Mentioned in today’s edition: Services Australia, H200 chips, Matthew McConaughey, shrinking clothes, Digg 2.0, and police robots. Plus, deals on Samsung phones, Lenovo laptops and Reolink cameras.

The News

Waymo looks like it's on its way to test its self-driving vehicles in Australia this year. In a Sizzle exclusive, I got my hands on federal Department of Transport documents showing that Google's autonomous driving company has been having high-level discussions about importing and seeking approval for its vehicles. The company even met with the minister's office about its "2026 plans". 

The Sizzle: You might remember last year that I broke the story that Waymo was looking at coming to Australia according to Transport for NSW (Crikey, $). What surprised me is that there's some pretty strong reactions to Waymo coming down under. There's obviously some backlash to automation and tech generally, not to mention the idea that self-driving might increase a reliance on individual vehicles, but also: driving is one of the most dangerous things we do and Waymo so far has been very safe (within its limited confines of its operation). Personally, I think reducing the road toll and car accidents would be an incredibly good use of technology. Your thoughts? 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Renewable energy tech is kicking ass

Australia's 2030 and 2035 renewable targets are looking increasingly dicey (AFR, $) and progress on renewables is being held back by lagging transmission/grid infrastructure. Plus, there's the hungry, hungry data centre build-out. All of that is bad, but good news that the technology behind renewable energy is going gangbusters. In Australia, renewables just about supplied half of the NEM power in Q4 last year (PV-Magazine). Meanwhile, you see good news just about every day. Literally today, I saw that coal power generation fell in China and India for the first time in 50+ years because of their wind, solar, and hydro (Guardian). And then that wind power in Spain cut energy bills by $8 billion last year (Sur in English). Renewables are cooking, folks. 

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Victorian students (maybe all of them?) have been caught up in a department hack

The personal details of current and former Victorian students have been exposed after the state's education department was hacked (ABC News). On Wednesday, the department said an "external third party" had accessed all student names, year level, school name, email addresses and encrypted passwords. It's not clear the scale of the breach — the ABC says "all" students are affected — but the department says this trove of data hasn't popped up anywhere on the internet... yet.

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Oh, Also

If I had a nickel for every time someone had sent me a tip about this Melbourne robot…

Out of the blue yesterday, I got a text from someone who I went to university with who said she had a weird robot experience. They were crossing the road in Melbourne when they saw a robot. It was humanoid, black, but had the fluro/blue and white checkered pattern worn by cops sometimes. When she approached it, someone came over and said they were the lead researcher on a University of Melbourne study about "how people react to robots in public", but wouldn't give any more details than that.

Somehow, this wasn't the first time I'd heard about the robot. Another person had sent me a picture, but they thought it was related to the police (because of the design) which was a dead-end. Anyway, this time I contacted University of Melbourne to confirm if this was all true... and it is! So if you see a random robot in Melbourne, uhh, act normal?

Discuss in Slack or Forum.

Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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