# Issue 742

##### Tuesday, 24th October 2018

## In This Issue

- Amazon's resume filtering AI discriminated against women
- Dutton's reckons tech companies don't want to help law enforcement protect Aussies
- Waymo is proud their robocars have driven 10 million miles
- Internet Australia reckons the Assistance and Access Bill will damage our tech exports
- Miscellaneous news
- A little bit of context around Bloomberg's Supermicro/Apple/Amazon/China hacking story
- Wind Farm Open Day is next weekend!
- Cheap Dell monitors, Sony CarPlay/Android Auto headunit, DJI Spark drone, 250GB Optus 4G plan, 80GB Telstra mobile plan

## News

### Amazon's resume filtering AI discriminated against women

Amazon experimented with an algorithm to sort through people's resumes and use AI to give each candidate a ranking from 1 to 5 - just like the products it sells. Unfortunately the AI was trained to read successful resumes from the past 10 years and due to hiring mostly blokes during that time, the AI learned that blokes = good, which "penalised resumes that included the word "women's", as in "women's chess club captain", and downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges, according to people familiar with the matter". The AI also "favoured candidates who described themselves using verbs more commonly found on male engineers' resumes, such as "executed" and "captured"". Amazon tried for years to get this system to treat men and women fairly, but they couldn't do it, so Amazon stopped trying to create a resume filtering AI entirely. It was never used to hire people, but the fact the big brains at Amazon couldn't make an AI that didn't discriminate against women says plenty about how immature the technology is.

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### Dutton's reckons tech companies don't want to help law enforcement protect Aussies

Dutton is walking around talking shit about the Assistance and Access Bill again, saying in a speech at the Press Club yesterday that "the bill specifically provides the companies cannot be required to create systemic weaknesses in their encrypted products or be required to build a decryption capability". Which is true, but the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security's submission to the Bill's consultation process said that there's nothing stopping a company doing it voluntarily to meet a demand from law enforcement. Dutton went on to say that "Opposition Leader Bill Shorten needs to decide whether he is on the side of Silicon Valley multinationals or with "law enforcement and intelligence agencies in this country who want to protect Australians".

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### Internet Australia reckons the Assistance and Access Bill will damage our tech exports

Also on the Assistance and Access Bill, the chair of Internet Australia has said that with the bill in it's current form, overseas businesses and governments will start to shitlist Australian tech gear, as they can't trust it not to be full of Australian/Five Eyes spyware. Quite a hypocritical situation considering how the government shut down Huawei and ZTE's attempts to build 5G networks in Australia because Chinese tech companies have to do the exact same thing Australian companies will be forced to do once the Assistance and Access Bill kicks off. According to Internet Australia, "under the current structure of the bill, these concerns and suspicions will arise just by virtue of the legislation existing, even if the legislation is not used". Awesome work Dutton, keep it up.

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### Waymo is proud their robocars have driven 10 million miles

Waymo's announced that they've driven 10 million miles in their robocars. This is apparently vastly more than any other robocar company like GM's Cruise, or Uber's murderbots. That said, everyone seems to reckon that straight up distance driven is not a good indicator of robocar reliability. Cruise is keen to point out that they've "only" logged 131,000mi compared to Waymo's millions, but "bulk of that testing was in urban San Francisco", "a much more challenging environment for driverless cars than the Phoenix area, where Waymo does a lot of its testing". I still reckon the dream of point to point transport with 0 driver interaction is decades away, but freeway driving with your eyes closed? That's coming sooner rather than later.

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### Miscellaneous news

- Razer launched a new version of its gaming smartphone that has a user configurable RGB LED logo on the back.
- There's now an app with a conversational UI, that'll let you sue anyone, for any reason, in all 50 US states.
- TSMC is deep into 7nm chips and is gearing up for 5nm parts early 2019, further eroding Intel's 20+ year dominance of the CPU industry.
- Dropbox is getting full text search. It'll index the contents of your files, even images and and bring them up as results when you search.
- Crime Stoppers is making a customised version of Keep Us Safe vResponder for people to use their smartphones to report crime.
- NBN's FTTC network is taking longer than it thought to roll out because it "often has to remediate pits and install new conduits", blowing out projected timelines. No shit.

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## Not News, But Still Cool

### A little bit of context around Bloomberg's Supermicro/Apple/Amazon/China hacking story

If you want someone to explain what the hell is going on with this Bloomberg hacker chip supply chain story, the latest episode of the Risky Business podcast is a must listen. Pat talks to Joe Fitzpatrick, one of the few sources named in the original Bloomoberg article. He gave technical insight to the journalists, but found that they either ignored his advice or just took the examples he gave and presented them as things that have happened. I honestly don't know what to make of it, all I know is that there's a full on infosec cold war going on between the USA, China and Russia. We're just bewildered onlookers getting drip fed information by vested state sponsored interests.

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### Wind Farm Open Day is next weekend!

Are you a gigantic nerd or a gigantic nerd with gigantic nerd kids? Go for a drive and visit a wind farm near you on Wind Farm Open Day next weekend. On the 21st of October, there will be tours of 10 wind farms all over the country, in an attempt to educate people on how they work and why they're an important part of generating clean electricity. I love the damn things, so I will be visiting the Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm and all 44 of its turbines, operated by Acciona Energy at around 11am. I'm not sure what you actually see or do at a wind farm open day, but it'd be cool to stand under one if possible. There might be a free sausage sizzle or two as well.

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### Cheap Dell monitors, Sony CarPlay/Android Auto headunit, DJI Spark drone, 250GB Optus 4G plan, 80GB Telstra mobile plan

- Dell U2715H 27" 2560x1440 IPS monitor - $479.20 delivered with code PDELL20
- Dell U2415 24" 1920x1200 IPS monitor - $303.20 delivered with code PDELL20
- Sony XAV-AX100 Android Auto/CarPlay headunit - $419 at Supercheap Auto
- DJI Spark drone Fly More Combo - $671.70 using code P20TGGS
- OVO has 250GB mobile broadband plans for $99.95/30 days. They're an Optus MVNO, no speed caps and not fixed wirless so you can use it anywhere.
- JB Hi-Fi have $65/m Telstra plans with 80GB of data and a free Samsung S8 or Oppo Find X or Huawei P20 Pro or Nokia 8 Sirocco. Flog off the Huawei P20 Pro for $600 & it works out to only $40/m for 80GB of Telstra data.

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That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony

Interpol - Obstacle 1

Aussie Broadband is the best ISP I've used since Internode's glory days. Their CEO gives talks at AUSNOG about their network and they even have network utilisation charts for every NBN POI. Their pricing isn't the cheapest, but if you want an ISP that's fast & reliable, give them a shot. Use my affiliate link and we both get $50 credit on our next bill.

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