Adventure Ausrama Blog

Bank staff are to be allowed to monitor the bank accounts of the elderly to see if relatives, friends and carers are stealing money. At first glance this may well seems to be a good thing. However, banks staff swear to keep all bank information private. Instant dismissal is the penalty for telling others about a customer's financial status. The thought of bank staff having the authority to pass on private information to government is frightening and will, no doubt, be challenged in court. Of course people with dementia will have someone managing their bank account. Reporting a carer just because a customer is permanently incapacitated is stupid. You don't need special training to see someone has decreased capacity to manage their own affairs. Smart Sparrow's who are developing the app to do this are wasting their time. Society will not accept bank tellers snooping into their affairs. It will not be allowed. Tremendous damage will be done to families on me

Environmental researchers do not have to take the kitchen sink with them on field trips any more. They can leave GPS, camera and notepad behind as they do their work. New software makes this possible. A single device linked to the Internet now has everything an investigator requires. This is especially so in mining. The Northern Territory has adopted the new system and it is doing all it promises.  As farming takes up new technology it would be expected that researchers would do the same. Capturing information is now very easy indeed with reports being done automatically. Photographs are coordinated with Google Earth maps. Relevant data is also stored.  In depth analysis is now possible with the extra time on hand for investigators. A researchers movement around a site is recorded. This makes monitoring of tasks much easier. The software is a significant step forward. Hours of tedious labor has been reduced.  With a solid data bank in hand, looking back on work

Despite the fairytale stuff put forward about delivering things to houses in built up areas of large cities, drone can be useful. Patrolling of protected regions for environmental damage is efficient and less costly than other methods. Conservation Drones a US company is mass producing drones to meet projected demand. Accidents will occur even though the drones will not land away from the operator, but injuries should be rare. Drones zooming around above our head will become the norm. Will there be complaints? Yes there will. The first major project will be to protect elephants in Africa. The distance that drones can travel will have to be significantly improved to do the job properly. At the moment helicopters are used. These can be expensive as well. They do have better range, however. Maximum range for non-military drones is about 40kms. High resolution videos can be taken. Preprogramming is possible to carry out surveillance and data collection. A test to

Microsoft is unhappy about a country that does not like government data stored overseas. It is jumping up and down about this policy in Australia. The question that must be asked is - Why is the big data giant so miffed about it? The loss in income for Microsoft cannot be that great. There must be another reason. Like Google, is Microsoft collecting data to use for its own ends? It is so upset it refuses to launch the Office 365 service in Australia. Microsoft is aggressively lobbying the Coalition government to change the rules and open up the market. It must be after something more than profit. Everything put into the cloud can be accessed by the cloud's owner. These services already hold data from many countries. If say a major government could get its hands on such data think of the power they would have. It seems only reasonable that countries should consider national security to be more important than reducing costs. Internet by Ty Buchanan http://www

, With fewer students choosing not to maths and science, or even worse doing badly in the subjects, there is a real shortage of people who can work in big data tech. Research scientists for universities are simply not there. Business pays twice as much as universities. Basically, universities need more money. The government is doing nothing about this commercial reality. Labor took a big chunk out of university funding with its educational reforms. The Liberal national government has promised less for both universities and schools, despite the Abbott back down. Just what the government plans to do is unknown at present. The Gonsky reforms are up in the air. Some states are not yet on board and states who have signed want the money promised by Labor. Universities are in the wings waiting for some kind of positive action by the government. If the Gonsky funding goes ahead there will very little left for the tertiary sector. Robbing tertiary to fund schools does not make

The NSA has said that it targeted non-US citizens in its information grab from large Internet companies. Australian and American government agencies have secured detailed data about Australian citizens. This fact came out in a new report. In the first half of 2013 546 requests were made on Australians. Facebook provided details on 349 of these. The US demanded information on 20,000 users assumed to be Americans. Access was granted on nearly 16,000 US accounts. Which government agencies made the demands was not announced by Facebook. Internet companies seem to have been given some sort of filtering power to decide what is released. This is strange considering such companies are not elected non-government agencies. Are they entitled to be above the law? Requests to Twitter by Australia have risen 600 percent since the second half of 2012. All members of the international data oligopoly were approached. About two thirds of all requests were successful. There is a fine balanc

Despite calls by some countries for Internet companies to had over information on citizens' searches and email, the knowledge superhighway is moving in the other direction. Information stored in the cloud are out of reach of national police forces. Gone are the days when just about everything that a suspect has done is available recorded somewhere at sometime. Data is there but it cannot be accessed. The ordinary person will not have much sympathy for police trying to "background" a suspect. They see authorities as being too intrusive anyway. For years Australian social security sent out "demand" forms for aged pensioners to provide up-to-date information about what they had in the bank. A court found that social security did not have the legal right to demand honest answers. The forms are still being sent out. Legally they are still suspect. Such is the quagmire authorities are in. Anyway, back to the case in hand. Police are saying even getting data