Tag: australian

Tesla To Construct ‘Virtual Solar Power Plant’ Using 50,000 Homes

Long-time Slashdot readers denbesten, haruchai, and Kant all submitted this story. CleanTechnica reports: Tesla and the government of South Australia have announced a stunning new project that could change how electricity is generated not only in Australia but in every country in the world. They plan to install rooftop solar system on 50, 000 homes in the next four years and link them them together with grid storage facilities to create the largest virtual solar power plant in history. And here’s the kicker: The rooftop solar systems will be free. The cost of the project will be recouped over time by selling the electricity generated to those who consume it. “We will use people’s homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills, ” says South Australia’s premier Jay Weatherill. “More renewable energy means cheaper power for all South Australians…” Price predicts utility bills for participating households will be slashed by 30%. Electrek reports that the project will result in at least 650 MWh of additional energy storage capacity, and Tesla points out that “At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla To Construct ‘Virtual Solar Power Plant’ Using 50,000 Homes

Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bitcoin News: In information released to shareholders this week, Coinbase revealed that it recorded turnover of $1 billion last year, which works out at an astonishing $2.74 million a day or $2, 000 a minute. As America’s largest bitcoin broker, Coinbase claims the lion’s share of the money that’s pouring into the crypto space at a dizzying rate. 2017 was a bumper year for all crypto exchanges, which reported record numbers across the board: new signups, new staff hired, new trading pairs, and new revenue. Those revenue streams have turned into a torrent that has caused Coinbase’ coffers to swell. Recode reports that the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion last year, most of it derived from the trading fees it levies. These vary from between 0.25% and 1%. and quickly add up: in the past 24 hours, 36, 000 BTC were traded on Coinbase, accounting for more than 15% of the total market. Coinbase isn’t the world’s largest exchange (and is technically a broker rather than a conventional exchange — that duty falls to its GDAX subsidiary) but it’s the best known and carries great weight in the cryptocurrency industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Coinbase Is Making $2.7 Million a Day

We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded

schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a “peculiar large mass” floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realised what it was — a raft of floating rock spewed from an underwater volcano, produced in the largest eruption of its kind ever recorded. “We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we’ve seen on land in the 20th Century, ” says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who’s co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft — composed of pumice rock — covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself… for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens — or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland. When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that “I thought the vehicle’s sonar was acting up… We saw all these bumps on the seafloor… It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded

Australia’s national broadband network under relentless attack—by cockatoos

Enlarge / I’m in ur tower, nommin ur Internets (credit: Tim Graham/Getty Images) Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) , the effort to bring high-speed Internet to the masses down under, has encountered many speed bumps. The plan to bring fiber-optic broadband Internet to every Australian has been pared back in its ambitions, with a shift to a fiber backbone between “nodes” and distribution over copper wire or cable networks to the majority of users. That cost-saving move, which puts ISPs and cable providers in charge of managing customers’ access,  has caused some consternation . But now the operators of the NBN have discovered another problem that affects the cost of delivering the backbone. And it’s for the birds. The BBC reports that NBN technicians have discovered cockatoos have been damaging the ends of spare fiber cables left in place on communications towers for future network expansion by chomping on them, wearing through the steel braiding that protects the fiber. Active cables haven’t been affected, so there has been no loss of service (as of yet) due to cockatoo attacks; the ends of cables carrying active traffic are protected by a plastic cages. But cables left with their ends exposed have become a favorite of the birds, who use them to help wear down their ever-growing beaks. And the cables cost AUS$10,000 (about US$7,700) to replace. NBN’s Chedryian Bresland told the BBC, “That’s Australia for you. If the spiders and snakes don’t get you, the cockies will.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Australia’s national broadband network under relentless attack—by cockatoos

8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

dryriver writes: China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China’s ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After two years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months. Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth’s atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth’s surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1’s debris is considered unlikely. When NASA’s SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 — for littering. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

Enlarge (credit: Royal Australian Air Force) The Australian Cyber Security Centre noted in its just-issued 2017 Threat Report that a small Australian defense company “with contracting links to national security projects” had been the victim of a cyber-espionage attack detected last November. “ACSC analysis confirmed that the adversary had sustained access to the network for an extended period of time and had stolen a significant amount of data,” the ACSC report stated. “The adversary remained active on the network at the time.” More details of the breach were revealed on Wednesday at an IT conference in Sydney. ASD Incident Response Manager Mitchell Clarke said, “The compromise was extensive and extreme.” The attacker behind the breach has been internally referred to at the Australian Signals Directorate as ” APT Alf ” (named for a character in Australia’s long-running television show Home and Away , not the US television furry alien). Alf stole approximately 30 gigabytes of data, including data related to Australia’s involvement in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, as well as data on the P-8 Poseidon patrol plane, planned future Australian Navy ships, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb. The breach began in July of 2016. A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense’s F-35 Joint Program Office confirmed the breach to Defense News , stating that the Office “is aware” of the breach. The spokesperson reiterated that no classified data was exposed. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

Bitcoin Is Forking. Again.

Merely weeks after it was announced that Bitcoin was splitting into two separate entities, the initial version of bitcoin and it’s new “bitcoin cash, ” the network is adding a third version, according to a report. From the article: On Wednesday, a group of bitcoiners scheduled yet another split for the network in November, which would create a third version of bitcoin. So, what makes this version different from the others? Right now, the bitcoin network can sometimes take a long time to process transactions due to so many people using it. This is because the “blocks” of transaction data that get added to bitcoin’s public ledger, the blockchain, are getting full. In the weeks preceding the fork, bitcoin coalesced around a solution called “segregated witness, ” which will change how data is stored in blocks to free up some space when it kicks in later in August. But the size of the blocks themselves will stay at one megabyte on the original bitcoin blockchain. Still, some bitcoiners maintained that the only way to speed bitcoin up for the foreseeable future was to increase the size of blocks themselves. So, a group of bitcoin companies and developers got together and launched a fork called bitcoin cash, which does not include segregated witness. It bumped the size of blocks up to a maximum of eight megabytes. That fork was widely anticipated to be a failure before it happened, but at the time of writing, bitcoin cash is trading above $300 USD per coin, which is comparable to cryptocurrencies like ethereum. Sounds like everyone got what they wanted, right? Oh, no. There’s a third group of bitcoin developers, companies, and users who advocate for a “best of both worlds approach.” This group includes Bitmain, the largest bitcoin infrastructure company in the world, and legendary bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik. They got together back in May and signed what is known as the “New York Agreement, ” which bound them to implement a two megabyte block size increase alongside segregated witness via a hard fork within six months of the time of signing. They call the fork Segwit2x. Now, that’s exactly what’s happening. According to an announcement posted to the Segwit2x GitHub repository, a bitcoin block between one and two megabytes will be created at block 494, 784. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Is Forking. Again.

After "Game of Thrones" Capes Revaled to Be Ikea Rugs, Ikea Releases How-To Instructions

Here’s a 10-second clip of “Game of Thrones” costume designer Michele Clapton revealing where the capes of the Night’s Watch come from: Apparently folks were titillated that Ikea rugs were the source material. So too was someone at Ikea, who then had whomever’s in charge of producing Ikea’s assembly directions create one for the cape: Yanks are out of luck; the Skold sheepskin rug pictured above isn’t available in the ‘States. (The image is from Ikea’s Australian website.)

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After "Game of Thrones" Capes Revaled to Be Ikea Rugs, Ikea Releases How-To Instructions

How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout

Not very pleased with your internet speeds? Think about the people Down Under. Australia’s “bungled” National Broadband Network (NBN) has been used as a “cautionary tale” for other countries to take note of. Despite the massive amount of money being pumped into the NBN, the New York Times reports, the internet speeds still lagged behind the US, most of western Europe, Japan and South Korea — even Kenya. The article highlights that Australia was the first country where a national plan to cover every house or business was considered and this ambitious plan was hampered by changes in government and a slow rollout (Editor’s note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), partly because of negotiations with Telstra about the fibre installation. From the report: Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya. For many here, slow broadband connections are a source of frustration and an inspiration for gallows humor. One parody video ponders what would happen if an American with a passion for Instagram and streaming “Scandal” were to switch places with an Australian resigned to taking bathroom breaks as her shows buffer. The article shares this anecdote: “Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by a studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1, 000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout

IT Contractors In Australia Are Not Being Paid Due To Dispute With Payroll Service

New submitter evolutionary writes: Plutus Payroll, an Australian payroll company, is refusing to pay contractors due to a dispute with companies using their services. Around 1, 000 IT workers are unable to receive payment for services rendered. One may ask, “Where are the companies who actually hired the IT workers?” The Register reports: “This story starts with Australia’s employment laws, which see lots of contractors officially employed by recruitment companies or payroll companies. The company at which the contractor works likes this arrangement as it means they don’t have to put such people on their books. Recruitment companies and payroll companies charge for the service. Contractors generally like the convenience of having one employer even though they hop from gig to gig. The system requires fluid payments. Companies who hire contractors pay the recruiter, which either pays contractors direct or pays the payroll company contractors prefer. If the cash stops flowing, contractors get crunched. That’s what’s happened to around 1, 000 contractors who elected to use Plutus as their paymasters: the company says it is in the midst of a completely unexplained ‘dispute’ that leaves it unable to pay contractors, or receive money from recruitment companies, but is still solvent. The Register has checked with the bank that Plutus clients say sends them their money — the bank says it is aware of no dispute. One possible reason for the mess is that Plutus did not charge for its services. How it made money is therefore a mystery. Another scenario concerns the company’s recent acquisition: perhaps its new owners are being denied access to some service Plutus could access as a standalone company. Plutus is saying nothing of substance about the situation. A spokesperson tells us the company deeply regrets the situation but won’t divulge anything about the dispute and has offered no details about when contractors can expect resolution.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IT Contractors In Australia Are Not Being Paid Due To Dispute With Payroll Service