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Alibaba Group Expands Presence in Australia, New Zealand

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Alibaba Group Expands Presence in Australia, New Zealand

Chinese online retailer Alibaba Group opened its Australian and New Zealand headquarters in Melbourne on Saturday, its first expansion in the region as it seeks to tap growing global demand for products from the two countries.

The group’s billionaire founder Jack Ma, who spent time in Australia as a young man, said he hoped the e-commerce giant would help Australian and New Zealand businesses “share their world-famous products with billions of customers around the world”.

There are more than 1,300 Australian and 400 New Zealand brands on Alibaba’s Tmall and Tmall Global, the company said in a statement.

“Alibaba Group’s vision for the ANZ region is to build the entire operating infrastructure needed to enable local businesses to expand globally,” Maggie Zhou, the group’s Australian and New Zealand Managing Director, said.

Further growth is planned in the areas of cloud computing, payments, digital entertainment and logistics, she said.

Alibaba also signed a memorandum of understanding with Australia Post aimed at streamlining logistics between Australia and China and developing the first Australian marketplace within Alibaba’s Lazada eCommerce Network in Southeast Asia.

Ma met with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Sydney on Friday where the pair discussed trade, small-and-medium businesses and young business people.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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News Update

Australia Houses Migrants in ‘Degrading’ Offshore Detention Camps

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

President Donald Trump’s reported rift with Australia’s leader over a deal to resettle refugees has shone a spotlight on the country’s controversial program which sees thousands of migrants kept offshore on detention islands.

But these places in the Pacific Ocean are not tropical paradises: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR say conditions on the islands are deplorable.

Image result for Australia Houses Migrants in ‘Degrading’ Offshore Detention Camps images

In an effort to clamp down on illegal smugglers and to decrease the number of migrant deaths at sea, the government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull won’t accept any asylum seekers, migrants or refugees who arrive by boat.

Instead, it intercepts such vessels and sends them to remote Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, as well as the world’s smallest independent republic, the impoverished island nation of Nauru.

Australia pays Nauru and Papua New Guinea to house the migrants there and then works with UNHCR to find countries that will resettle them.

Rights groups say the camps are “prison-like”: hot, overcrowded, unhygienic and dangerous. Human Rights Watch reported that refugees and asylum seekers on both islands faced physical abuse, including sexual assault and rape.

One of the U.N.’s top ranking officials on migrant human rights, Francois Crepeau, said that the conditions on Nauru, were “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

Almost 2,000 asylum seekers and refugees have ended up in limbo at the two island detention centers, languishing there for years as they wait for the lengthy UNHCR vetting process to complete.

Rights groups also report that conditions are so bad that many asylum seekers and refugees have developed mental health problems as a result of their lengthy captivity there — suicide attempts are frequent as well as cases of self-harm. There have also been multiple instances of refugees setting themselves on fire as a form of protest over Australia’s policies, according to the Associated Press.

Many of the refugees being held come from Iraq and Iran — two of the Muslim-majority nations among the seven countries whose citizens are currently barred from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days under the executive order signed by Trump last week.

And they are expensive for Australia to maintain, it costs Australia $400,000 per refugee, per year to house them on the islands, according to a September 2016 report by UNICEF.

In October 2016, Turnbull announced an ever stricter policy aimed at smugglers that bans any refugee who has tried to reach Australia by boat since 2013 from ever coming to Australia.

“They must know that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler, it is closed,” Turnbull told a press conference on Oct. 30, 2016. “Those passengers will never settle in this country.”

All that said, Australia takes in its fair share of refugees and asylum seekers who enter the country through other means in coordination with the UNHCR. It accepted 13,756 refugees in 2014-2015 (the most recent year statistics were available), according to Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Of the refugees and asylum seekers accepted by Australia in 2014-2015, the most came from Iraq and Syria, followed by Myanmar and Afghanistan.

The issue between Trump and Turnbull revolves around the U.S. agreement made by the Obama administration late last year to resettle up to 1,250 asylum seekers being held at the controversial Pacific island camps. Under the terms of the deal, only those who had gone through the rigorous United Nations screening process – that can take as long as 18 to 24 months – and granted refugee status would be eligible to go to the United States.

[Source:- nbcnews]

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Internet

Australia Online Census Shutdown After Cyber-Attacks

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Australia Online Census Shutdown After Cyber-Attacks

Australia was forced to reassure its citizens that their personal data was secure Wednesday, after malicious attacks by overseas hackers prompted an embarrassing shutdown of the online census.

Australians are required to complete the census every five years or face fines, and this was the first time there had been a major push for people to fill in the survey online.

But as thousands of people headed to the official website Tuesday evening, a series of denial-of-service attacks – attempts to overwhelm an online system to prevent people accessing it – prompted authorities to take the site offline.

“It was an attack, and we believe from overseas,” said David Kalisch from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which organises the census.

“The scale of the attack, it was quite clear it was malicious,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The census website was not back online Wednesday.

The attacks are an embarrassment for the government, which earlier this year confirmed that the weather bureau, which reportedly owns one of the nation’s largest supercomputers, suffered a “cyber intrusion” in 2015.

The Labor opposition jumped on the incident, labelling it “the worst-run census in Australian history” and “one of the worst IT debacles Australia has ever seen”.

But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull insisted that no data had been compromised.

The ABS had acted with “an abundance of caution” in shutting down the site after a large-scale denial of service attempt followed by a hardware failure when a router became overloaded, he said.

“The site has not been hacked, it has not been interfered with,” he told reporters in Sydney.

The statistics bureau reassured Australians that their data was secure, with Kalisch saying the shutdown “actually confirms the strong position that the ABS has taken in terms of security”.

Some 2.33 million online forms were submitted before the outage and safely stored.

“The data that comes to ABS is encrypted and it was secured and received safely at the ABS… we have it at the ABS, no-one else has it,” Kalisch said.

On its Twitter account, the ABS Census insisted that no fines would be imposed on the thousands of people unable to complete the survey, provoking even more anger.

“Fine yourselves for the completely incompetent way this was handled,” wrote one respondent to @ABSCensus.

Australians officially have until September 23 to complete the census, with some two thirds of respondents expected to use the internet rather than paper to complete the survey this year.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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Tech Update

Australia plans new co-ordinates to fix sat-nav gap

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Australia seen by satellite

Australia is to shift its longitude and latitude to address a gap between local co-ordinates and those from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).

Local co-ordinates, used to produce maps and measurements, and global ones differ by more than 1m.

The body responsible for the change said it would help the development of self-driving cars, which need accurate location data to navigate.

Australia moves about 7cm north annually because of tectonic movements.

Modern satellite systems provide location data based on global lines of longitude and latitude, which do not move even if the continents on Earth shift.

However, many countries produce maps and measurements with the lines of longitude and latitude fixed to their local continent.

“If the lines are fixed, you can put a mark in the ground, measure its co-ordinate, and it will be the same co-ordinate in 20 years,” explained Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia. “It’s the classical way of doing it.”

Because of the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, these local co-ordinates drift apart from the Earth’s global co-ordinates over time.

“If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental,” said Mr Jaksa.

“We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn’t line up with the co-ordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems.”

The Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country’s local co-ordinate system, was last updated in 1994. Since then, Australia has moved about 1.5 metres north.

So on 1 January 2017, the country’s local co-ordinates will also be shifted further north – by 1.8m.

The over-correction means Australia’s local co-ordinates and the Earth’s global co-ordinates will align in 2020.

At that point a new system, which can take changes over time into account, will be implemented.

“We used the old plate fixed system to make life simple, but we don’t want to do this adjustment every so often,” said Mr Jaksa.

“Once we have a system that can deal with changes over time, then everybody in the world could be on that same system.”

[Source:- BBC]

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Internet

‘Abandon FTTN for FTTdp’: Internet Australia Calls For NBN Rethink

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

According to Internet Australia, there is currently a rising level of debate about the NBN, partly due to the impending election, which follows ongoing claims of slowed deployments, installation problems and switchover issues.

“In 2007 a government was elected that undertook to build a modern broadband network delivering cable all the way to more than 90 per cent of the nations premises,” Internet Australia CEO Laurie Patton observed, making the call for a bipartisan NBN rethink. “A subsequent government adopted a different strategy, using existing copper phone lines, in the expectation that this would deliver the network to more homes sooner and at less expense upfront.”

“Putting aside the relative merits of each strategy, and the success or otherwise of their respective implementations, time has provided the opportunity for a reassessment of how we build the most appropriate broadband network fit for the 21st Century. New technology has provided a viable alternative to the copper-based fibre to the node (FTTN) model.”

A recent hearing of the Senate NBN Select Committee was shown so-called “skinny fibre” that NBN is now using. This technology was not available when the decision was made to adopt FTTN, which underpins the MTM.

As predicted by qualified observers, the overall costs of construction have come down over time as NBN has refined its operating practices and achieved economies of scale, irrespective of the technology chosen. “This will likely be the case for the lifetime of this project,” predicts Internet Australia.

“At the same time as we’ve seen the technology change, Internet speeds delivered to consumers in other countries have been steadily rising and causing Australia to fall behind quite dramatically”, Mr Patton noted. “We have slipped to 60th on global rankings from 30th just a few years ago, according to the widely-quoted ‘State of the Internet’ report from content delivery network Akamai. This slide relative to our peers will continue even as the NBN is being built so long as we rely on an ageing copper network”.

Internet Australia says it is keen to see FTTN abandoned in favour of “fibre to the driveway” (technically known as fibre to the distribution point, or FTTdp). This would see fibre cabling run all the way to a point at or near the boundary to homes and commercial buildings.

From there, existing copper could, if necessary, still be used in the short-term. Alternatively, copper wires could be replaced, at any time now or in the future, with fibre into the building. “Such an approach would provide a future-proofed network and avoid the need for a costly re-build in 10 to 15 years’ time when copper is simply no longer fit-for-purpose,” Internet Australia states.

“Both the Government and the Opposition have highlighted the need for Australia to become an innovation nation. To do this will require high speed Internet connectivity on par with countries in our region also seeking to be innovation hubs,” Mr Patton points out. “One of our biggest regional competitors, Singapore, already provides consumers with Internet access at speeds 100 times faster than ours. New Zealand is in front of us in a number of rankings and is ahead in its overall broadband rollout.”

“Now some commentators will say that it is easier to build a broadband network in smaller territories like Singapore and New Zealand. However, we didn’t use this as an excuse not to build roads and railways across the country, or to not provide telephones to people living in regional and remote areas”.

[Source:- Gizmodo]

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News Update

It was a massive shock: Gambhir recalls Dhoni’s 2012 selection policy for Australia series

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Gautam Gambhir played 7 matches in the CB series scoring 308 runs (Reuters Photo)

Former India opener Gautam Gambhir on Saturday came down hard on Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s captaincy during the 2012 CB series in Australia.

Gambhir, in an explosive interview with India Today, reveaked how he Dhoni told him that he couldn’t play him, Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag in the ODI playing XI as they would leak runs on the field in Australia.

But Gambhir was eventually included in the ODI final XI for the tri-series between Australia, India and Sri Lanka.

Gambhir and Tendulkar eventually got to play 7 matches in the series while Sehwag featured in 5. Gambhir amassed 308 runs at an average of 44 and was the second highest run-scorer for India behind Virat Kohli while Tendulkar and Sehwag managed just 143 and 65 runs respectively.

“In the 2012 Tri-series in Australia, Dhoni declared that he can’t play all three (Gambhir, Sachin and Sehwag) of us together as he was looking ahead at the 2015 World Cup.

“It was a massive shock, I think it would have been a massive shock for any cricketer. I have not heard anyone be told in 2012 that they would never be a part of the 2015 World Cup. I always had the impression that if you keep scoring runs, age is a just a number,” Gambhir told India Today.

“If you have the skills to score the runs and you are not a liability on the field, you can go on to play as long as you want. This was always told to us and even in Australia we got to know that all the three can’t play together, and we eventually got to play together.

“When we were in a desperate need to win a game, I remember in Hobart, Viru and Sachin opened and I batted at three with Virat batted at four. India won that game and we had to chase in 37 over.

“At the start of the series, we didn’t play together, it was a rotation thing. When it was a desperate moment, MS had to play three of us. If you take a decision, back your decision, stick to it. Don’t back on something on which you have already decided.

“First you decided that you won’t play the three of us together, then you decided that you are going to play the three of us together. Either the original decision was wrong, or the second decision was wrong. He took that decision as a captain and it was a shock to all three of us,” Gambhir added.

[“source-indiatoday”]

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