The new federal government's first budget was handed down last night and there's a few tech related things in it. Headline announcement for us nerds is "more than $2 billion" on "digital and ICT" programs. The bulk of it is revamping the IT systems of the NDIS, My Health Record, Veterans Affairs and MyGov. There's also over $100m on various cybersecurity programs, another $100m for "artificial intelligence and quantum technologies", $60m for Questacon, the eSafety Commissioner's budget quadrupled to $42.5m/yr and shitloads of other "little" projects, mostly to modernise the infrastructure of various government bodies and departments. The communications minister's press release covers most of the tech related stuff.
Apple announced Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro for the iPad. They'll be available on the App Store on May 23rd as separate US$49/yr or US$4.99/m subscriptions. They seem pretty full featured, which makes sense considering the top end iPads are basically the same guts as the Macs now. That said, if you want to use FCP you'll need to make sure your iPad has an M1 or M2 SoC in it and for Logic, an A12 or newer SoC - I wonder how many iPad users have the slightest clue which SoC their device has? Also, if Apple had to announce this now, rather than at WWDC in a few weeks time, they must have some pretty damn interesting stuff lined up for WWDC.
Latitude Financial fucked up so bad, they're facing a joint investigation by Australia's Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and New Zealand's Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) for their huge data breach back in March. The OAIC is interested to find out if "Latitude took reasonable steps to protect the personal information they held from misuse, interference, loss, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure" and if " Latitude took reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify personal information that was no longer required". I'm gonna guess the answer to both those questions will be a hard no.
Imran Chaudhri's TED talk where he gives the first demo of Humane's AI/AR assistant thingo is now up on TED's website in full. The Verge has a way better description of the "small black puck that slips into your breast pocket, with a camera, projector, and speaker sticking out the top" and what happens in the video than I could give here, but imagine if voice assistants actually worked properly and had excellent context awareness. I don't know if Humane's product will work as well in real life as it does in a very controlled demo, but even if it does, I don't think I want to interact with a computer this way and honestly don't trust the answers it would give me. I'm curious to see how wider society reacts to a device like Humane's, whenever it comes out.
IBM designers at the time such as John Karidis, Sam Lucente, Richard Sapper and Robert P. Tennant saw the Thinkpad 701C (1995) as a jet. They saw, in the keyboard, the opening and closing wings of military aircraft, an image that Top Gun, which came out nine years before the computer, had fixed in the minds of everyone. The four creators of this innovative design explained that people loved it above all because they didn't expect this function and were amazed at such a peculiar mechanism. How can we blame them? Even today, this portable PC amazes anyone who sees it open and close, and more than twenty years have gone by. (The Museum of Modern Art)
📻 Beggar's Need - Electric Citizen
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