accused around 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year, with 90 percent of cases related to AI use, ABCnews reports. The university says those figures were ‘substantially overstated’. ABCnews says many of the students had done nothing wrong.

08.10 The CEOs of Telstra, Optus and TPG fronted up in Canberra as the Minister Anika Wells and the government faced pressure over failure to legislate the Triple Zero Custodian to monitor the nation’s emergency call system. Wells introduced new legislation to formally create the custodian on Tuesday, InformationAge reports.

07.10 Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant have warned of a new large scale extortion campaign by the Cl0p ransomware group, this time alleging theft of sensitive data from Oracle E-business Suite environments. Oracle has issued emergency patches to address the vulnerability. GTIG says starting late September, the threat actor launched a high-volume email extortion campaign from ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of compromised third-party accounts, threatening to leak information stolen from companies’ databases unless a ransom is paid. The FBI’s cyber division assistant director has warned companies this is a ‘stop what you are doing’ and patch immediately’ vulnerability.

07.10 Deloitte will partially refund the federal government after acknowledging that genAI was used to help create a $440,000 report that contained several errors. The consultancy will repay the final instalment of its contract with the Department of Employment and Workplace relations. Details of the contract will be made public after the transaction is finalised, the Guardian reports. The report reviewing the targeted compliance framework and its IT system, first published in July, had multiple errors including nonexistent references and citations.

06.10 A ‘reset’ to the CDR, which could carve out smaller banks – and their valuable data – from the CDR, could weaken the system and make it harder for new fintech startups to take part, putting the handbrake on Australia’s fintech sector according to critics. SmartCompany reports size exemptions already exist in the non-bank lending and energy areas, but fintech experts are concerned carveouts will create a two-speed system forcing reliance on less secure data-sharing methods such as screen scaping.

06.10 A former contractor to the NSW Reconstruction Authority uploaded an Excel spreadsheet containing more than 12,000 rows of information to ChatGPT in March, exposing personal data of up to 3000 applicants to the Northern Rivers Resilient Homes Program. NSW Government says there is no evidence information has been made public and says it will be contacting people with updates and information on whether they have been impacted. Forensic analysts have been engaged and Cyber Security NSW is undertaking an investigation.

05.10 Melbourne’s Heidi Health has raised US$65 million in Series B funding, StartupDaily reports. The latest deal boosts the company’s valuation to US$465m. The Heidi ambient AI medical scribe is used by Monash Health and Queensland Health Children’s Hospital and Health Service.

03.10 Curtin University has signed two international agreements to help ‘unlock the secrets of life on Mars’ and advance next-generation robotics and autonomous systems. The University says a deal with LifeSpringsMars Working Group will advance mission design studies, demonstrate new technologies for mining, defence and remote operations and develop education, workforce pathways in space science. The second deal, with India-based tech company Uncharted AI, will support joint research, including pilot projects in WA and India.

02.10 Queensland’s SwarmFarm Robotics has raised $30m in Series B funding to ramp up production of its autonomous SwarmBots and expand into North America, SmartCompany reports. SwarmFarm’s open platform, SwarmConnect, provides an ‘app store for agriculture’ enabling developers to build software tailored to different crops and farming practices. Farmers then use the apps to customise the bots for specific jobs.

AppWrap September 2025

29.09 Pathology services provider Australian Clinical Labs has agreed to pay a $5.8m fine for the 2022 data breach the compromised the personal information of 223,000 customers of its Medlab Pathology business. It is the first penalty handed down for breaches of the Privacy Act. The breach saw 86 gigabytes of data stolen by the Quantum ransomware group, with data published on the dark web, CyberDaily reports. ACL has also proposed $400,0000 to cover the OAIC’s legal costs.

29.09 Optus has been hit by a second significant outage with a problem with a mobile phone tower at Dapto leading to failed emergency calls on Sunday. ABCnews reports the network outage, between 3am and 1220pm on Sunday, led to nine failed triple-O calls near Wollongong. Optus says it has confirmed with police that all callers are ok. Federal and state ministers have dubbed the outage, just 10 days after a major failure led to hundreds of failed triple-0 calls, ‘very concerning’.

26.09 A Gold Coast man has been fined $340,000 for posting deepfake images of several high-profile Australian women in the first case of its kind in the country. The man was found guilty of violating sections of the Online Safety Act after eSafety brought a case against him almost two years ago. eSafety says the fine sends a strong message about the consequences of deepfake image-based abuse.

26.09 A US judge has given preliminary approval for a US$1.5 billion class settlement in a class action lawsuit charging Anthropic with copyright infringement. Publishers Weekly says authors and publishers will receive about US$3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement.  Authors alleged millions of books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots, but just 482,000 works qualify for the payment. The settlement does not apply to future works.

25.09 US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order approving a proposal for a new joint-venture company to oversee the platform’s US business, with ByteDance holding less than 20 percent of stock. CNBC says China has yet to approve the deal, which values the company at US$14 billion. Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX investment will be the main investors in the US business under the deal, with ByteDance and new holders owning 35 percent. ByteDance has not acknowledged that a transaction is taking place and there is no indication the Chinese government has made law changes required for the deal to take place, though Trump claims the Chinese president has giving the deal the go-ahead.

24.09 Optus failed to divert calls away from the relevant part of the core network as part of a firewall upgrade, leading to Thursday’s triple zero outage. Optus CEO Stephen Rue says a playbook for previous successful upgrades of a similar nature was not followed. “The issue occurred because this time, there was a deviation from established processes.” An independent review, headed by Kerry Schott, will investigate the incident.

24.09 WhatsApp, Reddit, Discord, Roblox, Lego Play, GitHub and Pinterest have been added to the list of platforms which may need to comply with the upcoming under-16s social media ban. ABCnews reports the eSafety commissioner has written to 16 companies advising them the ban might apply to their platform. The companies have been asked to use eSafety’s “self-assessment” tool to help determine if they will fall under the new laws, coming into effect in December.

23.09 Optus claimed providing real-time updates on emergency call outages to emergency services and the government would impose a ‘huge burden’. The company resisted new government requirements for more immediate sharing of information during outages, The Guardian reports. The report comes days after a firewall upgrade blocked emergency calls on the Optus network, with more than 600 calls unable to connect in the 13 hours it was offline. Three deaths have been linked to the outage. Optus was unaware of the outage for 13 hours and failed to notify the ACMA or communications minister for another 1.5 hours. The public were notified more than 24 hours later, on Friday evening.

22.09 Optus will suffer ‘significant consequences’, with major financial penalties likely following Thursday’s triple zero outage, the federal government says. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the company’s behaviour was ‘completely unacceptable’ The Guardian reports, while Communications minister Anika Wells condemned Optus for its handling of the situation, and has said there will be a comprehensive investigation and response, warning there will be consequences for not just Optus but the broader telco sector.

19.09 The NSW government has passed new laws criminalising the creation and sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes. Amendments to the Crimes Act 1900 make the production of sexually explicit deepfakes designed to be a genuine depiction of a real, identifiable person an offence punishable by up to three years’ jail, NSW Communities and Justice says. Sharing or threatening to share such images, even if the person hasn’t created them, is also now punishable by up to three years’ jail.

18.09 Atlassian has continued its acquisition spree with a US$1 billion cash-and-stock deal for developer productivity platform DX. Forbes reports the deal positions Atlassian to capitalise on the critical market need of measuring AI-driven development, with DX providing an analytics platform that helps organisations track engineering team performance and identify development bottlenecks.

18.09 The OAIC has found that Kmart breached privacy through its use of a facial recognition system designed to tackle refund fraud. The system was deployed between June 2020 and July 2022, capturing the faces of everyone entering 28 of its retail stores and all individuals presenting at a returns counter, but failed to notify shoppers or seek their consent to collect their biometric information, the OAIC says. It’s the second determination issued by the OAIC on the use of FRT in retail settings, with Bunnings also found ton contravene privacy through its use of FRT. That decision is currently under review by the Administrative Review Tribunal.

16.09 The University of NSW has signed Australia’s biggest ChatGPT Edu deal, providing 10,000 staff with access to the platform. The University says academics will benefit from using ChatGPT to complement and enhance their research and teaching activities while protecting their IP.

15.09 Insurer Zurich is using open banking technology provided under the Consumer Data Right regime in a new offering. The Home Loan Protection policy provides cover that automatically adjusts its premiums as the insured’s mortgage reduces, InsuranceNews says.

14.09 The owner of publications including Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety has sued Google, alleging the company’s AI summaries use its content without consent, and have significantly reduced search referral traffic to its sites. Penske Media Corporation’s suit says while the company allows Google to crawl its websites in exchange for traffic, Google has begun to require publishers to also supply the content for other uses that cannabalise or preempt search referrals, TechCrunch reports. The only way to opt out is to remove Penske entirely from Google search, the publisher says. Penske is the first to target Google and its parent company Alphabet.

14.09 Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler has been appointed as shadow minister for cyber security and science as part of a frontbench reshuffle in the wake of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s removal. InnovationAge notes that under Peter Dutton, pre this year’s election, Chandler was shadow minister for the digital economy.

12.09 The ACMA’s fourth report on platforms efforts to combat disinformation and misinformation says efforts to support third-party fact checking appears to be stalling in Australia. It says most signatories have made ‘modest’ improvements in their reporting of Australian-specific data, and have reported fewer pieces of content being actioned, including removals.

11.09 Tech workers jobs are on the line in the latest round of finance job cuts, with ANZ, NAB and Bendigo all announcing significant cuts. ANZ has said around 3,500 jobs will go across its global workforce, with the Finance Sector Union claiming 14 percent of workers from the bank’s tech and retail divisions will be affected, InformationAge reports. NAB meanwhile is axing 410 roles from its tech and enterprise operations division and the FSU says 145 jobs in Bendigo Bank’s technology division will also go in a restructure.

10.09 NSW Health is under fire after the confidential documents, including passports and medical credentials, of 600 medical staff were mistakenly made accessible on South Eastern Sydney and Illawarra Shoalhaven local health districts’ websites. The information, which was supposed to be password-protected, was found to be publicly accessible via the website, the Guardian reports.

10.09 OpenAI has signed a $300 billion contract with Oracle purchase compute power in one of the largest cloud deals ever signed. The deal will reportedly require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity. The NYTimes notes that OpenAI previously said it had reached a deal with Oracle to build AI data centres in the US as part of Project Stargate, but had not revealed particulars of that deal. The new deal spans around five years, with OpenAI starting to purchase compute from 2027.

05.09 Atlassian is purchasing The Browser Company in a $1 billion deal in a move designed to keep users in the Atlassian sphere. The company says The Browser Company’s Dia browser will be optimised for SaaS apps with tabs ‘enriched with context’ and ‘packed with AI skills and your personal work memory’ to connect the dots between apps, tabs and tasks. The move puts Atlassian in competition with Microsoft and Google who are also adding AI features to their browsers.

05.09 A Victorian lawyer who submitted fake AI generated cases to court has become the first Australian practitioner sanctioned but has been allowed to remain in the profession. The Victorian Legal Services Board placed restrictions on the solicitor who will be under supervision for the next two years, after he produced a list of cases which did not exist after relying on AI, LawGazette reports. The solicitor said he did not fully understand how the research tool worked.

04.09 The federal government will pay $475m in additional compensation to 450,000 robodebt victims, after agreeing to settle an appeal from the 2020 class action settlement. The compensation is in addition to $112m paid in 2020’s class action, and $1.76 billion in debts that were forgiven, cancelled or paid back by the government, The Guardian reports.

03.09 WA Health has completed the first stages of a $247m medial record system modernisation, with single sign on and digital medical systems (DMR) completed and more than 44 million documents digitised. Health Minister Meredith Hammat says 27,000 clinicians are using the SSO system, with access to around 90 clinical applications provided at the tap of a card.

AppWrap August 2025

28.08 The Digital Transformation Agency has developed a proof of concept using a LLM to assist with Digital Marketplace 2 application reviews. ITnews reports the agency plans to expand the PoC into a pilot with a goal of going live later this year using an AI-human pairing, rather than AI alone.

28.08 Australian cybersecurity professionals are feeling the stress, losing 4.8 hours a week to stress and burnout in 2025 as 78 percent of organisations report experiencing issues with burnout driven primarily by increased threat activity, lack of resources and complex compliance requirements. The figures are contained in a Sophos report, Australian Cybersecurity magazine reports.

26.08 The Tech Council of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions have agreed to work on a ‘path forward on copyright that allows AI training to take place in Australia while also including appropriate protections for creators that make a living from their work’, InformationAge reports.

25.08 The Department of Defence has inked a new $18.7m deal with IBM related to its ERP overhaul, bringing the total engagement value to at least $575m since 2019, ITnews reports. The latest deal is for a year’s consultancy support for the SAP S/4Hana rollout.

23.08 US President Trump says the US government has secured a 10 percent stake in Intel through the conversion of US$11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. The deal makes the US Government one of Intel’s largest shareholders. AP notes the deal comes just a couple of weeks after Trump depicted Intel CEO  Lip-Bu Tan as a conflicted leader unfit for the job amid national security concerns about his previous investments in Chinese companies when he was a venture capitalist.

21.08 Commonwealth Bank has backtracked on plans announced last month to cut 45 jobs after introducing an AI voicebot saying its decision was an ‘error’ and it ‘did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations’. The Finance Sector Union, which has raised a dispute at the Fair Work Commission, says members found work actually increased after the bot was introduced, ABCnews reports.

21.08 Australia’s Momentum Software Solutions has taken out Wiise Partner of the Year in the ERP vendor’s annual Partner Awards. Solutions Plus, BusinessHub, Stratus Consulting Group and The Practical Enterprise Group were also among the winners.

20.08 The University of Melbourne has been found to have breached student’ privacy by using its wifi network to monitor students and staff at a pro-Palestine protest in May. The Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner found the university used wifi location data, student card photos and CCTV footage to identify 22 students who failed to comply with orders to leave the university building. Staff email accounts were also used to identify staff involved in the protest, with three given formal written warnings. While the university didn’t contravene information privacy principles with its CCTV use, it breached Victoria’s Privacy and Data Protection Act by failing to adequately inform students and staff how their information had been used and through using wifi data to identify individuals in a misconduct investigation, The Guardian reports.

19.08 iiNet says it has been impacted by a cyber incident with the active email addresses of 280,000 customers stolen along with landline numbers of 20,000 customers and around 1,700 modem setup passwords. The incident was confirmed on Saturday and an incident response plan has been enacted with external IT and cybersecurity experts called in to assist. Around 10,000 iiNet usernames, street addresses and phone numbers have also been accessed, the company says.

18.08 The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has renewed a deal for Datacom to manage its contact centre for another five years, ITnews reports. The deal is worth $176 million.

14.08 Accenture is acquiring Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX for an undisclosed sum to expand its cybersecurity capabilities across APAC. AFR reports the transaction is valued at more than AU$1 billion. CyberCX has 1,400 staff across APAC. Since 2015, Accenture has completed 20 security acquisitions it says.

12.08 The Federal Court has ruled Apple and Google engaged in anti-competitive conduct with their smartphone app stores, misusing their market power. ABCnews reports the decision clears the way for two class actions covering millions of Australian consumers and developers over price and commissions paid for digital content. The court also ruled in Epic Games’ favour finding Google and Apple breached section 45 of the competition and consumer act in misusing market power to reduce competition, but rejected other allegations including that the companies had engaged in unconscionable conduct.

12.08 Startup Perplexity AI has made a headline grabbing US$34.5 billion unsolicited all-cash offer for Google’s Chrome browser. The browser hasn’t been offered for sale, but Google is facing regulatory pressure after a US court ruling found it held an unlawful monopoly in online search and sought a Chrome divestiture. The deal value is far above Perplexity’s own valuation, Reuters reports, and would provide it access to the billions of Chrome users it wants in the AI search race.

11.08 CommBank is reporting a 76 percent drop in scam losses since the peak period of H1 2023. The bank, which rolled out in-app authentication earlier this year to help stop unauthroised access to online account says it is investing AU$900m this year to further bolster cyber defences. It has just unveiled a digital protection app, Truyu, which provides instant analysis of suspicious SMSs, and CommBank app users will now be asked to verify some online card transactions in-app before the transaction is authorised, FinExtra reports.

11.08 Foreign espionage cost Australia at least $12.5 billion in 2023-24 according to a ASIO and Australian Institute of Criminology report. Mike Burgess, director-general of security, says the figure, which is ‘an underestimate’, and the report is a wake-up call for Australia.

10.08 Instagram’s new location sharing feature has sparked concerns, despite Meta saying it is an ‘opt-in’ service. The NY Times reports some users saw their prior posts plotted on the map without using the feature. Instagram’s Adam Mossseri says the map was populated not only with real-time locations, but also with earlier posts tagged with a location. Location tags existed previously, but were not collated on a prominent map as they now are.

09.08 OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5, claiming it can provide PhD-level expertise in areas such as coding and writing. OpenAI CE Sam Altman says the new model will suffer fewer hallucinations and be less deceptive, providing answers that show workings, logic and inference BBC reports. The company is pitching GPT-5 to coders as a proficient assistant, able to create software in its entirety. Some experts, however, say the launch may not be as significant as its marketing suggests, with companies needing keep up the hype, while others have highlighted a growing gap in governance.

08.08 The OAIC is suing Optus over the 2022 cyber attack alleging the company ‘seriously interfered’ with the privacy of around 9.5 million Australians by failing to take reasonable steps to protect their personal information. ABCnews reports Optus could face a fine in the trillions in theory, with the Federal Court able to impose a penalty of up to $2.2 million for each contravention. The OAIC is alleging one contravention for each of the 9.5 million individuals.

08.08 The NSW Department of Education has inked a deal $13.8 million deal with Infosys to migrate its legacy SAP ECC6 platform to S/4HANA by the end of 2027. ITnews reports theupgrade will also see the department onboard the BW/4HANA warehouse solution.

07.08 The Community and Public Sector Union says hundreds more CSIRO jobs could be axed this year, with the national science agency confirming it is ‘reshaping’ its research portfolio to do fewer things better, InformationAge reports.

01.08 Accenture has scooped up a further $51.7 million deal for support for My Health Record as the Digital Health Agency gears up to carve up the much larger infrastructure services contract. ITnews reports Accenture has served as the national infrastructure operator since 2012, garnering contracts totalling $788 million. The most recent three-year, $141m contract, expired in June.

AppWrap July 2025

31.07 Vocus has completed its $5.25 billion acquisition of TPG Telcom’s enterprise, government and wholesale fixed business and associated fibre assets. Vocus says the deal provides Vocus with the scale and reach to deliver a better, broader suite of products and services, increasing competition in the sector.

30.07 YouTube is to be included in the under-16s social media ban after the Albanese government backflipped on an earlier plan for the video sharing platform to be exempt from the ban. Platforms will face fines of up to $49.5 million for failing to take ‘responsible steps’ to prevent underage account holders accessing their services, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says. The rules take force in December.

29.07 CBA has axed 45 call centre jobs after rolling out an AI chatbot. ABCNews reports the bank is consulting with dozens of staff impacted by the cuts and says opportunities to redeploy or reskill staff would be prioritised.

28.07 A Sydney man has been charged after allegedly defrauding an NT government agency out of $3.6 million in a business email compromise scam. The man posed as a contractor from a company the agency was engaged with, providing a completed vendor identification form. The AFP say they will allege the man registered a business to closely remember the legitimate contractor and opened a bank account to receive the funds. AFP says business email compromise and fraud were among the most common self-reported cybercrimes for businesses of all sizes, and individuals, in Australia in the 2023-24 financial year.

23.07 The federal government quietly launched a sovereign-hosted instance of OpenAI’s GPT-40 for use by the Australian Public Service recently, though it has since been removed. ITnews says the work is part of a whole-of-government pilot program, GovAI, which aims to fast-track AI adoption within public service. Currently in closed beta phase, it is expected to be expanded by November.

23.08 Patient data stolen in the Genea Fertility cyber hack in February has been published on the dark web. ABC News says the data includes patients’ full names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, Medicare card numbers, medical diagnosis and clinical information about the services received from the IVF provider and other service providers. Genea won’t confirm how many patients are affected, the name of the cybercriminal group claiming responsibility or whether a ransom was paid.

20.07 The ACSC has issued an alert saying it has seen active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Serve customers. A vulnerability is enabling unauthorised attackers to execute code over a network, the ACSC says. Microsoft is preparing and testing an update, with the ACSC urging organisations to monitor Microsoft advisories for updates and patches. US government agencies, universities, energy companies and an Asian telco are reportedly among those already hacked.

18.07 Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta directors and officers have settled claims seeking US$8 billion in damages for their handling of repeated privacy violations at Facebook. Shareholders had alleged Zuckerberg’s actions led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data of millions of Facebook users was leaked and used by a political consulting firm, the BBC reports. The settlement came just as the trial was about to enter its second day.

17.07 OpenAI is integrating a payments checkout system into ChatGPT enabling consumers to complete purchases while on the platform, Payments Journal says. OpenAI is reportedly working with Shopify and other brands to develop the system and negotiate rates, after an upgrade to the shopping feature earlier this year, done in collaboration with Shopify, enabled users searching for a product on ChatGPT to see top results with prices, reviews and links to sites.

17.07 Optus has obtained an interim injunction to prevent data in the breach earlier this month from being accessed or published by anyone, including third parties. The breach saw personal data of 5.7 million customers compromised. The airline says there is no evidence any personal data stolen has been released, and it is continuing to actively monitor.

17.07 Changes have been proposed for a $53m federal government Agtech grant program to subsidise on farm connectivity. InnovationAus says the proposed changes to the On Farm Connectivity Program will give primary producers more choice in where they source equipment and will significantly tighten which devices are eligible for rebates and will require proof of use from farmers.

15.07 Bunnings is calling for privacy law changes to enable it to use facial recognition technology. In a submission to the Productivity Commission review into how new technology such as AI should be used, managing director Michael Schneider says the Privacy Act should be reformed to keep pace with changes ushered in by AI, saying he’s concerned the evolving interpretation of privacy regulations appears to prioritise prescriptive compliance over balanced outcomes, AFR reports. Last year the Privacy Commissioner ruled Bunnings had breached the privacy of thousands of customers with its earlier use of facial recognition.

14.08 Optus is building and launching a sovereign LEO satellite, set to launch in early 2028. A consortium is working on the satellite which will include a specialised space telescope to take high-resolution pictures of space objects and a compact communication terminal which functions at fast speeds using laser light to send and receive data. More conventional radio frequency communications capability will also be included, Optus says.

11.07 Digital health accelerator program ANDHealth+ has received $33m in government funding to continue and expand its health technology commercialisation program. The acceleration and incubation program connects digital and connected health startups with support and funding to address critical commercialisation hurdles. ANDHealth+ says up to $5m will be provided in flexible, milestone-based non-dilutive funding and access to international markets to 10=15 startups over two years.

11.07 Forget the smartwatch, Samsung is looking into wearable devices potentially including earrings and necklaces. The company says AI could enable a wave of devices allowing users to communicate and get things done quickly without having to take out their phone, CNN reports.

10.07 Microsoft is claiming US$500m in savings thanks to AI in its call centres last year, with ‘tens of millions’ more savings from using AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, BusinessTimes reports. Last week the company announced it plans to lay off nearly four percent of its workforce to make savings amid its heavy AI investments.

07.07 Melbourne law firm Massar Briggs Law has been ordered to personally pay costs after submitting a native title summary document containing AI-fabricated citations. The junior solicitor had used Google Scholar and the citations were either incorrect or did not exist. The judge noted AI use in the legal profession is growing, and practitioners must be aware of its limitations, Lawyers Weekly reports.

07.07 Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared AI a key pillar of Australia’s future economic model, with the government aiming to create the right framework and make the right investments in skills and training to ensure AI is a contributor, not a competitor, Smart Company says.

04.07 The Australian Department of Defence has signed a five-year $495 million deal for Microsoft Azure cloud services. The Azure services will largely support Defence’s rollout of a new SAP-based ERP system, which recently went live, ITnews reports.

04.07 Goodman is setting up a $2.7 billion data centre business in Hong Kong. Reuters says the company has partnered with investors including the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and will be a 20 percent cornerstone investor, with the group owning four existing data centres held by Goodman, and two facilities currently being developed.

03.07 OpenAI’s Australian Blueprint calls for the country to ‘act more boldly and decisively to maximise AI’s possibilities’ promising a $115b windfall for Australia by 2030. The blueprint also calls for tax breaks for businesses adopting AI and claims data centres will create more than 8,000 jobs – with both those suggestions being questioned by experts who say data centres aren’t the mass-employer Open AI implied they will be once switched on, and the tax incentives are simply a grab for taxpayer money, Forbes Australia reports.

03.07 Australia’s tech sector’s contribution to GDP fell 2.6 percent in 2023-24 in its first decline in 17 years prompting a warning that the country needs to be building its digital economy rather than importing solutions, InformationAge reports.

02.07 Australia’s banks have launched confirmation of payee, which checks the name, BSB and account number entered with account details held at the receiving bank and showing the match results before payment is made to protect against scams. The Australian Banking Association says the $100m initiative will add a ‘powerful’ extra layer of protection for everyday transactions.

02.07 Service records of around six million Qantas customers have been compromised after cybercriminals targeted a call centre and gained access to the airline’s third-party customer service platform. The NZ Herald reports Qantas as saying it is continuing to investigate the proportion of data stolen but expects it will be ‘significant’.

01.07 Datacom has reported increases in group revenue and profit in the year to March, thanks to strong growth in Australia. Revenue was up from $1.47 billion to $1.48 billion with net profit after tax increasing $3 million to $37m, Datacom says. Group EBITDA was down as were staff numbers.

AppWrap June 2025

27.06 The Business Council of Australia is ‘doubling down on the critical growth drivers’ of digital infrastructure, connectivity and AI with the appointment of AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda and Telstra CEO Vicki Brady as directors. The BCA says the appointments are a ‘significant’ strengthening of the board’s capabilities in tech and innovation and will help shape its mission to lift Australia’s productivity.

27.06 A San Francisco federal court judge has ruled that Anthorpic’s use of copyrighted works to train its AI was ‘fair use’ and not a copyright breach, but the company may face a big bill for piracy instead. Anthropic downloaded more than seven million books from ‘shadow libraries’ including countless copyrighted works, without permission. The LA Times reports the judge as saying there will be a trial on the pirated copies, and the resulting damages – noting that piracy on that scale could result in judgements worth ‘untold millions’.

27.06 DeepSeek is facing potential bans in Germany after Berlin’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information asked Apple and Google to remove DeepSeek from their app stores accusing the company of illegally transferring user data to China. The official says DeepSeek did not provide convincing evidence data was protected as required by EU law, Euronews reports. The app has already been banned from Italian app stores, with other countries banning, or recommending it not be used, on government devices.

26.06 Two Sydney quantum startups have published research they say provides a pathway for scaling the number of qubits on a chip from current numbers under 100 to the millions needed to make quantum computation a ‘practical reality’. The result is enabled by new cryogenic control electronics operating at close to absolute zero, developed at the University of Sydney. The university says the development will take us from the realm of quantum computers being fascinating lab machines to a real-world offering, solving real world problems.

26.06 A former Western Sydney University student has been charged over a series of hacks at the University. The 27-year-old allegedly began infiltrating the system to get discounted parking on campus before threatening to sell peers’ data on the dark web, ABCnews reports.

26.06 Autohive has launched its AI agent building platform in New Zealand and Australia. The company is a spinoff of Kiwi software performance monitoring company Raygun, and is designed to enable SMBs to create and use AI agents. Mi3 notes the platform offers a range of use cases including handling customer inquiries 24/7, transforming spreadsheet data into actionable items and generating client proposals and reports.

25.06 Xero is looking to crack the US SMB market with plans to buy US-Israeli payments provider Melio in a US$2.5 billion deal. Reuters says the deal fills a gap in Xero’s offering, adding payments to its accounting software while enabling both companies to scale up. US sales account for just seven percent of Xero’s sales currently.

24.06 Kiwi company Halter has raised $165 million in series D funding. The funding, lead by global tech investment company Bond, values Halter at $1.65 billion, Halter says. The funding will be used for ‘exciting product innovations’ and expansion in New Zealand, Australia and the US. Among the investors was Kiwisaver company Generate, which threw in $10m.

20.06 A preliminary report into age assurance technology has found that age verification tools are ‘not guaranteed to be effective’, while face scanning technology gave incorrect results and some vendors were too keen to keep gather too much personal data. The Guardian reports operators of the systems insist age assurance can work and maintain personal privacy. The report suggests there aren’t any substantial tech limitations in the tested offerings, though no single solution worked for every situation.

20.06 PwC Australia has reported a 17 percent drop in profits to $619m, according to its first audited financial results. AFR says the figures show revenue dropped six percent to $2.17 billion – but the company’s 628 partners earned slightly more at an average of $767,000.

19.06 The Australian Signals Directorate has signed a $70m deal with AWS, pushing its renegotiated whole-of-government deal past $364m, ITnews reports.

18.06 Optus has agreed to a $100m fine for ‘unconscionable conduct’ in selling customers phones and contracts they didn’t want or need – in some cases when they lived outside of Optus’ reception. ABCnews says more than 400 customers, many vulnerable or experiencing disadvantage, were sold phones or signed up to the contracts. The Federal Court needs to approve the penalty – agreed to by Optus and the ACCC – and orders on customer compensation and the way sales staff are paid.

17.06 Google and OpenAI are reportedly winding down work with Scale AI after Meta’s US$14b investment in the AI data company. Meta is taking a 49 percent share in the company. Time reports that a Scale competitor has seen demand for its services ‘triple overnight’ on the back of the deal. Another company has added potential contracts worth US$50m as companies seek ‘truly neutral partners’. “With Meta being such a large owner of Scale, the ability for [Meta] to get information around what other foundation model labs are doing becomes a lot more challenging to manage,” the boss of another AI training data company says.

17.06 Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has warned employees the company will need fewer employees in future thanks to efficiency gains through AI. CNN reports Jassy says while the net outcome isn’t yet known, in the next few years the corporate workforce is expected to reduce through extensive AI use and urged employees to view AI as ‘teammates’.

16.06 Amazon is spending AU$20b to expand its Australian data centre network to support increasing AI and cloud demand. The work includes three solar projects to meet energy requirements of the expanded infrastructure, TechRepublic reports.

13.05 The ASX has sold its shareholding in blockchain developer Digital Asset Holdings for $57m. The ASX partnered with Digital Asset Holdings in 2016 for its ill-fated Chess replacement. The program was scrapped in 2022, with a $250m writedown for the ASX, Capital Brief reports.

12.06 An identity and access management failure within Google Cloud has caused large scale disruption across a range of internet services, including Google Workspace apps, Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, Snap, Shopify and Replit. Silicon Angle reports the issue was traced to a misconfiguration in Google Cloud’s IAM systems.

11.06 Australia has ‘no alternative’ but to embrace AI and seek to become a world leader in its use and regulation, industry and science minister Tim Ayres says. He says the government is still setting a course of action, considering approaches from like-minded countries, and the response will include legislation and regulation, The Guardian reports.

11.06 Disney and Universal studios are suing AI image creator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement. The suit filed in federal court in Los Angeles claims Midjourney allows users to blatantly incorporate and copy famous characters including Shrek, Darth Vader and Frozen’s Elsa. Time magazine says the lawsuit challenges one of the AI industries fundamental assumptions: that it should be allowed to train upon copyrighted materials under the principle of fair use, and could reshape the battle over AI and copyright.

10.06 Anthony Albanese is convening experts, unions and business leaders later this year to brainstorm ideas for economic growth and productivity, ABC News reports.

06.06 Apple has accused the Australian government of threatening consumers’ security and privacy while damaging the economy and stopping innovation, with its proposal to require tech firms to allow consumers to use alternative app stores and make third party payments inside apps, InformationAge says. A 28 page submission to Treasury argues that Australia should not follow the EU’s footsteps, and that the moves will reduce protection against scams, malware and potentially harmful content.

06.06 Lion has developed a ‘Pub Crawl’ app – not for customers but for its sales team – enabling them to automatically record how many taps at pubs serve its beers to ensure pubs are meeting their contractual requirements. The app was built using SAP’s Business Technology Platform and AWS Rekognition and uses computer vision and AI, ITnews reports.

06.06 Australian navy ship HMAS Canberra inadvertently caused wireless internet and radio outages across parts of New Zealand on Wednesday, with the ship’s navigation radar interfering with Wifi from Taranaki to Marlborough. The Guardian reports that when the radar was heard on the frequency used by internet providers and radio stations, those commercial operators had to stop using the channel. The issue was resolved when HMAS Canberra changed frequencies.

05.06 Ghost nets ranging in size from 50cm to more than five metres have been uncovered along Gulf of Carpentaria coast thanks to drones and AI. The project, led by Charles Darwin University, is enabling more efficient planning, targeted net removal and improved marine debris assessments. It has surveyed nearly 84km of remote coastline and located 72 nets Charles Darwin University says.

04.06 Hackers are abusing a malicious version of a Salesforce-related app to steal data, gain access to corporate cloud services and extort companies in Europe and the Americas, Reuters reports. The Google Threat Intelligence Group says hackers have tricked employees at companies into installing the modified version of Salesforce’s Data Loaded.

03.06 Telstra has launched Australia’s first direct-to-satellite text messaging service. ABC News reports for now the service is only available to Galaxy S25 users who pay up-front, and it has some technical limitations. However, it will provide coverage for those outside lang-based 4G and 5G networks. Voice calls via LEO satellites are still two years away.

02.06 The case of a primary school teacher who is suing her former employer for almost $800,000 for wrongful dismissal, saying she was in part fired because she used her right to disconnect, is tipped to become a litmus test of the right to disconnect laws. However, 9News reports the Queensland case is unlikely to provide a definitive interpretation of the legal limits of the law, and the right to disconnect aspect is only one element of the teachers claim.

02.06 Victorian firefighters are battling IT outages with three different systems failing on 1 and 2 May, along with five separate incidents within the last week. The United Firefighters Union says issues with the Station Turn Out system, which alerts firefighters to incidents and dispatches them, including opening doors for firetrucks, and the Firecom real time information source advising on the emergency, nearby resources and location of vehicle, have impacted the ability of the service to respond to emergencies, CyberDaily reports.

02.06 La Trobe University has official switched on its Australian Centre for AI in Medical Innovation (ACAMI) supercomputer. The supercomputer will be used for AI-driven medical and biotech research, La Trobe says. It is backed by a $10m investment from the Victorian Government.

02.06 Apple has appealed against the EU’s decision requiring it to make iOS more compatible with rival products, saying the rules are ‘deeply flawed’ and a threat to user security. Apple says the requirements force it to share sensitive user data with competitors, creating security risks, MacRumors reports.

01.06 Google has called on a US judge to reject the idea it should spin off its Chrome browser as remedy after the company was found to have an illegal monopoly in search. US government attorneys are calling for the divestment of the browser, and for Google to be barred from agreements with partners like Apple and Samsung to distribute its search tools. Google, meanwhile, noted that of the around 100 witnesses at the trial, not one had said if they had more flexibility they would have installed Bing, AFP reports.

AppWrap May 2025

29.05 The technology trial for Australia’s social media ban is ‘broadly on track’ according to the government, but the company behind the age assurance trial has revealed just one type of technology has been tested on children so far, The Guardian reports. A $275,000 report the federal government commissioned last year into Australian attitudes into age assurance technology has still not been made public, despite being delivered to government on 2 January.

28.05 In her first CDR determination, Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind has found that Regional Australia Bank breached privacy safeguards even though the error was caused by its third-party provider, Biza, which had implemented a patch for faulty software, but failed to identify that RAB would be affected. Data of up to 197 consumers was ‘co-mingled’ in the incident. Kind says RAB took reasonable steps to comply with the relevant privacy safeguards, but Biza did not – nevertheless, RAB is liable for any failings, and can’t shift liability for non-compliance to Biza.

27.05 Australian edtech platform Year13 is eyeing US expansion as it bolsters its leadership with the appointment of several former Atlassian executives. Pirow Cronje joined former Atlassian product and engineering leads Nick Menere and Mark Chaimungkalanot at the company. Year13’s Career Coach ‘AI-powered’ career guidance offering, developed in partnership with Microsoft and piloted in North Carolina, is expected to rollout in Australia and internationally this year, MediaWeek says.

26.05 WiseTech Global has announced its largest ever acquisition with a US$2.1b deal to buy US rival E2open. The merger expands WiseTech’s customer base by around 5,60, including 250+ blue-chip customers, and signals a return to the founder Richard White’s strategy of expansion through acquisition, StartupDaily reports.

26.05. The eSafety commissioner has launched proceedings against a man who posted deepfake images of prominent Australian women online and is seeking a $450,000 maximum penalty imposed. Anthony Rotondo failed to remove the images while he was based in the Philippines and the commissioner launched the case when he returned to Australia, The Guardian reports. The site he posted on has been shut down.

24.05 Salesforce has reportedly restarted talks to buy data management software company Informatica and a deal if reached, could be announced next week. The two companies ditched earlier talks – which were reportedly advanced –  in April 2024 after failing to agree on terms, Reuters reports.

22.05 OpenAI is buying Apple veteran Jony Ive’s AI device startup, io, in a US$6.5 billion all-equity deal. The deal will see io’s team working on hardware that allows people to interact with OpenAI’s technologies, endgadget reports.

21.05 Victoria has allocated $14m for two AI projects in its state budget, including a $11.1m project for a regulatory digitisation and AI program to replace paper-based and outdated digital processes. A second project will pilot the technology to improve recognition of prior learning across the vocational education system, Smartcompany reports.

16.05 An electrical fault has seen Gilmour Space postpone Australia’s first home-grown orbital rocket launch. ArsTechnica reports the nose cone fell off the Eris rocket hours before it was due to launch. No one was injured and no damage was done to the rocket or launch pad. No new launch date has been set.

16.05 Academics have slammed a trial of age assurance technologies commissioned by the federal government in preparation for the introduction of a social media ban for under-16s. Fifty-three technologies are being trialled but writing in The Conversation, the academics say there are internal tensions about the trials design choices, centred on a lack of focus on ways to circumvent the technology, privacy implications and verification of vendors’ claims. ‘Unresponsiveness’ of some major tech companies in being part of the trial is also cited.

15.05 Telstra has sent 55,000 text messages through its new satellite to mobile service during testing. The service is expected to launch ‘in the coming months’, the telco says.

14.05 Up to 100 of Microsoft’s employees in Australia will be made redundant as part of the 6000 job cuts – about three percent of its 228,000 employees – being made across the global business. AFR reports that while the job losses are expected to target middle management they will hit staff at all levels of the company. The company, which has remained mum on whether AI is playing a part in the job cuts, has just under 3,000 staff in Australia. CEO Satya Nadella has previously noted that around 20-30 percent of Microsoft’s coding is now handled by software.

13.05 Tim Ayres, senator for NSW, has been sworn in as Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science, replacing Ed Husic. Ayres has previously been assistant minister for trade and for the Future Made in Australia policy, ResearchProfessionalNews reports.

10.05 Autonomous delivery robots have yet to jump the hurdle of legal status and safety concerns in Australia, with issues around their regulatory status meaning they’re largely banned in public except in a few council areas with trials in place, the Guardian reports. Delivery robots are being seen increasingly in other parts of the world, but experts says current Australian laws are unclear, making companies hesitant to bring the technologies to Australia.

09.05 Ed Husic has been dumped from his role as Minister for Industry and Science, a role he has held for all of the Albanese government’s first term. InformationAge reports the ousting is the result of factional power-plays post election.

08.05 A University of Sydney academic is warning that Meta’s new standalone Meta AI chatbot is ‘a sophisticated data harvesting tool’ to potentially sell more to users via Meta’s ecosystem of apps. Professor Uri Gal warns that Meta’s cross-platform integration private information can seamlessly flow into the company’s advertising machine to create user profiles ‘with unprecedented detail and accuracy’ and that the chatbot has the capability to become an active participation in the manipulation, with the potential for product placement in its responses. The Washington Post has warned that Meta AI keeps a copy of ‘everything’ and deleting the app’s memory is problematic.

08.05 The US Trump administration plans to rescind predecessor Joe Biden’s global AI chip export restrictions. Biden’s rule, due to take effect May 15, had seen most countries subject to caps. A Commerce spokesperson says the Biden AI rule will be replaced ‘with a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance’ Reuters reports.

08.05 A US federal jury has ordered Israeli spyware company NSO Group to pay Facebook parent Meta almost US$168 million in damages for exploiting WhatsApp to deploy its Pegasus spyware. NSO exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp’s infrastructure to silently install the spyware without requiring any action from targets other than having their devices turned on, ComputerWorld reports. Around 1,400 accounts were compromised before engineers patched the vulnerability.

06.05 New Zealand is proposing to follow Australia in banning under-16s from using social media, with a planned draft law to force social media companies to verify user age before enabling people to sign up or face $2m fines. A date for when the bill, authored by National MP Catherine Webb, will be introduced to parliament is unclear and bipartisan support will be required, the Guardian notes.

01.05 ANZ’s digital banking platform, ANZ Plus, is introducing fully passwordless web banking from mid-2025, enabling customers to use either a passkey – which could be their fingerprint, face or mobile device Pin, or by entering their mobile number and approving a log in request to their ANZ Plus app. ANZ says the passwordless offerings will make it easier for customers, while also adding an extra layer of protection.

01.05 The Australian Institute of Marine Science has gone to market seeking developers for a proof of concept that could become a digital twin of its three marine technology test ranges on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef. InnovationAus reports the initial focus will be on the ReefWorks tropical marine technology test range south of Townsville, but the digital twin may eventually scale to other ranges.

01.05 ChatGPT is adding shopping features, enabling users to see prices and reviews more easily and find direct links to purchase personalised product recommendations. BBC reports OpenAI as saying the selections will be chosen ‘independently’ and will not be ads.

01.05 Tech Booster plans for small business, promises of an increased push to get students into STEM, a new office to cut red tape and improve Australia’s global competitiveness, and crypto reforms are among the tech policies being pushed ahead of this week’s federal election. InformationAge offers up a breakdown of the contrasting policies across a number of tech areas.

01.05 Login credentials for around 100 staff at Australia’s big four banks have been compromised according to cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock. The company told ABC ‘dozens’ of compromised staff credentials were found at ANZ and Commonwealth Bank, with fewer than five at NAB and Westpac. All were stolen between 2021 and April 2025. The banks have protections in place to prevent stolen passwords being exploited but in a worst case scenario the credentials could enable initial access. The report follows one earlier this week when ABC revealed more than 31,000 customer banking passwords had been stolen across the big four banks.

AppWrap April 2025

29.04 Australians are less trusting and positive about AI than most according to research from the University of Melbourne. It found 78 percent of Australians are concerned about negative outcomes and 37 percent say they’ve personally experienced or observed negative outcomes ranging from inaccuracy, misinformation and manipulation, deskilling and loss of privacy or IP. The report also highlights low AI literacy and strong public support for AI regulation.

28.04 The first 27 of more than 3,200 planned satellites for Amazon’s US$10 billion Project Kuiper have been launched into space. The network aims to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink, which has 8,000 satellites in orbit, with 1,600 of Kuiper’s satellites expected to be up by July 2026, CNBC reports.

23.04 A 38-year-old man has been charged over the NSW Online Registry Website breach which saw almost 9,000 ‘sensitive’ court filings accessed earlier this year. The man, who has been released on bail, was charged with unauthorised access to restricted data, after files including domestic violence orders and affidavits were downloaded, NSW Police says.

22.04 NSW Police have switched off a face-matching tool, 14 years after its last update following concerns with its old algorithm. InformationAge reports NSW Police declined to reveal why the technology was paused, but it follows criticism of the Cognitec technology’s demographic bias, an audit warning about facial recognition’s risks and progress on a tender for a new biometric platform.

23.04 The EU has fined Apple €500m and Meta €200m under the Digital Markets Act legislation introduced last year to curb big tech’s power. In Apple’s case the EU Commission says the company failed to offer alternative app marketplaces to users and app developers, while Meta’s fine came for choice offered on data collection, with users forced to chose between allowing Meta to combine data collected on Facebook or Instagram, or pay a monthly subscription. The BBC reports both companies have reacted angrily, with Meta accusing the EU of attempting to handicap successful American businesses.

22.04 Australian health startups Umps Health, Vively Health and Eugene Labs will share in $2.2 million in investment from the first round of Bupa’s Ventures Fund. The three companies are at Seed and Series A funding stages, Bupa says. Umps provides proactive insights with in-home sensors to support independence and wellbeing at home, Eugene offers genetic testing and counselling and Vively has developed a wellness platform to help people understand the impact of lifestyle choices on glucose levels in real time.

19.04 An Australian couple have developed an ‘autofill’ system enabling agricultural robots to automatically fill themselves up with more pesticide or fertiliser. Farmer Andrew and Jocie Bate launched their agtech startup in 2012 and have 145 robots working on farms across Australia. They told ABC News they believe the new autofill system is a world-first.

18.04 A US judge has ruled Google has a monopoly in online advertising tech. AP reports the finding is the second time in a year that Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge, following the August 2024 decision that Google’s search engine has illegally leveraged its dominance to stifle competition. Remedy hearings in that case are scheduled to begin next week and will see lawyers aiming to have Google sell its Chrome browser.

17.04 WiseTech is reportedly under formal ASIC investigation over its founder’s share trading during a blackout period and the company’s handling of market disclosures related to misconduct allegations.

15.04 The personal data, including driver licence information, credit card details and passport information, of Australian Hertz, Thrifty and Dollar customers is among data which appears to have been compromised in a supply chain attack. The rental car company says an unauthorised third-party stole data after exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities within file-transfer vendor Cleo’s platform late last year. Hertz says it is not aware of any misuse of the information and has hired Kroll to provide two years of dark web monitoring services to potentially impacted customers.

14.04 Woolworths Group has renewed its agreement with Google Cloud for another five years to ‘further enable the power of data and insights’. The companies have worked together since 2017, Woolworths says.

14.04 Western Sydney University and University of Sydney have been hit by cyber attacks. Information Age reports the information of around 10,000 current and former students was accessed at WSU, while a hacker claims to have compromised source code at USYD.

15.04 The Australian Computer Society is calling for the next federal government to ‘connect the dots’ and take a ‘unified, national’ approach to skills and translating innovation into impact, saying they are not side issues, but central to future prosperity. In its election position paper the ACS urges fast-tracking of the National Skills Taxonomy, investment in a Digital Skills Passport and expansion of professionalism frameworks like SFIA.

14.04 The Trump administration is readying to announce ‘a special focus-type of tariff’ on smartphones, computers and other electronics products within two months, with semiconductor tariffs also planned, the Guardian reports. The new tariffs will fall outside the ‘reciprocal’ tariffs. Last week Trump exempted smartphones, computers and some electronic devices from the tariffs, including the 125 percent tariffs against Chinese imports. Semiconductor chips from China will also be the focused of a national security probe.

11.04 Canva has launched a new AI-powered spreadsheet offering, Sheets, to compete with Microsoft Excel. The offering is one part of the Australian company’s largest ever update, which also include Magic Charts to create interactive reports and animated visualisations, Canva AI to generate slides and edit photos with verbal prompts and Code for coding websites and apps, AFR reports. Canva is currently preparing for a float.

11.04 Should a zombie apocalypse ever strike, you might want to pop across the Tasman to New Zealand, where telco One NZ has been named ‘the most zombie resilient network’ by the US-based ‘historical, cultural and scientific research group’ Zombie Research Society (yes, it is a real thing – the society, not the zombies). One NZ says the award, on the back of the launch of its One NZ Satellite, is the ‘most bizarre endorsement ever’ for its mobile network.

10.04 A trial update to the NSW Digital ID and Wallet will allow users of digital photo cards to convert them into verifiable credentials. Previously, users could only store a digital copy of a photo card and the changes will provide a more secure way for people to prove their identity and age digitally sharing information through a QR code, BiometricUpdate reports.

10.04 Amazon boss Andy Jassy has defended the company’s investment in AI, saying it is necessary to remain competitive – and wants customers to invest ‘aggressively’ in AI too. The company plans to spend more than $100b on capital expenditures this year, with the vast majority of that for AWS AI capabilities, TechCrunch reports.

10.04 US president Donald Trump has issued an executive order revoking the security clearance of former CISA director Chris Krebs and cybersecurity vendor SentinelOne. Krebs, who was fired by Trump in 2020 after countering Trump’s false claims of election fraud saying they were ‘unsubstantiated or technically incoherent’, is currently SentinelOne’s chief intelligence and public policy officer. Dark Reading says Trump has ordered an investigation into Krebs’ criticism of his fraud claims.

08.04 Woolworths has bought into telehealth, investing in Perth startup Hola Health’s $6 million Series A raise. StartupDaily reports Woolworths led the raise via its Healthylife subsidiary. Hola, which offers online consultations, prescriptions, medical certificates and specialist referrals, is now Healthylife’s exclusive telehealth provider. The raise values Hola at $70 million.

08.04 An EU official has downplayed expectations over the size of fines expected for Apple and Meta for infringing digital antitrust rules, saying the issue is about compliance, not fines. Politico reports decisions in the Apple and Meta cases are expected in the coming days, with the official suggesting the fines shouldn’t be compared to those handed out for past antitrust infringements which reflected repeat offences. The DMA only came into force a year ago.

05.04 China has called time on a deal to spin off TikTok into a new US-based company, owned and operated by a majority of American investors, following US President Trump’s tariffs. AP reports White House officials believed a deal for the spin off was close but it is uncertain whether a tentative deal can be announced after the Chinese government signalled it wouldn’t approve the deal until there can be negotiations about trade and tariffs.

04.04 The NSW government will consider establishing an emerging technology commercialisation fund aligned with state priority areas as part of an ambitious ‘innovation blueprint’ which aims to help grow more unicorns and help create nearly 100,000 jobs by 2035. The Blueprint sets a target of $27 billion in additional investment for NSW over the next 10 years.

04.04 Oracle has finally admitted to suffering a serious data breach, confirming to customers that some of its cloud systems have been breached. Bloomberg reports Oracle, which initially categorically denied the incident, has told some customers that a hacker has stolen old client log-in credentials and that the FBI and cybersecurity company Crowdstrike are investigating. Credentials from as recently as 2024 are reportedly among those stolen. The incident, which is separate from the health-care hack Oracle suffered last month, came to light when a hacker offered to sell millions or lines of data allegedly from 140,000 Oracle Cloud tenants.

03.04 The Western Australia Department of Communities, which is upgrading its aging child protection CRM has been urged to upgrade access permissions and disaster recovery plans by the end of the year. ITNews reports an audit has flagged several issues with the system including around disaster recovery and an inability to obfuscate sensitive information accessible to third-party vendors.

03.04 Ransom gang KillSec has demanded ransoms from a Brisbane tech provider and a Melbourne creative content agency. InformationAge reports a portion of apparent clients for tech provider Hexicor, whose client base includes more than 1,000 government and 1,500 business customers, is included in the breach listing.

AppWrap March 2025

31.03 Canberra quantum company QuintessenceLabs has received $15m from the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund as part of a $20m funding round for the company. The AFR says the funding is earmarked to help the company expand its manufacturing facilities and grow internationally.

30.03 Ditching your mobile phone won’t stop you being distracted according to a UK study which found it’s not the devices themselves that are distracting people, but how we’ve been trained to constantly check them. ABC News reports the study found people find other ways to distract themselves when their smartphone is out of reach.

30.03 Elon Musk has sold X to his own xAI company in a US$33b all-stock deal, with Musk saying the deal with ‘unlock massive potential’ by blending xAI’s capability with X’s reach. AP reports the deal values xAI at $80b and X at $33 billion according to Musk.

27.03 CSIRO and academics at at least 13 universities have been targeted with questionnaires from US authorities about whether they have received funding from China, are undertaking climate or ‘environmental justice’ projects and more. InformationAge says US authorities have already cut funding to six Australian universities, including ANU, Monash and the University of NSW as part of the Trump administration’s war on universities.

27.03 Fulton Hogan is trialling watch-type devices with its Australian roadworkers to identify traffic threats and alert road workers of danger, RNZ says.

26.03 Around 9,000 sensitive NSW court files, including domestic violence orders and affidavits, have been accessed in a ‘major data breach’ of the NSW Online Registry website. The NSW cybercrime squad has begun an investigation and work is underway to urgently identify and contact affected users, The Guardian reports.

25.03 The ACS has welcomed tax cuts for tech professionals included in the Federal Government’s 2025 Budget. The tax relief measures for IT specialists, software engineers, cybersecurity experts and other digital professionals integral to the economy are a ‘positive step towards retaining and attracting tech talent’ and will enable them to invest more in their careers and upskill. However the ACS says it is concerned about the lack of investment and incentives for the private sector around AI.

25.03 The AFP says it accessed the controversial Auror retail surveillance system 365 times in 2024. Auror is currently under investigation by the OAIC, which had previously been looking at the AFP’s use of the system, InformationAge reports. The AFP had paused use of the Kiwi platform, but began reusing it after a privacy impact assessment was completed at the end of 2023.

23.03 Some of Australia’s biggest organisations are scrambling to check their cybersecurity after a hacker claimed to have breached Oracle Cloud and stolen credentials. Infosec company CloudSek says more than six million records, affecting more than 140,000 tenants, have been exfiltrated in the breach, which has been denied by Oracle. AFR says companies including Australia’s biggest banks, Telstra, Optus, Qantas, Woolworths, Coles and the ASX are among those named by the hacker.

21.03 The Consumer Technology Association, whose members include Microsoft, Samsung and Accenture, has joined others in lobbying for the Trump administration to retaliate against Australia for ‘harmful’ foreign tax rules, the Guardian reports. Their comments come as part of a review that will inform the looming retaliatory tariffs.

20.03 Big tech including Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon and X have lodged a formal compliant calling for the Trump administration to target ‘coercive and discriminatory’ Australian media laws. The Computer and Communications Industry Association says the news media bargaining incentive, which includes a levy for digital platforms, is requires US tech companies to subsidise Australian media companies, the Guardian reports.

19.03 Meta is vowing to curb misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes in Australia ahead of the federal elections in May. The company says it is continuing to work with AFP and the Australian Associated Press for fact checking of content across its platforms. Content debunked by fact-checkers will have warning labels attached and distribution in Feed and Explore will be reduced. A new media literacy campaign with AAP will also be run to help Australians ‘critically assess’ online content.

19.03 Google parent Alphabet is buying cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion in its biggest deal ever. The deal will see Wiz become part of the Google Cloud unit. AP says Wiz, which was started five years ago, is on track for an estimated $1 billion in revenue this year. The acquisition comes as Google faces a potential breakup of its internet empire and at a time when the Trump administration has been inserting itself into major deals such as the TikTok sale.

19.03 Meta is fighting to shut down a memoir from Kiwi whistle-blower and former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. An emergency arbitration ruling this month saw Wynn-Williams ordered to temporarily stop personally promoting or distributing copies of the book, but does not stop the publisher or its parent from distributing or promoting Careless People. Slate says the memoir is filled with scandal and a portrait of Facebook’s execs as flawed, awkward and hypocritical humans.

19.03 New Zealand has become a ‘fully playable’ destination in the Minecraft world. Six Kiwi destinations, including the Waitomo Caves, Abel Tasman National Park and Doubtful Sound, are downloadable in a move Tourism NZ says is expected to generate $50m in visitor spend this year. The content coincides with the release of A Minecraft Movie next month.

17.03 A new government-backed digital manufacturing hub has opened at Swinburne University of Technology. The hub aims to drive new AI and IoT-powered digital manufacturing technology, such as digital twins, into manufacturing. It received $5m in funding from the Australian Research Council.

17.03 Microsoft’s AI technology and policy lead for Asia and former Australian CTO, Lee Hicken has been appointed as director of the National AI Centre. Hicken says he will take on the new role in May.

13.03 ASIC is suing FIIG Securities for alleged ‘systemic and prolonged’ cybersecurity failures that enabled the theft of 385Gb of confidential data affecting 18,000 clients. ASIC says FIIG failed to take the appropriate steps, as required by an Australian Financial Services licensee to ensure it had adequate cyber risk management systems in place. Hackers entered the network in May 2023 and were not detected until several weeks later – and a week after it had been notified of potential malicious activity by the ACSC. ASIC says the matter should be a wake-up call to all companies on the danger of neglecting cybersecurity systems.

12.03 Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar is taking over as chair of the Tech Council of Australia. Farquhar, who takes over from Robyn Denholm who has led the organisation since it started in 2021, says there is ‘enormous’ potential to expand advocacy in areas including digital infrastructure and emerging technology.

15.03 OpenAI and Elon Musk have agreed to fast-track a trial over OpenAI’s ‘for profit’ shift, though a decision on whether the case will be by jury or judge-alone has been delayed, Reuters reports. Musk has accused OpenAI, which he cofounded, of straying from its founding mission of developing AI for the good of humanity, rather than corporate profit.

12.03 UK business management software provider The Access Group has snapped up Kiwi job management platforms GeoOp and GeoNext for an undisclosed sum. Geo has a strong Australian presence. The Access Group says the deal will expand its offering in ERP software.

12.03 Spain’s government has approved a draft law imposing fines of up to €35 million for not correctly labelling AI-generated content. EuroNews reports the bill classified incorrect AI labelling as a serious offence with penalties of €7.5m to €35m or 2-7 percent of a companies global turnover. Startups and medium-sized companies could receive lower penalties. The move is designed to limit deepfakes.

11.03 The Australian Financial Complaints Authority is to receive new investigative powers to consider the actions of banks receiving scam transactions. Currently scam victims can only raise a dispute with the AFCA against the bank which sent the consumer’s funds. The changes will come into effect in 12 months, the AFCA says.

07.03 A Melbourne man has been ordered to pay $34,990 in compensation and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after swindling $35,000 using the LabHost cybercrime platform which was marketed as a ‘on-stop-shop’ for phishing, the AFP says.

06.03 Google  received 258 user reports about suspected AI-generated deepfake terrorist or violent extremist material or activity generated by its Gemini AI in the 11 months to the end of Feb 2024. The figures were released by eSafety, which wants tech companies to do more when it comes to tackling terrorist and violent extremist material and activity on their platforms. The eSafety transparency report details what companies are doing to prevent misuse of their platform.

06.03 A ransomware group is threatening to publish data, including valid passport documents, it claims it has stolen from Wendy Wu Tours. CyberDaily reports that the amount of data stolen isn’t revealed on the darknet leak site, but several documents are shared as evidence of the hack including nine scans of passports belonging to residents of Australia, the UK and Germany, and a passenger pre-travel form which includes names, addresses, emergency contacts and frequent flyer numbers.

06.03 The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has dropped its investigation into the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, concluding that despite Microsoft investing billions into OpenAI and having exclusive users of some of the company’s AI products, the relationship remains the same as previously and is not subject to review under merger rules, the BBC says.

05.03 Australian organisations will spend almost $6.2 billion on information security and risk management products and services in 2025, an increase of 14.4 percent, year on year, Gartner says.

05.03 Microsoft has launched two sales AI agents to its lineup. Sales Agent and Sales Chat will initially connect to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Agent will ‘help grow your pipeline’ researching leads, reaching out to customers and setting up meetings, while Chat will provide insights from CRM data, pitch decks, meetings, emails and the web. Both will be released for public preview in May, Microsoft says.

04.03 Meta, TikTok and Snapchat have hit out at the Albanese government’s plan to exempt YouTube from a social media ban for under-16s, calling the move irrational, indefensible and a ‘sweetheart deal’. The platforms made individual submissions to a government consultation process on the ban arguing Google-owned YouTube should not be treated differently, the Guardian reports.

03.03 Microsoft is cancelling data centre leases and increasing subscription prices for 365 software by up to 45 percent, in a push to make users carry AI costs, Queensland University of Technology and UNSW Sydney academics write in The Conversation. Kevin Witzenberger and Michael Richardson say Microsoft’s moves are indicative of a change in strategy to make AI profitable by shifting the cost onto consumers in ‘non-obvious’ ways.

02.03 Thousands of Microsoft 365 customers have been hit by outages which locked many out of accounts, including Outlook and Azure. Most impact was felt in the US. AP reports Microsoft has identified a potential cause of impact and reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact.

AppWrap February 2025

28.02 Apple is introducing ‘age assurance’ technology which allows parents to input the child’s age without sharing sensitive information like birthdays. Parents can instead share a general ‘age range’ rather than an exact birthday or other identifying information, the Canberra Times reports. The offering comes as the Australian government looks to require social media platforms to take ‘reasonable steps’ to assure the age of users. Social media platforms have previously called for app stores to be required to do the checking.

27.02 The FBI says North Korea was behind the theft of around US$1.5b in Ethereum virtual assets from the Bybit cryptocurrency exchange last month. Some of the assets have been converted into Bitcoin and other virtual assets which have been dispersed across thousands of address on multiple blockchains and are expected to be further laundered and then converted to fiat currency, the FBI says.

28.02 After more than 20 years, Microsoft is shutting down Skype, which it acquired in 2011 for US$8.5b. The company, which says Skype will be retired in May, has been focusing on Microsoft Teams for a number of years.

26.02 Australian IVF company Genea says obtained an interim injunction from the Supreme Court for an injunction to attempt to prevent patient data stolen during a cyberattack earlier this month being disseminated or used. The company says its patient management systems containing patient data were accessed by an unauthorised third party but it is unknown what personal data has been compromised at this time.

25.02 A review of the SAP-based Parliamentary Expense Management System says the benefits used to justify the original $38m expense have only ‘partially’ been realised, with the results not glowing. A two-year uplift is underway to deliver missing functions in a more suer friendly way, InnovationAus reports.

24.02 A report into the ATO’s AI use has raised questions about the design and explainability of the models when flagging individuals for auditing. The Australian National Audit Office audit questions design decisions made around work-related expense models, and the extent to which the ATO can be assured models are free from bias, meet modern data ethics standards and produce easily explainable results, ITnews reports.

24.02 The Australian government is banning products and web services from Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky on all government devices and systems, saying it poses an ‘unacceptable security risk’. Canada, the UK and the US have already announced restrictions on Kaspersky software, leaving just New Zealand remaining of the Five Eyes countries. TechCrunch reports Kaspersky’s spokesperson as saying the company is disappointed with the decision with the directive which was issued without warning.

23.02 Treasurer Jim Chalmers has headed to Washington as Trump and a top trade advisor hit out at countries levying additional taxes on American tech companies. The AFR says Trump’s recent comments accusing overseas governments of plundering the revenues of US tech companies are the strongest signal yet that his administration will retaliate against Australia’s proposed media bargaining code, which would force tech platforms to pay for news or face penalties.

23.02 Hackers have stolen $1.5 billion from Dubai-based crypto platform Bybit’s Ethereum digital wallet in what is believed to be the biggest crypto theft in history. The company, which holds $20b in assets, has told users their funds were ‘safe’ and it will refund those affected, the BBC reports. Hackers ‘exploited’ security features and transferred the money to an unidentified address.

19.02 Microsoft has unveiled a quantum computing chip, which it says could bring quantum computing within years. Microsoft says the Majorana 1 chip, developed after 17 years research, features a ‘breakthrough’ material, the topoconductor, a category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter which isn’t solid, liquid or gas, The Guardian reports. Microsoft says Majorana 1 could potentially fit a million qubits onto a single chip not much bigger than a desktop CPU.The claims have, however, been questioned by some physicists, according to the WSJ.

17.02 The Albanese government is reportedly halting plans to begin designing its News Media Bargaining Incentive policy over fears of a Trump backlash. The SMH (paywalled) says the delay is due to fears the policy will be seen as being unfairly targeted towards the US and result in reciprocal tariffs on Australian exports.

15.02 OpenAI’s board has unanimously rejected a US$97 billion takeover bid by Elon Musk, saying the company is not for sale and dubbing Musk’s bid his ‘latest attempt to disrupt his competition’. AP notes Musk, an early OpenAI investor, sued for breach of contract a year ago over what he called a betrayal of OpenAi’s founding aims as a non-profit. The company is increasingly seeking to capitalise on the commercial success of generative AI, but first needs to buy out the non-profits assets. Musk was attempting to buy the non-profit.

13.02 An AI ‘Bail Assistant’ to promopt the use of correct bail criteria for NSW bail hearings has been paused after preliminary models proved problematic, with the NSW Judicial Commission deciding the assistant wouldn’t make judgements more accurate or restore public confidence. InformationAge reports that the assistant failed to incorporate all of the mandatory tests and was just as difficult for users to navigate.

12.02 Five Russians and the ZServers platform have been sanctioned by the Australian government for enabling the 2022 Medibank data breach. The five individuals are the owner of ZServers and staff members. It is the first time Australia has imposed cyber sanctions against an entity, the Australian Federal Police note.

11.02 Airservices Australia has selected Australia’s AvSoft and Yarra Drones and US-based OneSky to participate in the first round of technical integration with a new data-sharing platform designed to enable drones and other uncrewed craft to be seamlessly incorporated into Australian airspace. The Flight Information Management System will enable Airservices to share flight information between air traffic control, traditional aircraft and uncrewed airspace users, Airservices Australia says.

11.02 The US and UK have both refused to sign a declaration on ‘inclusive and sustainable’ AI at a Paris summit. Sixty other signatories, including Australia and New Zealand, France, China and Canada, signed the document which calls for priorities to ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy and sustainable. The Guardian says the UK says the statement has not gone far enough in addressing global governance of AI and its impact on national security, while the US has criticised ‘excessive regulation’ of technology and warned against cooperating with China.

11.02 US vice president JD Vance has criticised Europe’s ‘excessive regulation’ saying it could cripple the AI industry, Time reports.

11.02 Microsoft is adjusting its Office-Teams pricing in an effort to avoid an EU trust fine, Reuters reports. The company has offered to widen the price differential between Office with Teams and without Teams in a move which could help rivals offer their own products at competitive prices and entice users to switch to them.

10.02 University of NSW’s Bronwyn Fox and Australia’s Temporary AI Expert Group are among those who have contributed to a new 300-page International AI Safety Report. The report looks at risks and safety of general-purpose AI risks including large-scale labour market impacts, scams, non-consensual imagery, bias, hacking and loss of control over AI. It notes a need for policymakers and governments to have access to the current scientific understanding on risks and calls for global collaboration to take advantage of opportunities.

08.02 Meta is cutting five percent of its workforce – or potentially around 4,000 jobs – on Monday as part of its performance-based job cuts. Workers in more than a dozen countries outside the US will be notified via work and personal emails and will lose access to systems within an hour of being informed, Business Insider says.

07.02 Some Australian Salesforce staff are among those impacted by the company’s lay-off of 1,000 staff, ARN says. It says it appears some partner account managers have been laid off.

05.02 AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda’s Khuda Family Foundation has made the largest ever donation to the University of Sydney, donating $100m to fund a 20-year program to create a pathway for Western Sydney girls into Stem careers. The University says it is one of the largest investments in women in Stem globally and will include tutoring, mentoring and university scholarships.

06.02 Workday is laying off 1,750 employees, or around 8.5 percent of its global workforce, saying it is realigning resources in light of increasing demand for AI and its potential to drive growth for Workday, FastCompany reports.

05.02 The Australian Cyber Security Centre has joined other Five Eyes agencies in issuing a ‘publication series’ on securing edge devices after observing an increase in targeted attacks on the devices. It has released four documents, covering mitigation strategies for edge devices for both executives and practitioners, security consideration for edge devices and guidance on digital forensics and protective monitoring specifications for producers of network devices and appliances. “Failing to secure these network perimeters is equivalent to leaving doors open,” ACSC says.

05.02 DeepSeek has been banned from all government devices and systems over security risks. The government says the ban is not due to the app’s Chinese origins but instead because of the ‘unacceptable risk’ it poses to national security, the BBC reports. It is unclear if the ban includes the wider public sector, such as schools.

04.02 Salesforce is cutting 1,000 jobs – while continuing a hiring push for AI-focused sales roles. Bloomberg says it is unclear which divisions will be impacted, and staff will be able to apply for other jobs within Salesforce. The company had nearly 73,000 staff a year ago.

04.02 The government has postponed plans to toughen online safety requirements for platforms until after the election. A government review has recommended penalties of up to five percent of global annual turnover or $50 million, for breaching duty of care but the regime will require legislation, with no timeline to legislate before the election, ABC says. There is also no timeline for revealing whether the fine regime will be adopted.

04.02 Mastercard plans to phase out credit card numbers by 2030, replacing them with tokenisation and biometric authentication. AMP Bank will offer Australia’s first numberless cards with others expected to follow, Queensland University of Technology academics note in The Conversation.

03.02 The ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre is warning of email scammers impersonating the ACSC, asking recipients to provide personal information, money or download software. It says organisations or individuals impacted and needing assistance should contact it.

03.02 A crackdown on outsourcing has saved NSW $450m. The bulk of the savings came from controls to limit the number of individual contractors doing the work of public servants, InnovationAus reports.

03.02 The Australian government has renewed its whole-of-government cloud sourcing deal with AWS for a further three years. The first AU$39m agreement, signed in 2019 ended up costing nearly $391m and was expanded in 2022 in a $174m deal. No price was given for the new deal, which the DTA says will reduce time, effort and resources to procure AWS services.

03.02 ASIC has launched an investigation into a December outage of the ASX’s embattled Chess system. The outage saw settlement of trading delayed and was blamed on a network issue that had remained undetected for nearly a decade. It paid out around $1m in rebates for the failure. The ASX says it has been notified of the investigation.

AppWrap January 2025

31.01 The US Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to block HPE’s proposed US$14b acquisition of Juniper Networks, citing antitrust concerns. HPE and Juniper both say they will ‘vigorously defend’ the deal in court.

29.01 The Australian government has granted $6.4 million to the not-for-profit cyber threat intelligence provider CI-ISAC to establish a health-focused cybersecurity threat sharing network. CI-ISAC (Critical Infrastructure – Information Sharing and Analysis Centre) has developed a health cyber sharing network with the funding, aiming to protect Australia’s health sector from cyber threats through enhanced collaboration and intelligence sharing, Australian Cyber Security reports.

29.01 The National Reconstruction Fund has taken a $32m equity investment in medical AI company Harrison.ai. The funding will ensure the company continues to base its operations in Australia and will enable it to continue its global expansion and further develop its suite of radiology and pathology diagnostic capabilities, the NRF says.

28.01 US President Trump has claimed Microsoft is in discussions to buy TikTok’s US operations. Trump made the claim to reporters aboard Air Force One. He signed an executive order extending the deadline for ByteDance to divest from TikTok a day after a law banning it came into effect. The outcome of the proposed deal is expected to be revealed in the coming days, Newsweek says.

28.01 Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler has been named digital economy and science shadow minister as part of a reshuffle by opposition leader Peter Dutton. Chandler takes over the role from Paul Fletcher, who is leaving politics at the forthcoming federal election. Western Sydney MP Melissa McIntosh has also been promoted to the role of shadow minister for communications, StartupDaily reports.

25.01 TechnologyOne founder Adrian Di Marco and Professor Bronwyn Fox, deputy vice chancellor of research and enterprise at the University of NSW are among those recognised in the Australia Day Honours. Two former NASA employees, Curtin University of Technology’s Leonie Rennie and the RAAF’s Brad Sheldon were also among those honoured for technology-related work, InformationAge reports.

24.01 Road Ninja, a Kiwi developed subscription online marketplace for commercial drivers, is expanding into Australia, focusing on the fly-in, fly-out driving jobs in the mining sector. The company claims to have onboarded more than 500 drivers and 100 companies in its first year in New Zealand, facilitating more than $1 million in transactions, NZ Trucking reports.

23.01 Australian tech workers are the highest paid workers in Australia, earning $20/hour more than the average employee according to Employment Hero’s SmartMatch Employment Report. Science and tech sector wages were up four percent in December, month on month, and six percent yoy, InformationAge reports.

20.01 Disaster experts are urging Australian governments to invest heavily in new technologies such as firefighting drones, water gliders, AI-powered fire detection, remote sensors, satellites and live feeds to fire fighters to fight future fires in Australia. Experts are calling for a multi-layered approach to hit fires early and stop them exploding into mega-blazes, ABC News reports.

23.01 LinkedIn is being sued for disclosing customer information to train AI models. The class action filed on behalf of millions of premium users alleges the Microsoft-owned platform disclosed private messages to third parties without permission to train models, and then attempted to ‘cover their tracks’ by quietly introducing a privacy setting  to enable or disable sharing, and updating its privacy policy, Reuters reports.

23.01 US President Donald Trump has announced a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to build a network of data centres and the infrastructure to power AI development in the US. The Guardian reports the move comes just a day after Trump reversed predecessor Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety standards.

17.01 Canberra Commonwealth Bank of Australia customers will be able to share their Medicare credentials for identity verification in one of the first proof of concepts for the Trust Exchange (TEx). IDTechWire reports participants will be able to use the myGov app to scan a QR code and share verified information from a test Medicare card, with the bank receiving government-verified details, but not sensitive information such as Medicare numbers. TEx aims to reduce the need to share personal information and hard copy documents.

13.01 Microsoft 365 users have taken to Reddit to discuss ‘workarounds’ to avoid being automatically upgraded to more expensive Microsoft plans, featuring AI, after the vendor began hiking prices by up to 45 percent. Microsoft says existing subscribers on recurring billing can switch to plans without Copilot or AI credits, or for a limited time to M365 Personal Classic or Family Classic plans, but some users have complained that Microsoft hasn’t made it clear that automatically moving to the more expensive plans with AI features could be avoided, InformationAge reports.

06.01 Canberra-based hyperscale cloud computing provider Vault Cloud has received a $22.5 million investment from the National Reconstruction Fund. The investment is the first in the NRF’s defence capability priority area, the NRF says.

For 2024 news from around the web head over to the 2024 AppWrap archive.

The post Appwrap: Reddit social challenge, CSIRO cuts continue despite funding, and govt AI use appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Raymond Dickinson, SailPoint New Zealand country manager says identity security is no longer a technical control and just a layer of defence in a multi-layered stack. Today, it’s the organising principle of cyber resilience.

“Every user, system, device and process now relies on identity as their control point,” he says.

“You’ve really got to start looking at what is the unique area you do have control over, and that’s identity – because every person has an identity that needs to be managed. Every machine has an account or identity that needs to be managed. Every agent has one as well.”

“Identity security has shifted from being a technical control to the organising principle of cyber resilience.”

The shift is being driven by the decentralisation of IT. With users connecting directly to cloud services and software-as-a-service platforms – often outside the purview of IT – traditional perimeter-based security is no longer enough. Identity is the new perimeter.

By managing identity properly, organisations can enforce least privilege and reduce the risk of breach while also reducing damage should a breach occur.

“The lower the amount of access someone has means when there is a breach, you’re really reducing the amount of damage that is going to happen to an organisation.”

Many organisations, though, are still grappling with the basics.

SailPoint’s latest Horizons of Identity Security report shows 63 percent of organisations globally are still stuck in basic identity maturity. Dickinson says in New Zealand and, to a lesser extent Australia, may be even further behind.

“A lot of organisations here are still looking at the very early stages of identity and access management – they’re still really looking at multifactor identification (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) – so we are in many cases a long way behind.”

He says many organisations still don’t realise the importance of identity governance and how it can uplift their cybersecurity maturity.

“They still seem to think that your average Microsoft Active Directory group is enough to achieve a lot of these outcomes. And it’s just not. It can’t give them the control, the governance and that real uplift that you get from a mature enterprise-wide identity security platform.”

Identity as a productivity engine

While identity security is critical for reducing risk, Dickinson says it also delivers serious business benefits, especially when it comes to productivity.

Automating joiner-mover-leaver processes mean new staff get access faster, internal moves are seamless and leavers are properly offboarded, cutting down on licence waste and security gaps.

“The leaver one is super important so you can ensure all their access has been revoked and you’re not having an account that is still active and may not be adhering to password policies and so on. It’s a key area where a lot of money and time is saved.”

Meanwhile, faster onboarding and provisioning means new hires and contractors can hit the ground running – improving customer experience and accelerating project delivery.

“Security often gets blamed for slowing things down,” Dickinson says. “But identity governance actually speeds things up. It’s a win-win.”

Automating user access reviews is also a key business benefit gained from identity security – bolstering accuracy while also reducing time.

“One organisation spent six months of the year going through doing access reviews, and then after six months, they start the next one. It’s a lot of time and effort that goes into sorting these things out.”

With identity governance, that becomes a continuous, automated process.

The benefits extend to cost savings too. With SaaS use exploding, many organisations are unknowingly paying for licenses tied to inactive accounts. Identity governance helps eliminate that waste revoking access as soon as someone leaves.

Despite the benefits, many organisations are still exposed. Over-provisioned access, unmanaged SaaS and shadow IT are common culprits, but one of the biggest risks is third-party access, Dickinson says, pointing to recent high-profile third-party breaches.

“Visibility over third parties is a critical gap. It’s an area where a lot of organisations still have someone manually managing the onboarding process and it’s just held in a spreadsheet.”

That opens the doors for people having too much access to systems, and accounts not being removed later on.

“It’s becoming a real issue for most people and it’s a real challenge for retail as well, because they have a lot of transient workers coming through and managing the onboarding and offboarding of those individuals is really hard.”

Machine identities and bots are another emerging threat as attackers increasingly target non-human accounts, increasing the critical need for visibility and governance.

Making the case to the C-suite

So how can businesses convince stakeholders outside of IT, such as the CFO, COO and risk managers, that identity security is worth the investment?

Dickinson says it’s not an easy sell unless you’ve got someone who has prior experience with identity governance.

“If they don’t there’s a lot of learning that needs to be done through that journey. It comes back to that lack of awareness and education within a lot of companies about the value of what identity governance can actually do for them.

“It’s the chicken and egg scenario – they haven’t seen it before so they don’t think it can achieve the objectives or outcomes.You’ve got to educate them before they’re actually ready to move forward.”

For many organisations, compliance is the lever that gets identity governance over the line.

“If they’re missing or failing compliance audits, that’s when [they say] ‘we have to get this done’.”

He recommends three key steps for building a compelling business case:

• Understand your cybersecurity objectives and frameworks

“Map those key framework controls back to how they link to an identity security platform… that will help you articulate back to the business why you need to invest.”

• Engage with other departments

“Go and talk to the CFO, go and talk to the head of risk. Understand their challenges. Look at how you can map them back to an identity security platform.”

• Quantify the value

“Sit down and understand what your current processes look like and what they are costing you today. If you were to put in a new identity security platform, what savings can be achieved?”

Even if the investment is net neutral, Dickinson says most business leaders will support a project that accelerates operations.

“Most business owners go ‘That’s great, so we’re going to do a security project that’s net neutral when most others cost a lot of money!’”

The post Cyber resilience begins with modern identity security appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The New Zealand Telecommunications Forum’s (TCF) Annual Report 2025 – which largely pulls together stats from other organisations – shows New Zealand is one of the highest adopters of fixed wireless broadband in the OECD, with use of the technology surging as copper connections decline.

The Commerce Commission’s (ComCom) latest Telecommunications Monitoring Report says two-thirds of those moving to 4G fixed wireless have moved from a fibre connection, with the largest proportion of those shifting from Fibre 300, followed by Fibre Max. Just seven percent shift from the entry-level Fibre 50 (now Fibre 100) plan.

Uptake of low earth orbit satellite services is now three percent of total market share, and 19 percent of rural connections, while five percent – some 92,000 – are still on copper. The entire Chorus copper network is due to be retired by 2030.

Eighty-seven percent of Kiwis have access to fibre.

The report shows telco costs rose 7.4 percent between January 2018 and January 2025. Electricity, by comparison, is up 17.8 percent.

The report figures however, were taken prior to price hikes by providers including Spark, Skinny, 2degrees and Slingshot last month and OneNZ’s hikes earlier in the year. The ComCom report says between them the three main telcos (Spark, OneNZ and 2degrees) hold 75 percent of the urban broadband market. (Energy providers Mercury and Contact now rank fourth and fifth, respectively, having doubled their market share from six percent to 13 percent over the past five years.)

The August hikes came just weeks after network operator Chorus upped internet speeds on its popular Home Fibre Starter, Home Fibre 50 and Home Fibre 300 plans at no extra charge.

The ComCom report noted that while most fibre customers subscribe to Fibre 300, the strongest recent growth has been at the budget and premium ends of the market – Fibre 50 (now Fibre 100) and Fibre Max, driven by cost-of-living pressures and evolving needs.

Monthly data use is also continuing to climb. The country is consuming nearly 10.5 million terabytes of data a year via fixed broadband and more than 400,000TB in mobile data usage.

The average monthly usage per connection has hit 648 gigabytes – up from 12GB in 2011, and well ahead of Australia’s average of 443GB per fixed broadband service in 2023.

“If this rapid growth continues, typical usage could reach one terabyte per month by 2028,” the TCF says. While the pandemic caused dramatic spikes in data consumption between 2019 and 2021, today’s usage has surpassed even those record peaks.

The Commerce Commission has flagged ongoing concerns with the challenges in changing plans between providers, saying broadband switching rates remain low and have worsened over the past year. Just 11 percent of broadband users changed plans in the past year, compared to 19 percent in electricity. For those who did switch, dissatisfaction with the process was high at 32 percent. Less than half of those switching from one of the three largest telcos stayed with a top three telco, with smaller providers, including the energy bundlers, gaining the lion’s share of switched connections.

“On the flipside, we can say that there are more than 100 retailer providers that these consumers can choose from, yet almost half of them decide on a largest three provider.”

Mobile growth

Mobile is also experiencing change. The 3G networks will shut down from the end of this year.

Customers are turning increasingly to on-account, or post-paid, plans, over prepaid, matching rising data needs and more advanced handset options, with the on-account plans often including more generous data allowances.

Eighty percent of customers are now on unlimited voice and SMS plans.

Text messaging is also on the downward slide, with traditional SMS dropping from 6.5 billion/month in 2018 to less than four billion/month in 2024 as messaging apps gained a foothold.

The report also notes the proliferation of scams: $1.6 billion was lost by Kiwis due to online threats in 2024 according the National Cyber Security Centre’s Cyber Security Insights report 2025.

The Department of Internal Affairs has partnered with Apple, 2degrees, One NZ, Spark and communications platform as a service provider Modica to provide a one-click reporting tool for users to report suspicious messages direct to DIA. The initiative works with iPhone 14 (mobile provider dependent), 15 and 16, updated to iOS 18.2 and enables users to select ‘report junk’ on suspicious messages and have the details shared directly with DIA.

The post Kiwis take to skies for broadband appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Smart’s CIO of the Year win came on the back of a ‘comprehensive transformation of Southern Cross Travel Insurance’s core systems’ with the judges praising her as an inspiring leader whose vision and strategic execution have delivered measurable growth and positioned the company for an ambitious new five-year strategy with technology as a true driver of business success.

Smart was one of two female health leaders to take out awards on the night

Hamish Archer, chief digital officer of WEL Networks; Sean O’Donoghue, CIO of BestStart Educare and Stephen Kurzeja, chief technology information officer for 2degrees, were finalists in the CIO of the Year category.

Smart was one of two female health leaders to take out awards on the night, with Stasha Rmandic, New Zealand Telehealth Services  head of analytics and insights beating out Fiona Millar from Christchurch International Airport, and Henry Chen from Yes Energy to take out the Emerging ICT Leader award. The award is presented to future leaders, under the age of 35.

Judges noted Rmandic’s ‘dynamic’ leadership of a high-performing team delivering strategic insights for critical decisions in a 24/7 virtual care environment, and recognised her as a values-driven leader passionate about health equity and using data to create meaningful change.

New Zealand Health Teleservices Whakarongorau Aotearoa was also a finalist for the Innovation Leadership through an Emerging Technology category, losing out to Hamilton City Council, which has used emerging technologies to create a high-resolution, predictive model for capturing and applying tree canopy data.

Elle Archer, whose current roles include as director of the electrotechnology and IT establishment advisory Industry Skills Board and a member of the executive council of AgriTech NZ, was the final individual honoured on the night receiving this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Technology and Business in New Zealand. Archer is also chair of Te Hapori Matihiko, and has worked extensively for Māori innovation.

The annual awards recognise exceptional leadership, transformative projects and impactful contributions across New Zealand’s tech sector with awards presented across seven key categories.

Finalists in the awards are selected based on a review of their written submissions and then face an independent judging panel of Kiwi ICT and business community.

AA Insurance’s win came in the Business Transformation through Digital and IT category, with the company modernising a complex, legacy business in a move judges said was not ‘merely an upgrade, but a truly transformative project’.

Auckland Transport’s HOP Open Loop project, which allows commuters to pay for public transport using contactless bank cards and digital wallets, won the organisation the Excellence in Customer Value award, ahead of Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Lightwire.

But while F&P Healthcare missed out on that award, they quickly scooped up the Best ICT Team Culture and Inclusion award.

The final award, for Community Tech Champions, went to Digital Future Aotearoa for its work on initiatives such as Recycle a Device and Code Club Aotearoa, and efforts to provide digital skills for the next generation and pathways into tech for underrepresented communities.

The full list of winners is:

NZ CIO of the Year

Winner:

Alexandra Smart, Chief Technology Officer, Southern Cross Travel Insurance

Finalists:

Hamish Archer – chief digital officer, WEL Networks

Sean O’Donoghue – chief information officer, BestStart Educare

Stephen Kurzeja – chief technology information officer, 2degrees

Emerging ICT Leader of the Year

Winner:

Stasha Rmandic, Whakarongorau Aotearoa New Zealand Telehealth Services

Finalists:

Fiona Millar, digital transformation manager, Christchurch International Airport

Henry Chen, principal analyst and data scientist, Yes Energy

Business Transformation through Digital and IT

Winner:

AA Insurance

Finalists:

2degrees

Foodstuffs South Island

Excellence in Customer Value

Winner:

Auckland Transport

Finalists:

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare

Lightwire

Innovation Leadership through an Emerging Technology

Winner:

Hamilton City Council

Finalist:

Whakarongorau Aotearoa New Zealand Telehealth Services

Best ICT Team Culture and Inclusion

Winner:

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare

Finalists:

Fletcher Building

2degrees

Community Tech Champions

Winner:

Digital Future Aotearoa

Finalists:

Talent Rise

Women in Data Science New Zealand

Outstanding Contribution to Technology and Business In New Zealand

Elle Archer

The post Leadership, transformation and impact awarded at NZ CIO Awards appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

“Identity security is an enabler for digital transformation. It is a foundation for cloud adoption, hybrid work and zero trust and enables you to transform your business so much faster,” says Dickinson, SailPoint New Zealand country leader.

“Without it, every project hits friction, risk or delay because teams just can’t move fast enough because at the end of the day, when people need to get access to the cloud there is an identity that needs access into that cloud.”

The discipline focuses on managing and protecting digital identities, ensuring the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons. It extends beyond just managing usernames and passwords, providing context aware, policy-driven controls enforcing a least-privilege access model for each digital identity.

While most local companies are currently managing cloud adoption manually, Dickinson says managing identity via a single tool enables cloud adoption to be dramatically sped up.

“Identity security is an enabler for digital transformation. It’s a foundation for cloud adoption, hybrid work and zero trust”

One area of identity security Dickinson believes has particularly big benefits for business and users alike is lifecycle management, or ‘joiner, mover leaver’, streamlining user on- and offboarding, improving productivity and creating a more secure, efficient and agile environment for businesses.

“It automates the processes of new hires to get the right access from day one, enabling them to be productive and feel like they are delivering value from day one, which has a huge user experience impact.”

That extends throughout their time with the organisation – if they change roles or are temporarily assigned to help another team, they can gain the access they need quickly and easily.

Access can be instantly deprovisioned when they leave the organisation.

Also included is the facility to enable users to self-service and for requests to be routed to the appropriate person for approval and for policies to be enforced; risk-based access controls to ensure dynamically based access is provisioned; and integration with MFA (multi-factor authentication) and single sign on to deliver strong authentication at the first log-on and simplify access across all apps.

Alongside the business transformation benefits are the cybersecurity benefits, protecting digital identities from unauthorised access, misuse and cyberattacks, and ensuring only authorised individuals and systems can access data and applications, helping prevent cyber risks including data breaches, account takeovers, and financial fraud.

Dickinson likens it to having a smart, evolving security guard at every digital door in your organisation, constantly checking who users are, what they should have access to, whether they are still authorised to be there and whether their behaviour is normal.

But while identity security has been a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity for several years, Dickinson says it remains one of the most overlooked areas for New Zealand organisations, with Kiwi organisations ‘significantly’ trailing Australian counterparts in identity security.

Part of that is down to the idea we’re not likely to be a target at the bottom of the world, and the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, which he says has created complacency around cyberthreats, especially those originating from internal mismanagement, like identity misuse.

Adding to that complacency is the lack of regulation in New Zealand, compared to Australia, where regulatory risk drives greater cyber focus.

But Dickinson says even without the regulatory risk, there are plenty of good reasons for Kiwi businesses to be embracing identity security, including the business risks of doing nothing, with potential for data breaches from misused or excessive access.

“Without identity governance users – especially contractors and leavers – can often have too much access for far too long. Stolen credentials for insider misuse can go undetected and cause significant harm and that’s a risk we’ve seen here before.”

In the event of a breach, figuring out how someone got in, where they went, what they did also takes much longer without an identity security platform in place, Dickinson says.

SailPoint research suggests that every dollar invested in identity security delivers disproportionately higher returns. Unlike traditional cybersecurity spend which typically delivers linear returns, identity security spend can ‘bend the curve’, delivering more value than investments in other cyber capabilities, according to SailPoint’s Horizons of Identity Security 2024-2025 report.

Those disproportionately higher returns are observed through business value and productivity, alongside the higher risk reduction, with the report showing more advanced companies were seeing accelerated time to market and reduced friction, while productivity gains for mature identity security users were 22 percent higher than less mature organisations.

For organisations keen to get started in identity security – or to level up their existing identity security work – Dickinson says a key starting point is an identity maturity assessment to understand their current state, what is working, what is manual and where there are risks.

“Identity security is critical to any security strategy today, but it extends well beyond just cybersecurity benefits,” Dickinson says. “If it’s not already in your strategy, you need to be thinking about how you are going to do it and do it well.”

The post Identity security as a business transformer appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Data performs a critical function within these industries, albeit one that has seen less digital transformation than other segments in recent years. Because of this, there is pressure on leaders to lunge for an AI project as a means to quickly manifest efficiencies in their operations.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly.”

However, whether organisations are curious, excited, motivated, or feeling like they’re under boardroom duress to deploy an AI solution into their asset management workflows, strategic considerations about how best to integrate these tools must come first.

Digital transformation is not a small undertaking, nor should it be about technology in and of itself, especially for companies managing critical infrastructure and assets potentially worth billions.

Hype Cycles, distractions and trust If you ask Scott McGowan, CEO of Australian asset management solutions firm COSOL, what he thinks of AI, he’ll tell you it represents a lot of potential in the asset management sector. However, he’ll also tell you not to run out and invest in an AI solution just because your board thinks you should.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly.”

Observing the proliferation of AI adoption hype across industry events, social media and the press, McGowan is concerned that market pressures might push organisations in asset-centric industries to try and run with AI before they can walk.

“Everyone expects everyone to build an AI division in-house, but if you’re a mining or infrastructure company, the reality is that’s not your core business,” he says. “Your core business is to produce iron, or coal, or copper, or to run trains and provide services to the public.”

Without reason or a roadmap, the discourse around AI integration often represents an unwelcome distraction from the primary mission of asset-centric industries.

Adoption pressures are being met with a degree of hesitation from business leaders, McGowan adds, due to the somewhat untested nature of AI in an asset management context and an absence of established trust.

“Hesitation toward AI probably comes from multiple aspects, but they all come back to one underlying principle, which is around trust,” he says. “Trust in security, trust in algorithms, and trust in data.”

“Trust is built on experience and understanding, and I think the challenge we have with AI as it stands today, is that the algorithms are designed in such a way that there’s little to no transparency as to the decision-making methodology those algorithms have.

“Data foundations must also be trusted, and solutions that act on that data must be trusted to do so correctly. Organisations need to trust that any solution they adopt is repeatable, robust and resilient.”

Exploring a path forward for AI in asset-centric industries will be the subject of a series of roundtables that COSOL, in partnership with IBM, will be running across three Australian cities in June. While the sessions are closed, select insights are set to be released highlighting discussions, pain points and strategies business leaders face.

Ahead of the events, COSOL’s McGowan touched on some of the issues set to be covered during the campaign.

First Steps: Learning to Walk with AI

AI transformation is a journey, not a big bang project. Organisations that approach their AI maturity through a lens of a walk-jog-run approach based on the true needs of the business are much more likely to find value in implementation versus those that seek shiny solutions.

In the first instance, the walk phase, McGowan urges that AI has to be solving an existing problem.

“There are a lot of AI initiatives and a lot of technologies looking for a problem; I think that’s the wrong way to go about it,” he says.

“The walk concept is solving a discrete problem that already lies within the technology space. If you think about self-solving and trust in data, using AI to resolve, infer, continually assess or optimise data quality is an interesting place to start.

“Through this approach AI starts to solve its own trust problem. The opportunity around master data quality and the ability to link physical equipment with digital representations for accuracy is in my view the first part of the AI journey.”

David Small, Principal Sales Leader for IBM Automation Software in Australia and New Zealand, echoes the need for organisational data layers to be updated and as accurate as possible to enable smarter asset management.

“Without quality data, organisations will struggle to achieve key benefits as they move along the asset maturity curve,” he says. “Data is the building block that asset management systems need.

“The direction that IBM has taken is to embed AI capability within the Maximo Application Suite vs saying to organisations go and build your own AI capability.

These AI enhancements are integrated AI experiences that deliver immediate value, increase productivity and seamlessly scale.”

Adding capability and building an AI-integrated business

Looking further into an AI modernisation program, companies might look to select an AI partner to help them further investigate ways and means AI can be implemented, be it in a proof of concept, or solving discrete problems.

Partnering with someone who specialises in AI can help companies build capability within the business from a cross-functional perspective.

“This phase is around automation of things like low-value tasks, work order administration, and master data creation as examples,” McGowan says.

“AI tools can bring forward understanding how to take a piece of equipment and represent it digitally and accurately.”

These types of initiatives should not be about solving technology problems but enhancing the operational capability of the business.

Of course, McGowan notes that strategy will need to be changed to enable technology to solve business problems. This may mean redefining the operating model and job descriptions around the purpose of AI.

“I can almost see a place where you define a job description for the AI agent or component, and it performs that task, has regular performance reviews, learns from its mistakes, and is managed like anyone else in a business,” he says.

Playing the long game

The warning to ‘innovate or be left behind’ is regularly bandied around with new technologies.

While McGowan notes the AI opportunity in asset management represents considerable potential, he feels strongly that it must be driven by practical business needs, organisational fit and readiness, rather than hype.

“The potential for AI particularly in the asset management space is almost endless, because largely the sector has not gone through as many digital revolutions that other industries and sectors have gone through,” he says.

“There are opportunities to do things like provide real-time feedback around avoiding potential incidents, or automating non-value-adding tasks.

“But it’s important that when we talk about driving efficiency with AI that we evolve our thinking in terms of what it means for careers and jobs and tasks and working to make those AI-infused rather than AI-replaced.

“We need to look at evolving the operating model to support the introduction of efficiency gains from AI and then driving your valued labour to much higher value tasks.”

This messaging will be central in COSOL’s upcoming roundtable series in Australia over the coming weeks.

With asset management leaders coming together to discuss the pivotal role of AI in shaping the future, valuable insights are guaranteed to emerge.

Many of these insights will be shared in an upcoming report. To register to receive these learnings, click this link.

The post Don’t run before you can walk with AI appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The deal will see integrate M-Files intelligent automation with local support in an effort to help local business unlock insights from their data.

“For so long, businesses have been document-centric and, as they digitise, they need to bridge the gap in systems and processes from documents to data.”

The M-Files platform links repositories and systems to provide a holistic 360-degree view of data across an organisation, making information manageable and accessible from a single platform and automating processes.

James Dickinson, Unisphere NZ managing director, says businesses, so long document-centric, need to bridge the gap in systems and processes from documents to data, as they digitise.

“M-Files is the ideal solution for Unisphere NZ to support how businesses work now and into the increasingly digitised future,” Dickinson says.

The system automates processes, from document creation and management to workflow automation and external collaboration.

Dickinson says the deal will help Unisphere’s local clients streamline operations, enhance security and ‘achieve truly intelligent information management’.

M-Files has claimed its customers see a 70 percent increase in workflow efficiency and 50 percent better document searches – aided by AI and metadata.

Unisphere NZ will get direct access to M-Files’ advanced technology resources, specialised training and ongoing support as part of the M-Files partner program, enabling it to expand its solution portfolio and offer enhanced business outcomes.

“M-Files’ robust metadata-driven platform lets Unisphere NZ scale its offerings rapidly, drive greater value in client engagements and further solidify its market position,” the company says.

Chris Smith, M-Files APAC senior manager partner sales, says Unisphere’s expertise in optimising business processes ‘aligns perfectly’ with M-Files’ vision to transform knowledge work through intelligent automation.

“This new collaboration marks a turning point in how businesses leverage technology to drive growth, streamline operations and transform how organisations work in a digital age,” Smith says.

The post Unisphere looks to bridge document-data gap appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap December 2024

14.12 A US appeals court has rejected an emergency bid by TikTok to stop a US ban requiring parent company ByteDance to divest in the app by 19 January 2025. If it fails to comply with the demand for divestiture, Tiktok will be banned in the US. Reuters reports that unless the Supreme Court reverses the decision TikTok’s fate now lies in the hands of US president Joe Biden, who could grant a 90-day extension to the divestiture deadline, and then Donald Trump.

13.12 Big tech companies will be forced to pay local publishers for content hosted on their platform, or face higher taxes under planned new rules. BBC reports the scheme, the design of which is yet to be finalised, will apply to sites including Facebook, Google and TikTok and will require tech companies to pay, even if they don’t enter into deals with publishers.

11.12 The government is unveiling new rules which could see big tech fined for refusing to pay Australian publishers for content. The SMH says the move, expected to be officially announced on Thursday, will put pressure on platforms to honour a bargaining code with publishers or face the risk of being forced to pay to keep operating in Australia. Deals under an existing news media bargaining code established in 2021 are running out, sparking fears Australian publishers could lose $1b over four years.

10.12 An algorithmic worker performance management program has been blamed in part for a 17 day strike which has cost Woolworths’ $140m. InformationAge reports distribution centre workers were unhappy with the platform, which the union says is based on digital surveillance and led to a sharp uptick in automation and digital surveillance in the workplace. A new agreement which does away with the use of digital surveillance to punish workers for the speed of work has been agreed .

10.12 Canberra’s Quantum Brilliance has received $13 million investment from the National Reconstruction Fund. The diamond quantum technology company will use the funding to create one of the world’s first foundries for quantum diamond devices, the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation says. It is the second NRF investment, following the $40m allocated to Russel Mineral Equipment last month.

09.12 Melbourne cybersecurity managed services provider Cythera Cyber Security is being acquired by Kiwi cybersecurity provider Bastion Security for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition creates a 150 strong dedicated cybersecurity business with more than 400 enterprise customers across A/NZ, Cythera says.

06.12 The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued two advisories calling on organisations to choose secure and verifiable tech. One paper covers secure-by-design considerations for digital products and services, while the second is aimed at senior leaders to assist in making ‘better informed’ ICT procurement assessments and decisions. The advisories call for organisations to demand manufacturers provide products and services that are secure-by-design and secure-by-default.

05.12 Attura is acquiring Sydney manufacturing ERP specialist ComActivity in a deal comprising $9m in cash with an earn out consideration of up to $5.5m. ComActivity’s solutions are based on Infor’s M3 suite. Attura says the deal will strengthen its ERP offerings, providing more options for manufacturing clients and expanding Attura’s Infor M3 capabilities from its existing capabilities in Infor Pathway. Last week Attura snapped up Plan B.

05.12 The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has issued an RFI as it gears up to replace its SAP finance system following the failure of the GovERP project. ITnews reports DFAT is exploring options for a front-end system and hosting platform.

04.12 The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning over the Salt Typhoon telco hacking, allegedly instigated by China and affecting ‘dozens’ of countries. The advisory is largely targeted at communications infrastructure providers, but notes that it may also be applicable to organisations with on-prem enterprise equipment, and encourages them to apply the best practices outlined in the guidance. It notes Cisco-specific features are often being targeted and includes specific guidance for those running Cisco.

04.12 Gartner says 45 percent of B2B tech buyers used GenAI to help choose their technology, with the analyst firm warning that an over-reliance on GenAI for tech buying increases the likelihood of buyer regret. CRN reports buyers who saw GenAI as the most valuable source of information for tech purchases were significantly more likely to end up with purchase regret or without a ‘high-quality deal’.

04.12 Home Affairs has released a consultation paper with five ‘guiding principles’ aimed at embedding a zero trust culture across government. The principles include identifying and managing cyber security risk at an enterprise level, knowing and understanding your most critical and sensitive tech assets and going beyond incident planning.

02.12 Australian tech and advisory services company Attura has acquired managed network, connectivity and cloud service provider Plan B in a $24.5 million deal. Attura gains more than 1000 clients across A/NZ through the acquisition. The deal includes NZ$20m in cash and up to $4.5m in earn out. Attura says the deal will be a ‘launchpad’ for further expansion both geographically and in capability, particularly with Plan B’s network of five primary data centres across New Zealand.

02.12 Australia’s latest proposed law targeting big tech could see fines of up to AU$50 million imposed on global tech companies who supress competition and prevent consumers switching between services. Reuters reports the proposed law would empower the competition regulator to oversee compliance, investigate online anti-competitive practices and fine companies.

AppWrap November 2024

24.11 The government has dumped plans to fine social media platforms up to five percent of their global revenue for failing to prevent the spread of dis- and misinformation. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland says there is ‘no pathway to legislate this proposal through the Senate’, Sky News reported. The Liberal-National coalition, as well as the Greens and cross bench senators all opposed the legislation.

20.11 The number of reported online crimes is down seven percent, with the average self-reported cost of cybercrime for businesses dropping eight percent, according to the ASD’s 2023-24 Annual Cyber Threat Report. More than 87,000 cybercrime reports were made for the period. While the average cost of cybercrime for medium business was down 35 percent to $62,800, and the average cost for large business was down 11 percent to $63,600, small businesses saw an eight percent increase to $49,600. Email compromise, online banking fraud and business email compromise fraud were the most reported cybercrime types for businesses.

20.11 The big four banks are piloting ‘the world’s first inter-bank, behaviour and device-based fraud and scams intelligence-sharing network’. CBA, National Bank, ANZ, Westpac and Suncorp will use Israeli startup BioCatch’s platfrom to assess risks linked to the accounts customers direct domestic online payments to, FintechFutures reports.

19.11 Queensland-based mining equipment company Russell Mineral Equipment is the first recipient of the National Reconstruction Fund, receiving a $40m grant. The grant comes more than two years after the fund was first promised, ABC News reports.

19.11 Bunnings breached privacy laws with its use of facial recognition without proper consent, the Privacy Commissioner has ruled. Bunnings is seeking a review of the ruling. The commissioner has ordered Bunnings to destroy all personal information collected and not to repeat the behaviour, ABC News reports. The system captured facial images of ‘likely hundreds of thousands’ of people between November 2018 and November 2021, when it was run in 62 stores across Victoria and NSW.

18.11 The Cyber Security Bill 2024, which could force businesses to disclose ransomware payments to the government, has been recommended or ‘urgent’ parliamentary approval by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. ITNews reports the committee caveated that the proposed ransomware reporting obligations only apply to the extent a ransomware incident relates to the reporting businesses’ operations in Australia.

18.11 The Tech Council of Australia is calling on large, mid-sized and startup businesses to increase tech adoption spending saying it will deliver substantial economic benefits and reverse declining productivity growth. The report claims increasing tech investment to 4.6 percent as a share of GDP could contribute an additional $38b to GDP in productivity gains in 2035.

18.11 Manager of Opposition Business Paul Fletcher has moved a motion to establish a select committee on PsiQuantum’s funding. Fletcher says the decision to invest almost $1 billion of taxpayers’ money – split between the Commonwealth and Queensland governments – into the US company raises serious questions warranting scrutiny. Queensland’s newly elected government has said it is reviewing its $470m contribution.

08.11 Google Cloud will mandate multi-factor authentication for all users in 2025. The company says from this month is will be ‘encouraging’ the 30 percent of users not already using MFA to begin. MFA will be required for password logins from early next year, and for federated users by the end of 2025.

08.11 A two-hour outage of Australia’s SmartGate kiosks at international airports has resulted in lengthy queues at Melbourne and Sydney international airports, with passengers having to be processed manually. The cause of the outage is under investigation, ABC reports.

07.11 The proposed ban on social media for Australian’s under the age of 16 is progressing with legislation to be introduced to parliament this year, with laws coming into effect 12 months after being ratified. The opposition Liberal Party has expressed support for the ban, but The Guardian reports that the government hasn’t spelled out how the ban will be enforced by platforms.

07.11 Hands off approach or stricter regulations? That’s the question for tech companies in the wake of Donald Trump’s US presidential election win. Wired reports that Trump presents a conflicting mix of options – showing disdain for Big Tech and talking up policies that will increase the cost of business for them along with unfavourable regulations, while at the same time vowing to back out of policies that could have negatively impacted some tech companies. Elon Musk’s role in things has also led to the suggestion we could see some ‘picking of favourites’.

07.11 The NSW State Crime Command’s Cybercrime Squad has charged a Sydney man with involvement in an alleged business email compromise resulted in the theft of $2m from Sydney hospital, NSW Police says.

05.11 Queensland rocket company Gilmour Space has been cleared to launch Australia’s first commercial orbital rocket. The company was cleared by the Australian Space Agency this week, after a two-year battle for clearance. ABCnews reports the company hopes to launch its first rocket next month.

04.11 Sydney crowdfunding platform Equitise has gone into voluntary liquidation after failing to secure the funding it needed. The company has facilitated capital raises of $94 million from 167 successful offerings since it was founded more than a decade ago, however BusinessNews Australia reports none of its FY24 funding rounds featured in the top 10 largest crowdsourced funding raises nationally.

02.11 Former competition watchdog Delia Rickard has delivered the final report of the independent statutory review of the Online Safety Act 2021 to Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who says the government will consider the ‘extensive’ recommendations and ‘respond in due course’. More than 2,200 public submissions were received on the review.

AppWrap October 2024

31.10 Coles says its investing $880 million in developing its third automated distribution centre, this time in Truganina, Victoria. The new facility will have 15 percent more capacity than Coles’ NSW and Queensland automated distribution centres, with the ability to process 4.6 million cartons a week. The new centre will use the same Witron automation technology as the existing centres, Coles says.

30.10 Nearly half of the NSW public sector agencies subject to a mandatory notification of data breach (MNDB) scheme are yet to publish a data breach policy. An Information and Privacy Commission NSW desktop review of data breach policy compliance found 44 percent of those surveyed did not have a publicly available DBP on their website. The report also notes concern that 56 percent of agencies did not have a privacy management plan which addressed the MNDB.

29.10 Google is launching its genAI AI Overview search in Australia. The offering launched in the US in May, but has proved contentious, providing incorrect and sometimes dangerous answers to users, including the suggestion to eat a rock every day. Google says AI Overviews are particularly helpful for more complex questions that might have previously taken multiple searches.

21.10 Target Australia has terminated a licensing deal with retail software provider daVinci, with the retailer heading to court and seeking $2.8m reimbursement for licences, hosting and professional services. ITnews reports the three-year deal was axed in its final year after the relationship unravelled with Target refusing to pay the third annual software licence.

17.10 Some of the most prominent AI models are failing to meet European regulations, including for cybersecurity resilience and discriminatory output. Reuters reports an EU AI Act checker has been used to check genAI models across dozens of categories, highlighting shortcoming with a number of LLMs. OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Alibaba Cloud’s 9988.HK scored low for discriminatory output, while Meta’s Llama 2 13B Chat scored poorly when subjected to a prompt hijacking test.

15.10 Banking giant HSBC will have to pay $47,000 in compensation to a scam victim, and may have to compensate other customers after the Australian Financial Complaints Authority rejected the bank’s claim it wasn’t liable. The Sydney Morning Herald reports a scammer masqueraded as a bank worker to steal from the victim’s account. The SMH says the decision is considered a change of approach for the AFCA.

10.10 Mandatory security standards for some products connecting to the internet and mandatory reporting of ransomware payments are among the proposals in legislation introduced to parliament this week, as Australia heads towards having its first standalone cybersecurity act. CSO reports the act would also see the establishment of a Cyber Incident Review Board, and provides for a range of compliance and enforcement powers.

10.10 Western Australia’s southern ports will receive ‘substantial’ operational technology upgrades, with the government investing $17.4m to boost the region’s port infrastructure. Accenture has been awarded $13.6m to modernise more than 22 critical assets as part of the work, the Cook Labor Government says.

10.10 Twenty-three percent of people don’t complete security awareness training because they ‘already know enough’ according to a Cybsafe report, which also says 38 percent share sensitive work information with AI without their employer’s knowledge.

05.10 Mining conglomerate Sibelco, which operates the largest quartz production facility in North Carolina’s Spruce Pine, says its operating facilities have sustained only minor damage in Hurricane Helene. The region produces as much as 90 percent of the world’s ultra-pure quartz, vital to chip manufacturing, FinancialTimes reports. Quartz Corporation says it’s too early to assess impact to its operations but it’s confident it can avoid any supply disruptions.

03.10 X has failed in its court battle to avoid its Australian child safety fine, with an Australian court upholding an order for the platform to pay a $610,500 fine for failing to cooperate with the eSafety Commissioner’s request for information about the steps X was taking to address child sexual exploitation material. Time dubbed the win ‘a notable victory’ in Australia’s battle with global internet companies.

02.10 Sixty-four percent of Australian cybersecurity professionals say their role is more stressful now than it was five years ago according to a survey by ISACA, with low budgets a key factor. Worsening hiring and retention challenges and lack of prioritisation of cybersecurity risks were also key issues ISACA says.

02.10 The Australian Federal Police have seized $9.3 million in cryptocurrency linked to the alleged mastermind behind the Ghost encrypted messaging app. The cryptocurrency was transferred into secure AFP crypto storage, 9News reports. The 32-year-old was charged with creating and administering the app, which police say was built solely for the criminal underworld.

AppWrap September 2024

30.09 NSW police have been banned from using WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps and social media on work phones amid concerns over data retention. The Guardian reports the move follows an investigation into claims of police coverup over an officer’s car crash in Sydney last year. Evidence revealed officers were using encrypted apps and deleting messages and call records.

27.09 The Tech Council of Australia has launched a Partners Forum to support technology adoption and expand tech employment opportunities across all sectors. The TCA says the forum is a platform to foster collaboration and innovation across all organisations, regardless of industry, with more than half of tech workers employed in jobs outside of technology companies.

27.09 Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall is back – although this time it’s opt in, and has security guardrails to allay concerns. Recall, which creates screenshots to create a searchable ‘photographic memory’ of a user’s computer use, was first announced in May but previews were quickly recalled due to security and privacy concerns and public backlash. RedmondMag says Recall now has added encryption layers and requires Windows Hello for access, with Microsoft using virtualisation-based security enclaves to keep snapshots secure.

25.09 KPMG Australia is buying technology and financial solutions company Chartertech, bolstering the company’s mid-market business and adding new technology capability, including IBM TM1 Planning Analytics. The deal will see around 140 Chartertech staff join KPMG, the company says.

24.09 Virgin Australia will be the launch partner for a new Sabre retail platform, developed in conjunction with Google. More than 40 SabreMosaic offerings will be adopted over the next two years. Implementation of the first module, part of an offer management suite, has begun, AviationBusiness reports.

20.09 Coles has launched an automated customer fulfilment centre in Victoria, where 700 bots will fulfil customer orders aided by AI. Orders of 50 items can be fulfilled in just five minutes, with an AI ‘air traffic control system’ overseeing bots as they move around the 3D grids. Items will be packed and delivered by Coles’ human staff. Ocado technology is being used at the site and for calculating the most efficient routes for delivery based on real-time conditions and tonnage of the home delivery vans, Coles says.

19.09 Australia’s Digital Platform Regulators Forum has published a working paper on multimodal foundation models (MFMs) used in genAI, and their implications for consumer protection, competition, the information environment, privacy and online safety. MFMs can process and output multiple data types, including text, images, video and audio, Forum member, the OAIC, says.

18.09 Australian police have charged a Sydney man for allegedly building and administering an encrypted message app built ‘solely for the criminal underworld’. AFP says the 32-year-old alleged ‘mastermind’ behind the Ghost platform was arrested as part of Operation Kraken, which involved 700 AFP members and two days of action across Australia, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Canada. Up to 50 alleged Ghost users in Australia are also facing ‘serious’ charges.

18.09 Australian teen Instagram users will be moved to restricted ‘teen accounts’ within 60 days according to Meta – but it’s done little to change political will for a social media age limit in Australia, ABC News reports. The teen accounts will include content restrictions and rules about who can contact teen users, along with features designed to curb screen time. Political leaders welcomed the announcement, but say they will still push ahead with plans for tougher rules.

16.09 Indigenous ICT and cyber security Baidam has partnered with global cloud networking and security services provider Infoblox to launch a takedown service to take down lookalike websites and scam domains using the DNS. Infoblox is claiming ‘industry first’ capability with the Baidam Takedown Services.

16.09 Australia has recorded its highest number of notifiable data breaches in 3.5 years, with 527 data breaches in the first six months of 2024. The period included the MediSecure data breach notification, which affected 12.9 million Australians. Health and the government notified the most breaches at 19 percent and 12 percent of all breaches respectively, the OAIC says.

16.09 The Government has announced an age assurance trial as it gears up to introduce rules regulating children’s access to age-restricted content. Regulators in other countries have cast doubt on whether age estimation technology, including biometric age estimation, is accurate, BiometricUpdate reports. A request for tender to conduct the trial of age assurance technologies was issued last week.

12.09 Elon Musk has lashed out at Australian plans to regulate online misinformation, calling the government ‘fascists’. Ministers were quick to hit back, with federal minister Bill Shorten saying Musk is a champion of free speech when it’s in his commercial interests, but keen to shut it down when he doesn’t like it, while assistant treasurer Stephen Jones labelled Musk’s comment ‘crackpot stuff’, the Guardian reports.

12.09 New fines of up to $50 million for social media firms which don’t do enough to stamp out fake ads on their platform are proposed as part of a new Scam Code Act. InformationAge reports the code will likely require a range of companies, including social media platforms, telcos and banks, to be subject to an expanded federal regulator with the power to force them to compensate victims of scams.

09.09 Hype isn’t translating into AI use for Australian SMBs, with a new report showing half haven’t incorporated AI into their operations, with concerns over security a leading issue (26 percent). The Paradigm survey shows concerns around reputational impact, risk of breaking the law (both +183 percent), loss of IP (+178 percent) and impact on work quality and productivity (+158 percent) were up significantly year on year. Despite the local reservations, Australian and Kiwi respondents were still more likely to use AI regularly compared to their Canadian, Irish and UK-based counterparts.

05.09 Task automation and risk management top the AI uses for Australian project managers according to a Capterra report. It found project managers feel that generating status reports and predictive analytics will be greatly impacted by AI in the next 12 months. The report also notes the Australian AI market is expected to hit $9.5 billion this year.

03.09 NAB and SA Power Networks have claimed top awards in Red Hat’s APAC Innovation Awards 2023. Both companies won in the digital transformation and automation category, Red Hat says.

02.09 Hong Kong’s finance secretary is heading to Australia to woo local enterprises to expand operations in the city. AsiaNews reports that Paul Chan Mo-po is looking to attract investment in emerging industries, including fintech and biotech, saying Hong Kong, with its strong research and financing ecosystems, is an ‘ideal’ platform for companies to expand into regional and mainland China markets.

AppWrap August 2024

28.08 Australian businesses risk falling behind APAC counterparts if they don’t up their digital game according to a CPA Australia 2024 Business Technology Report. TheAccountant says the report found just 53 percent of Australian businesses have a digital strategy, compared to 63 percent of those in countries including China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia.

26.08 Strict quantum computing export controls are being imposed preventing the sharing of information and technology with overseas individuals. The controls have been added by the Department of Defence in changes to the Defence and Strategic Goods List, InformationAge reports. Items listed require a permit when being exported, supplied, brokered or published with individuals from anywhere other than the US and UK.

26.08 Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been arrested in France under a warrant for offences related to the messaging app. Durov was arrested after landing at an airport north or Paris. The BBC says the investigation reportedly is around a lack of moderation and failure to take steps to curb criminal use of Telegram.

21.08 Australian federal government agencies are close to achieving universal deployment of DMARC email domain protection, and are demonstrating widespread enforcement (79 percent). Email security vendor SMX says its research shows many ASX companies, however, have made little progress in enforcing the protocol.

21.08 The OAIC is dropping its pursuit of Clearview AI over its collection of facial images and biometric templates from Australians saying it’s not satisfied further action is warranted at this time. In 2021, the OAIC found Clearview had breached Australian’s privacy by scraping of biometric information from the web and disclosing it through a facial recognition tool. Clearview withdrew from proceedings in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to challenge the finding in 2023, with the original determination still standing, along with the requirement the company not collect images from Australians and must delete previously collected images, the OAIC says.

21.08 CSIRO is cutting up to 500 jobs as part of an organisational restructure. ABC News reports the cuts will come from enterprise services, which includes IT, legal, finance and other departments, along with technical staff supporting scientists.

19.08 Australia is gearing up to replace its incoming passenger card with a digital version, due to begin testing on selected flights from NZ later this year. The trial, with Qantas, is the third attempt to replace the paper card, Executive Traveller reports. A purpose-built website will be made available as the program expands.

19.08 Australian and Kiwi musicians are expected to lose out on $500 million by 2028 due to AI according to a report released by music rights orgnanisation APRA Amcos. RNZ reports that the survey found 23 percent of music creators’ revenues would be at risk due to AI, with 82 percent of surveyed creators concerned AI’s use could lead to them no longer being able to make a living from music.

16.08 Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is to be extradited from New Zealand to the US after losing his 12-year legal battle. Dotcom is charged with copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering. The NZ Herald reports Dotcom claims to have a ‘plan’ to fight the extradition order.

16.08 Australia’s first policy for responsible use of AI for government entities, excluding defence and national intelligence agencies, will come into force next month, requiring agencies to publish a public transparency statement outlining their approach to AI within six months. The DTA says the policy introduces principles, mandatory requirements and recommended actions.

16.08 Google has rejected suggestions that it is a dominant player in search in Australia. During an Australian Senate committee hearing, a local Google representative said Google will appeal a US ruling that its search dominance is an illegal monopoly and saying the Australian search market was ‘diverse’, Smart Company reports.

14.08 ASIC is suing the ASX for alleged misleading statements about the progress in its clearing and settlement system (Chess) replacement project. ASIC says statements in early 2022 that the project was ‘on-track for go-live’, scheduled for April 2023, and ‘progressing well’ were misleading and deceptive. The project was ‘paused’ in 2023 after an Accenture review, with ASX writing down costs of $250m.

13.08 A new digital ID project, Trust Exchange (TEx) will enable Australians to share only necessary details from government-held information via a digital wallet on their mobile phone. Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten says TEx will build upon investments already made in Digital ID and use myGov and MyGovID to make the sharing of personal information more secure. The offering, which he says is ‘brand new and world leading’ is currently in proof-of-concept stage with an $11.4m investment in the buildout.

13.08 ANZ says it will put 3000 leaders through an AI ‘immersion centre’ over the next 12 months as it seeks to accelerate AI adoption at scale. The AI Immersion Centre, at the bank’s Melbourne headquarters, is a partnership with Microsoft, ANZ says.

13.08 Accenture has won a $289 million deal for computer services with the Department of Health and Aged Care. The ICT transformation delivery project is a two year contract.

12.08 Australian gold miner Evolution Mining says it has detected a ransomware attack that affected its systems last week. The company is working with cyber forensic experts and believes the incident is contained Evolution Mining says.

06.08 Google has spent billions to create an illegal monopoly and become the world’s default search engine, a US judge has ruled. Reuters says the ruling paves the way for a second trial to determine potential fixes, which could include breaking up parent company Alphabet.

05.08 The NAB claims banks are being hampered in the fight against crime, and in innovation efforts, by Australian data rules. In a submission to the parliamentary committee on the capability of law enforcement to respond to money laundering and financial crime, the bank says GenAI is an opportunity for the sector to implement effective risk management controls through better understanding of financial crime risks, but data can’t be shared with third parties to develop and deploy the solutions due to ‘outdated’ rules.

02.08 Chipmaker Intel is cutting 15,000 staff – around 15 percent of its workforce – as it looks to slash US$10 billion in costs in 2025. Company CEO Pat Gelsinger says Intel is yet to benefit from trends like AI, costs are too high and margins too low, AP News reports.

01.08 Telstra and Optus have been asked by a parliamentary inquiry to voluntarily delay switching off their 3G networks. ITNews reports the inquiry has also asked the government to intervene in the event the telcos don’t delay the switch-off.

01.08 An eight-hour Azure outage was triggered by a DDoS attack but an error in how Microsoft implemented defences contributed to the global issues with some Azure and Microsoft 365 services, Microsoft says. The outage was quickly followed by further issues for many Kiwi users went NZ Microsoft went down hours after the DDoS attack, in an unrelated outage.

AppWrap July 2024

31.07 The Lowy Institute has raised concerns over the Australian Signals Directorate’s recent partnership with AWS to build a $2 billion Top Secret Cloud, saying trusting the country’s digital defence capabilities to one company is a potential threat to national security. The organisation says the CrowdStrike global outage ‘casts a long shadow over Australia’s partnership with AWS on the TS cloud’, with taxpayers largely in the dark and accountability in the event of a beach remaining ‘murky’.

30.07 Canva is acquiring Australian genAI startup Leonardo.ai for an undisclosed sum. Canva says Leonardo’s technology and its Phoenix foundational model will be integrated into Canva’s existing suite of Magic Studio products. Leonardo.ai will also continue to develop its web platform as a separate offering. Canva did similar in its acquisition of Affinity earlier this year.

30.07 The UK Competition and Markets Authority is scrutinising whether Google’s partnership with Anthropic has ‘resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation’ which would open the doors for a formal investigation, the Guardian reports.

28.07 Tony Burke has taken on the role of Minister for Cyber Security in a ministerial reshuffle which also sees MP Andrew Charlton become special envoy for cyber security and digital resilience. PM Andrew Albanese says the envoy is a ‘special task’ discussed with Charlton, Burke and Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland, looking at where Australia and the world, is going on a range of tech issues. Clare O’Neil, former cybersecurity minister, moves to the housing portfolio.

25.07 Defence’s Digital Group is adding another 300 IT staff to the 150 already added as it transitions away from contractors. ITNews reports that cadet and graduate numbers will also be tripled to 75 in 2025.

25.07 Insured losses from the global IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update could cost up to $1.5 billion. The figure, from cyber risk analytics platform CyberCube could make the July 19 outage the largest single insured loss event in history.

24.07 The University of Auckland and University of South Australia have teamed up on space communications, developing a system for managing an international network of optical ground stations. The network will transmit data between earth and space, UoA says.

24.07 Google has abandoned plans to ditch cookies from its Chrome browser. The company, which announced it was dumping cookies four years ago, says it will instead provide opt-out process users can apply across web browsing, enabling advertisers to continue to track most Chrome users.

23.07 The Australian infrastructure-as-a-service market grew 20.7 percent in 2023 to hit AU$3.3 billion, Gartner says. Microsoft overtook Amazon to claim top position, with 30.9 percent share versus Amazon’s 30.1 percent. Google took third with 20.6 percent followed by IBM (4.7 percent) and Oracle (2.4 percent). Globally the IaaS market was up 16.2 percent to US$140 billion, with Amazon retaining top spot.

23.07 CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas says the company is expecting compensation claims and potential class action after last week’s global IT outage. In an interview with Sky News, he outlined how the company ‘got wrong’ a software update, knocking out systems around the world.

22.07 The Australian Signals Directorate’s ACSC is urging Australian organisations to continue to apply updates and patching to software and security products in the wake of Friday’s IT shutdown. It says CrowdStrike have released further technical advice and guidance.

21.07 The cost to Australia from Friday’s global IT outage could be in the billions according to an economist, though the overall impact on things like retail sales and GPT might not be as high as initially thought, SBS reports.

20.07 A number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the CrowdStrike ‘technical incident’, the Australian Signals Directorate warns.

19.07 OpenAI has launched GPT-4o mini, a smaller, less expensive version of its GPT-4o model which is available now in ChatGPT free, plus and team plans, replacing GPT-3.5. Enterprise users will have access next week. Ars Technica says the offering is ‘very inexpensive’ as an API product, costing 60 percent less than GPT-3.5 Turbo at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens.

18.07 About 12.9 million Australians had their personal and health information stolen in the MediSecure hack earlier this year, the e-prescriptions company has revealed. The breach is among the largest cyber breaches in Australian history, ABCNews reports.

12.07 The Department of Defence has paid $62m to ServiceNow since January for assistance with the provision of IT service management relating to an SAP ERP upgrade. ITNews reports ServiceNow’s platform is being used for enterprise portfolio, program and project management services. Defence’s migration to SAP S/4Hana, started in 2019, is expected to cost $1 billion.

12.07 An Australian Defence Force information systems technician and her husband, accused of spying for Russia have been denied bail on the first charges against suspected operatives under Australian espionage laws enacted in 2018. AP reports the couple have each been charged with preparing for an espionage offense and will appear in federal court in September.

11.07 Australia has accused China-backed APT 40 of conducting a wide-scale cyber espionage operation, repeatedly targeting Australian networks as well as government and private sector networks in the region. ABC News reports that in an unusual move the advisory appears to be spearheaded by Australia with one expert suggesting it is the first occasion on which Australia felt it necessary to issue an advisory about this ‘specifically egregious threat’ to Australia.

10.07 The ACMA has imposed ‘remedial direction’ on Telstra after the telco made public unlisted numbers of over 140,000 customers. The ACMA says its investigation found that Telstra breached conditions of its license on more than 163,000 occasions.

08.07 Technology is coming to the rescue of Australia’s wildlife in a number of projects targeting wildlife trafficking. One sees AI used to automatically scrape the web for illicit animal traders, ABC reports.

05.07 Services Australia is spending nearly $94m to renew licensing and support deals with VMware for another three years, ITNews reports. The figure is a 20 percent increase on previous deals.

02.07 AI could create up to 200,000 AI-related jobs in Australia by 2030, according to a report from the Tech Council of Australia. The study, supported by Microsoft, LinkedIn and Workday, claims the AI sector could inject ‘billions’ of dollars into the economy with greater adoption of genAI alone contributing $115 billion to the economy, largely from productivity gains, the Tech Council says.

02.07 The eSafety Commissioner has given the online industry six months to come up with enforceable codes to protect children from porn and other high-impact content. Industry bodies must present a preliminary draft of the codes by 3 October with final codes no later than 19 December 2024, the eSafety Commissioner says.

01.07 Australia’s banks are engaged in ‘asymmetrical warfare’ facing a bombardment of cyberattacks ‘every minute of the day’. National Australia Bank executive for group investigations Chris Sheehan told ABC the threats come from a range of areas, from ‘Larry the loser in the basement at home’ to highly sophisticated, ruthless and resilient transnational organised crime groups who are driving 90 percent of scams hitting Australian victims.

AppWrap June 2024

27.06 A ‘high-severity’ security vulnerability in the MoveIt transfer software has been identified, with attackers actively trying to exploit it just hours after it was disclosed. The vulnerability enables attackers to bypass authentication and gain access to sensitive data, ArsTechnica reports. Last year a MoveIt vulnerability led to compromise of more than 2,300 organisations.

27.06 Bank details of Victorian government suppliers have been altered four times in 18 months according to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office. The bank details were held in a central database, ITNews reports.

26.06 Arinco has been named as Microsoft’s 2024 Australian Country Partner of the Year, the vendor says.

25.06 The federal government is considering using the tax system to prevent Meta from pulling news from Facebook and Instagram. The Guardian reports the move is one of a number being considered after Meta announced in March that it wouldn’t enter new agreements with media companies to pay for news. The government is considering whether to designate Meta under the news media bargaining code, which would require it to negotiate with news providers or risk fines of 10 percent of local revenue.

21.06 The US has banned sales of Kaspersky antivirus software citing ‘national security concerns’ over the company’s Russian-ties. The Guardian reports the ban includes providing any updates to software already in use.

19.06  A coding error which went undetected for more than four years was behind the Optus breach which resulted in personally identifiable information of more than 9.5 million former and current customers being breached, according to the ACMA. The information is contained in court documents.

18.06 Biomedical engineers at RMIT University say they’ve developed AI capabilities which enable stroke identification via a smartphone face-screening tool which could help paramedics identify a stroke in seconds. RMIT says the tool has an accuracy rating of 82 percent.

17.06 US regulators are suing Adobe for hiding fees and preventing consumers from easily cancelling software subscriptions. The Federal Trade Commission alleges Adobe deceived consumers by hiding early termination fees for its most popular subscription plan and making it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions.

17.06 Queensland network operator Powerlink is using drones to string 50km of high voltage power lines in north Queensland. PVmagazine reports the operation claims to be the longest section of high-powered electricity line strung by drones in APAC.

17.06 Infratil is looking to raise NZ$1.1 billion for investment in Canberra Data Centre’s expansion and provide more ‘flexibility’ across Infratil’s portfolio. The NZX listed company says it expects to invest AU$600m in CDC over the next two years.

13.06 Australia and the EU are looking to strengthen ties on priority digital and technology issues. The second EU-Australia Digital Economy and Technology Policy Dialogue was held yesterday brining together government departments to create a framework for shared priorities, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources says. Online safety, data governance and AI were among the topics for discussion.

11.06 Mandiant says at least 165 organisations have been targeted in the threat campaign targeting Snowflake customer database instances. It says most of the login credentials used to access Snowflake environments were stolen via historical infostealer infections, some dating back to 2020.

05.06 SAP has renewed its whole-of-government agreement, inking an initial three year deal worth around $152 million. The deal covers software, cloud and professional services, the Digital Transformation Agency says.

05.06 MediSecure has gone into administration and liquidation just weeks after the eScript provider was hit by a large-scale data breach. A request to federal government last month for financial support was declined, ABC News reports. MediSecure has yet to provide details about what data has been compromised, and says it will continue ‘to make every effort to assist the government in responding to this cyber-attack’.

05.06 Carmaker Advanced Auto Parts has joined the list of companies confirming its had data stolen and put up for sale following the Snowflake breach. BleepingComputer says threat actors are claiming to have 3TB of data from the carmaker, which operates primarily in the Americas. Australians and Kiwis are believed to have been caught up in the Ticketmaster breach, also linked to Snowflake.

05.06 SAP is buying digital adoption platform provider WalkMe in a US$1.5b deal aimed at boosting SAP’s AI offerings. WalkMe’s offerings provide guidance and automation to help organisations execute workflows across a range of applications, SAP says.

05.06 SAP has unveiled new genAI capabilities integrated across its portfolio at its annual Sapphire conference. Its GenAI copilot Joule is now embedded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud solutions Build and Integration Suite with further expansion planned for Ariba and Analytics Cloud. The company also announced partnerships with companies including Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS and Nvidia, Technology Magazine reports.

05.06 The Information Commissioner has filed civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against Medibank following its October 2022 data breach. The Commissioner is alleging Medibank seriously interfered with the privacy of 9.7m Australians between March 2021-October 2022 by failing to protect their personal information.

04.06 Australia’s eSafety commissioner has dropped Federal court action against X over the removal of graphic church stabbing footage. ABC News reports that other litigation against X will continue with Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant saying she will focus her efforts on those matters ad an independent review of her removal notice by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

04.06 The Federal government is considering adding a range of cybersecurity related jobs to Australia’s skilled migration visa list. InformationAge reports consultation is underway on the proposal, with six cyber roles on the list of potential roles to consult more widely on. Those roles include cyber security engineer, cyber governance risk and compliance specialist and cyber security architect.

04.06 Snowflake says its platform is not at fault in the breaches of Ticketmaster and other organisations. Reports, including from security researchers, have pointed the finger at Snowflake, which announced on May 31 that it was investigating a cyber incident impacting a limited number of customers. Snowflake says it has not identified any evidence suggesting a targeted threat campaign against some of its customers has been caused by a vulnerability, misconfiguration or breach of its platform.

01.06 Ticketek Australia says some account holder information, stored in a third-party cloud platform, has been breached. The incident, just days after rival Ticketmaster was hacked, has not compromised any customer passwords or payment details, Ticketek says.

AppWrap May 2024

30.06 Big tech including Cisco, HPE, Meta, Microsoft and AMD have developed a new industry standard to create a new way for scale-up AI systems linking data centres. The Ultra Accelerator Link, which does not include Nvidia, says it will establish an open industry standard.

30.05 About two million Australians are believed to have been caught up in a hack of Tickemaster. A hacking group claims to have stolen 1.3 terabytes of data on 560 million Ticketmaster customers globally, and is reportedly seeking a US$500,000 for a one-time sale. ABC News says about two million Australians are affected. Data including names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers are reportedly included in the compromised data.

29.06 Australia’s Luyten 3D has printed the first 3D printed two-storey building in the Southern Hemisphere. The two-level granny flat was printed in one go at Luyten’s Melbourne headquarters the company says.

29.05 The Federal Government has unveiled Australia’s first national robotics strategy, as it looks to capitalise on a potential $600 billion GDP boost, and up to 150 percent productivity boost. The strategy includes bolstering national capacity; increasing robotics and automation adoption; trust, inclusion and responsible development and use; and skills and diversity, Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic says.

28.05 X is liable for hate speech published on its platform and is subject to Australian law, even though it is US-based, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal has found, Information Age reports.

25.05 ChatGPT is failing to meet EU data accuracy standards, despite measures put in place to comply with the EU data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog says. Reuters reports the task force was set up last year following concerns about ChatGPT. Data accuracy is a guiding principle in the EU’s data protection rules.

24.05 eSafety and seven other online safety regulators have developed a cross-border roadmap to regulate online harms. The group, which includes UK, French, South African, Irish, Fijian, Korean and Slovakian regulators, will collaborate on regulatory tools, including risk assessment and transparency reporting; information requires to industry; good practice around safety measures’ and user complaints functions, eSafety says.

23.05 The ACMA has begun legal action against Optus over its 2022 data breach, with the comms and media regulator alleging Optus failed to protect customers’ data. Data from more than 10 million current and former customers was breached in the attack. The AFR reports that Optus says it will defend itself and is not yet able to determine potential penalties.

23.05 Google is building the first subsea fibre optic cable linking Australia with Africa. Umoja will start in Kenya, running through various African countries including the DRC, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa before crossing the Indian Ocean to land in Perth. The terrestrial component has already been completed, TechCrunch reports. No timeline for completion has been released.

21.05 Strong showings from One NZ and Canberra Data Centres have bolstered results for Infratil, which posted revenue of AU$3.3b (vs $1.8b a year earlier) for the 12 months ending March. Underlying profit was up from $532m to $864m. A ‘substantial’ portion of the increase was attributed to the higher ownership stake in One NZ. Eight CDC data centres are currently under construction across A/NZ with Infratil saying it is responding to a surge in customer demand which has expanded CDC’s development pipeline by more than 400MW in FY2024.

20.05 Gentrack has upgraded its full-year revenue and earnings expectations on the back of growth in recent and in-year new customers, along with upsells and upgrades. The company, which provides software for power and water utilities and airports, reported a 21 percent increase in revenue to $102m, with EBITDA of $12.3m.

18.05 MediSecure has confirmed that personal information and ‘limited’ health information related to prescriptions, along with personal information of healthcare providers, has been compromised in last week’s cybersecurity breach. 7News reports that Services Australia is looking into potential impacts to identify security associated with breached card numbers, but has said individuals don’t need to take action related to Medicare, Pensioner Concession, Healthcare Concession and Commonwealth Seniors cards.

17.05 Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness says last week’s ‘significant’ breach of e-script provider MediSecure is an isolated attack and no other entities are impacted, ABC News reports. McGuinness declined to comment on who was behind the attack. Authorities are working with MediSecure to support anyone whose information is compromised.

17.05 Sydney’s John Bigatton has pleaded to promoting cryptocurrency lending services for the now-defunct BitConnect. Bigatton provided ‘unlicensed financial services’ for the crypto Ponzi scheme, which required investors to purchase BitConnect coins which could then be invested or ‘loaned’ for fixed terms in return for promised high interest rates but could not control the loans once invested and could not withdraw their capital until the investment period expired, ASIC says.

16.05 Pizza Hut Australia has been hit with a $2.5m penalty for sending more than 10 million marketing messages in breach of Australian spam laws. The messages, sent over four months were sent to customers who had not consented or withdrawn consent to receive marketing material, or were sent without an option to unsubscribe, the ACMA says. Last month eyewear retailer Luxottica – owner of  OPSM, Oakley and Sunglass Hut brands – paid $1.5m for sending more than 200,000 marketing texts and emails to customers who had unsubscribed, or without unsubscribe facilities.

14.05 The Federal Budget has served up $2.8 billion in planned IT investments for the next four years, including $466m for PsiQuantum to support the development of a quantum computer in Brisbane. Nearly $40m is being provided to progress Australia’s regulatory response to responsible AI and release a national robotics strategy, with $288m going towards digital ID work. Scam busting also got a $67.5m boost, King&Wood Mallesons notes.

09.05 The federal government is launching an inquiry into social media’s influence to ‘put big tech under the microscope’. The joint parliamentary select committee will look at a wide range of issues, including Meta’s decision to abandon News Media Bargaining Code deals, and the impact of algorithms, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland says. Issues around scams, age-restricted content and violent extremist material will also be examined.

08.05 IBM is embedding AI business solutions into SAP’s cloud in an extension on an ongoing deal between the two companies. Use cases will initially focus on industrial manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, retail, defence, automotive and utilities industries, IBM says.

07.05 The Victorian government is slashing funding to its Breakthrough Victoria startup fund by $360m over the coming four years, and will pursue fewer investments each year in an attempt to ‘reprofile’ the fund. Funding for the controversial fund will be reduced by an average of $90m a year for the next four years, SmartCompany reports.

07.05 An alleged leader in the LockBit ransomware group has been banned from Australia and had financial sanctions imposed. Russian Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev is described as having a ‘senior leadership role’ in the group, which was reportedly behind 18 percent of reported Australian ransomware attacks in 2022-23. The US and UK also announced bans in coordination with Australia, the Guardian reports.

06.05 Legislation to overhaul the outdated Privacy Act and protect Australians from doxxing will be introduced to parliament in August. InnovationAus says the legislation will include all proposals agreed to in the government’s response to its September 2023 review, though it is not clear how many of the in-principle proposals will be included.

06.05 Telstra is delaying the shutdown of its 3G network until August amid concerns that hundreds of thousands of people still using 3G only mobile phones, or a subset of older 4G phones, could be blocked from making emergency calls. The network was due to shut in June, ABC News reports.

05.05 The Government is providing an additional $11m in the Budget for a mobile app and secure website to enable Australians to provide real time alerts if someone uses their identity without consent. The app builds on the Credential Protection Register, which enables Australians to see how their identity credentials are being used, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says.

03.05 A Sydney man has been charged with blackmail over the massive ClubsNSW third-party data breach which exposed the identify of more than one million people. 9News reports police were alerted to a website which had published the personal information of patrons who signed in using their drivers’ licenses at premises across NSW. The site claims the incident happened after the IT provider failed to pay developers, who then set up the searchable website. Politicians are among those believed to have been impacted.

03.05 An updated code of conduct for Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service says integrations with the service must not be used for real-time facial recognition by any law enforcement globally. The change comes as Microsoft bans US police departments from using its AI cloud service for facial recognition, Quartz reports.

01.05 Qantas is investigating after customers were apparently able to access other people’s personal data via the airline’s app. BBC reports some users said they saw boarding passes and flight details including names and frequent flyer information, of other Qantas customers. Qantas says the problem was fixed three hours after it was discovered and was likely caused by a technology issue related to recent system changes, rather than a security breach.

AppWrap April 2024

29.04 Standards Australia has launched training for its world first AI standard. The two-hour online course, delivered in partnership with Australian National University, will address the ‘unique challenges AI poses’ including ethical considerations and transparency, Standards Australia says. It is designed to cut through the complexity of AI at an organisational level to help Australian organisations understand risk management best practices.

29.04 Investors poured nearly US$22 billion into generative AI deals last year, despite many startups not having released products yet. The WSJ (paywalled) reports CB Insights figures show the investment was up fivefold year on year.

26.04 Scott Farquhar is stepping down as Atlassian co-CEO, with Mike Cannon-Brookes becoming the company’s sole chief executive from August. Farquhar, who co-founded the company with Cannon-Brookes, will remain as a board member and major shareholder, AFR reports.

25.04 IBM is acquiring multicloud software company HashiCorp in a $6.4 billion deal to expand its  hybrid cloud solution suite. Shareholder and regulatory approval is still required, but the deal is expected to close by the end of the year. IBM says the deal will create ‘a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud platform for the AI era’.

21.04 X says it will challenge what it calls an ‘unlawful and dangerous approach’ by the Australian eSafety commissioner, in court. Earlier this week the eSafety Commissioner ordered the platform to remove material related to Monday’s Sydney church stabbing. X, which complied with the order, has accused the watchdog of censorship and says it will ‘robustly challenge’ it in court, The Guardian says.

19.04 Meta has unveiled its Meta Llama 3 AI model, which will be integrated into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The company released two models, one with eight billion parameters and one with 70bn parameters, claiming Llama 3 has ‘vastly improved capabilities’, the Financial Times reports. The model is ‘less sanctimonious’ than the previous model, Meta says.

18.04 Reset Australia has called for the federal government to step in in a five-month long battle with Meta and big tech group Digital Industry Group (Digi) over the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. InformationAge reports that the digital advocacy group has accused Digi of a conflict of interest in overseeing the code and receiving funding from many companies subject to it, and has called on the government to stop using voluntary codes and instead regulate.

18.04 A software glitch during an upgrade allowed 43 Sydney’s Star Casino customers to incorrectly withdraw $3.2 million from ‘ticket in cash out’ machines last July. The fraud went unidentified for a number of weeks, despite audits detecting machine discrepancies, an investigation heard this week. Several people have reportedly been arrested after the Star reported the customers to police.

18.04 The Australian Federal Police is looking to replace its SAP ECC 6.0 platform. A discovery process is now underway for the replacement, IT News reports.

17.04 Planning for GenAI initiatives is forecast to drive an eight percent increase in worldwide IT spend in 2024. Gartner says spend will hit US$5.06 trillion, with IT services on track to become the larges market Gartner tracks, clocking 9.7 percent growth as lack of internal staff drives consulting spend.

16.04 Australia and New Zealand bucked an APAC trend to deliver declining year on year IT and business services market spend in Q1. ISG’s Asia Pacific Index, which measures commercial outsourcing contracts with annual contract value of US$5 million or more shows ACV was up 25 percent for Asia Pacific but down 15 percent for A/NZ, the only countries not to record growth.

15.04 Salesforce is reportedly close to buying Informatica in a deal which would add to the company’s data integration and management capabilities. The two companies have bene in talks and could reach a deal within a week, Bloomberg says. The deal would be one of the company’s biggest ever deals, and its biggest since its purchased Slack in 2020 for nearly US$28 billion.

15.04 CSIRO is offering SMEs working on advanced manufacturing solutions the opportunity to ‘innovate to grow’ with a free 10-week program to explore and use R&D for growth in advanced manufacturing solutions. The organisation recently launched a $20m investment to provide SMEs with greater access to R&D and says the funding will support an additional 600 SMEs through the Innovate to Grow program, kicking off with its advanced manufacturing cohort.

15.04 Fintech Australia is calling for capital raising and trade support for the sector ahead of the federal budget. It’s calling for targeted initiatives to address capital raising challenges for fintechs and incentivise investment, an expansion of the National Reconstruction Fund, targeted incentives to promote the rollout of the Consumer Data Right and a review and revitalisatoin of the Enhanced regulatory Sandbox, among other measures.  The organisation says its recommendations support Australia’s next round of prosperity and job creation.

10.04 More than 300,000 fraudulent attempts to use stolen identity credentials have been blocked thanks to identity protection measures introduced by the Albanese Government after the Optus breach. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says updates to the Identity Verification Service Credential Protection Register will enable near real-time updates to the register by document issuers and other trusted organisations.

10.04 TikTok is contributing $1.1 billion to the Australian economy each year according to a report from Oxford Economics. The report says the platform is the fourth most used digital platform in Australia, with 8.5 million users, with 38 percent of those users having purchased a product or service recommended on the platform in the past month.

09.04 MotorCycle Holdings has disclosed a data breach affecting customers of its Sherco and Lambretta websites. The company says a threat actor gained access to the third-party web server, inserting malicious code into the sites which may have resulted in exposure of customer personal information, including names and contact details. Access to the server, which stores customer responses to webforms, was also gained.

05.04 Visa applicants in Australia are now subject to ‘critical technology-related screening’ with some student visa holders now required to seek approval from the Minister for Home Affairs before undertaking a new critical technology-related course. The changes kicked in this month, in an effort to ensure no ‘unwanted transfer’ of critical technologies and related expertise or knowledge which could harm Australia’s strategic and economic competitiveness, Home Affairs says.

05.04 KPMG has expanded its alliance with Google Cloud, with the two companies establishing a program to help KPMG’s clients accelerate genAI adoption. KPMG says it will deploy the Gemini for Google Cloud genAI assistant for internal use and has established a centre of excellence around Google Cloud AI technologies.

04.04 Google is reportedly considering charging for AI-assisted internet searches. The Guardian reports that the plans would see Google offering its new search feature, currently in beta, to users of its premium subscription services, which customers already have to sign up to if they want to use AI assistants in other tools such as Gmail and its office suite.

03.04 X has announced it will take legal action against the Australian government after being forced to remove a harmful post slamming an Australian trans activist. The post was removed after eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant issued a take-down notice in March, and threatened a fine of up to $782,500. X says it will file a legal challenge to the order, News.com.au says.

03.04 Sydney ‘software aggregator’ Software Combined has acquired Auckland’s Activate for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of the self-service automation and business process company gives Software Combined a presence in New Zealand and is the seventh acquisition for the company since it began in 2020, it says.

02.04 Diabetes WA has reported a data breach resulting in a third-party gaining access to personal information of some contacts. The organisation says the breach was quickly detected and fully contained and an investigation is underway. It says no detailed medical records or detailed clinical information was accessed in the breach, however personal information including names, DoB, contact details, ethnicity and medicare numbers may have been affected.

02.04 A $20m business investment fund has been established by NT government and Darwin investment firm Paspalis. The fund focus on sectors including advanced manufacturing, technology, logistics and defence and space and primary industries, StartupDaily reports.

02.04 Microsoft is breaking Teams out from its Office software globally, following last year’s European separation under threat of fines from competition watchdogs. BBC says it’s unclear if the decision will be enough to avoid EU antitrust charges. Microsoft has said Teams will no longer be available as part of the Office suite to net new subscribers. Those currently subscribed can continue to use, renew, upgrade and add seats to their current plans or switch to the new lineup.

01.04 The Digital ID Bill 2023 has passed Senate, moving a step closer to passing into law. The bill will establish a voluntary identity verification service, building on the myGovID already used by 10.5m Australians to access government services. While the lure of ID verification without companies needing to collect and store sensitive customer data and promised simplicity is attractive, the ABC reports others are sceptical of government data collection.

AppWrap March 2024

30.03 Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the failed FTX crypto exchange has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Bankman-Fried was convicted last year of stealing US$8 billion from customers and faced a maximum sentence of 110 years, the NYTimes reports.

26.03 A NSW auditor-general’s report into cybersecurity in local government says City of Parramatta Council, Singleton Council and Warrumbungle Shire Council ‘are not effectively identifying and managing security risks’ exposing their information and systems to ‘significant’ risks which could have consequences for communities and infrastructure. The report notes that 50 councils are yet to implement cybersecurity governance frameworks and related internal controls.

21.03 A South Australian Department of Education rollout of an education management system has been slammed in an Auditor-General’s report into the project. Started in 2018, the project to modernise the administrative functions of around 900 public schools, is expected to go $47m over budget and be delivered three years late, InformationAge reports.

18.03 AUCloud has announced its acquiring three Australian technology companies – PCG Cyber, Venn IT and Arado – in a $30 million buy-up designed to broaden its portfolio and its geographic reach while providing new technologies, skills and expertise to the company, AUCloud says.

18.03 A Sydney IT contractor has been sentenced to 2.5 years in jail for cybercrime and fraud offences after defrauding more than $66,000 from a dozen victims, using his role as an IT support worker to access the Australian National Maritime Museum accounts payable system. The 25-year-old changed bank account details to his own and obtained financial details later used to make fraudulent purchases, the Australian Federal Police says.

16.03 Epic Games legal battle with Apple and Google has begun in a Melbourne Federal Court. The five-month showdown centres around allegations of misuse of market power by Apple and Google in regards to their control over their app stores. The Guardian reports that Epic’s Fortnite was kicked off Google and Apple app stores in 2020 after the company offered its own in-app payment system which bypassed those used by the platforms and cut out the fees Apple and Google received for in-app payments. Epic lost an antitrust case against Apple in 2021, but won its case against Google last year. The Australian cases have been pulled into a single case.

15.03 McDonalds is blaming a third-party configuration change for system failures around the world on Friday. The issue saw some restaurants around the world, including in Australia and New Zealand, shut for hours after staff were unable to take orders or serve food, Inc Australia reports.

15.03 Microsoft’s LinkedIn has been served with a request for information from the EU over its use of user data for ad tracking. It’s the latest platform to be face questions, with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta also under scrutiny for potential breach of the Digital Services Act prohibition on larger platforms’ use of sensitive data for ad targeting, Tech Crunch reports.

14.03  A London high court has ruled that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not the creator of bitcoin. The presiding judge ruled that Wright, who claimed to have invented the cryptocurrency, was not the author of the bitcoin whitepaper and nor was he ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ – the pseudonym of the bitcoin creator – The Guardian says.

14.03 The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that could see TikTok banned throughout the United States. TikTok parent ByteDance would have six months to sell its controlling stake or the app would be banned in the US, the BBC reports. The bill still needs to clear Senate and be signed by the president in order to become law.

13.03 Singtel has denied it is planning to sell Optus to Brookfield for $16 billion. The company says there is ‘no impending deal’ to offload Optus ‘for the said sum’, saying the company remains ‘an integral and strategic part of the Singtel Gorup and we are committed to Australia for the long term’. Brookfield is the former owner of One NZ.

13.03 The Australian PC market dropped by 9.8 percent in 2023 to 4.2 million units, with desktop and notebook categories declining 9.7 percent and 10.4 percent respectively, while workstations were up 7.2 percent. IDC says big drops were recorded in the consumer segment, while reduced demand from the government, VLB and SMB sectors pushed commercial demand down 4.9 percent.

13.03 The European Parliament has approved the AI Act, dubbed the world’s first ‘comprehensive, binding rules’ for AI. The Act takes a risk-based approach, with more risky AI applications facing greater scrutiny. The majority of AI systems, such as content recommendation systems, are expected to be low risk, with companies able to follow the voluntary requirements. Higher risk scenarios will face tougher requirements when the Act passes into law later this year. Time says the AI Act is expected to act as a global signpost for other governments grappling with regulation of the technology.

13.03 Oracle has won a major deal with the South Australian Government which will roll out Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to standardise its financial processes across 51 state agencies. The Shared Services South Australia says Oracle Cloud ERP and Fusion ERP Analytics will enable improved speed and accuracy of financial processes and expand insights for decision-making and resource allocation.

13.03 More than 11,000 cybercrime incidents have been linked to the 2022 Medibank breach according to Victoria Police. The incidents were identified through Operation Guardian, a joint police operation monitoring misuse of data from the high profile breaches including Optus, Medibank, Latitude Finance and MyDeal, ITNews reports.

12.03 Australia has introduced a new code requiring search engines to prevent child sexual abuse and terrorist content appearing in search results. The code, which is one of Australia’s first sets of AI regulations, bans generative AI from being used to produce deepfake versions of the offensive material, The Canberra Times reports.

09.03 The Russian hackers who broke into Microsoft’s account are still attempting to use stolen data from corporate emails to gain further access to its systems. Microsoft first disclosed the hack, by a group linked to Russia’s foreign intelligence, in January, and now says in recent weeks stolen information has bene used to access some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems, CNN Business reports.

08.03 A report from the NSW Ombudsman shows 275 automated decision-making systems, including AI, are in use across the NSW public sector. The report, which was tabled in Parliament and is based on voluntary reporting, found widespread and increasing use of automation across both state government and local councils.

07.03 An incorrect system configuration has cost the ASX more than $1 million, after it was fined by ASIC for failing to make pre-trade information about orders available on its trading system. The infringement notice is the first time one has been issued by ASIC to a market operator. ASIC says the issue arose out of a failure by ASX to correctly configure certain order functionality on its trading system. The issue went undetected – despite at least two occasions when it could have been identified – until drawn to the ASX’s attention by a market participant, ASIC says.

07.03 Seventy-six percent of Australian organisations in a survey say the complexity of their technology has increased in the past 12 months, with the average multicloud environment spanning 14 different platforms and services. The Dynatrace report shows globally 88 percent are reporting increased complexity. Locally 36 percent expect that complexity to continue to increase.

05.03 Accenture is buying learning platform Udacity for an undisclosed sum, as part of a plan to launch a technology training service for enterprises and government organisations. Accenture says it will be investing $1 billion in building the LearnVantage learning platform which will be integrated with Udacity.

05.03 Google and Xprize have launched a $5m competition to find practical uses for quantum computers. The three-year competition aims to find specific real-world applications for quantum, rather than ‘simple benchmarks’, NewScientist reports.

05.03 Western Australia digital twin plans are moving ahead with a $140m to be allocated through the Digital Capability Fund for the 10-year project. IT News reports the funding is a considerable expansion of the project, which received $12.4m in the 2023-24 state budget.

01.03 The Australian government is seeking advice from Treasury and the ACCC after Meta announced it will stop paying Australian news publishers for content appearing on Facebook. Reuters reports that the move has set up a new battle with Canberra which has long argued that platforms like Facebook and Google unfairly benefit in terms of advertising revenue when links to news articles appear on their platforms. Meta says it is discontinuing the news tab in Australia and the US and as a result won’t be entering into any new commercial deals for traditional news content in those countries. 

02.03 Elon Musk is suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming they have abandoned the original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. The BBC reports that Musk, who was an early co-founder of OpenAI, is claiming the company has become focused on ‘maximising profits’ for major investor Microsoft.

02.03 The US is investigating whether Chinese car imports pose national security risks because of the vehicles collection of large amounts of data on drivers and passengers and the use of cameras and sensors to record detailed information on US infrastructure. Reuters says restrictions could be imposed due to the concerns.

01.03 Twelve projects will share in more than $9 million in Moon to Mars grants to help drive innovation and support cutting-edge Australian science. Companies winning grants include Valiant Space for its work on a non-toxic propulsion system, NextAero, which is developing cryogenic rocket propellants, and HEO, which is developing advanced cameras for imaging satellites, Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic, says.

AppWrap February 2024

27.02 Darwin has opened its first gaming and esports development centre. The Array, in the Victoria Hotel, signals ‘notable’ government investment, Information Age reports.

29.02 Australia Post has inked a multiyear deal with Salesforce to support customer experience. The deal will see Australia Post harnessing Salesforce’s data and AI capabilities with the company’s tech platform as a key foundation to ‘redesign and deliver an enhanced customer experience across sales, service and marketing’, Australia Post says.

25.02 Michelle McGuinness has been appointed national cybersecurity coordinator by the Department of Home Affairs. McGuinness, a a 30-year military veteran, will lead reforms to counter cybersecurity treats in Australia, ABC reports. McGuinness replaces Darren Goldie, who was recalled in November after four months in the role.

23.02 Google has ‘paused’ its Gemini people image generation, just three weeks after launch, admitting the feature ‘missed the mark’ with inaccurate or even offensive images as the model ‘overcompensated in some cases, and [was] over-conservative in others’. The company publicly apologised and says it’s working to improve it ‘significantly’ before turning it back on.

22.02 The Australian government was one of the top five sectors to notify data breaches in the six months to 31 December 2023, reporting 38 breaches. The OAIC figures show government breaches accounted for eight percent of the 473 reported breaches during the period, ranking fifth overall. Health service providers remained the top target, with 104 breaches (22 percent). Finance, insurance and retail were also in the top five. The OAIC used the release of the report to warn on the risk of outsourcing personal information handling to third parties, noting a high number of multiparty breaches, most resulting from breaches of cloud or software providers.

21.02 The Australian Taxation Office is defending against 4.7 million attempted cyber attacks a month, on average, Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan says. “I’ve been asked may times what keeps me awake at night and my response is always ‘cyber security’,” he says, noting the organisation holds 50 petabytes of data – equivalent to one billion tall filing cabinets.

21.02 The AFP was among international law enforcement agencies involved in the takedown of the LockBit ransomware group. The Europol-led investigation has seen the arrest of several LockBit members and the issuing of arrest warrants and indictments by French and US law enforcement.  Critical infrastructure, including the primary platform and 34 servers including in Australia, have also been disrupted the AFP says. It says the group, first identified in 2019, caused billions of dollars of harm globally, including millions to Australian individuals and businesses.

20.02 IT project management is the second most sought-after skill in Australia – beaten out of top spot by accountancy. Business analysis and software developers also make the top 10 in Hays list of the skills in most demand in 2024. Eighty-eight percent of employers are experiencing a kills shortage, according to Hays, with the recent rise in job vacancy activity across Australia reported.

14.02 Twelve people have been appointed to the new Artificial Intelligence Expert Group which will steer the creation of mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI settings in Australia. Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic says the board includes expertise across law, ethics and technology.

14.02 Atlassian co-founder and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar have topped the tech contingent for Australia’s richest tycoons. Cannon-Brookes has taken fourth place with $13.7 billion, and Farquhar fifth, with $13.5 billion, on Forbes’ Australia’s 50 Richest 2024 list. Canva founders and husband and wife team Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins also make the top 10, at seventh, despite Canva’s value declining nearly 40 percent since its 2021 $40b valuation.

13.02 150 people who have worked with the Australian Taxation Office have been investigated over a GST fraud scheme which went viral on TikTok, with actions including termination of contracts, administrative action and criminal prosecutions taken against 12. The ATO says the majority were contractors or ex-employees and were not working with the ATO at the time they are suspected of committing the fraud, Information Age reports.

13.02 Investigations are underway after a 38-wagon Rio Tinto autonomous train derailed in Western Australia. No one was injured in the incident which comes less than a year after another Rio Tinto autonomous train derailed in the same region, Mining.com reports.

12.02 A review of Australia’s online safety laws will kick off a year early amid concerns over the risks posed by the likes of deepfakes and online hate. Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland says the review will be a broad-ranging examination of the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act 2021 and consider whether additional protections are needed for harmful online material such as hate speech and image-based abuse. Further protections to address harms from new and emerging tech like generative AI and algorithms will also be considered.

12.02 Forget security or AI issues, Australian IT decision makers are most concerned about government-enacted regulatory and policy uncertainty according to the the AIIA Tech Index. The report shows CIOs are concerned over increasing regulation and policy uncertainties that could disrupt their business this year. The report also shows cybersecurity and cloud continue to dominate buying and hiring decisions.

12.02 NBN Co has recorded a half-year loss of AU$696 million for the first six months of fiscal 2024, despite a five percent revenue increase to $2.75 billion. The company’s financials show an increase on finance charges and interest on borrowings impacted results.

07.02 The Federal Government is being urged to establish a Bureau of Indigenous Data to promote and advance Indigenous data governance. The Closing the Gap report also recommends amending the agreement to support Indigenous data sovereignty – the right of Indigenous people to exercise ownership over Indigenous data.

08.02 More than 200 ‘AI stakeholders’, including big tech, civil society and academia, have joined the newly launched US AI Safety Institute Consortium. The US Department of Commerce says the consortium will help set safety standards and protect the US innovation ecosystem.

09.02 The Bard has been banished, with Gemini instead rising in its place as Google introduced its free AI Gemini app. The app for Android has launched, with Gemini’s features expected to be added to Google’s existing search app for iPhones in the coming weeks. US customers can subscribe for US$19.99 a month to access Gemini Advanced, Fortune reports.

05.02 The DTA says it has made progress in getting agencies to tie delivery milestones to funding requests for tech projects. ITNews reports that the DTA cited four examples of its efforts to make progress on tech projects more transparent through the investment oversight framework, including the work with the Bureau of Statistics.

02.02 US government agencies have been ordered to take Ivanti VPN products offline by the end of the day due to actively exploited vulnerabilities. Patches for the four vulnerabilities are available however the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued the order, saying agencies must perform additional forensic analysis and clean-up steps in case they have already been compromised CSOonline reports. Australia’s ASD warned about the critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure in January.

01.02 Coles has inked a deal with data and AI company Palantir to deploy an analytics suite across its 840+ supermarkets to better understand and address ‘workforce-related spend’. Plantir says the deail will support decision making to optimise Coles workforce, connecting the ‘C-suite to the shelf-edge’ to enable better workforce planning, shift efficiency and a more granular understanding of spend.

01.02 ASIC has called for specific laws around AI saying it’s using existing laws in an attempt to rein in alleged AI misuse, but reforms are needed, ITNews reports.

AppWrap January 2024

31.01 The joint Australia-US Cloud Act has come into force, providing authorities in both countries to more easily access electronic data held by service providers to prevent and prosecute crime. A joint statement from the two countries Attorney-Generals says the agreement provides safeguards and protections covering human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law, including ‘stringent’ privacy and oversight protections.

29.01 A ‘supermassive mother of all breaches’ involving 12 terabytes of data and 26 billion records from organisations including LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Adobe and Canva has been revealed by security researchers. Security researcher Bob Dyachenko and Cybernews discovered the billions or exposed records on an open instance. Data breach search engine Leak-Loopup has since disclosed that it was the holder of the leaded dataset with a ‘firewall misconfiguration’ leading to the leak, Cybernews says.

28.01 Microsoft, eBay, Amazon and Tiktok have started the year with mass layoffs. Microsoft is cutting 1,900 jobs in its 22,000-strong gaming division, while TikTok is shedding 60 jobs in its advertising and sales unit, FastCompany reports. Ebay will cut around 1,000 jobs, while google is laying off ‘hundreds’ of employees from its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams. The layoffs follow SAPs announcement earlier in the week that it was restructuring with 8,000 jobs impacted (see below).

26.01 Adobe’s myGov deal has been extended for a further two years – and $30.7m – for ‘core customer experience technology for the platform underpinning myGov, InnovationAus reports. The extension sees the cost of the Adobe software used for the platform from 2021-2026 hit more than $67m.

24.01 A Russian has been named and sanctioned, including financial penalties and a travel ban, for his role in the 2022 Medibank data breach which saw the personal information of 9.7 million Australians stolen. Documents were later posted online. Australian authorities say Aleksandr Ermakov is part of the REvil cyber-crime group. The BBC reports that the cyber sanctions are the first of their kind in Australia and with investigations ongoing, more people may face penalties.

24.01 SAP is restructuring its business in a move affecting 8,000 jobs as it shifts its focus to AI. SAP says the restructure will cost €2 billion with it retraining staff or replacing then through voluntary redundancy programs. The company has previously announced plans to embed ChatGPT in its products. The restructure was confirmed during SAP’s FY23 financial results announcement where it revealed revenue for the year was up six percent to €31.2b with operating profit down five percent to €5.8b.

23.01 Optus has admitted that close to 2,700 emergency service calls failed during the November 2023 network outage – 10 times more than initially disclosed. The telco says it is writing to customers to apologise, while the Federal government is conducting a review, the ABC reports.

23.01 Underinvestment in technology by supermarket chains has helped lead to systemic issues with pricing, according to Consumer NZ. Jon Duffy, Consumer NZ CEO, says the supermarkets haven’t been incentivised to use technology to clean up their lax pricing practices as they haven’t been called to account for those practices, RNZ reports. The Commerce Commission is currently investigating whether the pricing and promotional activities of Woolworths and Foodstuffs comply with the Fair Trading Act.

19.01 A Melbourne man has been sentenced to 150 community work hours after pleading guilty to buying stolen data on the invite-only Genesis market, which sold login credentials, browsing history, autofill form data and other sensitive data from compromised devices. Police investigations found he had purchased several bots containing around 650 compromised credentials, the Australian Federal Police say.

19.01 Russian state-sponsored hackers have gained access to Microsoft’s corporate systems, stealing emails and documents from staff accounts. The compromise began in November 2023 and was identified by Microsoft’s security team on 12 January. Microsoft says to date there is no evidence any access to customer environments, production systems, source code or AI systems was gained.

17.12 Gartner has forecast worldwide IT spending to hit $5 trillion this year, up 6.8 percent on 2023 – down on a previous forecast for an eight percent increase for the year. And despite the hype around GenAI, it won’t be impacting spend significantly. Software spend (up 12.7 percent) and IT services (up 8.7 percent) will be the biggest movers, with IT services becoming the largest segment of spend this year, according to Gartner’s forecast.

16.01 NSW has released an an RFI for a new off-the-shelf internet voting system for blind and low vision voters. The move marks the first steps into restarting internet voting following the failure of the iVote system during the 2021 local government elections. The RFI will be used by the NSW Electoral Commission to inform planning for the potential reintroduction of online voting for the cohort, InnovationAus notes. 

16.01 A/NZ managed service provider Lancom Technology has been acquired by US MSP group Evergreen in the first expansion into ANZ for Evergreen. Lancom says it only took three weeks to decide Evergreen was the right partner for its business, with the US company committed ‘to preserving our team’s expertise, rather than replacing it’.

11.01 X Corp – the company previously known as Twitter – has reinstated more than 6,100 previously banned Australian accounts since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company according to a new transparency report released by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. The report also notes an 80 percent reduction in the number of safety engineers, with global trust and safety staff cut by a third, sparking increased concerns from eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant. She says it’s ‘almost inevitable’ any social media platform will become more toxic and less safe in the face of such actions.

11.01 HPE’s US$14b plans to buy Juniper Networks has raised scepticism on Wall Street, Bloomberg reports. HPE says the deal will ‘accelerate AI-driven innovation’ amid the ongoing AI gold rush, but has left some analysts questioning the potential acquisition and whether the purchase of a legacy tech company like Juniper will complicate growth initiatives. Concerns have also been raised over the risk of an increasing debt load and overlapping product lines, Bloomberg says.

10.01 NSW chief data scientist Dr Ian Oppermann has stepped down from the role after eight years. He announced the departure on LinkedIn. InformationAge reports that he is joining former politician Victor Dominello in ServiceGen, which the pair co-founder late last year.

09.01 OpenAI has admitted that it would be ‘impossible’ to develop GenAI without using copyrighted material. The admission comes as OpenAI is embroiled in legal action, brought against it by the New York Times, which has accused the company of mass copyright infringement. Responding to a UK parliamentary probe on large language models, Open AI defended its use of copyrighted material saying current copyright laws don’t forbid training data, BankInfoSecurity reports.

01.01 Kiwi video game studios netted $434.4 million in the year to April 2023, with 95 percent of that coming from high-value digital exports, according to a a NZ Game Developers Association survey. However, the impact of Australian competition has hit growth, which tumbled from 47 percent the previous year to just seven percent – well below the five year average of 26 percent.

For 2023 news from around the web head over to the 2023 AppWrap archive.

The post Appwrap: Cybersecurity sale, Quantum Brilliance; and Woolworths algorithm sparks strike appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Amazon Web Services announced plans in 2021 for its $7.5 billion AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) region. AWS ‘chief evangelist’ Jeff Barr said at the time that the facility would open in 2024.

“Work on the development appears to have stalled.”

The region would, AWS informed us, include three interlinked data centres, and the investment would create around 1,000 jobs (though it failed to specify how many of those would be temporary roles for construction of the centre) and add $10.8 billion to the local economy over 15 years.

Early last year AWS brought the right to draw down 51 megawatts of electricity from Mercury Energy for the data centres in a deal AWS said would be more than required at launch.

But with launch due this year, work on the development appears to have stalled after issues around stormwater design, and a fire at the West Auckland site in January.

Reports say while land was cleared for the data centre, and two small artificial wetlands were drained, the property remains empty.

A resource consent application was paused in September 2023 over issues with stormwater design. Amazon is apparently still working with Auckland Council and adjacent landowners.

Auckland Council told RNZ it was not uncommon for resource consent applications to be placed on hold during the consenting process and ‘there is nothing out of the ordinary about this one’.

AWS told iStart this week that it remains committed to launching an AWS region in New Zealand, but said it was not able to share details about the construction or location of the region ‘as this is part of our secure design approach’.

The question of whether there was a new completion date went unanswered by AWS.

Microsoft was the first major hyperscale cloud player to announce plans to build a data centre in New Zealand. It gained consent from the Overseas Investment Office in 2020 to purchase 6.5ha of land for the Auckland build and amid much fanfare (just as accompanied AWS’ announcement), Fonterra and Spark were announced as anchor tenants for the new region.

It says once operational the new facility will create around 50 new FTE jobs, with 300 temporary FTE roles created during the construction of the data centre.

In August 2022 it announced the three New Zealand data centres would be powered by 100 percent carbon free energy from day one, but apart from occasional blasts from Microsoft about new customers signing up for the data centres, little has been revealed about the construction progress. Microsoft did not respond to a request for an update on the work.

But if the big names are faltering, or at least playing coy, others are at least advancing their plans – and in some cases even opening facilities.

ASX-listed data centre company NextDC bought land in Auckland in late 2022 and registered a local subsidiary in preparation for its build of its AK1 Auckland facility – its first data centre on this side of the Tasman.

Announced by the company in May 2023, the facility, which would be located in the Auckland CBD would have total power of 10MW+. NextDC has said work is expected to commence in FY2024 with the site expected to reach ‘practical completion’ of its phase one build in the first half of FY2026.

While it’s listed as ‘in planning’ on NextDC’s website, company financials last year show the facility as being ‘in development’. The latest half year financials however, say the facility is ‘in planning’.

Also announcing big data centre plans for Auckland was DCI Data Centers. The Brookfield Asset Management portfolio company already had one data centre build underway in January 2022 when it announced it was adding a second to the lineup.

It held a ground breaking ceremony in August of that year for AKL02, which it said would be ‘one of New Zealand’s largest data centres’.

Combined the two DCI centres would bring $600 million to the Auckland region, with a combined economic value exceeding $1.4 billion over the life of the projects, DCI claimed.

The first of those centres, in Westgate in north-west Auckland, was completed on time and on budget in early 2023. It was first announced in 2021, and was fully leased prior to opening.

Not to be outdone, Kiwi telco Spark also recently announced plans to build a hyperscale data centre campus on Auckland’s North Shore, having reached conditional agreement to purchase land. The telco completed a 10MW expansion of its Takanini data centre last August.

Canberra Data Centres is also planning a 7,000m2 facility in Hobsonville and a second, 11,000m2 facility in Silverdale, where construction is already underway.

It’s not just Auckland in the data centre running. Datagrid New Zealand is planning a ‘carbon neutral hyperspace data centre’ in Southland, having acquired 43ha in Makarewa.

The $700 million project is headed up by Remi Galasso, who founded Hawaiki Cable, among other things and CallPlus founder Malcom Dick .

Intelia, another company founded by Galasso, announced a submarine cable project linking Invercargill with Sydney and Melbourne a month ago.

Datagrid’s offering is one of two data centres planned for Southland, with New Zealand co-location data centre company T4 also announcing plans for a $50 million data centre. The facility will be T4’s – and New Zealand’s – first tier 4 data centre.

That data centre is due to commence construction this year, though specifics on its location haven’t been revealed.

Last week T4 announced it had bought global IT infrastructure services provider and IBM spin-off Kyndryl ’s East Tamaki facility for an undisclosed sum. T4 has been using the East Tamaki data centre, which is an all-of-government approved tier 3+ site, since 2022. The company also has data centres in Whangarei and Auckland.

A UK-based startup, Lake Parime, which announced plans in 2021 for a data centre near Clyde went into liquidation last year.

The post What happened to the Kiwi data centre boom? appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Key Insights:

• High Demand for Expertise: 86% of respondents reported a notable increase in the demand for data and analytics expertise, indicating a sustained need for skilled professionals in the field.
  
  
• AI Reshaping the Landscape: AI emerges as a transformative force, with 89% of data leaders expecting a reduction in full-time hours within their organisations due to AI adoption. An overwhelming 90% believe that AI will drive the single greatest change in their data strategy over the next three to five years.
  
  
• Collaboration with Cybersecurity: 98% of participants underscored the importance of closer collaboration between data leaders and cybersecurity teams, emphasising the need to safeguard data in an increasingly digital landscape.
  
  
• CEO Alignment: Only 6% of respondents report to their organisation’s CEO, highlighting the limited direct connection between data and analytics leaders and top-level executives.
  
  
• Cloud Data Warehouses on the Rise: The report reveals that 92% of respondents are utilising cloud data warehouses across multiple business functions, reflecting a growing reliance on cloud infrastructure for data management.
  
  

Digital transformation full speed ahead

Brad Drysdale, principal solutions engineer at SnapLogic, says the report sheds a positive light on A/NZ businesses and their digital transformation journeys. “The survey results not only demonstrate that organisations across the region are investing in data-driven initiatives to power the customer experience, but they’re also setting themselves up to support that with 92 per cent using cloud data warehouses, which is great to see.

“There is a concern here that the people who are entrusted with using data to drive the business forward […] don’t have the ear of the CEO directly.”

“They’re also starting to look down the barrel to the fact that AI, particularly generative AI, is playing a more important role in their organisations, purely as a way to deal with the volume of data that’s coming in.”

Security and privacy top of mind

Drysdale shares that security and privacy are especially top of mind for organisations given recent data breaches, with nearly all (98%) agreeing there’s a need for greater collaboration between data leaders and cybersecurity teams.

“Underlying that number is the fact that people are scared to inherently trust the data when it makes decisions for the business. They are concerned about the risk associated with using a higher volume of data that’s closer to the customer, meaning customers’ personal data and what that means from a privacy perspective,” he says.

“If you look at the key findings, 6 per cent of respondents report to their organisation’s CEO, and 98 per cent agree there’s a security, trust and privacy elephant in the room. It seems logical to assume that issues such as brand erosion, risk and the financial implications of security and privacy concerns should squarely fall within the CEO’s purview.

“There is a concern here that the people who are entrusted with using data to drive the business forward and with the privacy, security and trust associated with it don’t have the ear of the CEO directly. The 6 per cent finding, although not unexpected, serves as a warning. CEOs must be more invested in the ownership of data-related matters. I think when that 6 per cent goes up, that 98 per cent security concern will drop.”

Generative integration

SnapLogic CTO Jeremiah Stone said, “Strong data infrastructure and integration solutions are critical capabilities if organisations wish to gain competitive advantage through being data-driven and through automation and analytics.

“Organisations that are able to create a sustainable effort with data drive more impact and results.”

The report coincides with the release of SnapLogic’s GenAI Builder, the world’s first no-code generative AI application development product for enterprise applications and services. Uniquely compatible with both legacy mainframe data, modern databases and APIs, GenAI Builder leverages conversational AI to transform and simplify customer, employee and partner digital experiences

About the survey

This representative survey of 159 data-focused leaders was conducted in June and July of 2023. Of these, 75% were from Australia and 25% were from New Zealand. Respondents were selected from local and global enterprises with at least 500 employees and those responsible for their organisations’ data strategy functions.The report features contributing insights from:

• Pieter Vorster, General Manager, Data Platforms, Westpac
• Nonna Milmeister, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, RMIT
• Brian Ferris, Chief Data, Analytics and Technology Officer, Loyalty New Zealand
• Julian Delany, Chief Technology Officer, Data and Digital, News Corp Australia
• Nasca Peng, Head of Artificial Intelligence, Fonterra

The State of Data and Analytics Australian and New Zealand 2023 report, now in its third consecutive year, provides in-depth insights and analysis into the evolving data landscape. To access the complete findings and recommendations, watch the webinar or download the full report here.

The post Demand for data & analytics expertise at three-year high appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap November 2023

13.12 A Sydney man has been charged with allegedly sending more than 17 million scam texts. 9News reports that the 39-year-old impersonated large businesses including Australia Post and Linkt, sending texts with links to fake websites aiming to scam people out of money.

08.12 Services Australia paid Infosys AU$191 million over four years for a welfare calculator, including more than $50m paid after a better  – Australian – solution was identified a year before the Infosys project was scrapped. The Infosys offering was written off as a failure after processing just 784 aged care claims. The Australian SecureFast solution had been tested and judged a ‘solution’ with a much higher success rate 12 months before the Infosys project was scrapped, the Guardian reports.

08.12 The Australian Government is spending $17m to establish up to five ‘AI Adopt’ centres across Australia in a push to encourage local businesses to adopt and integrate the technology safely into work practices. Training will be offered without charge to eligible businesses, Minister Ed Husic says.

08.12 Microsoft’s close partnership with ChatGPT developer OpenAI is being investigated by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority regulator, concerned about the partnership’s impact on competition. Microsoft was given a non-voting seat on OpenAI’s board following the recent management dramas as part of governance changes at the company. The CMA has called for comment on the partnership as part of the information gathering process ahead of the launch of a formal phase 1 investigation.

07.12 Controversial identity verification services legislation has passed with 38 privacy-enhancing changes. InformationAge says the amendments are largely in line with recommendations made by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee.

07.12 Nissan says its Australian and New Zealand operations have been hit by a cyber attack. The automotive giant says it is investigating the extent of the incident and whether any personal information has been accessed. The Australian Cyber Security Centre and NZ National Cyber Security Centre have both been notified, and the company is working to restore systems, Nissan says.

05.12 A/NZ CIOs and CTOs are struggling to balance IT modernisation efforts with business growth and profitability, according to a Rimini Street report. It found that while 88% of survey respondents are running an IT modernisation program, 61 percent admit to being behind schedule, with 68 percent saying they’re over budget. Nearly 60 percent said their modernisation programs were not succeeding beyond marginal improvements for the business.

04.12 Companies could be forced to develop and implement anti-scam strategies under regulations currently being canvassed, ITNews reports. The measures are part of a $86.5m scam-busting program, which includes the establishment of a National Anti-scam Centre and an SMS sender ID registry.

04.12 Applications for $18.5m in funding to establish the Australian Centre for Quantum Growth opened today. The funding will be awarded to an organisation to set up the centre, designed to support the growth of the quantum workforce and build relationships with key international counterparts, while increasing public understanding of the technology and how industries can benefit, Ed Husic says.

AppWrap November 2023

30.11 Queensland has passed a mandatory data breach notification scheme. The scheme, which will come into effect from mid-2025, will initially affect state agencies. Local governments will follow in mid-2026, IT News reports.

27.11 The ACCC is calling for new competition laws in response to the continued expansion of digital platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. It says platform’s expansion increases the risk of the platforms engaging in harmful behaviour such as invasive data collection practices and consumer lock-ins that reduce choice and stifle innovation. The ACCC has released a new report on the matter and says it is further evidence to support earlier recommendations that competition and consumer laws be updated to ensure consumers and businesses continue to benefit from opportunities created by digital platform services.

27.11 Google will begin deleting inactive personal accounts from December 1 as part of a new security plan. The purge will see accounts that have been inactive for two years closed off, is designed to prevent accounts from being compromised, Google says. The closures will be phased, with Google saying it will send multiple notifications to users before closing the accounts, CBS News reports.

23.11 NextDC has started work on its $80m Darwin data centre, with plans to launch in June 2024. Vocus, which is partnering with NextDC at the D1 facility, switched on its first international fibre-optic cable into Darwin – the Darwin-Jakarta-Singapore cable – in July. NextDC says the facility will have 8MW and 1,500 rack capacity, 3,000m2 of space, with 2,000m2 of mission critical space.

22.11 The federal government has set a zero trust target for Australia’s public sector, to be embedded by 2030. ITNews says uplifts in identity verification and privileged access management may be on the cards as part of the plan.

22.11 Australia will provide roving teams of cyber experts to help Pacific Islands deal with online threats. The teams will be led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but include private and public sector specialists, including from intelligence agencies. A further $16.7m has also been allocated by the federal government to help Pacific nations identify vulnerabilities and trial solutions, ABC says. The move comes amid concerns about the Pacific’s vulnerability to cyber attacks.

23.11 Australian companies won’t be banned from paying ransoms, but the federal government will provide a ransomware ‘playbook’ and require reporting of attacks. The $568m Cyber Security Strategy was unveiled on Wednesday, InformationAge reports, with the government planning to work with industry to develop legislation for the ‘no-fault, no-liability’ reporting obligations, which will be used to provide anonymised trends data.

22.11 Sam Altman is heading back to OpenAI as CEO, five days after being dumped from the company, with the board being restructured. The NYTimes says what appears to be emerging from the mess is a company better suited to handle the billions of dollars thrown its way – but potentially not as attuned to OpenAI’s earlier mission of creating AI that’s safe for the world.

22.11 Negotiations are underway – again – for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI. Altman’s abrupt firing on Friday following ‘a deliberate review process… which concluded he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its responsibility to exercise its responsibilities’ was followed by co-founder Greg Brockman announcing he was leaving the company too, in solidarity. Other senior staff were also reported to be resigning, and on Monday Altman and Brockman were hired by Microsoft – whose stocks had dropped following the Friday news of Altman’s departure from OpenAI, and hundreds of employees signed an open letter saying they’d resign themselves if the pair weren’t reinstated. Bloomberg reports discussions are now underway, with one scenario being Altman becomes a director on a transitional board.

21.11 Social media companies will be forced to crack down on ‘emerging harms’, including offensive and dangerous content created by generative AI services. The Guardian reports that updates to the Basic Online Safety Expectations on tech companies will ask them to ensure algorithms don’t amplify harmful content.

12.11 Australia’s second largest port operator, DP World, has suspended operations in several states after a cybersecurity incident described by the Australian government as ‘serious and ongoing’. Operations were halted on Friday with DP World, which manages nearly half of the goods in and out of Australia, reporting it was looking into possible data breaches and testing systems, Reuters reports.

11.11 Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will front up at a Senate inquiry this week with the company facing threat of substantial fines over the inability of customers to call 000 during Wednesday’s outage. While details of the parliamentary probe haven’t been released yet, the SMH reports that leaked correspondence shows the committee will have a public hearing on Friday, with the Optus CEO attending. A post-incident review of the outage has also been announced by the federal government.

09.11 MyGov is looking to go passwordless from next year, harnessing pass-key technology instead. The move will see users able to log in using face scans, fingerprints and PINs. AFR reports the MyGov is the first government service in Australia to adopt the Fido standard, already in use by some private sector sites.

09.11 Optus is warning customers that phishing messages claiming to be from Optus about yesterday’s outage are circulating. The telco says it is not sending email or SMS communications about the outage with links.

09.11 Customer insights innovation platform Ideally has raised $2.15m in seed investment as it looks to expand services within Australasia. The self-service platform enables users to test concepts, ideas and messages with their target audience. The investment was lead by Icehouse Ventures alongside Brand Fund 1, Brandt notes.

08.11 Siemens and Swinburne University of Technology have teamed up on a $5.2m energy grid laboratory in Melbourne, complete with a digital twin of Australia’s energy market to enable users to run simulations or new solutions, Smart Energy says.

08.11 An outage at Optus has left around 40 percent of Australia’s population without internet or phone and raised questions about the fragility of the country’s core infrastructure. The outage was reported at 4am, with Optus saying at 4.35pm that most services should be back online. The outage threw payment, transport and health systems into chaos, Reuters reports.

08.11 Kiwi commercial real estate valuation software company Forbury is being acquired by Canada’s Altus Group for an undisclosed sum. Altus says the acquisition solidifies its Australia and broader APAC presence and provide market specific valuation capabilities. Forbury, which has 34 employees, was founded by former All Black Steve Surridge.

07.11 IBM is launching a US$500m venture fund to invest in early stage to hyper-growth AI companies to bolster enterprise-grade GenAI solutions. IBM says the startups will have the opportunity to work with IBM’s team, gaining operational expertise on product and engineering and go-to-market strategies.

04.11 The Records and Information Management Practitioners Alliance is calling for urgent changes to the Archives Act to fix Australian Public Service’s poor record keeping. RIMPA sent a letter to the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance saying federal record-keeping and data-retention practices within agencies are so bad, they face becoming the next Medibank while being unable to find documents needed, The Mandarin says. RIMPA says it hasn’t received any response to its letter yet.

03.11 The Australian Information Commissioner is taking Australian Clinical Labs to court over 2022 data breach. The Commissioner is alleging that from May 2021 to September 2022, ACL failed to take reasonable steps to protect personal informations and that those failures left ACL vulnerable to attack. It is also alleging that ACL failed to carry out a reasonable assessment following the data breach or to notify the Commissioner of the breach quickly. The February 2022 breach saw personal information including health and credit card information of more than 100,000 individuals, breached.

01.11 Australia and New Zealand have joined 25 countries including the US, EU and China in agreeing to work together to manage the risk from AI. The Bletchley Declaration includes a focus on identifying safety risks of shared concern, and building risk-based policies across countries.

01.11 The Reserve Bank of Australia has warned that cybersecurity, AI and cloud are posing operational risk for Australia’s financial stability. Assistant governor Brad Jones says while increasing digitisation has been a source of innovation, it also means operational risk is now ‘a first order enterprise-wide risk that demands the highest standards of management and governance’. He noted a building challenge from third-party technology dependencies, and moves by big tech seeking to move into payment services without the regulatory oversight typically imposed on other financial service providers.

AppWrap October 2023

31.10 The federal government has been urged to wait until privacy reforms are complete rather than continuing to try to retrofit laws on identity management. InformationAge says witnesses at a public hearing were largely supportive of the introduction of the legislative regime for ID matching services and changes made from earlier efforts, but were highly critical of the short timeframe for the inquiry and that the government has been using the services without legislative basis for several years.

30.10 President Joe Biden has signed a sweeping AI executive order in the US government’s most ambitious attempt to address concerns around the technology, The Washington Post says. It places new safety obligations on AI developers, requiring developers to perform safety tests and notify the government of results before rolling out products. It also directs the government to develop standards for companies to label AI-generated content and calls on federal agencies to mitigate the technologies risk while evaluating their own use of the tools.

30.10 The G7 are expected to this week agree an AI code of conduct for companies developing AI systems, Reuters says. The voluntary 11-point code of conduct will set a landmark for how countries govern AI and urges companies to take appropriate measures to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks as well as tackle incidents and patterns of misuse after AI products are in market. 

27.10 Australia and the US have formalised the Technology Safeguards Agreement, enabling US companies to carry out space launch activities in Australia and protect US tech, including rockets and satellites. The Department of Industry Science and Resources says the deal will create new high-skilled tech jobs and supply chains locally.

26.10 Innovation has become the fourth pillar alongside economic, defence and climate and clean energy cooperation, in the Australian-US alliance. InnovationAustralia says the two countries will work more closely on innovation and science with President Joe Biden saying he and Anthony Albanese had discussed opportunities to increase cooperation in areas including biotech, quantum and cybersecurity.

24.10 Australians are planning on doing 48 percent of their seasonal shopping online this year according to a Cisco report. The report says 33 percent of respondents expect to do more shopping online this year than last and those increasing their online shopping this year expect to make 72 percent of purchases online. Consumers cited more choices, avoiding the last minute rush in physical stores,  online’s anytime access and lack of time for extensive holiday shopping as the key reasons for online shopping, Bandt says.

26.10 The federal government paid out $1.34m over five weeks – or $35,000 per working day –  to McKinsey for work on the development of its 2023-2030 Cyber Security Strategy. The Department of Home did not go to market for the work and the tender was open for one week, with only one other company applying. The figures were revealed during Senate Estimates, InformationAge reports.

24.10 Microsoft is investing AU$5 billion into its Australian hyperscale cloud and AI infrastructure over the next two years. The company says the investment will also increase its data centre count from 20 to 29 and that it plans to extend its global skills programs to help more than 300,000 Australians gain ‘the capabilities they need to thrive in a cloud and AI-enabled economy’. An initiative with the Australian Signals Directorate to improve cyber protection for Australian residents, businesses and government entities was also announced.

24.10 A group of researchers have developed a tool which enables artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art in order to ‘poison’ models using images to train AI. Nightshade can cause  the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways, MIT Technology Review reports and could mean future iterations of models such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion’s include useless outputs.

20.10 Australian-founded fintech Airwallex is expanding its Latin American business after acquiring rival Mexican payments provider MexPago. CNBC notes that Latin America is an attractive spot for fintech companies, largely due to a younger demographic. Mexico will provide something of a hedge for the company as it deals with geopolitical and economic uncertainty between the US and China. Airwallex says it has seen more than 460 percent year on year revenue growth in the Americas.

19.10 Kiwi and Australian tech companies have been warned about the ‘unprecedented threat’ China poses to innovation and the country’s targeting of businesses with activities including cyber intrusions. Five Eyes countries’ intelligence bosses came together to issue the warning and accuse China of IP theft and using AI for hacking and spying against nations, Reuters reports.

18.10 X is rolling out a US$1/year fee for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines in a move it says is aimed at combatting bots. The ‘Not A Bot’ subscription is a trial designed to reduce spam, manipulation of the platform and bot activity, X claims. Those who decline to pay will only be able to read posts, watch videos and follow accounts, Aljazeera reports. Existing users are not affected.

13.10 Queensland agencies will face mandatory data breach reporting with the state government introducing a bill to set up the scheme, requiring agencies to notify the Office of the Information Commissioner, as well as affected individuals, of data breaches. Queensland is only the second state, after NSW, to introduce such a scheme, GovernmentNews reports.

13.10 Australia’s Atlassian is buying Loom for US$975m (AU$1.5b) – some 36 percent below the US enterprise video chat and screen recording company’s last valuation. Atlassian says Loom will continue to be available as a separate product, but will also be it integrated into its Atlassian’s offerings, the SMH reports. The deal, Atlassian’s largest to date, is expected to be completed in the quarter ending March 2024.

12.10 PwC government contracts, along with new deals, can be delivered by PwC Australia spin-off Scyne Advisory after the company was approved by the Finance Department to take on the work. Allegro Funds acquired PwC’s government consultancy in July for $1, following scandal over PwC Australia’s misuse of confidential information. The Department of Finance issued an advisory green-lighting the work.

12.10 A ‘ripple effect’ from Optus’ data breach resulted in so many complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, that it tapped robotic process automation to meet the demand. More than 20,000 complaints were lodged against Optus according to the TIO’s latest report, with 6,800 received in October 2022 – the month after the breach. The TIO says it launched a new pre-conciliation tool to give it the ability to be flexible and meet higher demand in response to the surge in complaints. Overall complaints were down 16.5 percent, Information Age reports.

11.10 Telstra is acquiring Melbourne cloud consultancy Versent in a AU$267.5 million deal to scale its Telstra Purple tech services business. The deal also includes Versent subsidiary, self-serve cloud management platform Stax. Telstra says Versent, which has a team of more than 500 and offers professional and managed services, will provide additional depth for Telstra and help it met growing demand for specialised services in cloud-led transformation.

11.10 The Australian government has unveiled draft laws to regulate digital payment providers such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, enabling monitoring of digital wallet payments in the same way credit card networks and other transactions are monitored by the Reserve Bank. Reuters says Google and Apple have been opposing plans to designate them as payment providers.

09.10 Smart technology in mouthguards will be used to detect brain injuries suffered by rugby players on the field in a €2m initiative from World Rugby. The technology will provide in-game alerts to independent pitch-side doctors, debuting in the women’s WXV competition from this month, World Rugby says.

07.10 The Queensland government is trialling an AI learning platform which provides quiz-based learning. The trial involves 500 students and 25 teachers from 10 Queensland state schools, with the Cerego tool providing a ‘personalised, tailored learning experience while keeping teachers at the centre of the classroom, the CourierMail reports.

06.10 AWS will mandate MFA for all privileged accounts from 2024. Initially those signing into the AWS Management Console with the root user of an AWS Organizations management account will be required to use MFA, with the program expanding throughout 2024, Infosecurity Magazine reports.

04.10 Queensland is investing AU$76m in funding for quantum, with the government working with industry and universities to establish a Quantum Academy to introduce the topic into schools and Tafes. Announced by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in her State of the State address, the funding will pour millions into commercialising the technology, Brisbane Times reports.

04.10 Australia is facing its most significant skills shortage in 60 years with almost 70 percent of ICT jobs experiencing shortages. The inaugural Job and Skills Report 2023 points to gender imbalance as a key issue, noting occupations with strong imbalance are more likely to be in shortage. The need for expert digital skills, and digital literacy, are highlighted, with digital transformation noted as a megatrend shaping the economy and workforce.

02.10 Bank of Queensland expects to recognise technology costs of around $14 million along with a $27m write-down in value for its ME core banking systems, ITNews reports.

02.10 Seventy-eight percent of respondents in an ISACA survey believe Oceania organisations are underreporting cybercrime. The report says just 42 percent of Oceania organisations surveyed conduct cyber-risk assessments at least annual, despite 56 percent reporting an increase in attacks in the past 12 months. Meanwhile,65 percent of Oceania cybersecurity teams say they’re understaffed, with soft skills, cloud computing and security controls among the biggest skills gaps.

AppWrap September 2023

27.09 Cloud-enabled SMEs could help unlock AU$9.3 billion in annual productivity gains and support 1.4m jobs across healthcare, education and agriculture by 2030, representing 10 percent of all Australian jobs according to an AWS commissioned report. The report puts current Australian cloud adoption at 48 percent for ‘basic’ adoption, such as use of email services or cloud storage, with intermediate (use of CRM or ERP tools) at 41 percent and advanced (such as AI and ML for fraud detection or supply chain forecasting) at just 15 percent.

28.09 OpenAI has been given real-time internet access, enabling it to provide up-to-date information and sources, fixing what has been a major limitation of the chatbot. Information was previously limited to pre-2021. The updated version will, however, only be available to Plus and Enterprise chatbot users, Interesting Engineering reports. The ability to search online will be made available through Microsoft’s Bin product.

27.09 Sixty-six percent of Australians believe social media and digital platforms aren’t doing enough to protect users from scams, according to Choice. The consumer watchdog says its own investigations had ‘no trouble’ finding ads on Google, Facebook and Instagram linking to fake websites. It notes there are also issues with Google’s own policies to prevent scams because some advertisers don’t appear to be verified before publishing ads.

26.09 KPMG Australia has invested $16 million into SME ERP platform Wiise, which was spun out of KPMG in 2018. The new funding, equivalent to a series B funding round, will be used to set up operations in New Zealand as well as furthering product development and sales and marketing, AFR reports. The company is on track for $10m in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2023.

25.09 Microsoft is looking at using small nuclear reactors to power its data centres in preparation for a future of AI – notoriously compute, and energy, intensive. The company has advertised for a principal program manager for nuclear technology to lead its technical assessment of integrating small modular nuclear reactors and microreactors to power the cloud and AI data centres, CNBC reports.

21.09 Medibank’s breakdown of its AU$46.4m data breach expenses from last year’s incident, reveals additional tech expenses accounted for just $7.5m of the costs. The health insurer’s annual report shows the company has spent $22m in administration costs, $15.6m in employee benefits and $1.2m in marketing as well. ITNews reports that another $35m in costs is expected in the coming year.

26.09 Australian executives estimate 39 percent of their workforce will need to reskill in the next three years as a result of AI and automation according to an IBM Institute for Business Value study. The report shows executives feel building new skills for existing talent it eh number one challenge for their organisation.

22.09 Ninety-five percent of those holding NFT collections are now holding worthless investments according to a new report by dappGambl. The Guardian reports that nearly 70,000 NFT collections have a market cap of 0 Ether following a drastic downward market shift.

22.09 Cisco is acquiring Splunk for US$28 billion. The deal is the the largest acquisition yet for Cisco – which is known for building its business through acquisitions – and signals a big push into software and AI-powered data analysis, Bloomberg notes.

22.09 The Australian Federal Police have revealed they’re using AI to analyse data obtained under surveillance warrants, but that use of technology has so far been ‘limited’. In a submission to the federal government discussion paper on responsible use of AI, AFP indicates AI could be used to analyse tranactional data to identify money laundering and potential fraud, The Guardian reports.

21.09 ASIC is suing Kraken crypto exchange provider Bit Trade for failing to comply with the design and distribution obligations for the margin trading product it offers Australian customers on the Kraken exchange. ASIC alleges the product is a credit facility as it offers credit for use in the sale and purchase of crypto assets and says its case focuses on Bit Trade’s failure to make a target market determination for the product, as required by law, before offering it to local customers.

20.09 Microsoft’s week just got even worse, with another major leak – this time of highly confidential, unredacted FTC filings detailing plans for the Xbox gaming platform out to 2030, along with confidential emails about potential acquisitions of Nintendo and other companies. The documents, part of the FTC action around Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of ActivisionBlizzard, show detailed timelines for offerings including gaming consoles and controllers, Endgadet notes. Earlier in the week, the company exposed 38 terabytes of private data on GitHub.

19.09 Consultations have opened on a draft digital ID bill to introduce a national digital ID system for Australia. Finance Minister Katy Gallagher says the Digital ID would be introduced and expanded in four phases with phase one establishing the ID in legislation and accrediting providers. State and territory digital IDs would be able to be used to access Commonwealth services in stage two, with MyGov used in the private sector in stage three, such as when opening a bank account or signing a telco contract or real estate lease. Stage four would see private sector Digital IDs used to access some government services. An exposure draft has been released.

19.09 Shareholders of ASX-listed cybersecurity company Tesserent have voted in favour of a $176m takeover by Thales. The deal will help Thales expand its cybersecurity services, with the addition of 500 Tesserent employees. AFR reports that the deal is still pending approval from the Foreign Investment Review board. 

18.09 Microsoft’s AI research team has accidentally leaked 38 terabytes of private data, including private keys, passwords and more than 30,000 internal Teams messages. Security company Wiz says the data was exposed while publishing open-source training data on GitHub using Azure’s SAS tokens feature.

18.09 Fujitsu is acquiring Australian digital transformation consultancy MF & Associates for an undisclosed sum, in a move it says will strengthen its management, technology and cybersecurity consulting capabilities, particularly within the government and healthcare sectors. MF & Associates will operate as a standalone Fujitsu company retaining all team members and continuing to operate under current MD Mat Franklin, Fujitsu says. The deal is Fujitsu’s fifth in A/NZ since 2021.

18.09 Dymocks has confirmed 1.24 million customer records have been leaked in a data breach it’s blaming on ‘unauthorised access’ of a third-party partner’s systems. Customer records have been published on the dark web, and Dymocks says it is working with forensic experts to monitor the dark web and take down data where possible. The OAIC and ACSC have also been notified.

14.09 A ‘design fault’ has seen an AI-powered road safety camera system in Queensland incorrectly ping nearly 2,000 drivers with demerit points for alleged non-wearing of seatbelts. Sanctions on the drivers may be reconsidered, as the Queensland government orders an urgent review and issues an apology, InformationAge reports.

07.09 There were 172 breaches from malicious or criminal attack reported to the OAIC for the six months to June, down 15 percent on the previous half. Human error accounted for a further 107 reports, with system faults contributing a further 14 the OAIC report shows.

07.09 Nearly 25 percent of Australian SMBs say their businesses wouldn’t survive the financial or reputational impact of a privacy breach, but an equal number admit they don’t understand what is expected of their business as part of recent Privacy Act changes. The Zoho survey found awareness is increasing, with 45 percent of those surveyed ranking data privacy as a top business priority, but less than half having a well defined, documented and applied customer privacy policy.

07.09 Australia’s boards are among the most nervous about cyber security breaches, with the spectre of generative AI further upping the ante with 71 percent viewing it as a security risk. Despite concerns, just 81 percent believe they have adequately invested in cybersecurity, InformationAge reports.

06.09 Russian hackers say they have stolen at least 4.95 terabytes of data from a number of Victorian companies, including pathology firm TissuePath, real estate agency Barry Plant, law firm Tisher Liner FC Law and Strata Plan, an owners corporation service provider. The same group were behind the HWL Ebsworth attach which saw 1.45 terabytes of data published on the dark web after ransom demands weren’t met. It is unclear exactly what data may be included in the latest theft, with AlphV threatening to again publish the data, ABC News reports.

02.09 Google has unveiled its AI tools and pricing for enterprise customers. Google Duet, which adds Ai smarts to Google offerings including Gmail, Docs, Meet, Sheets and Slides, will cost $30 per user per month – the same as rival Microsoft’s Office 365 Copilot tools. Pricing for consumers and smaller businesses has yet to be revealed, CNet reports.

01.09 Optus says it won’t release a report into last year’s data breach, citing confidentiality and saying it is the subject of a ‘legal professional privilege claim’. The report had been expected to be released in late May, ITwire notes.

01.09 Microsoft is unbundling Teams from its 365 suites in EU markets in October, to allay antitrust concerns. The unbundling will mean enterprise customers in those markets can buy Office 365 and Microsoft 365 without teams for €2/month less, and purchase Teams separately, for €5/month. Teams will remain in plans targeted at SMBs, the Verge says.

AppWrap August 2023

30.08 Macquarie Data Centres has expanded its plans for an upcoming Sydney data centre to help meet demand for AI workloads in Australia and ‘create the ideal home for hyperscale cloud customers. The expansion gives IC3 Super West the potential to increase IT load 41 percent to 45MW, Macquarie says.

30.08 Treasury is considering a ban on screen scraping of data shared by consumers in some sectors. Assistant treasurer Stephen Jones says a recent statutory revioew of the Consumer Data Right recommended screen scraping be banned where the CDR is a viable alternative, and the new discussion paper looks at how it is used and the feasibility of a ban. The discussion document follows the release of exposure draft rules expanding the CDR to the non-bank lending sector last week. CDR rules released in July will prevent businesses using automated processes to collect content and share it with third parties. 

29.08 While 76 percent of Australian organisations have suffered a cyber attack in the past year, just 27 percent have reported the incidents to authorities according to a CloudFlare survey. The report found 49 percent of respondents reported financial impact of $1.5m or more, while 25 percent of small businesses had been impacted to the tune of at least $3m, CybersecurityConnect reports. 

29.08 The majority of Australians, particularly women, older people and regional Australians, believe AI creates more problems than it solves. Respondents in the Roy Morgan survey cited the potential for job losses, followed by the need for regulation and the ability for AI to be misused as the most common reasons for believing it would create more hassle than benefit.

28.08 The business register modernisation program has been canned, after an independent review found the program was ‘way off course’ and would cost up to $2.8 billion – more than five times the original $480.5m estimate. The report also found the program, which has already cost $530m, could run five years late, AFR reports.

28.08 The Royal Flying Doctor Service says it has digitised and consolidated its medical records with a nationwide electronic health record running on Oracle and Azure. RFDS says the deployment has improved accuracy, accessibly and security of information for better continuity of care.

28.08 Australian AI training provider Appen has seen its shares slump to their lowest in more than seven years on the back of a much wider half year loss on weak demand. Appen says it could face continuing headwinds, Reuters reports.

24.08 Thousands of charity donors have had their details released on the internet after being caught up in a major data breach of a Brisbane telemarketer, Pareto Phone. The Australian Conservation Foundation, Fred Hollows Foundation, Canteen, the Cancer Council and MSF are among those impacted, the Institute of Community Directors Australia notes. The Fred Hollows Foundation has said they were not aware their data was still held by Pareto, in breach of privacy laws.

24.08 The OAIC has joined 11 other international data protection and privacy agencies outlining ‘global expectations’ of social media platforms and other sites to safeguard against unlawful data scraping. It is seeking information from platforms over how they currently comply, or intend to comply with the expectations and principles outlined in the joint statement.

23.08 Serious policy consideration of issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia, is ‘still some years away’ according to a report following the Reserve Bank of Australia project into the digital currency. The report notes CBDC could potentially unlock benefits for the Australian economy, but there are potential issues, including legal, regulatory, technical and operational. The report identifies avenues for further research.

23.08 Eighty percent of small business owners are concerned AI development and adoption is outpacing regulation according to Xero research. Sensitive information disclosure and data privacy challenges were cited as the biggest ethical challenges faced from AI use in business, with 26 percent of those surveyed creating policies and guidelines, 25 percent providing training to employees to identify biases or inaccuracies and 23 percent seeking written consent from customers before using the tools, Xero says.

21.08 CISRO has launched a new round of the Innovate to Grow program to provide SMEs in cybersecurity and digital tech with R&D know-how. The 10-week virtual program links businesses to expert knowledge, resources and mentors to validate and develop R&D ideas that could lead to commercial outcomes. Successful participants can apply to work with CSIRO researchers and access dollar-matched R&D funding on competition of the program, CSIRO says.

19.08 X, aka Twitter, is removing the blocking feature in a move slammed by some concerned that it will make it hard for people to remove abusive posts from their timelines, the BBC says. Posts from blocked accounts don’t appear in the blockers timeline and blocked accounts can’t send messages to the blocker or view their posts. X’s Elon Musk says users will still be able to block people from directly messaging them.

17.08 Melbourne AI vector search engine startup Marquo has raised US$5.2m in a seed round led by Blackbird. The company, founded by two former Amazon employees is looking to improve online search for related objects, using machine learning to find semantic relationships, StartupDaily reports. The funding will be used to create a technology that continuously improves based on user engagement.

17.08 Generative AI has hit its hype peak, according to Gartner. The analyst firm says while the popularity of many new AI techniques will have a profound impact on business and society, CIOs and CTOs must also turn their attention to other emerging technologies with transformative potential. That includes tech enhancing developer experience, driving innovation through the pervasive cloud and delivering human-centric security and privacy.

17.08 Forty-one percent of Australian businesses are turning to automation in the face of rising costs, inflation and low unemployment according to SS&C Blue Prism research. That’s less than the global average of 44 percent. A quarter of Australian businesses use automation for data processing, with 28 percent using it to support customer-facing services and just 17 percent using it to help with sophisticated and complex operations – lower than the APAC average of 24 percent.

15.08 NextDC has launched an Edge data centre in Pilbara to support key sectors including mining. PH1 Port Hedland will support growing demand for direct connectivity to cloud services and critical infrastructure co-located in regional Australia, NextDC says. Partners include BHP, Vocus and Microsoft.

14.08 Sydney customer engagement startup Pendula has raised $14.5 million as it gears up to enter the UK market. AFR says Pendula, which says its software enables companies including Origin Energy to have conversations with customers and reduce churn and increase average revenue per user, will hire 10 staff in new London and Singapore locations.

14.08 Swinburn University has launched its $5.2m supercomputer. Dubbed Ngarrgu Tindebeek, it features 11,648 CPU cores and 88 GPUs and is powered by 150 Dell PowerEdge server nodes, DatacenterDynamics reports. The supercomputer will enable researchers and students to do in hours what used to take weeks or months on desktops and will be available to all Victorian universities for collaborative research projects.

14.08 Australia is a rising SportsTech hub, with several startups using tech to help enhance athletic performance and ensure player safety on the field. VueMotion and NeuroFlex are among those leading the charge CNN says.

10.08 More than 630 organisations have confirmed they have been hit by the zero-day attack on MoveIt file-transfer servers, including Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC.  At least 41 million individuals have been affected to date BankingInfoSecurity reports, with Russian-speaking Clip ransomware group stealing data including personal details.

09.08 The US White House has launched a US$20 competition to fix software vulnerabilities using AI. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have partnered with Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the two-year competition. The White House says the competition will drive the creation of new technologies to improve security of computer code, finding and fixing vulnerabilities in an automated and scalable way.

08.08 Ninety-three percent of Australian organisations are implementing or considering bans on ChatGPT and other generative AI applications in the workplace – well ahead of the global average of 75 percent. The Blackberry research says 69 percent of Australian organisations looking to ban the apps say the measures are intended as long term or permanent.

08.08 Cybersecurity provider Arctic Wolf has opened a Sydney data centre using AWS cloud infrastructure. The company says the move opens up more opportunities for it to work with industries that stress the importance of data locality and will enable ‘faster innovations to local customers’.

08.08 New Zealand’s Commerce Commission has cleared Microsoft’s planned US$69b acquisition of gaming developer Activision Blizzard. The ComCom says it is satisfied the merger is unlikely to substantially lessen competition in any NZ market. The NZ clearance follows similar decisions by a number of regulators globally, including the EU, Japan and Brazil. In the US Microsoft won a court An Australian decision was put on hold in February while a UK decision is expected in the coming weeks. In the US, the FTC’s attempt to pause the deal was rejected by an appeals court.

07.08 Oracle has launched a secure hyperscale cloud platform for Australia’s government and defense. The offering is isolated from Oracle’s other public and government cloud regions and shares no backbone connections with them. Oracle says Oracle Cloud for Australian Government and Defense enables customers to deploy applications that  adhere to data sovereignty and residency regulations for locally hosted sensitive data.

07.08 Kilimanjaro Consulting, which supports the largest MYOB Exo install base of any partner in Australia and New Zealand, has been granted an interlocutory injunction against MYOB. The injunction prevents MYOB from taking any action for breach of contract or withholding licence codes for the use of MYOB Exo by Kilimanjaro end-user customers, Enprise Group says. It follows a dispute over reductions in MYOB Exo margins.

05.08 AWS’ revenue growth for Q2 dropped to 12 percent, continuing the downward trend of the last three quarters, but the company says there’s reason for optimism, particularly given the potential for future revenue from generative AI interest, TechCrunch reports.

03.08 Salesforce has patched the PhishForce vulnerability that exploited a weakness in Salesforce’s email service, sending phishing emails, appearing to be from Meta, to steal Facebook account details. Cyber and Fraud Centre Scotland warns that the issue with Facebook’s gaming platform, however still exists.

03.08 Threads is getting a little frayed with Meta’s Twitter-replica losing more than 80 percent of its daily active users. CNN reports just eight million users are accessing the app each day, down from a peak of 44 million. Users are also spending less time on the app.

03.08 The Australian Tax Office paid more than $557m to cyber criminals in less than two years according to an ABC report. Fraudsters exploited a weakness in the identification system used by the myGov portal, InformationAge reports.

01.08 The Select Committee on Foreign Interference Through Social Media final report has recommended social media companies should be required to meet legislated minimum transparency standard, or be banned or face fines. The AFR reports that the minimum requirements include requiring an Australian presence and disclosing directions from governments and any foreign interference.

AppWrap July 2023

31.07 Fifty-five percent of Australia’s digital tech workers are in a cluster, with clusters contributing to 62 percent of national growth according to CSIRO. Its research into clusters identified four tech ‘super-clusters’ – the Sydney Arc, Melbourne Diamond, Brisbane Corridor and Canberra Triangle. CISRO notes research showing clusters tend to grow faster, innovate more, gain access to a larger workforce pool and attract more investment.

31.07 Australian AI consultancy Max Kelsen Consulting has been acquired by Bain & Company for an undisclosed sum. Bain &Co says Max Kelsen’s full stack ML engineers will help deliver more powerful solutions for clients.

31.07 SAP is beefing up sovereign cloud capabilities across Australia and New Zealand, creating 70 new specialist roles. The new service can store and process protected-level workloads ensuring business critical and personal data are not transferred outside Australia, SAP says.

27.07 Microsoft is facing an EU antitrust investigation over its bundling of the Teams collaboration app with Office. Reuters says the action follows after Microsoft offer of remedies failed to address concerns following a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned Slack. Microsoft has been fined US$2.5 billion in EU antitrust fines in the past decade.

26.07 Meta’s Reality Labs has lost US$21.3 billion since January 2022 – with executives warning it’s going to get worse. The unit, which oversees VR and AR projects needed for the company’s metaverse push, logged a $3.7b loss in Q2 on $276 milion in sales. The losses were wider than analysts expected, the NYPost notes, but Meta’s CFO says the company will continue its investment and expects operating losses to increasing ‘meaningfully’ yoy.

26.07 Sam Altman’s eye-scanning crypto project, Worldcoin, is facing several inquiries, just days after launch. Decrypt reports that French and German watchdogs are co-ordinating on their investigation into the project, which gives people digital coins in exchange for a scan of their eyeballs in what the OpenAI founder has said the system could help confirm is someone is human or robot. He’s also claimed it could pave the way the way for an ‘AI-funded’ universal basic income, but hasn’t explained how. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office is also making enquiries.

26.07 A national Australian Digital ID could be live within 12 months. The digital ID won’t be a new card or number, but instead will enable ID forms such as driver’s licenses, Medicare cards and proof of age cards to be compiled into one system which could be used by external organisations to verify identities, 9News reports.

26.07 The Australian Federal Court has fined Meta AU$20 million for failing to disclose that users’ data would be used for other purposes. Subsidiaries Facebook Israel and Onavo – which provides VPN services – were both handed AU$10m fines for their actions. Onavo, which was installed 270,000 times by Australian users in 2017-2017 was promoted as a product that would keep data protected and safe but, along with Facebook Israel it shared personal activity data in anonymised and aggregated form with parent Meta for commercial benefit, the ACCC says. Meta must also pay $400,000 in legal costs to the ACCC.

25.07 Twitter is no more, with Elon Musk renaming the company X. The rebrand is another step in Musk’s plan for an ‘everything’ app (or superapp) called X enabling users to ‘basically live on’ the app, using it to communicate, shop, consume entertainment and more, CBS News reports. For more on superapps, check out our story.

24.07 Microsoft is reportedly cutting around 50 positions in Australia as part of its latest round of layoffs, which are expected to see 10,000 more staff cut globally. The layoffs are separate from the January cuts. Microsoft Australia has around 2500 staff, with the latest staff reductions meaning 200 Australian staff have been cut this year, Finance News Network says.

21.07 Tesla is spending US$1 billion on its Dojo supercomputer over the next year. Project Dojo, which includes ‘powerful’ machine learning features, aims to improve the software within Tesla’s autonomous vehicles and process the data they send back. Tesla will train the supercomputer, Quartz reports.

21.07 The World Ethical Data Foundation, whose members include Meta and Google, has released a voluntary framework for AI development. The framework includes a checklist of 84 questions for developers to consider when starting an AI project, the BBC reports.

20.07 Job listings for tech professionals in Australia dropped a further 2.3 percent in the June quarter. The Jobs Report says that fall, attributed to a decline in funding of early startups, is the fourth consecutive quarter and totals 25.4 percent year on year.

19.07 The GovERP program, based on SAP S4/Hana, has cost $265 million so far according to newly disclosed figures, ITNews reports.

19.07 Microsoft 365 Copilot, which integrates OpenAI’s ChatGPt into Office applications, will come with a hefty US$30 per user per month charge, Microsoft has announced. That’s on top  of the cost of the ‘eligible’ licenses for its E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium offerings. The company says it is also launching Bing Chat Enterprise – a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot.

19.07 App providers could soon be able to bypass paying commission for in-app purchases to Apple and Google in Australia as part of the government response to ACCC’s consultation on a mandatory code of conduct for digital platforms, The Guardian reports.

18.07 Meta is open-sourcing its LLaMA2 large language model, making it free for research and commercial use as it tries to take on ChatGPT. Meta says Llama 2 was pretrained on two trillion tokens, with Llama2 chat models additionally trained on over one million new human annotations. It is available via the Azure platform.

19.07 Rapid Circle, Velrada, Arinco, FiveP, Data#3 and Volpara have taken out the local partner titles in the Microsoft A/NZ Partner Awards, Microsoft says. Volpara was earlier announced as the overall New Zealand Partner of the Year, with Insight taking out the Australian Partner of the Year.

17.07 Australian learning platform Secure Code Warrior has raised US$50 million in Series C funding, led by Paladin Capital Group. The funding is the largest investment since the company’s inception and brings its total funding to date to more than US$100m, Dynamic Business reports.

13.07 The Department of Finance has taken over control of the $600m+ digital identity program from the Digital Transformation Agency. InnovationAus notes the move is part of a carve up of DTA’s responsibilities, which has seen other tech and service delivery responsibilities removed.

13.07 The Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into OpenAI looking at whether the ChatGPT owner has breached consumer protection laws with unfair or deceptive data security practices, putting personal reputations and data at risk. The Washington Post reports the FTC is demanding records on how OpenAI addresses risks.

12.07 Optus has signed a deal to use Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite fleet too provide what it claims will be 100 percent mobile coverage of Australia. Optus says SMS coverage will be available in late 2024, with voice and data following in late 2025. Telstra has also signed a similar deal, bypassing the NBN.

12.07 A US company has filed a lawsuit against Google over its alleged scraping of publicly available data from the internet to train its AI products, including Bard. Clarkson Law Firm says the scraping of data was done without users consent and included creative and copywritten works, violated copyright laws. CNN reports that Google has called the claims ‘baseless’. Clarkson filed a similar suit against OpenAI last month.

11.07 KPMG is investing $2 billion in AI and cloud services in an expanded deal with Microsoft, which it says will bring in more than US$12b in revenue over the five years. The deal will see KPMG automating aspects of its tax, audit and consulting services. The Wall Street Journal says KPMG isn’t expecting to lay off ‘a lot’ of people with the tech used not to eliminate jobs but to enhance the workforce with AI skills. Staff will be moved to new roles or retrained.

10.07 The ACCC is calling for input on data broker services as part of its five-year digital platform services inquiry. The new issues paper focuses on the role of businesses collecting information from third-party sources and selling or sharing the data, rather than businesses collecting data on their own customers. Products and services supplied by CoreLogic, Experian, Oracle and Equifax are among those being ‘considered’ by the ACCC.

08.07 Ventia has taken some key systems offline after a cyber attack. The ASX infrastructure services provider, which has operations across Australia and New Zealand, says it is working with external cyber security experts, regulators and law enforcement after identifying a cyber incident affecting some of its systems.

07.07 The Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme has made a number of recommendations around automation in government services and criticised at least seven public servants, referring some for criminal and civil prosecution Those include considering legislative reform to establish a legal framework for automation in government services, and establishing a body to monitor and audit automated decision making processes, Government News reports.

06.07 Sensitive personal and government data from a number of Australian Government entities was released following the attack on law company HWL Ebsworth in May. In a LinkedIn post, newly appointed National Cyber Security Coordinator Darren Goldie says he has sought briefings from both the Department of Home Affairs and HWL Ebsworth on the response to the incident.

06.07 Thirty-seven percent of Australian businesses suffered a breach in their cloud environment in the last 12 months according to a Thales study. The report says 65 percent of Australian businesses surveyed now store more than 40 percent of their data in the cloud, and just seven percent have more than 60 percent of their cloud data encrypted.

06.07 PwC Australia divulged confidential information about the start date of a new tax law to Google, according to Reuters. It is the first time a company has been directly linked to the scandal where PwC used the confidential information to drum up work. Last month PwC agreed to sell its government practice – which contributed around 20 percent of the business’ AU$3b revenue in fiscal 2023, for AU$1 to Allegro Funds, on the back of the scandal.

05.07 Meta’s Threads text-based messaging app has had five million signups within four hours of launching today. The Twitter rival allows users to post up to 500 characters and is linked to Instagram with users needing to have an existing Instagram account, CNBC reports. Its launch comes as Twitter suffers a wave of missteps.

05.07 Concerns over the use of facial recognition technology in Australian stadiums has flared with Choice warning sensitive biometric data is being collected. Consumers are largely unaware of the practice, Choice says.

01.07 Twitter is ‘temporarily’ limiting the number of tweets users can read, capping numbers at 10,000 for verified (read, paid) accounts and 1,000 for unverified. Owner Elon Musk says the limits are to prevent data scraping, but Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has said that rationale ‘doesn’t pass the sniff test’, BusinessInsider reports. The announcement came amid yet more outages for the service.

AppWrap June 2023

30.06 New Zealand’s Datacom Group has announced an 80 percent drop in profit for FY23 and a $2 million loss for the year, amid investment in its SaaS and infrastructure offerings. While revenue increased to $1.49 billion, up from $1.45b in FY22, befor tax profit slumped from $41m to just $8m and after tax profit . CEO Greg Davidson says the company has invested $80 million into its ‘strategic products businesses’ as part of its ‘highly strategic’ long term strategy.

29.06 Beverage behemoth PepsiCo is collaborating with Stanford Institute for Human Centred Artificial Intelligence on ethical and responsible AI in supply chains, forecasting, smart manufacturing, customer experience, sustainability. The company says it believes AI ‘will contribute to digitalisation efforts throughout the company’.

29.06 Salesforce has added new ESG reporting capabilities for Net Zero Cloud. The SASB Report Builder uses generative AI to build produce ESG disclosure reports in alignment with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) standards, Salesforce says.

28.06 Medibank has been hit with a $250 million capital charge following last year’s massive data breach which saw the data of nearly 10 million customers and former customers stolen. The Australian Prudential and Regulation Authority banking regulator told Medibank to set aside the capital as insurance against issues associated with the breach. At least three class action suits have also been filed against Medibank, Reuters reports. The capital adjustment is effective from July 1 and remains in place until an agreed remediation program is completed.

26.06 Phone scammers are getting a taste of their own medicine courtesy of a chatbot from Macquarie University’s cybersecurity team. The AI-driven Apate system – named after the Greek goddess of deception – has created convincing fake victims to waste the time of scam callers in an effort to reduce the number of real people losing money to the thieves, Macquarie University says.

26.06 IBM is acquiring software company Apptio in a US$4.6 billon deal to extend its finops and cloud management capabilities. Apptio offers financial and operational IT management and optimisation software, with customers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, CNBC notes.

23.06 Australia has its first National Cyber Security Coordinator, with Air Marshal Darren Goldie appointed to the role. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Goldie will support Minister for Cyber Security, Clare O’Neil to lead the coordination of national cybersecurity policy, responses to major cyber incidents, work of whole of government cyber incident preparedness efforts and strengthening Commonwealth cybersecurity capability. Goldie’s secondment was through a cabinet process. He takes on the new role next month.

22.06 Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued a legal notice to Twitter requesting information on what the platform is doing to tackle online hate. The notice follows ‘a worrying surge in hate online’ with eSafety saying it has received more complaints about Twitter in the last 12 months than any other platforms, with increasing numbers of reports of ‘serious’ online abuse since Elon Musk’s October 2022 takeover of the company.

21.06 A proposed AU$1.8b network sharing deal between Telstra and TPG Telecom has again been given the thumbs down, with the Australian Competition Tribunal affirming an earlier decision by the ACCC not to grant authorisation for the deal. The Tribunal denied authorisation on the grounds it could substantially lessen competition, the ACCC says.

21.06 Macquarie Group’s banking and financial services group is planning ‘hyper-personalised’ services through use of an AI-first approach in its retail bank. The company has partnered with Google Cloud and plans to embed AI and machine learning across its customer service functions, including generative AI in its contact centre and individualised suggestions to make use of Macquarie’s mobile app functionality, InvestorDaily reports.

21.06 An IT incident impacting a third party’s unit registry system is being blamed for an ‘extended outage’ of some systems at ASX-listed fund manager Perpetual. The incident involved unauthorised access to the registry provider’s system, Perpetual says. Reuters notes that some funds were affected, but all client investments and Perpetual’s own systems are ‘unaffected and secure’.

20.06 ANZ bank has deployed 170 new algorithms to help combat scams targeting its customers. AI and ML capability to detect ‘mule’ accounts being used to receive funds from scam victims have also been deployed, detecting nearly 1,400 high risk accounts since April 2023, ANZ says. It is also preventing payments being made to high risk cryptocurrency platforms and putting measures in place to stop text scammers.

19.06 ANZ bank is establishing a ‘major’ digital, cloud and data tech hub in Brisbane – if its acquisition of Suncorp goes ahead. The bank announced plans to hire or place 700 people into the hub over five years as part of a joint agreement with Queensland government. Google cloud training and working with Queensland universities to drive research and training is also promised.

16.06 Australian and Kiwi customer data has been stolen in a ransomware attack on NZ payments solutions provider Smartpay, but the company says no card data was compromised in the hack. The company says it is working with cybersecurity specialists CyberCX and government authorities on the hack.

15.06 Megaupload coders Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk have each been sentenced to around two-and-a-half years in jail after pleading guilty to charges related to Megaupload’s copyright infringement, estimated by police to have cost copyright holders more than $500 million. The deal struck, which includes the pair testifying against Kim Dotcom, will see them serve their time in New Zealand, the NZ Herald reports. The US is still seeking to extradite Kim Dotcom. The sentencing comes 11 years after they were arrested.

15.06 Microsoft is adding more AI-powered assistance to ERP systems, via Copilot. Dynamics 365 Finance, Project Operations and Supply Chain Management have all had Copilot features added, Microsoft says.

15.06 Only around half of Queensland agencies responding to a recent survey have a data breach response plan. The survey, by the Office of the Information Commissioner found there is ‘more work to do’ before a mandatory data breach scheme commences in Queensland. Of those that had plans in place, the OIC report says ‘most’ had plans that addressed most elements that would make the plan effective.

14.06 Macquarie Technology Group is raising AU$130m to capitalise on the growth of AI and cloud. If successful, the fundraising will see Macquarie add a new data centre at the Sydney North campus, DataCenterDynamics reports.

13.06 French giant Thales is on track to acquire A/NZ cybersecurity company Tesserent in an effort to boost it’s A/NZ presence. Thales has made an offer, unanimously recommended by the board, to acquire all Tesserent shares. The deal values Tesserent at AU$176 million, AFR says.

09.06 The European Commission has approved €8 billion in state subsidies for semiconductor research, development and production. The funding, provided by 14 EU member states, follows the European Chips Act agreement in April, aiming to strengthen European competitiveness and supply chain resilience, InnovationAus reports. The projects will be backed by €13.7 billion in private funding.

09.06 Meta is planning an app to rival Twitter, taking a dig at Twitter boss Elon Musk with a comment that the Meta offering will be ‘sanely run’. Coding on the app, which could be named Threads, has been underway since January according to The Verge, with Meta saying the app will launch ‘as soon as we can’. Meta has been in discussions with ‘celebrities’ including Oprah and the Dalai Lama to use the app.

08.06 Barracuda has urged customers to replace vulnerable email gateway appliances after discovering they are being exploited. The company says patches for a critical zero-day vulnerability are insufficient and devices must be ‘immediately replaced regardless of patch version level’.

06.06 NCS Australia has launched an ERP for the fresh food supply chain. The company says FreshFocus includes ‘seamless integration and data exchange capabilities, end-to-end tracking of produce and a farm accounting module for real-time resource allocation and cost management to streamline operations and enhanced traceability for businesses in the fresh food industry.

05.06 The ASX will stress test its existing Chess system in December to check the system is capable of meeting trading volumes this year, ITNews reports. A blockchain-based replacement for the system was canned late last year, with the current system needing to be kept operational until a replacement is identified and implemented.

06.06 The ransomware gang behind the MoveIT hack affecting organisations including the BBC, Aer Lingus, the government of Nova Scotia, says it will publish stolen data on 14 June unless they begin negotiation with the gang via a darknet portal. More than 100,000 staff at the BBC, British Airways and Boots have been told payroll data may have been stolen by the Russian Clop, the BBC reports.

01.06 Australia’s Thinxtra has raised US$5 million in pre-IPO funding. The Massive IoT company says it will use the funds to expand and increase partner coverage in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Hong Kong and Macau, ahead of a public listing this year.

AppWrap May 2023

31.05 AI experts have issued a stark 23-word warning on AI saying ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’. The statement, published by the Centre for AI Safety, has been supported by dozens including bosses of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, BBC reports. Others however, suggest the fears are overblown.

28.05 Twitter has pulled out of the EU’s voluntary disinformation code, with the EU warning new laws will force compliance. BBC reports the EU says Twitter will be legally required to fight disinformation in the EU from 25 August. From that date platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU will need a mechanism for users to flag illegal content, act on notifications ‘expeditiously’ and put measures in to address the spread of disinformation.

26.05 Kiwi startup Yabble has launched a research plugin for ChatGPT, which works by combining ChatGPT knowledge with social media and trend data. The company claims the augmented approach delivers insights with ‘high degrees relevancy and accuracy’. The plugin has been given a spot on ChatGPT’s plugin store.

26.05 Neuralink has gained US FDA approval to test brain implants in humans. The Elon Musk startup, whose tech aims to let brains interface directly with computers, has been given the go ahead for its first clinical study. France 24 reports that Musk believes the implants could restore vision and mobility to users, including full body functionality to patients with severed spinal cords.

25.05 A/NZ organisations will gain better positioning and navigation benefits after Geoscience Australia and Land Information New Zealand signed a $187.4m deal with Inmarsat. The deal will see a new satellite providing augmented services from 2027. Inmarsat says the all major industry across A/NZ, from transport and construction to resources and agriculture, will benefit from the deal.

24.05 Australia and the US have reached an in-principle agreement on a technology safeguards agreement which will enable US space technology, including rockets and satellites, to be launched from Australia. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources says the agreement, subject to final domestic authorisations, will help the domestic launch sector and spaceports to grow and create jobs, while reducing the cost of access to space.

24.05 Fire and Rescue NSW has taken on a suite of Motorola services designed to provide seamless collaboration between frontline teams, vehicles and control rooms. ComputerWeekly says FRNSW has deployed the SmartConnect service to securely extend coverage and capacity of mission-critical radio comms.

24.05 The US’ National Security Agency is working with the Australian Cyber Security Centre and New Zealand’s Cyber Security Centre to identify potential breaches after a state-sponsored Chinese hacking group was discovered targeting a wide range of critical US infrastructure. Microsoft reported the activity this week, outlining the ‘living off the land’ techniques in a blog. The NSA says the attacks are using built-in network tools to evade defences and leave no trace behind.

23.05 Australian insurers have hit back at suggestions ransom payments should be banned, with the Insurance Council of Australia arguing that such bans could have ‘unintended consequences’. It says the decision to make a payment is largely a function of cost of recovery and remediation being higher than the ransom demand and a ban could disproportionately affect small organisations unable to make the payments impacting their ability to recover, InformationAge reports.

22.05 Meta has been fined a record €1.2bn by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission for infringing the GDPR, and ordered to suspend the transfer of user data from the EU to the US within five months. Meta also has six months to stop ‘unlawful processing, including storage, in the US,’ with user data required to be removed from Facebook servers. The ruling doesn’t affect data transfers at other Meta platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp, The Guardian says.

17.05 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called for the US to regulate artificial intelligence, saying a new agency should be formed to license AI companies. Altman made the call while testifying before a US Senate committee about the possibilities and pitfalls of the technology. He noted that if the technology goes wrong ‘it can go quite wrong. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening,’, BBC reports.

16.05 Microsoft is readying its public service cloud for launch later this year. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is one of a number of industry clouds the tech giant is launching and will help governments meet ‘specific compliance, security and policy requirements’, Microsoft says.

16.05 A low-code approach has seen Westpac create 300 automations and free up over a million hours of staff time. The bank’s low code platform allows non-tech and tech staff to build solutions using a drag and drop approach, ITNews reports.

16.05 SAP and Microsoft say they’re deepening their collaboration on generative AI to help customers address the talent shortage. SAP’s SuccessFactors solutions will be integrated with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service in a move the companies say will enable new experiences designed to improve how organisations attract, retain and skill their people.

16.05 The UK Competition and Markets Authority has defended its blocking of Microsoft’s US$68.7 billion Activision Blizzard buyout, a day after the EU approved the deal. The CMA disputed suggestions their blocking of the deal would have an impact on international confidence on doing business in the UK amid questions of whether the UK is open for business, Eurogamer says.

15.05 A $58m Australian anti-scams centre is set to open in July as part of a $86m effort by the federal government to crack down on scams and online fraud. ABC News reports that banks are also feeling the heat to do more to address scams.

10.05 Latitude Financial’s personal information handling practices are under investigation by Australian and New Zealand privacy watchdogs. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commission launched the joint investigation in the wake the massive March data breach which saw accounts for nearly eight million customers across A/NZ were impacted. It is the first joint investigation between the two countries and underscores the significance of the breach. If the investigation finds any breaches on Latitude’s part, the company could be required to redress loss or damage, with the power to seek civil penalties through the Australian Federal Court also an option the OAIC says.

10.05 TechnologyOne shares have been placed in a trading halt after the company detected a cyber attack on its internal Microsoft 365 back-office system. The company’s customer facing SaaS platform is not connected to the affected system and has not been impacted, The Motley Fool reports.

10.05 More than $2 billion has been allocated for digital and ICT in the federal government’s 2023-24 budget, with up to $3.7 billion for the next four years. IT News notes the funding includes big allocations for the National Disability Insurance Agency, My Health Record, the ADHA and Department of Veterans’ Affairs, among others.

09.05 Deloitte is working with Google Cloud to develop enterprise-grade industry generative AI solutions. Deloitte says its Generative AI practice will use technologies including Vertex AI and the PaLM Foundation Model, along with Generative AI studio and open-source and third party models to address growing demand for generative AI. Offerings for financial services analysts and consumer business marketers are on the cards.

06.05 The former Coalition government spent at least $1.9 billion on external labour for ICT and digital solutions last FY. An Australian Public Service audit shows the majority of that spend was on contractors. AU$20.8b was spent on outsourcing across public service operations, with IT and digital solutions making up 43 percent of the spending on external labour, while 17 percent went to the delivery of services, the Guardian reports.

06.05 Hype is growing around BlueSky, a decentralised social media platform backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and developed in parallel with Twitter. Currently in invite-only beta mode, the offering is being touted as a potential replacement for Elon Musk’s troubled Twitter, TechCrunch notes.

05.05 Salesforce has launched a ‘green code’ guide. It provides best practices for UX designers, software engineers, systems architects and IT ops managers to reduce carbon emissions associated with the software development lifecycle.

04.05 NZ-based Fusion5, which has offices across Australasia, has acquired Netsuite provider Liberate IT for an undisclosed sum. Liberate IT’s 30 staff will join Fusion5’s team. Liberate IT owner and director Jim Brodie says the deal provides additional capability and support for the company’s customer base. It is the second major acquisition for Fusion5 in the last two years, Channel Insider notes. Last year it acquired Adelaide consultancy Empyreal Solutions.

03.05 Australia is reinstating a dedicated privacy commissioner to deal with the increasing number of data breaches. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will also be restored to a three-commissioner structure to deal with growing threats and increasing volumes and complexity of privacy issues, The Guardian reports. Information commissioner Angelene Falk will continue to act as privacy commissioner until the new appointment is made and will remain information commission and head of OAIC.

03.05 Google pulled in a record $8.4 billion in revenue in Australia last year – putting it ahead of the highest estimates for Meta’s Australian advertising revenue, the Brisbane Times says. Most of the money is directed to an international subsidiary reducing the tax overhead in Australia, with ASIC accounts showing just $1.9b in net revenue and $92m in income tax paid in 2022.

03.05 The federal government has unveiled its first national quantum strategy, featuring five focus areas covering investment, infrastructure, workforce, standards and frameworks, and trust, ethics and inclusivity. Each focus area has set actions to be delivered over the coming seven years, ITNews notes.

02.05 The ‘Godfather of AI’ has quit Google to speak out on the ‘dangers’ of AI. CNN reports that Geoffry Hinton has spoken publicly about AI’s potential to do harm as well as good, noting that we don’t fully understand the ways society is going to be transformed and that not all of the effects will be good.

AppWrap April 2023

28.04 Meta is maintaining significant market power in Australia according to the latest interim Digital Platform Services inquiry report, which notes the company is facing ‘weak’ competitive constraints from other platforms. The ACCC says it doesn’t expect any new competitors to successfully emerge as a close alternative to Meta in the short or medium term, InnovationAus reports.

25.04 Google’s cloud computing business has turned its first profit following years of multimillion dollar investments – and losses. Parent company Alphabet reported US$7.4 billion in revenue and an operating income of $191 million for the cloud business in the quarter ending March 31. A year ago, it reported an operating loss of $706 million, TechCrunch reports. Alphabet itself reported first quarter net income of $17.4 billion on revenue of $69.8 billion.

21.04 More than 100,000 people have joined a class action against Optus following last year’s data breach, which compromised around 1.2 million customers. The lawsuit claims the telco failed in its duty of care to protect customers from harm breaching both laws and its own policies by failing to adequately protect customer data and destroy or de-identify customer data, Reuters reports.

21.04 Google’s Bard is becoming a programming assistant, with an update to help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and explanation. More than 20 programming languages are included with Google saying Bard can also assist with writing functions for Google Sheets.

20.04 Australian organisations are expected to spend AU$19.9 billion on public cloud services in 2023, up 19.3 percent from 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. IaaS is forecast to experience the highest growth at 30.2 percent, followed by PaaS at 24 percent. Globally spend is forecast to hit nearly US$600 billion this year, Gartner says.

20.04 Reddit will start charging companies who make excessive use of its data-downloading API, using it for training of large language model AIs. The API will continue to be free to developers working on bots and other Reddit tools and to researchers working on academic or non-commercial projects, Ars Technica reports. ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have both used Reddit as a source.

19.04 Atlassian is adding generative AI capabilities to its entire cloud workforce management portfolio to help make service- and project-based work more efficient. Atlassian Intelligence, which is available in early access, will be an opt-in offerings, the company says.

17.04 CSIRO has launched a free 10-week online program to help SMEs enhance their R&D knowledge, focused on cybersecurity and digital technologies. On completion of the program, eligible participants may be able to access continued support through CSIRO, including dollar-matched R&D funding and access to national research expertise, the national science agency says.

17.04 Stack Overflow is jumping on the generative AI bandwagon adding the technology to Stack Overflow and its Overflow for Teams. The move comes after the company earlier banned AI-generated responses following a flurry of incorrect AI-generated answers to user questions last year. The decision prompted criticism by many in the community, with one user noting ‘We’re not interested in fact-check AI content; we are interested in generating the content ourselves”.

18.04 AI robotics company Advanced Navigation has unveiled what it says is Australia’s largest subsea robotics centre in Western Australia. The new 5.5 hectare facility will accelerate production of the company’s underwater technologies including the Hydrus autonomous underwater robot, Advanced Navigation says.

18.04 Choice is calling for urgent privacy reforms, saying renters are being pressured to use RentTech platforms that demand excessive personal information. The consumer group says as well as being forced to hand over private information or risk not being able to apply, the tactics come with security and data privacy risks and added costs for renters.

18.04 The New Zealand and Australia armies have signed a deal to share operational intelligence and technology. The Plan Anzac cooperation agreement, which comes a week out from Anzac Day, extends the existing military partnership, ABC News reports.

14.04 Australia and New Zealand have joined other five eyes countries in pushing for software vendors to provide ‘the cyber equivalent of seatbelts’ and take greater responsibility for security. The joint guidance urges software manufacturers to take ‘urgent’ steps to ship products that are secure-by-design and -default. Alon gwith specific technical recommendations the guidance includes core principles around building software security into design processes before developing, configuring and shipping products.

14.04 Amazon has launched its rival for Microsoft and Google’s generative AI offerings, with Bedrock, a new service for building and scaling generative AI applications. Bedrock provides access to a number of foundational models from AI startup model providers, Quartz reports.

13.04 A whole-of-government permissions capability platform has been scrapped without delivering a working use case, after two years and $16.5 million. InnovationAUS reports that dumping is the third failed attempt by the former government to upgrade visa processing technology. More than $100 million has been spent on the failed projects.

11.04 The Tasmanian Government is urging citizens to keep a check on their bank accounts after admitting that 16,000 documents have been released online following the hack of a third party file transfer service, GoAnywhere MFT. The service was used by the Tasmanian Department of Education, Children and Young People. Compromised documents include invoices, bank statements and information relating to student assistance applications, InformationAge reports.

11.04 Latitude Financial has refused to pay a ransom demand following last month’s cyberattack. The decision is in line with the position of the Australian government with regards to paying ransoms. The company says in an ASX announcement that it doesn’t believe paying would result in the return or destruction of the stolen information and paying would only encourage further extortion attempts on Australian and NZ businesses in future. Latitude says to the best of its knowledge there has been no suspicious activity in its systems since 16 March.

11.04 The US government is requesting public comment on creating accountability measures for AI as it looks to establish rules for AI tools. The Guardian reports that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is seeking to establish guardrails that would allow the government to determine if AI systems are performing the way companies claim they do, whether they are safe and effective, whether they have discriminatory outcomes or unacceptable levels of bias and whether they spread misinformation or affect individual’s privacy.

11.04 Sixty-nine percent of Australian organisations were hit once by ransomware in 2022 according to a new report, with 33 percent hit twice or more. Barracuda Networks’ 2023 Ransomware Insights report shows those that were hit multiple times were more likely to have paid the ransom, with 30 percent of those affected twice or more paying up. Malicious emails accounted for 69 percent of ransomware attacks in Australia, with phishing emails used to steal credentials. Web application and traffic were the second biggest threat vector.

09.04 Demand for PCs is continuing to fall, down 29 percent year on year for Q1, with Lenovo and Dell both clocking declines of more than 30 percent, while Apple was down more than 40 percent. IDC says the Q1 2023 shipments of 56.9 million are noticeably lower than the 59.2 million shipped in Q1 of 2019 and 2018’s 60.6 million. Weak demand, excess inventory and worsening macroeconomic conditions were blamed, though IDC notes the lull in demand is providing room to make changes as factories explore production options outside China.

06.04 An Australian mayor is preparing to take a defamation case against ChatGPT, after it falsely named him as a guilty party, who served prison time for his role in a bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s. Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire near Melbourne, was in fact a whistleblower in the case, the BBC notes. If action goes ahead, it would be the first time OpenAI has publicly faced a defamation suit over content created by ChatGPT.

06.04 Xero’s WorkflowMax which Xero was retiring in June 2024, is set to live another day with the brand acquired by Australian professional services company BlueRock. The company will re-launch the project management offering, used by more than 10,000 businesses, in ‘a new and improved form’, Consultancy.com.au reports.

04.04 Regulators in European countries including France, Ireland and Germany are considering possible measures against ChatGPT following Italy’s temporary ban of the chatbot. Reuters says privacy regulators in France and Ireland have contacted counterparts in Italy to find out more about the ban, with Germany’s commissioner for data protection saying the country could follow Italy’s footsteps. But Italy’s deputy PM has slammed the ban as excessive, and a German government spokesman says a ban wouldn’t be necessary.

04.04 Australia must establish a much stronger technological base and think about how the country can be at the centre of global technology advancement, deputy prime minister Richard Marles says. “That is our great national challenge,” Marles said, opening the ASPI Sydney Dialogue this week.

04.04 Australia is banning use of TikTok on federal government devices, following the footsteps of a growing number of countries including the US, France, UK and New Zealand. Aljazeera notes the ban follows concerns that China could use the app to spy on users and manipulate public debate.

03.04 AWS is investing more than $13b as it expands its Sydney and Melbourne data centres, with 11,000 full-time jobs also expected to be added. The Guardian says AWS has also been expanding local zone services to provide cloud services to Perth, with Brisbane due to be announced soon.

03.04 Twitter has begun removing blue ticks from accounts with numerous high profile Twitter users saying they won’t pay for the all-paid verified accounts. Around 10,000 high profile organisations will be exempt from the new system, which requires companies to pay US$1,000/month for gold verification ticks and individuals to pay $8/month. The NY Times is among those refusing to pay, prompting an outburst from Elon Musk, the BBC reports. The new system has prompted concerns from many over the potential for increased misinformation.

AppWrap March 2023

30.03 OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has found itself the subject of a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission. The complaint, by prominent tech ethics group the Center for AI and Digital Policy, alleges OpenAI is violating the FTC Act with a ‘biased, deceptive’ AI model, Engadget reports. The center wants the FTC to investigate and to suspend future releases of large language models until they meet the agencies guidelines.

29.03 The Albanese government’s flagship $15 billion manufacturing fund has been passed by the Senate following a series of amendments. The fund will now be established to provide loans, equity and guarantees across seven priority areas with a focus on a tech including robotics, AI, fintech and quantum technology. ABC News reports that an initial $5 billion has been made available from the commencement of the fund with the remaining funds to be made available in instalments by July 2029.

29.03 ASIC is investigating the ASX’s failed blockchain-based Chess replacement project and whether the ASX and its directors and officers breached legal obligations during the project. The investigation into ‘suspected contraventions’ of the Corporations and ASIC Act will focus on oversight of the program and statements and disclosures made on the status of the program, AFR reports.

29.03 Australian academics have joined global counterparts and tech leaders in calling for moratorium of at least six months on training AI systems ‘more powerful than GPT-4’. In an open letter issued by the US NFP Future of Life Institute more than 1,300 signatories have called for the pause on generative AI development until the risks posed by the emerging technology are better understood, InnovationAus reports.

27.03 Latitude Financial says more than 14 million customer records, including 7.9 million Australian and New Zealand driver’s license numbers were stolen in this months hack. Some 53,000 passport numbers were also stolen along with financial statements related to ‘less than 100 customers’. Latitude has said it will reimburse customers who replace stolen IDs. The company only has three million customers, leading some to question why it was still holding records on so many more, with records dating back to at least 2005 in an affected database, Bank Infosecurity reports.

24.03 Accenture has joined the list of companies slashing staff, cutting 19,000 jobs, or 2.5 percent of its workforce, over the next 18 months as part of ‘structural’ cost cutting. An Accenture A/NZ spokesperson declined to comment on local impact, AFR reports. The consulting giant has also lowered profit forecasts in expectation of lower demand for its services. IBM, KPMG and McKinsey are also making similar cuts.

24.03 OpenAI says personal data of some ChatGPT Plus subscribers, including payment information, may have been exposed. The issue was discovered additional issues while OpenAI was fixing a bug which enabled some users to see the title’s of other users’ conversation history and discovered other issues. Full credit card details were not exposed, CNet reports.

23.03 Cybersecurity minister Clare O’Neil has suggested the tech sector could bear more liability for cybersecurity. Development is underway of a legislative framework to ‘shift cyber security risks away from our most vulnerable members of the community towards those who are best placed to manage it’, including software and cybersecurity service providers, telcos and tech developers, ITNews reports.

21.03 Latitude Financial has confirmed that last week’s data breach is worse than initially indicated. More than 330,000 customers have been affected across A/NZ and the company says a review has ‘uncovered further evidence of large-scale information theft’. Copies of driver’s licenses and passport details, along with Medicare numbers have been stolen, 9News reports.

20.03 Amazon is cutting a further 9,000 corporate jobs in the coming weeks, including in its cloud-computing and advertising businesses. The company had already announced plans to slash 18,000 positions. CNBC says the company’s HR and  Twitch livestreaming businesses will also be impacted.

17.03 The Productivity Commission is calling for more emphasis on new technology and best practice, better sharing of government data with other organisations to undertake research and develop new products and services and streamlined cyber reporting regulation. The report says restricting the sharing of data to government and universities limits the ability for the data to be used for productivity and welfare-enhancing purposes, InnovationAUS reports.

17.03 Meta, in partnership with Code Like a Girl and T&DA has launched a new ‘immersive learning academy’ in Australia to provide free training in AR to 200 women. The training is via a self-guided Meta Spark training module, Gizmodo reports. The launch comes as Meta continues to push boss Mark Zuckerberg’s pet topic: The metaverse.

16.03 Latitude Financial has been hacked with the identification documents of 328,00 customers believed stolen. Drivers license details for about 100,000 Australians are included in the breached data. The company, which provides consumer financial services to Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys, Apple and David Jones, says it was targeted by a sophisticated and malicious cyber-attack. It declined to say if consumers using financing from those companies are impacted, the SMH reports.

16.03 Australia has launched the Responsible AI Network cross-ecosystem program to support companies in creating and using AI ethically and safely. The alliance will provide best practice guidance and coaching for companies using AI, CSIRO – which is one of the members – says.

14.03 Meta is laying off another 10,000 people just months after 11,000 staff were made redundant. The new measures will also include a further hiring freeze. The latest round of layoffs are expected in the tech groups in late April, followed by business groups in May, The Guardian reports. CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t however, slowing down on his metaverse plans, into which the company has ploughed billions of dollars, saying it ‘remains central to defining the future of social connection’.

14.03 Security and data quality concerns are the largest barriers to Australian businesses adoption of AI according to a Forrester report. The complexity of implementation, with an average of four AI tech and services providers engaged in each project, was also an issue, InnovationAus reports.

13.03 A/NZ tech companies including Xero, Canva and Nitro Software say they don’t have material exposure to Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last week, Reuters says. US regulators have guaranteed depositors funds in the failed bank. Rocket Lab is also among the companies who had funds with the bank with an estimated $100-$200 million deposited with it.

10.03 Momentum Software Solutions has scoped three awards including ANZ Channel Partner of the Year in the MYOB Enterprise High Achiever awards. Acclaim Group, Alphabiz Solutions and Endeavour Solutions also took out awards, with BusinessHub’s David Taylor and Kilimanjaro Consulting’s Candice Lee taking out individual awards, MYOB says.

09.03 Xero is cutting up to 800 jobs across its business as it streamlines and ‘realigns’ the business to provide better balance of growth and profitability. The company will reinvest in ‘key strategic areas’. It is unclear yet how many Australian roles will be impacted, the SMH reports. The 800 jobs account for around 15 percent of the company’s workforce.

08.03 Coles is preparing to launch a Beem-based digital wallet enabling customers to pay using an eftpos QR code. The retailer has partnered with Australian Payments Plus for the project. Coles says customers are seeking quick checkouts, no wait times and an easy, seamless payment experience, something it believes the technology can provide.

08.03 Kmart says it is exploring potential use cases for ChatGPT. The retailer says it sees ‘multiple’ potential use cases it wants to experiment with including interactions with customers and HR-related cases including onboarding and training, ITNews reports.

06.03 Australia’s privacy regulator’s lawsuit against Meta over Cambridge Analytica has cleared a major hurdle with the High Court clearing the way for proceedings to return to Federal Court after two years in legal purgatory. The High Court revoked Facebook’s special leave to appeal after a change in court rules came into effect in January. The move could expose Facebook’s US and Ireland entities to civil penalties over Cambridge Analytica, ITNews notes.

06.03 Atlassian is cutting around 500 employees – around five percent of its workforce – as it refocuses on ‘key priorities’ such as IT service management and helping customers move workloads to the cloud. CNBC reports that among the most impacted teams will be talent acquisition, program management and research and insights.

06.03 A third-party IT contractor working at the Australian National Maritime Museum has been arrested and charged after an alleged trusted insider attack. The man allegedly accessed the accounting system and changed bank account details to his own. Police say financial details of several individuals and businesses were also unlawfully obtained with the man allegedly using credit card information to make unauthorised purchases, ITNews reports.

04.03 The US Federal Trade Commission has issued a warning over overblown claims and hype around generative AI in the wake of ChatGPT. The FTC, already concerned about AI’s concerns to introduce bias, discrimination and other consumer harms, has warned companies that overhyping their products could violate the law, BusinessInsider says. The FTC says it will track exaggerate promises and is also watching companies who fail to foresee and mitigate risks.

03.03 The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ and Mastercard have signed on for a central bank digital currency pilot in Australia. Fourteen projects have been greenlighted for the trial, covering use cases including offline payments, GST automation, tokenised FX settlement and livestock auction, Retail Banker International notes. Australian fintechs including Unizon, Fame Capital, Canvas Digital and digi.cash will also be part of the trial.

01.03 Five data breaches affected more than a million Australians each in H2 2022 according to the latest Notifiable Data Breaches report. It shows a 41 percent increase in malicious or criminal attacks and a 26 percent increase, to 497, in overall notifications, the OAIC says.

01.03 Data centre operator NextDC has acquired land in central Auckland and registered a New Zealand subsidiary, Reseller News reports. The company has not as yet announced any plans to establish local facilities and its half year results made no mention of planned sites in Auckland.

AppWrap February 2023

28.02 Fujifilm Business Innovation has acquired Australian ERP and IT services provider MicroChannel Services as it looks to take its ERP play global. MicroChannel, which has also has an Auckland office, offers services around Microsoft, SAP and Sage, among others. It has rebranded as Fujifilm Microchannel Services, with all 200 staff remaining with the company, AFR notes.

27.02 The federal government is appointing a coordinator for cybersecurity, backed by a new National Office for Cyber Security in the Home Affairs department. The new office will be established as soon as next month. A cyber security strategy discussion paper is also due to be released in preparation for a new seven-year cyber security strategy. The Conversation says the coordinator will triage action after major incidents and ensure a centrally coordinated approach to government cybersecurity responsibilities.

27.02 Twitter is under threat of increased regulation from the Australian government if it doesn’t re-hire Australian safety staff. InnovationAUS says communications minister Michelle Rowland has written to the company demanding it do more to keep users safe and ensure it is complying with online safety laws.

24.02 ASIC and ACCC blocked 5,579 scam websites in three weeks in an automated technology trial using Netcraft technology. IT News says many of the URLs ASIC removed related to cryptocurrency scams.

23.02 Japanese consultancy Nomura Research Institute (NRI) is looking to grow its A/NZ staff by 50 percent in the next three years following a rebrand of Australian subsidiary ASG Group to NRI. The company, which provides SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft ICT services, has 2,500 staff across A/NZ already, following an aggressive acquisition plan over recent years which has seen it snap up companies including Velrada, Pragma Partners, 1ICT and Group 10 Consulting.

23.02 A stolen Medibank user ID and password of a third-party IT services contractor and a misconfigured firewall which didn’t require an additional digital security certificate, enabled hackers to gain access to Medibank’s systems – and further credentials – in the October breach. In its half year results the insurer says that enabled the hackers to access ‘a number’ of Medibank systems ‘and their access was not contained’. Medibank says it will take a $26.2m hit in non-recurring cybercrime costs from the breach.

22.02 New Zealand’s Immersv has partnered with Mastercard to enable consumers to make payments using cryptocurrency directly from their Web3 wallet. Immersve says the solution uses decentralised protocols to settle real-time cryptocurrency transactions for any Mastercard payments, whether physical, digital or metaverse. United States dollar-backed stablecoin USD Coin tokens will be converted to Fiat currency and settled on the Mastercard network when transactions are made.

21.02 The University of Sydney is investing a further $7.4m to expand its quantum technology facilities with the establishment of the Future Qubit Foundry. The University says the Foundry, at the Sydney Nanoscience Hub, will leverage the University’s research in advanced quantum technologies and ensure Australia can train the quantum workforce needed.

21.02 The Australian government is closing a metadata loophole which enabled over 100 agencies to access telecommunications data. ITNews reports that the government also committed to much greater oversight of the use of the scheme. Telcos had complained about scope creep and a lack of financial contribution to the scheme, along with concerns about how agencies handled the data they received.

18.02 VMware and Broadcom have extended the completion date for their US$61 billion merger by 90 days. The two companies now have until May to complete the deal – a full year after first announcing it. Reuters notes that Britain’s competition regulator and the EU antitrust regulators are still investigating the deal between the cloud computing and virtualisation provider and the chip maker.

15.02 GitHub has launched Copilot for Business, the enterprise version of its AI-powered code completion tool. The Business version has been in beta since December and adds features including license management and organisation-wide policy management, TechCrunch reports.

15.02 Procurement reforms could be on the cards as a result of a current review of government technology procurements, triggered by a lobbying scandal around former Services minister Stuart Robert. InnovationAus says the review, which is examining the procurement of agencies which awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to companies that were clients of consulting firm Synergy360, is being structured so that findings can be shared with other agencies responsible for Commonwealth procurement policy. Synergy360’s clients include Adobe, Infosys, Salesforce and Delv.

10.02 The Tech Council of Australia is calling for the $15b reconstruction fund to focus on ‘long-term, strategically important investments’ in critical tech that inherently carry higher risk. InnovationAus reports that the body wants a dual objective of both strategic and financial returns for the fund.

09.02 An independent review has been ordered into Modernising Business Register program, after a $1 billion blow out. Treasury says the review will ensure investment in the MBR is delivered ‘within a reasonable timeframe and budget’, Accountants Daily reports.

09.02 Alphabet’s shares crashed as much as nine percent after Google’s Bard AI chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video, and a company event ‘failed to dazzle’. Reuters says the announcement flub was likely due to Google scrambling to keep up with Microsoft’s OpenAI push. Bard incorrectly identified the James Webb Space Telescope as having taken the first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system – images actually taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

08.02 Medibank says it will fight a class action lawsuit over the October 2022 data breach. The attackers released several data dumps following the attack after Medibank said it would not pay the ransom. The class action was filed in the Federal Court by international law firm Baker & McKenzie and funded by Omni Bridgeway on a ‘no win, no pay’ basis, Insurance Business says.

08.02 Microsoft has launched OpenAI-powered search capabilities to its Bing search engine and Edge web browser. Currently available in a limited preview on desktop but expected to scale in the coming weeks, the new capabilities include chat and compose. But as Bloomberg reports, answers in Bing are currently somewhat hit and miss.

07.02 KPMG is acquiring Adelaide’s SAP asset, work and project specialist company Think180 for an undisclosed sum. Think180’s 30+ staff will join KPMG’s existing SAP technology team in a move KPMG says will expand the company’s capabilities in work execution, asset management, regulatory compliance, analytics, managed services, migrations and integrations.

07.02 The 20-year old Sydney man arrested for trying to scam Optus customers affected by the September data breach has escaped a jail sentence and instead been sentenced to an 18 month community corrections order. Dennis Su, who was 19 at the time, admitted texting 92 Optus customers, demanding they transfer $2,000 to a CBA bank account or face their personal information being used for ‘financial crimes’, The Guardian reports.

07.02 My Health Record will be significantly upgraded as part of a push to modernise primary healthcare. Health minister Mark Butler says the current iteration is a ‘pretty outdated, clunky, pdf format system’ and functionality need to be improved. It has been recommended that more health professionals be able to access and add to the records, The Guardian reports.

06.02 A new industry group has been established to boost critical infrastructure resilience in Australia. InnovationAus says the Critical Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Centre hope to enlist and support 11,000 organisations across 11 critical infrastructure sectors along with material suppliers and local government bodies. It plans to distribute timely digestible updates on threats and guidance on defending against them.

06.02 ANZ Bank has made a proptech push, investing AU$50 million for a minority shareholding in Australia’s View Media Group, whose line-up of offerings include a residential listing portal, real-estate marketing agencies and property technology businesses including property portal Realestateview and AI and data business Propic, the bank says.

03.02 The numbers affected by the December 22 Royal Ransomware cyber attack at QUT has risen to 11,405, with employees, students and former staff affected. Tax file numbers for nearly 4,000 people were breached in the attack, ABC News says.

AppWrap January 2023

31.01 ChatGPT developer OpenAI has launched a text classifier help detect AI-generated content. OpenAI says the AI Text Classifier could help limit the ability to run automated misinformation campaigns, use AI tools for ‘academic dishonesty’ or position an AI chatbot as human. As SearchEngineJournal reports – and OpenAI itself openly admits, the AI Text Classifier isn’t 100 percent accurate, mislabelling both AI-generated and human-written text.

31.01 A review and audit of the myGov platform has found it is underfunded, causing it to fall ‘well short’ of serving its role as the primary digital front door to government. ITNews reports the review calls for the government to commit at least $138 million a year to the platform, conditional on Services Australia committing to a number of enhancements.

31.01 Kiwi fintech startup Hnry has secured NZ$35 million in new funding, which will be used to expand in A/NZ and overseas. The company, which has raised $60m to date and seen its revenue triple and its customer base quadruple in the last 12 months according to SmartCompany, plans to double its headcount to 150 across A/NZ in the coming year.

30.01 Salesforce has axed its Australian VC arm, Salesforce Ventures, as part of its global cuts. AFR reports that Salesforce says the lack of presence in the local market does not mean the end of the company’s interest in the local tech start-up scene with plans to manage investments, including 17 portfolio companies, from the US. Salesforce Ventures also invested in some Kiwi companies, including Soul Machines.

30.01 Microsoft and OpenAI – whose ChatGPT has garnered mass coverage in recent weeks – are fighting to get an AI copyright lawsuit dismissed. The lawsuit, brought by a group of anonymous software companies, alleges the companies’ AI assistive code-writing software breaches open-source licenses, InformationAge reports.

27.01 The FBI says it has hacked the hackers to disrupt the Hive ransomware gang. Reuters says the operation, which saw the FBI infiltrating Hive’s network and stealing digital keys used to unlock victim’s data, thwarted the group from collecting more than US$130 million in ransomware demands from more than 300 victims.

24.01 Australian tech staff, engineers and game workers earning less than $102,000 annually will get overtime pay and penalty rates after changes to the Professional Employees Award, AFR reports.

26.01 Microsoft is blaming a change it made to its Wan for knocking out services to Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Outlook and Azure for four hours last night. The outage hit around 230am ET/830pm NZDT, The Verge reports.

24.01 Microsoft’s security business surpassed US$20 billion in revenue in the past 12 months – doubling the $10 billion achieved just two years ago. The company says customers are consolidating on its security stack with the number of organisations with four or more workloads increasing over 40 percent year on year.

24.01 A/NZ mid-market businesses are continuing to struggle with outmoded, siloed and ineffective systems, which are costing them valuable time and resources according to the latest MYOB mid-market report. Nearly half of A/NZ mid-sized businesses say they’re wasting valuable time inputting data into different systems with more than 40 percent having to regularly check between systems to ensure data is correct. Businesses which have added to or changed their digital solutions with strategic implementations in the last 12 months reported significant gains, MYOB says.

24.01 Days after Google announced it is laying off 12,000 due to falling ad revenues, the US Justice Department has launched a second lawsuit against parent company Google, alleging that Google is abusing its monopoly power as a broker, supplier and online auctioneer of ads. The WSJ says the Justice Department is seeking the breakup of Google’s ad-tech business.

24.01 Microsoft has confirmed a ‘multibillion-dollar’ investment in ChatGPT parent OpenAI. FT says the deal comes with a belief that AI could transform Microsoft, enabling it to develop new productivity software and even renewing its challenge for market share against Google in the search space. Full financial details for the multi-year agreement haven’t been disclosed.

24.01 UST Global, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech and WiPro have been named the Top Employers Institutes top ranked places to work in Australia for 2023 in the IT category. To be eligible for the rankings companies must have at least 250 local or 2,500 international employees and advanced and formal HR practices, Information Age says.

23.01 AWS has launched a cloud region in Melbourne and says it plans to invest around $6.8 billion in the Melbourne region by 2037, with 2,500 jobs planned. The region is the second for Australia and consists of three availability zones, located far enough from each other to support business continuity while being close enough to provide low latency, AWS says.

21.01 Elon Musk has taken the stand in a court trial, with Tesla shareholders suing the company to recoup losses they say resulted from a tweet by Musk claiming he had secured money to take the company private. Musk told the court his tweets were truthful, but limited by Twitter’s character count, NBC News says. Earlier, his lawyer had argued Musk didn’t lie, but used the ‘wrong words’ in his tweet.

20.01 Google is cutting around 12,000 jobs, or six percent of its workforce, after two years of ‘dramatic growth’ during which it added 37,000 jobs. The company says a changing ‘economic reality’ is forcing the cuts, BBC Business Report notes. The news came just days after Microsoft announced it was slashing 10,000 jobs.

21.01 The NAB has minted a stablecoin, AUDN, linked to the Australian dollar, with plans to launch mid-year. The stablecoin will launch on Ethereum, CoinGeek reports, with NAB the second Australian bank to launch its own stablecoin. ANZ launched its own, much smaller, offering in March 2022.

20.01 The ACMA is being given ‘a new and graduated set of powers’ to hold digital platforms to account over misinformation and disinformation, including information-gathering power to create transparency around digital platforms efforts to respond to the issue. The powers will also allow the regulator to register an enforceable industry code and to make a standard, should industry self-regulation measures prove ‘insufficient’, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland says.

18.01 Microsoft has confirmed it is laying off 10,000 employees and making changes to its hardware portfolio, as it looks to cut costs. The company had around 221,000 full time employees globally at the end of June 2022 and has since announced several staff reduction plans. Satya Nadella says the move will reduce the company’s headcount by less than five percent and will hit all teams and geographies, with more impact for sales and marketing than engineering, CNBC says.

17.01 The Australian National Audit Office is looking at a B2B portal to secure and standardise pre-audit information received from government agencies. It has launched a request for expressions of interest, with ITNews noting the self-service interface would issue automated data request questionnaires and return reports to agencies on the submission’s compatibility with predefined data validation rules.

13.01 AWS has launched its Perth local zones for applications requiring ‘single-digit millisecond latency’ or local data processing. A new Sydney direct connection, enabling AWS customers to establish network connections from their premises to AWS in the NextDC S2 data centre was also launched today, AWS says

12.01 A damaged database file, rather than a cyberattack, has been blamed for an outage which grounded planes across the US. The FAA grounded planes for several hours after an attempted reboot of its notification system was unable to rectify a system error, FedScoop notes.

11.01 Twitter is reportedly winding down its physical presence in Australia, with the SMH reporting it has begun cutting the remaining Australian staff. The SMH reports sources saying the local office has been closed, and notes this means there will be no local staff to speak with government or handle any local issues.

10.01 NBN Co has dropped its privatisation plans and will instead focus on upgrading and improving its network. The Corporate Plan 2023 says the government will keep NBN in public hands ‘for the foreseeable future’ to provide it with the certainty needed to continue delivering improvement to the network while keeping prices affordable, InformationAge reports.

09.01 Western Australia’s state government is developing an early stage venture capital model to boost funding for local scale-ups and startups. InnovationAus says VC funds are currently being invited to provide feedback.

04.01 Salesforce says it will lay off around 10 percent of its staff – or about 8,000 people. The news came in an SEC filing. Co-chief executive Marc Benioff says the company hired too many people leading into the economic downturn, the NYTimes says. The company will also reduce office space and expects to spend US$1.2 billion restructuring.

For 2022 news from around the web refer to the 2022 archive.

The post AppWrap: Govt’s $17m AI spend-up, ID verification legislation passes, Nissan attack and modernisation headaches appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The move sees Oracle join the increasingly busy Kiwi cloud party – albeit, somewhat belatedly, and via a local partner, rather than its own build and the hefty investment required there. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google have already announced their own local cloud regions in New Zealand, opting to build their own data centres here, while local self-proclaimed hyperscale provider Catalyst Cloud may take some exception to Oracle’s ‘first’ tag.

“Team IM will bring the benefits of Oracle Cloud delivered by a locally owned and operated company.”

Team Cloud, which will run independently across two Team IM data centres in the North Island, will run on Oracle Alloy and offer more than 100 Oracle cloud infrastructure services. Alloy is Oracle’s global strategy to enable its partners to manage and operate the Oracle Cloud locally.

Team IM has been a long term Oracle Gold partner and currently offers Oracle-based workloads on both Oracle Cloud in Australia and other hyperscalers in Australia.

Ian Rogers, Team IM chief executive, told iStart he hopes to have Team Cloud commissioned by mid-2024.

“Team IM has been an Oracle Gold partner for years and currently supports and markets Oracle based workloads on both Oracle Cloud in Australia and other hyper scalers in Australia.

“It was the ability to run these workloads in New Zealand, by Team IM, to provide our customers with better commercials and performance, in carbon neutral data centres, and extend these factors to other New Zealand based customers that helped Team IM to select Oracle Alloy.”

Rogers says local organisations are increasingly eager to harness the power of the cloud while safeguarding the integrity of their data within their own shores by leveraging a unique hyperscale cloud solution.

“Oracle Cloud, which Team Cloud is based on, will provide the same number of IaaS and PaaS services as is available from the Oracle Public Cloud overseas,” he says.

“Oracle’s price/performance ratio is very competitive compared to other hyperscalers, data egress fees are very low, there are SLA’s for performance in addition to availability and customers can use encryption keys to keep their NZ located data very secure.”

The company will initially be providing a private enterprise cloud for IaaS and PaaS aimed at public sector, all commercial sectors and iwi organisations.

“Essentially any organisation that wishes to move their applications from on-premise to cloud or from other clouds to Team Cloud in New Zealand,” he says.

GPUs for AI will be available in the future, depending on demand, with Team Cloud also hoping to offer Oracle SaaS applications in the future.

Oracle will provide and maintain the platform, while Team IM will deliver the services and hold the customer relationship. Rogers says the sales, marketing and engineering teams of both companies will collaborate ‘but that does not prevent Team IM from working with partners and other managed service providers or cloud services providers’.

Rogers says Team IM, which has a wholly-owned subsidiary in Australia, intends to support the cloud locally and invest into developing local talent to run Team Cloud.

He says the company is making ‘considerable’ investment in people, premises and training – with plans to increase the number of jobs by ‘at least 500 percent’, all of whom will be New Zealand-based, across Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

The company is also investing in tertiary scholarships to encourage young people into the sector.

“We will expand our graduate recruitment programme with Victoria University and introduce the same for Auckland and Canterbury,” he says.

“Our vision is to train and recruit local talent and only recruit from overseas for specialist roles,” he says.

Existing staff view the move as ‘a huge career opportunity’ Rogers says.

He says the announcement marks a significant milestone for Team IM – formed when Team Asparona and Team Informatics united in 2020 –  as it transforms from a managed services provider to a cloud services providers.

“This provides another hyperscaler to the New Zealand market and more choice for organisations,” he says. “Team IM will bring the benefits of Oracle Cloud delivered by a locally owned and operated company.

“Microsoft and Oracle have also announced some key initiatives which Team IM will be able to bring to New Zealand,” he adds.

AWS’s cloud region is also expected to open in 2024.

Microsoft, was granted consent from the OIC to purchase a third package of land for its $180m data centre with Fonterra, BNZ and Auckland Transport among the names already signed to migrate to the new data centre region. Google is expected to use another provider’s facilities for its local cloud region, based in Auckland.

CDC Data Centres opened its first two hyperscale data centres in Auckland’s Silverdale and Hobsonville last year.

The post Team Cloud – locally owned and operated hyperscale cloud coming to NZ appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Thodey, currently Chair of cloud-based accounting software Xero and former CEO at Telstra and IBM A/NZ, is a passionate technologist and well-regarded for his insights and global expertise on innovation, digital transformation and telecommunications.

As the world grapples with the hastening pace of change, Thodey’s understanding of technology – including emerging technologies like AI – offers valuable insights for the tax and accounting industry, as well as the broader nation. Australia’s digital readiness slipped last year (to 16th globally), presenting a major opportunity to strengthen capabilities, particularly among businesses, and prepare for change.

“We need leaders who are willing to create change”

Ahead of next week’s Tax Summit 2023 event in Melbourne, Thodey shares three actions budding innovators and changemakers should consider to prepare for the evolving digital world:

1. Turn ideas into reality. Often, innovators and entrepreneurs have great ideas, however don’t give themselves enough time to explore them – so they never translate into reality. Australia scores in the world’s top 10% for our science and research but only rank #35 in our commercialisation. Simply give it a go to bring these ideas to fruition. It’s hard and risky, but the rewards are enormous.
2. Invest in your leadership journey. In corporate Australia, the traditional models of hierarchical leadership no longer work in a digital age where information flows quickly. To make decisions fast and create value for clients, people need to invest in their leadership journey. The first step is knowing what type of person you are then embracing self-learning and vulnerability to continue to grow.
3. Embrace learning. Technology will only keep rapidly changing – lean in and embrace this opportunity.  Keep learning, keep driving forward and keep putting yourself in situations where you can be exposed to new ideas to progress yourself.

“Technology enabled innovation will continue to radically change our society and economy. Realistically, we’re at best 35% through an enormous global transformation. Ultimately, it’s about the enablement of doing things differently, whether using technology to deliver a better product, service or something at a lower cost. Many accountants and tax professionals are at the leading digital edge for the industry, but we must ensure everyone comes along for the journey,” Thodey warns.

“Speaking at The Tax Summit is an opportunity to connect with the industry on topics that are important for all Australians. Taxation is essential to support our quality of life and contributes to a great society. I want to see Australia grow and prosper to realise this potential. Innovation needs a different style of leadership.”

The event is hosted by the Tax Institute. President, and Chair of The Tax Summit Organising Committee, Marg Marshall, said, “We are thrilled to have one of Australia’s most respected business voices join us at this year’s event. Not only is David an experienced leader and technologist, he deeply understands the world of tax and accounting to help attendees navigate the digital frontier and beyond.

“At the event, attendees will hear expert insights on technology, leadership and the issues affecting the industry, as well as connect with peers in-person to share their learnings.”

Thodey joins a compelling speaker lineup of the nation’s most forward-thinking minds, including

• Karen Payne, CTA, Inspector-General of Taxation and Taxation Ombudsman;
• Victoria Lanyon, Senior Associate at King & Wood Mallesons;
• Australian Sporting Legend Kevin Sheedy; and many more.

Held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) on Sep 5-7, The Tax Summit 2023 brings together taxation specialists, lawyers, accountants, newcomer tax professionals and business leaders as well as anyone with an interest in the latest issues impacting businesses on a local and global scale.

The Tax Institute is the leading forum for the tax community in Australia. It is committed to furthering tax education, representing its members and continuously improving the tax system for the benefit of all.

Register now to hear more insights from Thodey at The Tax Summit. And for more information on The Tax Summit and its line-up of more than 70 expert speakers, covering topics including economics, property, business, global tax developments and technology, please see the full agenda here.

The post Thodey warns of leadership challenges appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

However, in the face of the global disruptions we’ve seen over recent years, managing demand volatility and supply constraints and their impact on production scheduling and distribution are now mission-critical.

Floods, fires and sustainability imperatives have only added to the challenge and made the availability of trustworthy real-time data a matter of survival.

The latest Interos Annual Global Supply Chain Report reveals that supply chain disruptions, ranging from climate change to economic uncertainty and digitisation, cost large organisations an average of AU$274 million in lost revenue – per company – every year.

While the surveyed companies are in the ‘large’ category, the message, and cost implications, are clear.

So how can supply chains be modernised with the power of data and machine learning?

Automation and machine learning in supply chain management

 One example of innovative supply chain management is a fast-growing SaaS (software as a service) company headquartered in Singapore, Stemly, which built an enterprise decision intelligence platform to support supply chain management.

It offers demand planning, replenishment and inventory optimisation, sustainability planning and optimisation as well as retail planning for ecommerce businesses and marketplaces. Their objective is to help executives make better and faster decisions by decoding data science to automate forecasting and optimise information so it is in the right place at the right time.

Data critical to drive modern SCM

An essential aspect of Stemly’s products is the machine-learning-based insights they provide. However, ML needs data, which is why data integration – the ability to connect to a variety of data sources and ingest that data in real-time, or via batch, is critical.

“Data problems are hairy problems. They’re not easy.”

Given the nature of its business, Stemly needed a trusted iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution that was cloud-native, easy to use and provided functional support. After evaluating a handful of different solutions on the market this year, SnapLogic, a leader in intelligent integration and enterprise automation, emerged as the clear winner.

Real-time data enabling faster issue resolution

With SnapLogic’s intuitive no/low-code platform, Stemly has the data it needs in real-time to serve customers better and faster than ever before.

“We chose SnapLogic because it fits the bill on all the criteria we were after,” says Stemly CTO Abhimanyu Prabhavalkar. “The SnapLogic platform was very easy to use in the trial period. And I was also happy with how intuitive it was for us to build pipelines and ingest data into the product.”

Giving business leaders an edge in the market

Prabhavalkar looks forward to Stemly’s continued collaboration with SnapLogic because it gives the business a competitive advantage in the market.

“The exciting part about working with SnapLogic is the time-to-market abilities it provides us. It allows us to rapidly ingest data in a quality manner by transforming and cleaning the data before it comes into our data lake,” he shares.

With SnapLogic, we have the ability to build our data pipelines declaratively, rather than with code. This allows for more reliable, resilient and reproducible deployments, reducing our time to market considerably.”

“I’m really looking forward to our joint collaboration and the future of our relationship as we take on an increasing number of big-name customers with even bigger data problems to solve,” Prabhavalkar says.

James Campbell, Regional Manager, Australia New Zealand at SnapLogic, says, “Like many companies, Stemly leverages rich sources of data to transform executive decision-making and chose SnapLogic as an efficient way to seamlessly connect with a large variety of customers’ systems, as well as external data sources.”

“I’m thrilled to see that SnapLogic has helped the Stemly team break data silos by easily and quickly connecting applications and data endpoints, helping them deliver a better customer experience faster in a volatile business landscape. Stemly is an innovator in supply chain, finance and sustainability planning, and we are eager to watch our relationship unfold over time.”

The post Why it’s time to modernise supply chains appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap December 2022

15.12 ASIC and the Reserve Bank of Australia have directed the ASX to engage EY to conduct an audit into the support and maintenance of its Chess system, following the collapse of the replacement program. IT News reports that the two organisations have outlined a list of expectations, including compliance with financial stability standards and identifying what upgrades will be needed to keep the current Chess in operation until a replacement is ready.

10.12 The ATO has raided 35 properties across Australia as part of a crackdown on businesses supplying or using sales suppression software. The tools are being used globally to alter PoS data to understate or conceal revenue. Many of the businesses raided were in the hospitality sector, ABC News reports. The raids coincided with similar action in the UK and US.

09.12 Work on the GovERP SAP-based project will be reduced over summer. InnovationAUS says it understands work on the project stopped recently for six weeks, though a government spokesperson would not confirm that, but said there would be reduced activity due to Christmas and New Year leave. It is unclear if the project is impacted by recent cuts in contractors at Services Australia.

08.12 Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil is considering local data storage requirements in Australia to improve security for sensitive data, InnovationAus says. O’Neil told the publication data localisation would be ‘very much’ a feature of the discussion for the recently announced cybersecurity strategy.

08.12 Regional Bank Australia has sold its myCDRdata consumer data right platform to Australian payment, banking and regulated data solutions company Cuscal. The bank says consumers have used myCDRdata to access all 114 bank brands in the CDR ecosystem, while the pro-subscriptions are available to banks and other entities to help them undertake simple and fast verification testing of their CDR capabilities.

08.12 Former Telstra CEO Andrew Penn is among those charged with developing a new cyber security strategy to make Australia ‘the most cyber secure country in the world by 2030’. Penn will be joined by Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre CEO Rachael Falk and retired Air Force chief Mel Hupfeld in immediate development of the strategy ITNews says. Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil says the 2030 target will involve an international panel with ‘some of the biggest cyber guns from around the world’.

06.12 Real estate agency LJ Hooker has confirmed it has affected by a data breach, with a ransomware group claiming to have stolen 375 gigabytes of employee and customer data, including passport scans, credit card details and loans data, from a NSW office, Vice says. It’s the second big breach for the real estate sector in recent weeks with Harcourts Melbourne City hit in October.

01.12 The Medibank hackers have published what is believed to be all remaining datasets from the incident on their dark web blog. The data dump, with compressed files amounting to more than 5GB, was accompanied by a ‘case closed’ announcement, The Guardian notes. The drop is the sixth from the hack, which the AFP says originated in Russia. Investigations are continuing, with the case far from closed.

01.12 Six invasive warrants were enacted last year under the controversial Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, which provided the AFT and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission with new warrants, including the power of account takeovers. Two data disruption warrants, two network activity warrants and two account takeovers were issued in 2021-22 according to the annual Surveillance Devices Act 2004 report, ITNews says.

AppWrap November 2022

29.11 A/NZ SMBs are predicting 12 percent growth in their IT spend on managed service providers and system integrators every year until 2025 according to a new report commissioned by Microsoft. Fifty-one percent of the SMBs said they want tech partners who proactively recommend new solutions.

28.11 Legislation increasing fines for privacy breaches has passed through Parliament. The legislation will see companies subject to fines of up to $50m, three times the value of any benefit obtained through misuse of the data or 30 percent of a company’s adjusted turnover in the relevant period, for serious or repeated breaches. The penalties come into effect a day after Royal Assent by the Governor-General. Opposition from stakeholders failed to secure reduced penalties, InnovationAus reports. There had been calls for tiering of penalties to prevent SMBs and charities being subjected to the same penalties as multinationals.

28.11 The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has intensified its supervision of Medibank following its data breach, with Deloitte examining the incident and Medibank’s response and the effectiveness of its controls. ZDnet says the financial services regulator will determine if further regulatory action is necessary following the completion of the external review.

25.11 Melbourne’s Montu has taken out the top spot in the Australian Deloitte 2022 Technology Fast 50, with FrankieOne and me&u runners up. Montu provides paths to medical cannabis therapies through an integrated digital system, and achieved 20,728 percent revenue growth in the 2020-22 period. FrankieOne is a fraud and money laundering risk management platfrom, while me&u is a digital order and pay platform, Deloitte says.

24.11 Supermarket chain Coles has digitised its supply chain with a ‘track and trace’ system to monitor poultry moving between farms and its distribution centre. The company says 4,500 smart, foldable food bins, fitted with IoT devices, have been deployed, with the combination of the bins and IoT reducing the cost of the asset pool required by 25 percent, tripling the amount of empty bins returned, reducing cost and waste. The system is also ensuring food safety standards.

24.11 Martech vendor Wunderkind has launched its APAC hub in Sydney after singling out Australia as a priority growth market. The US based company says it plans to grow headcount ‘exponentially’, across sales, customer success and client partnerships in the coming 12 months, Retail World reports.

22.11 Children’s charity The Smith Family has become the latest major Australian cyberattack victim, as it warns personal data and some card information of up to 80,000 donors was potentially exposed. Card data is limited to the first four and last digits on some cards, other card data was not stored by the charity. It says there is no indication so far that any information has been misused, SMH reports.

21.11 EY has acquired Sydney professional services firm Bridge Business Consulting in a deal designed to bolster its data and analytics capabilities. Twenty Bridge staff will join EY’s data and analytics practice, EY says. Financial details for the deal were not disclosed.

19.11 If you’re counting on Twitter during the World Cup, you may want to think again with one former employee claiming the company has a 50 percent chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the Cup. The employee estimates a 90 percent likelihood of failures and glitches, The Guardian says. The article follows a New York Times piece last week saying the company was ‘teetering on the edge’ after another 1,200 staff resigned last Thursday. Meanwhile Elon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump to the platform, but Trump himself has said he has no interest returning to the platform.

17.11 The ASX’s blockchain-based Chess upgrade has been scrapped – five years into the project, with the ASX taking a pretax charge of up to AU$255 million in H1 2023. The ASX announced it has ‘paused’ all current activities of the project following an independent review by Accenture. That review found significant gaps and deficiencies in the ASX’s program delivery capabilities and that there are significant challenges in the technology design. ASIC and the Reserve Bank of Australia dubbed it ‘altogether unsatisfactory’ that the findings were made at such a late state of a critical replacement program.

17.11 NSW is getting Australia’s first state-based mandatory data breach notification scheme for the public sector with the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Amendment Bill passing the upper house last week, without amendment. It will come into effect within a year and requires public sector agencies, state-owned corporations, local councils and some universities to report breaches ‘likely to result in serious harm’, InnovationAus reports.

17.11 New Zealand’s Ackama has acquired Melbourne bespoke software company Common Code for NZ$2.7 million in a deal which will lift its revenue to over $12 million – 75 percent of which is via exporting its services. The deal will also increase Ackama’s staff by 90 percent across A/NZ, Ackama, which develops software and secure cloud platforms, says.

11.11 The ACCC is gunning for big tech again, calling for a range of new measures to address harms from digital platforms. The fifth report in the five-year Digital Platforms Services Inquiry proposed platforms be subject to mandatory dispute resolution processes and stronger requirements for combating scams, harmful apps and fake reviews, among other measure.

11.11 Apple added US$190 billion in market value overnight on November 10, setting a stockmarket record for US listed companies. The company has seen strong double-digit growth in emerging markets. Its market value gain last week was greater than Alphabet, Amazon and Meta combined and gave the company a capitalisation of US$2.34 trillion, MoneyControl says.

10.11 Australia’s police and emergency services will be able to access telecommunications data faster in order to help triangulate the location of missing persons under a bill introduced to federal parliament. The bill is in part a response to a recommendation made following a 2020 coronial inquest and removes a current requirement that a threat to a persons’ life be imminent in order for telcos to disclose information, InnovationAus reports.

10.11 Seven large data breaches affecting more than 50,000 people each were reported to the OAIC in the first half of the year. The OAIC report shows one of the breaches affected more than one million Australians. Overall notifications were down 14 percent to 396. The report covers the period to June, so recent big breaches, including Optus and Medibank are not included.

10.11 NAB boss Ross McEwan has called on the government to rethink increases to the data breach penalties, saying it could be ‘terminal’ for some businesses and could result in companies being less willing to promptly disclose beaches. The comments came in a submission to the senate inquiry on the proposed bill, ITNews reports.

10.11 Optus parent Singtel has set aside $140 million for this financial year for customer remediation efforts following the September data breach, while also booking a $1 billion write down for the Australia business’ goodwill. Singtel attributed the non-cash impairment to a combination of interest rate hikes and the weaker Australian dollar, rather than the breach, AFR reports.

09.11 The first details customer details from the Medibank hack have begun appearing on the dark web, a day after the alleged hacker threatened data would be released in 24 hours. The data includes phone numbers and Medicare numbers. Medibank has said it will not pay the ransom. WhatsApp messages between the hackers and Medibank reps have also been published 9News reports.

04.11 More than 110 quantum software experts across nine universities and two Australian startups have teamed up in an alliance to drive quantum software research and development locally. The Australian Quantum Software Network is also partnering with six companies, including Google Quantum AI and three Australian quantum hardware companies, to foster collaborations and partnerships between software and hardware, University of Technology Sydney says.

04.11 IP Australia is working on a $20m patent system modernisation to support high-quality customer centric administration of the patents system, strengthen cyber security and adapt to evolving requirements, IT News reports.

03.11 Harcourts’ Melbourne City franchisee’s rental property database has been accessed by an unknown third party, exposing names, addresses, banking information and other personal details. Harcourts says an external cybersecurity team is investigating. The breach comes amid rising concerns about the volume of data being collected on renters, SBS News notes.

02.11 Australia will convene and host a virtual international ransomware task force as part of the International Counter Ransomware Task Force, established to share intelligence and coordinate law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Clare O’Neil says the task force aims to develop innovative solutions to counter the ransomware threat. New Zealand is also a member of the Counter Ransomware Initiative.

AppWrap October 2022

30.10 Twitter has been hit by a trolling campaign with more than 50,000 tweets from 300 accounts bombarding the platform after Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. The Guardian says the coordinated campaign aimed to make users think the platform had dropped or weakened its content policies following Musk’s finalising of the acquisition last week.

28.10 Elon Mush has completed his US$44b deal to purchase Twitter, whipping up a media frenzy around what the future Twitter will look like. Musk was reportedly quick to stamp his authority on the company, with reports of staff firings coming hard on the heels of Musk’s confirmation the deal has been completed. Claims he’s trying ‘to help humanity’ through the purchase, and has long raged against the amount of spam and bot accounts he says are on Twitter. As BBC reports he’s also been making hints about the new company being the start of ‘X, the everything app’ – reputably a ‘super app’ along the lines of China’s WeChat, wrapping social media, messaging, finance and food orders into one app.

28.10 GWA Group, Virtus Health, My Plan Manager and Great Western Water have taken out the top prizes in this year’s IDC Future Enterprise Awards Australia and New Zealand. GWA Group took the gong for Best in Future of Digital Infrastructure, Virtus won for best in future intelligence, Best in Future Operations went to My Plan Manager and Great Western Water won the Best in Future of Work, IDC says. 

27.10 Australia’s fintech space has grown eight percent in the past year with 775 currently active fintechs, KPMG says. Record levels of investment are also flowing into the sector, with US$29.6b recorded in H1 2022. That includes a US$27.9b acquisition of Afterpay by Block (formerly Square) which was the biggest deal in H1. Three of Asia Pacific’s biggest deals were in Australia.

27.10 ANZ Bank has been hit with $25m in fines – alongside $211m in remediation costs – after the Australian Federal Court found a failure to maintain systems and processes and complex siloed IT systems had contributed to errors in its handling of the Breakfree Benefits package. The remediation package was also approved by the court, ITNews reports. Breakfree had offered fee waivers and interest rate discounts on some ANZ products but the court found customers didn’t always receive the benefits. Monitoring and analysis of the systems and processes were also lacking the court noted. 

26.10 Australian HR and payroll software provider Elmo Software has agreed to a $500 million takeover by US investor K1 Investment Management. The bid has been recommended to shareholders by Elmo’s independent board committee, Reuters reports.

26.10 Australian VC firm Square Peg Capital has raised $550 million for its fifth fund. Bloomberg reports that $350 million of that will be allocated to early stage deals with the remaining focused on later stage investments. The company has previously backed companies including Canva and Airwallex.

25.10 Medibank says customer data has been taken in its recent cyber breach. Initially it was believed no customer data had been stolen in the October 13 attack. The health insurer confirmed the ‘distressing development’ saying it has received a series of files from the criminal, including personal and health claims data and some customer data. “Given the complexity of what we have received, it is too soon to determine the full extent of the customer data that has been stolen,” Medibank says. The cybercrime is being investigated by the AFP.

25.10 Vinomofo customer details have been offered for sale on a Russian cybercrime forum after a cyber security ‘incident’ where the online wine retailers’ customer database was breached. Vinomofo has said it doesn’t hold identity or financial data in the exposed database, which contained a range fo sensitive customer and member details of reportedly up to 500,000 customers, InformationAge reports. 

24.10 The combined revenues of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are expected to have dropped to just under 10 percent for the third quarter when results are announced this week, Financial Times reports. The big five saw a 29 percent increase for all of last year, with combined sales of US$1.4 trillion.

19.10 Quantum technologies could add $6 billion to the economy and generate more than 19,000 jobs for Australia by 2045 according to CSIRO figures. The science agency says recent developments such as public and private investment announcements, new policy initiatives and focused funding provide optimism, though there are still high levels of uncertainty around how quantum technology will be commercialised.

18.10 The Communications Alliance is calling for a phased introduction of the CDR for the telco sector. In a submission to Treasury consultation on the matter, the Alliance has asked for implementation to be extended to two years, IT News says.

18.10 Australia and Singapore have signed a new agreement to boost cooperation on climate investment, financing and technology. The ‘green economy’ deal will promote the development and commercialisation of green technologies and support the transition to net zero, Reuters says.

18.10 Westpac is in preliminary discussions to acquire payment provider Tyro Payments, the bank says. The deal would strengthen Westpac’s small business proposition enabling it to grow merchant acquiring, particularly in the hospitality and healthcare sectors, Westpac says.

17.10 Microsoft is extending its Azure Availability Zones to Melbourne and the new Auckland data centre region still under construction, to provide greater infrastructure redundancy, the company says. NAB says the Melbourne Azure Availability Zone will enable the bank to deploy critical applications into the Australia Southeast region.

15.10 The CRM of Woolworth’s subsidiary MyDeal has been accessed by a ‘compromised user credential’ with 2.2 million customer records affected. MyDeal says while the ‘majority’ of affected customers have only had their email address exposed, others have had customer names, emails, phone numbers, delivery addresses and in some instances date of birth exposed. The company says all impacted customers have been notified. No other Woolworths systems were affected.

14.10 Aruba has released patches for a number of critical vulnerabilities affecting multiple versions of its EdgeConnect Enterprise Orchestrator software. On-prem, as-a-service provider and global enterprise tenant versions were affected, ITNews notes.

12.10 The head of UK intelligence and security organisation, GCHQ, says Chinese technology poses a major risk with countries risking ‘mortgaging the future’ by buying into the technology with ‘hidden costs’. Sir Jeremy Fleming says China is using technology to secure control at home and abroad and cautioned against the UK and its allies use of the technologies, the BBC says.

12.10 Australia’s tech workforce has expanded by 164 percent in the past decade according to Census data. Computer programmers (up 91 percent) and business and systems analysts (up 96 percent) were particularly sought-after, ABC News says.

11.10 The OAIC and ACMA have both opened investigations into Optus’ massive data breach. The OAIC will be looking at whether Optus too reasonable steps to protect customers’ personal information, and whether its data collection practices were necessary and best practice was used for collecting and storing the data. The ACMA will be looking at whether Optus upheld its obligations as a telecommunications service provider, ITNews reports.

11.10 Ernst & Young has snapped up Kiwi ServiceNow specialist Red Moki for an undisclosed sum. EY says it’s experiencing ‘unprecedented growth in ServiceNow demands from clients and the deal will expand its footprint and expertise, and strengthen its transformation capability across Oceania.

07.10 Ten more IT-related jobs have been added to the National Skills Commission’s skills priority list. The Commission says 31 percent of the 914 occupations assessed are now in national shortage. The IT jobs added include systems analyst, web developer, analyst programmer, database administrator, network administrator and ICT quality assurance engineer, InformationAge reports.

07.10 Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has been hacked with CNBC reporting around US$570m stolen. The company, the world’s largest crypto exchange, temporarily suspended transactions after an exploit on a cross-chain bridge, which enables transfer of tokens from one blockchain to another, was targeted. Operations have since resumed.

06.10 The Federal Government has announced temporary emergency amendments to telecommunications regulations to help protect people caught in the Optus breach. The amendments include enabling telcos to temporarily share approved government identifier information with regulated financial services to allow enhanced monitoring and safeguards, Treasurer Jim Chalmers says. Separate regulation will allow identifiers to be shared with Commonwealth, state and territory governments.

05.10 A Parliamentary probe has opened into Canberra’s procurement culture after a series of damning audits showing failures in the procurement practices of government departments. Labor MP and committee chair Julian Hill says there appears to be a ‘concerning’ pattern of agencies cutting corners or interpreting the rules to suit themselves, InnovationAus reports. Submissions will be taken until November 11.

05.10 Elon Musk’s Twitter deal is back on – but not before Musk sought a discount of up to 30 percent on the US$44 billion deal, NYTimes says. Twitter rebuffed the proposal and Musk ultimately ‘offered’ to pay his full initial price. Twitter had sued Musk for after he tried to back out of the deal.

03.10 Banks have been told not to dump fintech, crypto and remittance customers with the Council of Financial Regulators proposing a range of proposals for policy options to address debanking, AFR says. Treasurer Jim Chalmers says a government response to the recommendations – which include collecting debanking data and increased transparency and fairness measures – will be released ‘in due course’.

03.10 Microsoft has shared ‘mitigation measures’ for the latest two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019, after admitting last week that there have been ‘limited’ targeted attacks using the vulnerabilities. Researchers, however, are warning that the mitigations are ‘insufficient’, Bleeping Computer says.

02.10 A new accounts payable automation, a configure, price and quote offering and a mobile app to help improve warehouse operations efficiency were among the big announcements from NetSuite at Suiteworld. NetSuite Account Payable Automation embeds banking services into the ERP system to make it easier and faster for businesses to process bills and pay vendors from within NetSuite, while NetSuite CPQ will enable sales teams to quickly configure offerings and generate accurate proposals, saving costs in the pricing process, Manila Times says.

AppWrap September 2022

27.09 The Royal Commission into the Robodebt scheme has begun with senior government officials expected to be called to give evidence. Commissioner Catherine Holmes says many people at different levels of the government will be asked to give an account of their role in the scheme, but the focus will be on those holding senior positions who had, or should have had, oversight, The Guardian says. Class action with 453,000 victims of the scheme resulted in a AU$1.8b federal court settlement in 2021.

26.09 The ransomware bill has been reintroduced to Parliament without major alterations. The bill which, could see the introduction of maximum sentences of 10 years for ransomware use and up to 25 years for those targeting critical infrastructure, was first introduced under the previous government, was not debated before parliament dissolved ahead of the election, InnovationAus notes.

26.09 Iranian-affiliated hackers are actively targeting organisations in Australia according to a new advisory from the ACSC, which is urging businesses to carry out mitigations including implementing and enforcing backup and restoration and patching and updating systems.

26.09 Big CRM and Slack updates are among the raft of announcements Salesforce has unveiled at its Dreamforce 2022 conference. It’s Salesforce Genie – dubbed the ‘biggest innovation’ to come to its CRM and sales enablement platform, will unify customer data and enable real-time capabilities and new uses, while Slack Canvas will unleash greater collaboration, Forbes says.

22.09 A mix of commercial and scientific leaders will head the new National Quantum Advisory Committee to drive Australia’s quantum computing capability. The 15-person committee will help shape the national quantum strategy and coordinate capability across research, industry and government, InnovationAus says.

21.09 The Digital Transformation Agency has been slammed for its handling of nine procurements examined by the ANAO. The Australian National Audit Office says the procurements have been ‘ineffective’ and the DTA’s approach ‘fell short of ethical requirements’. Management of contracts was also not managed effectively. The review found a litany of issues including evidence of conflicts of interest, failure to manage contracts effectively with costs blowing out, duplicate payments being made, poor application of risk and fraud management guidance and missing records. Seven contracts originally valued at $25m blew out to $54m, with one $121,000 project blowing out a massive 40x to nearly $5m. Three of the nine projects reviewed related to the Covid pandemic response.

21.09 New research into the impact of algorithms won’t involve big players such as Facebook, Google or TikTok. The nine-month, US$1.5 million research project was touted by NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern earlier this week with Ardern calling it the ‘centrepiece of her visit to New York for the UN General Assembly this week, Stuff says. Microsoft, Twitter, OpenMinded and the NZ and US governments are involved in the grandly titled ‘Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes’.

21-09 NextDC has opened its $1b S3 data centre in Sydney’s Artarmon. The 20,000m² centre – NextDC’s largest in Sydney – will support 1,600 customers and 770 partners and features 1,500m² of mission critical operation space, CRN reports.

18.09 Drone-blocking technology is being deployed in London as part of the security around Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral. A no-fly zone is in place over the city the Telegraph says, with ‘top secret’ anti-drone devices deployed on rooftops around Westminster. The devices, which block signals between drones and their pilots, are part of one of the biggest security operations in British history.

15.09 Microsoft’s US$75 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty, is being probed by UK antitrust regulators with Brussels expected to follow suit. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority says it has referred the deal for an in-depth investigation amid concerns the deal is anti-competitive. Rivals including Sony have raised concerns over the deal.

15.09 Australian workplace wellness startup Sonder has closed a AU$35 million series B funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures. The company already has Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank, Allianz and Toll Group among its clients and plans to expand into the SMB market and to the UK, AFR says.

14.09 The ATO will go to tender soon for midrange and data centre services along with separate hyper converged infrastructure services. The tenders are part of a modernisation of the ATO’s outsourcing portfolio, IT News says. Advance notices for the tenders have been issued, with the actual tenders expected later this month.

14.09 Google is facing a €25 billion lawsuit in the EU and UK over alleged anticompetitive behaviour in the digital advertising market. Law firms involved in the action say they’re seeking compensation that could reach up to €7 billion in the UK and €17 billion in the EU. The UK case is expected to be taken to the competition appeal tribunal over the next month but could take years to reach a conclusion, The Guardian says.

13.09 Australian Universities are calling for GDPR-style data reforms, saying deficiencies in local laws are preventing sharing of data between European researchers and their Australian counterparts. The issue could force local projects offshore, InnovationAus reports.

08.09 The Australian Banking Association has sided with big tech in opposing being forced to house Australian customer data onshore. The ABA’s submission to The Data Security Action Plan Discussion Paper cautions against a general policy of storing or moving data offshore, saying data localisation can weaken data security and would disrupt existing commercial and infrastructure arrangements, the Mandarin says.

07.09 US tech companies receiving government funding will be banned from building ‘advanced technology’ facilities in China for 10 years as part of a plan to build up the US semiconductor industry. Companies receiving funding under the $50 billion Chips and Science Act – Washington’s response to the semiconductor shortage – have been told they can’t invest it in China and can only expand mature node factories in China to serve the Chinese market, the BBC says.

05.10 New Zealand is eyeing up tech exchange programs with Korea, with NZ ambassador to Korea Philip Turner saying the two countries are well placed in the digital ecosystem to work together. Turner says Korea is very good at finding a path to market ideas, and NZ is keen to connect startups with Korean partners for collaboration and capital raising, The Korea Herald says.

04.09 An AI generated work has taken first place in the digital category at a US show – and others aren’t happy. The winning artwork was created using Midjourney, which turns lines of text into graphics and has prompted a social media pile-on with complaints that using AI was cheating other artists, Aljazeera reports.

02.09 The Federal government has committed to opening 6,800 extra permanent migration places for tech workers. An additional $36 million will also be invested in additional visa processing staff, InnovationAus notes.

02.09 Science and Technology Australia has launched a plan of five policy fixes in science jobs and skills to ensure Australia can keep up with economic competitors. The plan includes a call a top-up investment for new discovery research and for Labor’s election pledges to legislate new investments in research commercialisation to be confirmed in Budget papers. A shared story, training bench-to-boardroom scientists and work to keep talent is also called for.

AppWrap August 2022

31.08 The Tech Council of Australia will formally ask the federal government to give higher earning migrants faster entry and a better pathway to permanent residency in Australia at this week’s jobs and skills summit, the SMH says. The Tech Council released a report earlier this week noting 2.3 percent of the world’s tech unicorns have been founded in Australia. The report also highlights potential ‘star’ segments including mining tech, edtech, diversified fintech and AR/VR.

30.08 Blockchain developers, UX designers and AppSec engineers are among the most in-demand tech jobs for the coming years across A/NZ, at least according to recruitment company Hays. IoT, software, robotics and cloud engineers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, mobile application developers, and IAM and DevSecOps engineers also make the list of roles that Hays says ‘will rapidly increase in demand in coming years’.

30.08 Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued legal notices tech companies including Apple, Meta and Microsoft requiring them to report on what measures they’re taking to tackle child sexual exploitation material on their platforms. The Commissioner says the notices are ‘an information gathering process’, with more planned for additional providers ‘in due course’. Companies face penalties of up to $555,000 a day for failing to respond within 28 days.

29.08 A new $25 million Cyber Security Operations Centre has opened in Sydney to identify and block terrorist, criminal and hacker threats in real time. The centre, in an undisclosed location, is an Australian-first and will protect important data, including that of held by the NSW Police network, from online threats and has a team of 15 analysts and engineers, NSW Government says.

29.08 The Tech Council of Australia and the ACTU are joining forces to push for reforms to the skills, training and immigrations systems. The two organisations are calling for the establishment of a new modern Australian Digital Apprenticeship, along with expedited consideration of highly skilled, highly paid migration places where there are clear skills shortages and where roles can provide coaching and expertise to the local workforce. Improved access to tech jobs for women, people with a disability and indigenous Australians are also among the key policy areas touted.

27.08 Facebook parent Meta has ‘dramatically’ reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica’s access to the private data of tens of millions of users. No details about the terms of the agreement are known yet, with the parties requesting a stay of 60 days to finalise the written agreement. The deal means Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg will avoid giving depositions, The Guardian notes.

26.08 Ed Husic has approved all grants made by the former Morrison government under the Modern Manufacturing Initiative, following an ‘examination’ of the program. Grants that had been announced, but not signed, were put on hold while the review looked at whether relevant rules and advice had been followed. Husic had been critical of ‘the brazen attempt of the former Morrison government to politicise this grant’.

25.08 The federal government has announced the terms of reference for the botched Robodebt debt recovery scheme. The $30 million inquiry will be headed by Former Queensland chief justice Catherine Holmes, with a report on the saga, which Anthony Albanese has called a ‘human tragedy’ due in April 2023, The Guardian says.

23.08 ASIC has flagged a focus ‘technology risks’ as a key priority over the next four years. The organisation’s 2022-26 Corporate Plan notes its desire to ‘focus on the impacts of technology in financial markets and services, drive good cyber-risk and operational resilience practices, and act to address digitally enabled misconduct, including scams’.

23.08 A former Twitter security chief has turned whistleblower testifying that the company misled users, regulators and its own board about security vulnerabilities, and – in news that will delight Elon Musk – how many fake accounts are on the platform. CNN Business says Peiter Zatko also alleges Twitter does not reliably delete users data when they cancel accounts. Musk is attempting to pull out of a US$44 billion deal to buy Twitter, amid claims the company was lying about the number of spam bots on the platform. Zatko, for his part, was reportedly fired by Twitter in January. Twitter says the allegations are inaccurate.

22.08 The federal government has opened consultation as part of a review of the critical technologies list, launched last November. The 2022 list will build on the 2021 list of 63 technologies, Ed Husic says. “It is vital we understand and send a clear signal about what technologies we should be focusing on and where our strengths lie – and that is exactly what this consultation is all about,” he says.

18.08 Australia’s High Court has ruled that Google is not a publisher and can’t be held responsible for defamatory material. The judgement overturns an earlier ruling which found Google through its inclusion of links to articles could be treated as a publisher of defamatory content in the case of an Australian lawyer allegedly involved in Melbourne’s gangland wars. The latest finding says: “In reality, a hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage,” Law Society Gazette says.

16.08 The federal Department of Health does not have adequate assurance over the completeness and accuracy of data and third party systems used in its Covid-19 response, an ANAO audit says. Data collection and IT management for systems used in the vaccine rollout was outsourced to parties including Services Australia, Salesforce, Accenture and AWS. “Health does not have assurance that third parties have IT controls in place to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data,” the report says.

15.08 Services Australia has locked in 5 September as the changeover date for myGov. IT News says the updated beta platform will replace the legacy site, used since 2013, with new functionality progressively added.

12.08 The Australian Federal Court has ordered Google to pay AU$60 million for misleading users about the collection of their personal location data on Android phones. The ACCC says Google misled users into believing it would only collect and use location data if Location History was on, when in fact the Web and App Activity setting also enabled Google to collect and use the data. The ACCC began action against Google back in 2019 and the order is the fist public enforcement outcome arising out of the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry.

10.08 Cisco has admitted suffering a hack in late May, with an adversary with ties to Lapsus$ blamed. While a list of stolen files were leaked to the dark web, Cisco says no sensitive customer or employee data, IP or supply chain information was obtained.

10.08 Health Minister Mark Butler has scrapped the CovidSafe app, saying it was clear the app failed as a public health measure, the BBC reports. The AU$14m app, launched in April 2020, identified just 17 close contacts not found manually.

10.08 Zero trust is the future of security according to A/NZ IT decision makers, but many say their internal teams lack time or expertise to adopt best practices effectively. The results, from a Forrester survey commissioned by Datacom, show 58 percent of A/NZ organisations are ‘well on their way’ to implementing zero trust, with just 17 percent yet to begin.

09.08 South East Queensland’s has announced its partnered with Wisk Aero to introduce self-driving air taxis to the region. Despite the MoU signing, there are still significant regulatory hurdles to overcome, InformationAge notes.

09.08 The Reserve Bank of Australia has launched a one-year research project into use cases for central bank digital currency in Australia. The research, in collaboration with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, hopes to identify innovative use cases and business models that could be supported by a CBDC, the RBA says.

09.08 The Federal court has ruled that ransomware victim Inchcape can’t claim costs incurred for cleanup and recovery from the attack under the insurance policy the company held. ITNews says the judgement declares such costs as decisions taken by the victim, rather than costs directly incurred from the attack.

08.08 Australia’s Digital Rights Watch is calling on the government to tighten privacy laws following Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, which manufactures the Roomba vacuum. The group says many of the vacuums create detailed maps of users homes, with that information now belonging to Amazon and able to be combined with data from products such as Ring cameras and Echo speakers.

05.08 Slack reset the passwords of 0.5 percent of its users last week, after identifying a vulnerability which exposed some users’ hashed passwords for five years. The bug affected all users who created or revoked a shared invite link between April 2017 and July 17, 2022, transmitting the link creator’s hashed password to other members of the workspace, Wired notes.

03.08 The ASX has called in Accenture to review its blockchain based Chess cleaning system project. The appointment comes alongside yet another delay to the project schedule. ASX says it now does not expect go-live for the new system to be before late 2024. The three-month review will focus on the Chess application software, from Digital Asset.

03.08 DCI Data Centers is building a 20MW data centre in Canberra. The company has secured land and power for the centre in Jerrabomberra’s Poplars Innovation Precinct, with the facility due to be ready for service in 2024, DataCenterDynamics says. The new facility comes as demand for greater resilience and sovereignty for federal government cloud workloads steps up.

01.08 MYOB has signed deals to buy Endeavour Solutions Australia’s Greentree and MYOB Advanced practices, and Perth-based ERP specialists Addax Business Solutions. The company has been on an aggressive acquisition trail in recent months as it builds out its mid-market direct channel, with the latest deals bringing to eight its acquisitions since beginning the push. It acquired the NZ Greentree practice of Endeavour Solutions last December.

AppWrap July 2022

26.07 Government services minister Bill Shorten has outlined his vision for a myGov that ‘unifies government digital services’ and is outcome and people-led. “While agencies continue to create digital silos, with their own disconnected apps and websites, ordinary Australians will remain rightfully frustrated,” he said at the Australian Financial Review Government Services Summit. He says there’s no reason myGov couldn’t be used for ‘simple conveniences’, such as accessing prescriptions or nudging people to book for cancer screenings.

25.07 Bunnings and Kmart have temporarily switched off their in-store facial recognition systems, news.com.au says. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is currently investigating the technology’s use and how the stores handle customers’ personal information.

22.07 The ACCC has launched a free Consumer Data Right sandbox to help test and improve CDR solutions. It says the sandbox will help participants improve the effectiveness of their data sharing offerings, and reduce time and cost in the process of becoming an active CDR participant or updating CDR offerings. Earlier this month the Bank of Queensland paid a $133.200 penalty for failing to provide a service enabling consumer’s data to be shared. The CDR has only rolled out to banking so far with energy and telecommunications due to follow.

22.07 Victorian government agencies are failing to ensure third parties they share public information with are effectively securing it. A Victorian Information Commission audit of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, Transport Accident Commission and Worksafe Victoria found none were ‘completely effective’ across all audit criteria, ITNews reports.

21.07 The Australian National University has called for Australia and other quad countries to do more to provide tech training to Indonesia to ward off the threat of China, which provide large-scale, free tech training to the country. An ANU paper says Huawei alone is potentially training ‘tens of thousands’ of Indonesians each year, steering the country’s tech leaders towards Chinese technology – despite its apparent ‘deep animosity toward China’.

21.07 The Australian Digital Health Agency has missed the government deadline for moving out of a Chinese-owned data centre. The agency is yet to finish decommissioning hardware but says it completed its migration of sensitive data earlier this month – about a week after deadline, InnovationAus says.

20.07 The Federal Government is fast-tracking almost 60,000 permanent visa applications for skilled workers based overseas. Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil says a lot of the people given visas to work in Australia are actually already here and the move to prioritising people offshore will help more effectively address the skills crisis.

17.07 ANZ has pulled the pin on its play for MYOB, and is instead looking to acquire retail banking assets from insurance giant Suncorp, SMH reports. 

13.07 Details for almost 47,000 current and past Deakin University students have been stolen in a ‘smishing’ attack after a staff members login credentials were compromised. Among the details stolen are names, student ID and mobile numbers and ‘special comments’, Deakin says.

14.07 Amazon is promising to stop using sellers data for its own benefit as it attempts to ward off EU regulators action. The company, which has been under investigation for allegedly using its dominance to box out competitors, has offered up a range of changes, including stopping collecting non-public data about merchants it competes with, and providing other sellers more access to prime space, such as the Buy Box, on its site, the NYTimes says.

13.07 ANZ bank has confirmed its in talks to buy MYOB for more than AU$4.5 billion. Bloomberg says MYOB’s owner, private equity giant KKR, and ANZ are in ‘advanced discussions’, though there is no certainty a deal will go ahead. The deal could give ANZ a ‘deeper relationship’ with the hundreds of thousands of small businesses using MYOB.

11.07 Twitter has called in the big guns in preparation to sue Elon Musk after he pulled out of a US$44 billion acquisition of the company. The company has hired US law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, with Reuters reporting it plans to force him to complete the acquisition. Musk pulled out last week claiming Twitter had failed to provide information about fake accounts.

06.07 In what could be one of the largest ever data breaches, hackers claim to have obtained data on one billion people from a Shanghai police database. A user on online hacking forum Breach Forums offered to sell nearly 24TB of data from the hack for 10 Bitcoins, or around US$200,000, Aljazeera reports.

04.07 MYOB has snapped up Sydney-based Greentree partner GT Business Solutions as it continues ramping up its ERP sales channel. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, continues MYOB’s acquisition strategy which has seen it buy companies including Aztech, Star Business Solutions, Axsys and Exobiz since announcing its move to a direct sales and service model. MYOB says the deal will bolster its Greentree sales and support capability.

04.07 Labor is doubling the share of government procurement earmarked for SMBs with new Commonwealth Procurement Rules requiring that 20 percent of procurements by value are sourced from SMEs. Each year the government spends around $70b on contracts, notes AuManufacturing.

04.07 Wellington software testing and assurance provider Qual IT has been snapped up by Australia’s Planit in a move the companies say creates the largest independent IT testing company in New Zealand and Australia and the third largest globally. Qual IT partner company, SEQA, which provides cybersecurity, has also been acquired as part of the deal.

03.07 Australia’s Digital Passenger Declaration has been dropped, with Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil admitting the offering ‘needs a lot more work to make it user friendly’. In announcing the change, which takes effect from midnight AEST Wednesday 06 July 2022, O’Neil noted that the removal will reduce airport delays and said it will ‘encourage more visitors and skilled workers to choose Australia as a destination’.

AppWrap June 2022

29.06 Australia’s first online-only bank, Volt, has pulled the plug, returning AU$100m in deposits, selling its mortgage book and surrendering its banking license after failing to secure needed funding. The bank had needed to raise AU$200m to continue trading, the FinancialTimes notes. Xinja, another neobank granted a license in 2019 alongside Volt, announced the closure of its banking service at the end of 2020.

30.06 The plummeting cryptocurrency market has wiped millions of dollars in funds stolen by North Korean hackers, threatening a key source of funding for the country’s weapons program. An analyst says a crypto cache, worth tens of millions of dollars, from a 2021 heist lost 80-85 percent of its value in recent weeks and is now worth less than $10m, Reuters says. Earlier this year it was suggested North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group was behind a US$615 million cryptocurrency theft.

29.06 Australian climate tech companies raised $1.4 billion in capital in the last year according to a Climate Salad report. The funding was reported by 171 survey respondents – the majority of which are pre-seed or seed stage – with a similar amount expected to be raised in the coming year, InnovationAus reports. About half of the funding came from international investment.

29.06 Algorithms, digital transparency and increased collaboration will be top priorities for the Digital Platform Regulators Forum in the coming year. Created earlier this year and made up of representatives from the ACCC, OAIC, ACMA and the Australian eSafety Commissioner, the forum says transparency issues around digital platforms, the impact of their activities and how consumer data is being handled are particularly concerning for the forum.

29.06 Rocket Lab has successfully launched the first lunar mission from New Zealand with Nasa’s Capstone micro-satellite spacecraft testing a never before flown orbit of the moon. The launch this week is the first step in Nasa’s mission to send humans back to the moon, RNZ News notes. The launch came a day after Nasa launched a rocket from Australia – the agency’s first launch from a commercial spaceport outside the US. The sub-orbital rocket will enable astrophysics studies that can only be undertaken in the Southern Hemisphere, Nasa says.

24.06 Queensland government has proposed mandatory data breach reporting, requiring agencies to report data breaches to both affected individuals and the privacy commissioner. No Australian state has yet implemented a MDB notification scheme yet, though NSW has an exposure draft of planned legislation, ITNews reports.

23.06 Australians are more interested in flexible work times than in a four day working week according to new research. A report by Qualtrics found while Australians were open to a four-day week, they also had concerns about the potential trade-offs for themselves, customers and the business itself, Business Daily Media notes.

21.06 NSW’s budget has included a $703 million Future Economy Fund for R&D, commercialisation and business growth and relocation to the state, and a $262 million for an advanced manufacturing research facility digital, but there’s no increase for the Digital Restart Fund, for the first time since its 2019 launch, InnovationAus says. That fund will however receive another $126.7 million from its $2.1 billion fund.

21.06 Queensland’s integrated electronic medical record functionality rollout has garnered another $300 million in Budget funding. The Budget also includes $127 million to digitise Queensland Courts and the Civil and Administrative Tribunal and $30 million for Queensland Corrective Services, IT News reports.

21.06 Microsoft is retiring its ‘emotion reading’ facial analysis capabilities and restricting the use of its facial recognition operations in Azure Face API, Computer Vision and Video Indexer in the wake of rising concerns over such technologies and their validity. In a blog post, Microsoft conceded that there were ‘important questions about privacy’ in the case of emotion classification, which has been criticised by experts who say the technology is unscientific.

16.06 The University of Melbourne has launched two major investment funds, including a $15m pre-seed fund and a $100m startup fund. The University says the funds will play a critical role in supporting researchers to take more risks and accelerate the possibilities to take research discoveries from idea to market.

16.06 Meta, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Microsoft and other online platforms have agreed to tougher EU standards against disinformation. Thirty-four companies have signed on to the strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation which requires them to take action to counter fake accounts and deep fakes or face hefty fines of as much as six percent of their global turnover, Social Media Today reports.

15.06 A Choice investigation has found Kmart, Bunnings and The Good Guys are using facial recognition in retail stores, with most shoppers unaware of the use of the technology. Choice says it asked 25 leading Australian retailers whether they used the technology, with Kmart, Bunnings and The Good Guys appearing to be the only three capturing biometric data of customers.

09.06 Australasian cyber security services company CyberCX has snapped up Auckland’s Consegna and Sydney’s Tracer Cloud for an undisclosed sum. The deal will add more than 150 staff to CyberCX’s 1,000+ team, the company says.

09.06 The NSW Government’s M4 Smart Motorway Project has taken out the transport infrastructure award at IDC’s 2022 Smart City Asia/Pacific Awards. The project features in-road traffic sensors, and is designed to help drivers navigate the road by monitoring traffic volumes and providing variable speed and messaging signs, plus a quick-change light system, IDC says. It was the sole Australian winner in the awards.

08.06 US data centre operator Stack Infrastructure is entering the Australian market with plans for five local data centres by 2023. The data centres will be in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth. Work on the campus Melbourne campus is already underway and approval has been granted for Canberra and Perth, Stack says.

08.06 Nasa is heading downunder to launch three rockets from the Northern Territory. It’s the first Nasa launch in Australia since 1995, with the rockets being used to investigate heilophysics, astrophysics and planetary science phenomena which can only be seen in the southern hemisphere, ABC reports.

08.06 The ACMA is teaming up with New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs in an attempt to battle spam and scam messages. The newly signed memorandum of understanding furthers existing information sharing and strategic engagement to enhance compliance and enforcement outcomes, the ACMA says.

06-06 Westpac Australia has launched a new commercial data analytics offering using de-identified credit card data from more than six million daily transactions to provide insights to its largest clients to help in decision making. The self-serve DataX offering aims to enable customers ‘to optimise logistics, take advantage of market share opportunities or deliver to their growth strategy’, Westpac says.

02.06 Australians are being offered $40,000 to study cyber. Deloitte, the University of Wollongong, Swinburne University of Technology and TAFE NSW have joined forces to create the new three-year Cyber Academy program, which aims to fast track 1,200 cyber security careers. Students will earn an annual salary of $40,000 and work three days a week at Deloitte, a government department or industry partner while undertaking their study, InformationAge says.

01.06 New Zealand has won the battle of the upload speeds – and is proving better during busy hours –in the Trans-Tasman broadband Performance report. New Zealand’s Fibre 100 speeds squeaked in 0.1Mbps faster than Australia for downloads. On uploads NZ rated 22.3Mbps, while Australia could manage only 18.2Mbps, with more outages also recorded for Australia. The ACCC says NBN’s access charging model and approach to provisioning upload traffic ‘appear to be causing some busy hour and upload metrics to fall below New Zealand’s’. The report was released by the ACCC and New Zealand Commerce Commission.

01.06 Facebook’s number two, Sheryl Sandberg, is stepping down as COO of Meta after 14 years in the job. She will leave the position in Fall, though will remain on the board. Javier Olivan, currently Meta chief growth officer, will take on the COO role, Forbes reports.

AppWrap May 2022

26.05 New Zealand Rugby has signed SAP as its first ever major tech partner, with a multi-year ‘digital transformation’ deal. NZ Rugby says it will work with SAP to identify and implement innovative cloud solutions from SAP and connect data across key areas of the business to provide competitive advantage both on and off the field.

25.05 Google is collecting more personal data than any of the other tech giants, including Facebook. Analysis from AtlasVPN and security.org shows Google is collecting 39 data points, such as name, contact details, payment information films, photos, documents and spreadsheets you’ve stored and YouTube comments, on each user. That’s well ahead of second placed Twitter, which collects 24. Amazon follows with 23, with Facebook way back on just 14 data points. Apple came in on 12. “In general, they collect every little detail that they can,” AtlasVPN says. “There are a few exceptions, like your address, SSN, or driver’s license number, but besides that, not much else is left out of their databases.

25.05 Dyson is planning a major robotics centre as it seeks to create new domestic robots though the company isn’t revealing what forms those robots might take. The company’s announcement of the plans is accompanied by video and images of robot arms picking plates and detergent, along with a soft toy, and vacuuming an armchair. Don’t expect robotic helpers anytime soon, however, with Dyson saying it plans to bring the tech into our homes ‘by the end of the decade’.

24.05 Australia, the US, India and Japan are boosting their cooperation over cybersecurity and telecommunications standards and plan to convene industry partners to help unlock opportunities in critical and emerging technologies, following this week’s Quad conference. Strengthened information sharing on both cybersecurity and technical standards activities and coordinated cybersecurity standards for Quad governments’ procurement of software are among the initiatives set out. The four countries will also work together more closely on space initiatives, the White House says.

23.05 Clearview AI has been fined more than £7.5 million by UK privacy watchdog the ICO, and ordered to delete the data of UK residents, scraped from the internet, from its systems. The Information Commissioners Office says the controversial facial recognition provider’s collection of personal data breached UK data protection laws. Earlier this year founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That said it was ‘heartbreaking’ that countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia – where he grew up – had ‘misinterpreted’ Clearview’s technology and intentions.

20.05 WhatsApp – aka Meta – is looking to squeeze new revenue from businesses, with the launch of its WhatsApp Cloud API worldwide and plans for a paid tier for it Business App. The on-prem version of the Business API – the company’s first revenue-generating enterprise product – has thousands of businesses using it, including big brands such as Vodafone, BMW, KLM and Royal Dutch Airlines, notes TechCrunch. Companies pay WhatsApp on a per-message basis and can use the platform to direct customer communications to other channels. The cloud version is aimed at smaller businesses.

20.05 Woolworths has taken an 80 percent, AU$243m, stake in online marketplace MyDeal as it seeks to expand its online retail presence. Woolworths says the deal ‘materially expands our marketplace capabilities, especially in general merchandise’, ZDNet notes.

19.05 Australian businesses will spend $3.6 billion on AI systems in 2025 according to IDC, with strong demands from organisations for streamlining of core business processes and maximising the power of organisational data. The spending growth represents a CAGR of 24.4 percent between 2020 and 2025.

18.05 Eftpos’ QR code payments platform has finally gone live, with two Subway stores, in Sydney and Brisbane, as launch partners. Further rollouts across other restaurants are expected over the coming months, ZDNet reports.

17.05 Australia AI software company Clear Dynamics has closed a $35 million funding round as it eyes global expansion, BusinessNewsAustralia says. The company, which is tapping into the Gartner vision of a composable future, automates coding to create modular systems that can be assembled and reassembled as needed.

11.05 The University of South Australia has invested $25,000 in a quadruped robot to help advance research. Quadrupeds are now commonly used for remote inspections by defence, space, mining and utility companies, and for search and rescue, but the university says it’s interested in taking the robot’s capabilities ‘much further’.

11.05 The long-touted myGov app is reportedly on track to launch later this year, nearly three years since its need was first flagged. InnovationAus says the app went into private beta testing in December. An ‘enhanced’ version of the myGov platform, which the smartphone app is expected to harness, is also in beta testing.

11.05 The ASX has confirmed the April 2023 launch timeframe for its blockchain-enabled Chess platform will not be met. The launch had already been delayed by more than a year and the ASX says the April 2023 go-live is also ‘no longer viable’ with delays to the delivery of application software meaning there isn’t time for users to complete by April. No updated timeframe was provided.

10.05 Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI has been banned from selling its software to most US companies. The ban comes as part of a legal agreement following action by civil rights advocates who accused the company of breach of law for allegedly using biometric dat without use, TechCrunch says.

09.05 Meta is adding NFTs to Instagram this week, and Facebook ‘in the near future’. The move, initially for a small group of US creators and collectors, will enable them to share the ‘digital collectables’ on Instagram, Engadet reports.

06.05 Oracle has been certified to host Australian protected-level public sector data under the federal government’s hosting certification which requires agencies to use certified data centres, cloud service and SaaS providers from July. ITnews reports that Oracle quietly joined the list of certified providers last week. AWS, AUCloud, Sliced Tech, Vault Cloud, Microsoft and Kyndrl have also received ‘certified strategic’ accreditation – the highest level of assurance under the framework.

04.05 Pac Capital has launched Australia’s first Web3 focused VC fund. The $50 million Pac Private 1 will invest in metaverse, blockchain, gaming, health, AI, ML and VR, ITNews reports.

03.05 The NSW Government has identified digital, materials and chemistry, biotechnology and energy as key tech areas of focus in its 20-year R&D Roadmap. The roadmap is designed to better target funds to fast-track new technology and commercialisation. The roadmap also includes 39 applications, including Fintech, quantum computing and process automation as areas where NSW has ‘competitive advantages’.

02.05 Telemedicine has taken to space with Nasa ‘holoporting’ a medical team to the International Space Station. The technology allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted live in real time, Nasa says. When combined with mixed reality displays such as Microsoft’s HoloLens, it enables users to see, hear and interact with remote participants ‘as if they are actually present in the same space’.

AppWrap April 2022

29.04 Amazon has declined to provide the ACCC with information on its search algorithms, Reuters says. The ACCC is investigating online marketplaces’ practices, including whether they give preference to in-house products. Amazon has denied doing so, but refused to provide details of its algorithm inputs when requested by the ACCC.

28.04 Labor has pledged to develop a $1.2 billion independent Advanced Strategic Research Agency to support cutting-edge research and technology if it wins the federal election. The existing Defence Innovation Hub would be transitioned into the agency under the proposal, InnovationAus says.

26.04 The Australian National University’s random number generator has launched on AWS Marketplace. ANU Quantum Numbers uses quantum technology to generate true random numbers, ANU says. Random numbers are in demand for a range of uses, from generating secure passwords to research simulations and simulating processes and events in computer games.

26.04 Microsoft has beaten earnings expectations across each of its key business segments in Q3 to record US$49.4 billion in revenue – up 17 percent year on year. The Intelligent cloud segment, which includes Azure public cloud, SQL Server, Windows Server and enterprise services was up 26 percent to $19.0 billion, CNBC says.

26.04 Elon Musk’s likely US$44 billion purchase of Twitter has pushed debate on free speech and disinformation up a notch with Musk proclaiming that Twitter is ‘the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated’, the BBC notes. He’s announced his plans to ‘unlock’ Twitter’s ‘tremendous potential’. Others however have expressed concern the lack of a strong platform moderation will spell disaster. Twitter shares will be delisted and taken private once the deal closes, giving Musk total control.

21.04 CSIRO and industry and university partners are investing $16.2 million for its Next Generation scholarship program to fund 165 students to work on ‘challenges’ including data-centric and machine-driven engineering, AI in mental health, smart manufacturing and sensing, digital privacy and cybersecurity, national quantum technology capabilities and enhancing industry operations through the metaverse. Students will be part of multi-disciplinary teams working across industry, research and the university sector. At least 480 scholarships are expected to be funded over the six year Next Generation Graduates program, CSIRO says.

21.04 The Australian Taxation Office plans to replace its current IBM z14 mainframe before tax time in July 2024. The organisation has gone to market for a replacement, which it says can be a ‘cloud-like’ service or a more traditional model, ZDNet reports.

19.04 Woolworths has migrated its SAP applications and platforms to Microsoft Azure in an eight-month project. The migration covered 20 SAP applications and platforms, including ERP and Cloud platform, Microsoft says.

14.04 A multimodal logistics hub in Tennant Creek and logistics and agribusiness hubs at Alice Springs and Katherine are part of the $440m in Northern Territory logistics hubs to be established under the federal government’s budget commitment, InnovationAus says.

14.04 Australian telecommunications services provider Uniti Group has agreed to a AU$3.6 billion takeover offer from Brookfield Asset Management, Morrison & Co and Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation. Uniti says value of the deal is testament to the strength of the business built over the three years since listing on the ASX.

12.04 Services Australia has opened tendering for an IaaS platform to host the federal government’s S/4 HANA ERP system, ITNews says. GovERP will replace the existing SAP-based ERP systems with a single platform across six shared services hubs.

11.04 Google Cloud is reportedly hiring overseas support employees after slashing its Australia-based support team. CRN says more than 200 support employees are being hired across India, Poland, Canada and Mexico.

10.04 Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to propose new features, including an ‘edit’ button, and highlight areas of concern around Twitter – including questioning if the platform is ‘dying’ – after being appointed to the company’s board last week, the Guardian says. Musk acquired a 9.2 percent stake in the company, becoming its largest shareholder, earlier this month.

07.04 Australian IT spend will grow 13.1 percent this year to hit AU$117.2 billion, but half that growth rate is being attributed to exchange rate changes, Gartner says. If a constant exchange rate is assumed, actual growth will be 6.9 percent. IT services – the largest category – will grow 12.2 percent to hit $41.5 billon, while software spend is the big mover with 21.4 percent growth to $29.2 billion. Worldwide spend is forecast to be US$4.4 trillion, CRN notes.

07.04 NetApp is acquiring Canberra-based Instaclustr for an undisclosed amount. Instaclustr is a database-as-a-service provider, and the deal will enable Netapp to provide its customers with an easier way of installing open-source databases and help it grow beyond its on-premise storage roots, TechTarget says.

07.04 A Senate Select Committee has slammed the CovidSafe app, calling for funding of the app to stop. ZDNet reports the committee’s report says the app is ‘not fit for its intended purpose, has cost millions of dollars and offered limited public value’.

01.04 Microsoft has launched a new startup founders hub in Australia and New Zealand offering over US$300,000 of benefits and credits, including free access to technology, tools and resources and connections to mentors. Microsoft says the hub, available to all A/NZ startups, is designed for early-stage startups, to lower barriers of business creation and be a catalyst for entrepreneurship and innovation.

AppWrap March 2022

31.03 The Federal government is investing $44 million in four industry-run AI centres in a bid to drive research commercialisation. ITNews says each of the four centres will nominate a focus area, aligned with government digital growth or manufacturing priorities, in specific applications of AI.

30.03 US sanctions on Russia’s Kaspersky Lab are in limbo with the Biden administration divided over whether to impose sanctions, amid concerns the Kremlin could use the cybersecurity giant as a surveillance tool. The WSJ says some officials have also flagged any sanctions could increase the risk of triggering a cyberattack against the West by Moscow, potentially using Kaspersky software to do so.

29.03 Air purifying headphones anyone? Yes, Dyson is apparently making its first foray into wearable tech with an interesting looking offering (think headphones with a mini horse nose bag) combining a noise-cancelling headphone and a personal air filter – worn over the nose and mouth – in one. As CNet reports, it looks like something you’d see in a dystopian sci-fi movie. And if it had been announced three days later we would have said ‘April fools!’.

28.03 The ASX’s blockchain-based Chess platform, already delayed by more than a year, is expected to face further delays. The ASX, which just last month was confident of an April 2023 launch, this week announced a ‘strong likelihood of delay’, ZDNet reports.

28.03 Singtel subsidiary NCS has made its fourth Australian investment in 15 months, snapping up local digital consultancy firm ARQ Group for $290 million. ARQ’s clients include government agencies, Qantas, NAB and Australia Post, Business News Australia reports.

24.03 ANZ Bank has minted its first stablecoin – the first Australian-bank issued stablecoin, tied to the Australian dollar. The bank says the A$DC is ‘a first and important step in enabling our customers to find a safe and secure gateway to the digital economy’. Don’t be rushing to purchase the digital currency however. The 30 million of A$DC was delivered as part of a trial. The stablecoin isn’t available for retail investors and will be targeted, initially at least, at institutional clients.

24.03 The ACSC is urging Australian businesses to nab their .au domain name before it becomes available to the general public, leaving businesses open to fraudulent cyber activity. Organisations holding a .au name in another namespace have until 20 September to apply for its .au direct match after then it becomes available to the general public. The Australian Cyber Security Centre is warning that opportunistic cybercriminals could register a .au domain name in an attempt to impersonate a business.

24.03 Europe is putting the squeeze on the dominance of big online platforms with proposed legislation to curtail their power. The Digital Markets Act will blacklist certain practices and force large platforms such as Facebook Messenger, iMessage and WhatsApp to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms if requested, says the European Parliament.

22.03 Eighty-six percent of Australian executives say their organisations are already dependent on AI to function effectively according to an Accenture report. The report also notes that just 22 percent of Australian consumers trust how organisations are implementing AI, Technology Decisions says. 

21.03 The Australian government plans to establish a market licence regime for crypto exchanges, saying the scheme is a way of regulating ‘trust’ between crypto investors and exchanges, ZDNet says. The introduction of the policies comes ahead of the federal government, expected to take place in the next couple of months.

17.03 Three NSW council elections have been voided thanks to issues with NSW’s digital voting system, reports InnovationAus. The iVote system crashed during council elections, leaving people locked out and unable to vote. The system has now been dumped indefinitely and new elections will be held in the three councils.

17.03 The NSW government has slashed more than $1 billion from its ERP sourcing agreement with SAP, ITNews says. The revision is due to consolation of licenses and sees spend plummet from $1.65 billion to $475 million over the 15 years.

17.03 Microsoft is facing new antitrust complaint with French data centre provider OVHcloud among several cloud services providers filing a complaint with the European Commission, the Register says. Microsoft is also the subject of a complaint filed last year by NextCloud around Microsoft’s bundling of OneDrive and other services with Windows. The new complaint alleges Microsoft is undermining fair competition and limiting consumer choice in the cloud computing services market.

17.03 Australian Android users may soon need to provide proof of age when attempting to watch ‘mature’ content on YouTube or download content on Google Play. The ‘age assurance’ step comes in response to government regulations requiring platforms to take reasonable steps to confirm a users age when accessing content deemed inappropriate for those under 18. Users will be asked to complete ‘a brief check’ to verify age, and in some instances my be required to provide a ‘valid ID’ or credit card to verify age, 9to5Google says.

15.03 Australian tech companies are missing out on high-quality people because they are failing to explain the opportunities that exist within the sector, with the sector urged to make itself more appealing to a diverse cross-section of society, AFR says. Delegates at the ACS Reimagination Thought Leaders’ Summit were told that while recruitment will remain a significant challenge, by thinking outside the box and casting the net more widely the talent can be found.

10.03 The New Media Bargaining Code has seen Google and Facebook pay Australian media companies around AU$200 million in the past year, with ’at least’ 50 new journalist roles in underserved parts of the market created. The regulation, which requires platforms including Google and Facebook to pay local media for content, came into effect a year ago, but a report from the Judith Neilson Institute says the system remains an ‘opaque mess’ with some companies unable to negotiate easily with big tech companies, Financial Times reports.

10.03 Queensland University of Technology and Cisco have partnered up in a AU$3 million partnership to push development in retail and logistics through industry and university research collaboration. InnovationAus says the deal will include funding for a Chair in Trusted Retail and Logistics Innovation to develop a research program, and the development of an innovation hub, due to be operational by July.

10.03 TikTok is close to finalising a deal with Oracle to store data from US users on Oracle servers in order to appease US national security concerns, Reuters says. An earlier deal, begun after then-President Trum tried to ban TikTok and force parent ByteDance to sell the US business, fell apart.

09.03 Google is buying security intelligence company Mandiant in a US$5.4 billion deal. The company acquired cybersecurity specialist Siemplify in January for a reported $500 million, with TechCrunch noting it is building a strong security business.

07.03 Commercialisation of research could provide a AU$17.6 billion economic boost for Australia according to Science and Technology Australia analysis. The STA says only half of the recently announced $1.6 billion Economic Accelerator’s projects would need to succeed in order to produce that result, Research Professional News reports.

07.03 The Australian Electoral Commission has launched a disinformation register listing prominent pieces of disinformation regarding Australia’s federal election process. The searchable database includes information about the platform it was spread on, timing and factual information about the matter. “The message here is simple: The AEC will not tolerate the spread of mis- or disinformation about our electoral system, no matter the source,” Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers says.

04.03 Airservices Australia is looking to build a digital twin of Australia’s airspace to improve network planning and reduce airport delays. ITNews says an RFI has been issued.

03.03 Accenture has scored itself an extra $62 million in federal government work in the past year, receiving $371.5 million in contracts, InnovationAus says. The money comes from some 104 contracts in the 2020-21 financial year.

03.03 Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has told platforms including Meta, Google and TikTok to immediately remove Russian state media posts from their platforms locally over concerns about the volume of content promoting violence, extremism and disinformation in relation to the invasion of Ukraine. SMH says Apple and Snapchat were also told to remove the Kremlin-backed RT and Sputnik media outlets. RT and Sputnik were also banned by Google and the EU this week.

AppWrap February 2022

28.02 The ACCC is proposing major reforms to address concerns about the dominance of digital platforms. A discussion paper includes proposed new rules to prevent anti-competitive behaviour, including a ban on self-preferencing conduct and obligations to treat competitors fairly or in a non-discriminatory manner, ZDNet reports.

21.02 Services Australia says proposed Privacy Act changes could require ‘wholesale’ IT changes to critical whole-of-government IT systems. Services Australia, which is responsible for Centrelink and Medicare is calling for ‘sufficient lead time to enable changes to systems, infrastructure and processes’, with ‘significant concern’ about both the time accost to make changes required under proposal 2. IT News reports Services Now says proposed changes and the broadening of the personal information definition would also ‘likely impact on the ability to conduct research projects and customer journey analytics activities’.

18.02 A team of researchers from Australia, New Zealand and India has taken facial recognition to the next level, using smiles, frowns, even clenched jaws to manipulate objects in a VR setting, without the use of a handheld controller or touchpad. It’s hoped the ‘world first’ study, will not only provide a novel way to use VR, but will enable people with disabilities to interact hands free in VR, the University of South Australia says.

17.02 AWS is adding Local Zones in Auckland, Perth and Brisbane. TVNZ will be a foundation customer for the Auckland Local Zone – ‘a new type of cloud infrastructure that brings computer storage, database and other select services close to customers’, providing ‘single-digit millisecond performance’. The Local Zone comes on top of a $7.5 billion investment in a new infrastructure region in Auckland, expected to open in 2024, AWS says.

16.02 All major social media platforms have assured the Australian Electoral Commission that they will allocate more resources for monitoring election disinformation and misinformation for the upcoming Australian federal election, ZDNet says. The AEC says it’s seeing an increase in election conspiracy theories locally.

14.02 Australian deep-tech startup incubator Cicada Innovations, with NSW Government support, has launched a National Space Industry Hub in Sydney. The accelerator program will support world-class research, innovation, collaboration and commercialisation in the sector and host emerging space tech ventures. The Hub will ‘closely collaborate’ with the NSW Space Research Network, SamrtSat Cooperative Research Centre, Space Industry Association of Australia, University of Technology Sydney Tech Lab, University of New South Wales, ANU InSpace and the University of Sydney, Investable Universe says.

11.02 The Australian government is investing an additional AU$6.7 million in Stem initiatives for women and girls. The Superstars of Stem program and Stem Ambassador and Future You will all receive funding, ZDNet says.

10.02 The US Justice Department has seized more than US$3.6 billion of Bitcoin allegedly stolen during the Bitfinex virtual currency exchange hack in 2016. A husband and wife team has bee arrested for conspiracy to launder US$4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. The seizure is the Department of Justice’s largest financial seizure ever, the DoJ says.

10.02 The remainder of the proposed critical infrastructure security reforms have been introduced to parliament. The Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure Protection) Bill 2022 includes measures such as enhanced security obligations for infrastructure deemed to be on national significance and would require operators of certain assets to ‘adopt, maintain and comply with’ an all-hazards critical infrastructure risk management program, ITNews says.

07.02 Facebook – now Meta – has lost an appeal against a Cambridge Analytica data lawsuit launched by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The Federal Court’s dismissal of Facebook’s appeal means the OAIC case alleging Meta has breached the privacy of more than 300,000 Australians caught in the Cambridge Analytica scandal can now go ahead, ZDNet says.

02.02 MYOB has started the year off with two acquisitions, snapping up business operations software specialist Tall Emu and document management software developer Nimbus Portal Solutions. The company says it sees opportunities in combining the end-to-end management tools with its existing financial management capabilities.

02.02 Google parent Alphabet’s profit soared 36 percent, with quarterly sales up 32 percent to US$75.3 billion as its digital advertising raked in the dollars – some US$61.2 billion in ad revenue to be specific. The results were ahead of analyst expectations for the quarter, ABC News notes.

01.02 Citrix and Tibco are to merge in a US$16.5 billion deal, creating what Tibco says will be one of the world’s largest software providers with 400,000 customers including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and 100 million users in 100 countries. The all-cash deal sees affiliates of Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital purchasing Citrix, whose future has been under scrutiny in recent years, becoming private.

01.02 Aussie-born automated CX platform provider Cyara has secured a record US$350 million (AU$485 million) in funding from California’s K1 Investment Management. The company had previously been looking at a public listing on the ASX. That IPO has now been deferred StartupDaily says.

01.02 Facebook’s Diem digital payments dreams are over with the company announcing it has sold Diem’s assets to small US bank Silvergate Capital for US$182 million. Diem’s chief executive says it had become clear following dialogue with regulators that the project ‘could not move ahead’ and selling was the best option, the Financial Times says. Silvergate plans to launch a stablecoin by the end of this year using the Diem assets and its own IP.

AppWrap January 2022

31.01 Telstra Purple, Telstra’s managed and professional services offshoot, has bolstered its IoT and infrastructure capabilities with the acquisitions of Alliance Automation and Aqura Technologies. The Aqura acquisition alone has a AU$30 million price tag. Aqura, which has more than 90 staff around Australia, provides technology and telecommunications infrastructure solutions, while Alliance Automation, with 250 staff, is one of Australia’s largest independent providers of IoT industrial automation solutions and control systems. Telstra Purple says the deals strengthen its presence in the mining, energy, oil and gas, utilities and defence projects.

23.01 A robot cleaner made a bid for freedom, escaping from a UK Travelodge and roaming free for a day before being found by a human cleaner under a hedge. The automated device failed to stop at the front door, with staff posting the story of the robot’s great escape on social media asking for it to be returned if located, BBC says. Its freedom was short lived and it’s now back at work.

19.01 A Los Angeles startup, founded by three former SpaceX engineers, is aiming to create electric self-powered train cars, which it says are more energy-efficient than trucking, CNBC says. Parallel Systems says the autonomous battery-electric rail vehicles could help alleviate supply chain issues by providing low cost and regular movement of freight in and out of ports.

19.01 Tonga is likely to be without internet connectivity for at least two weeks following the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on Saturday. The nearest cable-laying vessel required to repair the damaged submarine cable, is 4,700km away in Papua New Guinea and expected to take several days to reach Tonga, The Verge notes. Telco Digicel said on Wednesday it has restored international calling capability for the nation.
[Supplementary update 24.01 – what will it take to fix Tonga’s cable? (BBC)]

18.01 France’s IDEMIA has won nearly $180 million in contracts from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to replace Australia’s fingerprints matching database. The three contracts include $57 million to keep the legacy system running over the next three years while the system is replaced with an off-the-shelf IDEMIA offering, NextGen, which will be customised for Australian use. The deals followed a ‘limited’ tender, InnovationAus says.

18.01 Online voting is on hold in NSW until ‘extensive reconfiguration and testing’ of the iVote system is undertaken. Electoral commissioner John Schmidt says the system won’t be used until issues seen during the local elections last month, when the system failed for a period, are resolved, ZDnet reports.

18.01 The United States government is reportedly reviewing Alibaba’s cloud business to determine whether it poses a risk to national security, according to Reuters. The news outlet cites three people briefed on the matter and says how US clients’ data is stored and whether the Chinese government can gain access to it are key focuses. The Office of Intelligence and Security, set up by the Trump administration and welding powers to ban or restrict transactions between US firms and internet, telco and tech companies from ‘foreign adversary’ nations, is managing the investigation.

16.01 The first round of the NSW government’s $1.5 million Bushfire Technology Pilots Program has opened, offering grants of up to $100,000 for Australian companies to trial bushfire technology in the field. The program is part of the $28 million Bushfire Response R&D Mission designed to support bushfire research commercialisation and was recommended by the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, InnovationAus says.

14.10 NAB has been on the M&A and investment trail. Its NAB Ventures arm has invested in agritech startup Genora, with the bank also snapping up digital health claiming tech business LanternPay in a deal with InLoop. Geora, which provides a SaaS blockchain platform linking traceability data with financing solutions using no-code digital tools, secured funding from NAB Ventures, Tenacious Ventures and Flying Fox Ventures in a $1.5 million seed round. “Agribusiness customers have demonstrated they’re extremely innovative in their use of technology and we think Geora’s data capabilities will further help farmers and agri-supply chains prove their sustainability credentials,” NAB says.

13.01 Australian fintech Airwallex has officially launched in Singapore, offering a suite of global payments services including global account issuance, domestic and cross-border money transfer and multi-currency wallets and online payments acceptance. The company, which recently raised US$300 million increasing its valuation to US$5.5 billion, has plans to scale its solutions across South-east Asia, notes The Business Times.

12.01 NSW is requiring positive rapid antigen test results to be logged in its Service NSW mobile app – with fines of $1,000 for those that test positive and don’t record it on an app. NSW is the first state to launch in-app reporting of RATs, InnovationAus reports.

For 2021 news from around the web refer to the 2021 archive.

The post AppWrap22: Local data storage requirements, myCDRdata sold appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Improving a ‘broken’ system 

Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation and Taxation Ombudsman (IGTO) revealed she’s interested in seeing how data can be used to improve the system. 

“If you’re not capturing reliable data, which we’re advised is not being done – partly because it is a manual system – then how are you ever going to identify where the opportunities are for improvement? And I’d like to encourage that we should move to that [data-centred] mindset to actually improve our tax administration system.” 

“Data is not gold. Data is uranium.” 

According to Payne, objections to an assessment, even if sent via email, are not being properly recorded because the process is paper-based and completely manual. She said this creates questions about the quality of the data that is available for monitoring the objection process and improving the system.  

“Why are more than 50 percent of individuals having to object to amend their own assessment?” Payne asked. “I think that’s odd, and I would like to know more about that.”  

Having more data and better integrity of data is key to improving the system and bringing it up to speed with the 21st century, Payne insisted. 

Data is not gold, it’s uranium 

ATO Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn highlighted how digitisation is about integrating ATO systems with natural systems as much as possible. 

He wants to move tax reporting and payment closer to the taxable event. 

“Often that may require policy changes. It may require designing the [tax] system around verifiable data, rather than constantly trying to find data to bolster the system. Importantly, it doesn’t mean that all data must sit in ATO systems and be analysed there, in fact it may mean the opposite.” 

“In many cases, it may be more natural to move some of the ATO’s systems to the natural systems rather than require customers to send us information for checking. As someone in the room today once described it to me, data is not gold. Data is uranium. So, before you get it, you better know how you are going to use and store it. And there needs to be a very good reason for owning it.” 

Managing sensitive data at scale 

Of course, with personal data, or commercially sensitive data, increasingly being shared between banks, super funds, tax agents and the ATO, there’s a larger attack surface for cybercriminals. Hirschhorn stated that the ATO was aware of this and taking all the necessary precautions. 

“The flip side of digitisation is cybersecurity,” he said. “There is [the possibility] of cyber-enabled identity fraud and cyber-enabled information theft. In the time it takes me to make this speech, there will be 4,000 attempted hacks on the ATO’s system. There are three million attempted hacks of the ATO’s system every month.” 

“The systems of tax agents and super funds are also a ripe source of data. Increasingly, we see cascading penetration attempts, where criminals attempt to obtain information from different devices before putting it together for a fraud attempt… the Optus data breach has really brought home how vulnerable many businesses and organisations are to attack and dispelled any sense of hubris. That’s a topic on its own but the ATO will continue to strengthen our safeguards and think about how we can help the broader ecosystem that you [tax agents] are part of.” 

‘Mood is right’ for reforms 

Economist and renowned ‘data whisperer’ Elisa Choy predicted the outcome of the last Australian election with unnerving accuracy. She forecast the Liberals would lose lots of seats but the ALP would only gain a handful. (She said Labor would win 76 seats, they got 77.) 

As Founder and Managing Director of Maven Data, Choy revealed what people engage with online “shapes their perception of the world, which in turn creates a feeling.”  

By leveraging AI/ML technology to analyse “at speed” the vast amounts of data created every second through online interactions Maven Data derives insights to understand what Australians are feeling at any given moment, often without being consciously aware of it, then predict how they are likely to behave. 

Choy revealed her data analysis has uncovered the following: 

“Unsurprisingly, thinking about tax is a downer for most Australians. Surprisingly, Australians are currently open to tax reform, presumably as a result of recent economic and possibly geopolitical instability.” 

According to Choy, a majority of Australian voters would accept Anthony Albanese both walking away from the Stage Three tax cuts and may even be open to him introducing a carbon tax. 

“It’s very rare to find sentiment in the transformational phase,” she added. “This is a unique window for the tax industry to influence and shape this conversation because Australia is ready to discuss tax reform.”  

About The Tax Summit 
 
The Tax Summit is hosted by the Tax Institute, which is the leading forum for the tax community in Australia. Their reach includes membership of 12,000 tax professionals from commerce and industry, academia, government and public practice and 40,000 Australian business leaders, government employees and students. Read more at taxinstitute.com.au. 

The post The future of tax is data-driven  appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The way we live and work has changed significantly over the past two-and-a-half years, and it’s likely to have an everlasting impact.

More recently, the economic environment has shifted rapidly. Australians are now experiencing accelerating inflation, delayed growth in wages, high levels of personal, business and government debt, all combining with steadily increasing interest rates.

“Tax is the area of government policy that has the single biggest impact on the lives of its citizens.”

It’s a volatile combination and the pressure on improving productivity has never been greater.

Speakers at the Summit include commentators from across the political and business spectrum.

Atlassian futurist on the ‘future of work’

Dominic Price is Atlassian’s resident work futurist and in-house ‘team doctor,’ Price believes if everyone in business leadership does a ‘few degrees better every week,’ it has the potential to drive sustainable improvements.

Price cuts through the noise to design collaborative patterns that are easily adaptable for any purpose and every organisation.

Ahead of The Tax Summit, he shares a ‘goodie bag’ of pragmatic tips that every attendee can action to become a better leader, manager, teammate and professional in the modern work environment.

They are lessons learned after Atlassian made waves as one of the first companies to close offices indefinitely and transition all staff to work remotely at the height of the pandemic.

Atlassian’s modern work tips:

• Onboard new team members remotely
• Distribute ways of working and build effective teams
• Focus on intentional togetherness and psychological safety in new teams
• Have less meetings
• Work across timezones to improve inclusion

“I’ve been working with teams across the globe to build cohesion and identity in an environment where none of them have ever met before physically. And it’s very doable. Many organisations just don’t have the muscle to do it. Building that muscle starts with becoming a good teammate and working within the limitations of our environments by tweaking our mindset,” says Price.

“My goal in life is to get people to connect across an organisation. We find true community where there’s diversity and inclusion. When you have those differences of opinion and get them to work together, that’s where the magic happens. There is so much opportunity for everyone to do a few degrees better every week. It has the potential to drive huge sustainable improvements.”

Political leaders on resilience and productivity

Australia’s 29th Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull AC, serving the nation from 2015-2018, will also be speaking at the event, highlights that it’s a challenging time for the global economy.

“Inflation in the United States remains stubbornly high, Europe and the UK head into winter with a deep energy crisis, and global markets are volatile,” says Turnbull.

“In Australia, inflation is the highest it’s been since the early 1990s. But these challenges are not beyond us. Australia has many opportunities to create a strong, modern economy equipped for the challenges that lie ahead.”

Allegra Spender MP, says the time is ripe to turn around the tax system to support greater productivity.

“At this year’s Tax Summit, I will be advocating for a wide-ranging parliamentary review or summit on our tax system,” says Spender. “Tax is the area of government policy that has the single biggest impact on the lives of its citizens. Our tax policy doesn’t support productivity, it doesn’t support equity, and it doesn’t support fiscal or environmental sustainability. This has to change.”

The Tax Summit is on in Sydney 19-21 October and is hosted by The Tax Institute, Australia’s member-based association of tax professionals. Find out more about the event and register to attend here.

The post Aussie leaders debate the future of work, productivity, resilience appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.