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• Encryption bill: What’s a ‘systemic weakness’? It depends, the government says

  A key protection in a government bill that is designed to increase the ability of police to access online communications is a prohibition on forcing a company to build a “systemic” security vulnerability into its products or services. However, exactly what that provision will mean in practice remains unclear.

• VR raises empathy more than other mediums, Stanford study finds

  ​Virtual reality’s power to put people in the shoes of another has been used to great effect ever since the technology became readily available and affordable.

• UK govt launches code of practice for connected devices

  ​The UK government has launched a voluntary code of practice for internet connected device makers, and urged industry to improve the security of their consumer IoT products.

• PostgreSQL 11 taps LLVM and parallelization for speed boost

  The powerful open source database now offers more features for data sharing, JIT-accelerated queries, and transactions inside stored procedures

• Atlassian revamps Jira Software, adds roadmaps tool

  The redesign follows a multi-year migration of the popular issue-tracking app to the AWS cloud and the acquisition last year of Trello.

• IBM wants to manage your cloud services no matter which ones you run

  IBM’s new Multi-cloud Manager will manage workloads on Big Blue clouds but also workloads on Amazon, Red Hat and Microsoft infrastructure as well

• Melbourne Uni launches quantum simulator and environment QUI

  The University of Melbourne has launched an online quantum computer simulator and programming environment aimed at making students and industry 'quantum ready'.

• Chemist Warehouse plans AR guides, IoT sensors for stores

  The Chemist Warehouse chain of discount pharmacies is contemplating installing thousands of sensors in each of its stores to track customer preferences and providing augmented reality guides via customers' smartphones that would help them navigate around its stores.

• Government should consider tearing up Telstra cancer contract: Inquiry

  The Department of Health should consider terminating its contract with Telstra Health to operate two cancer screening registries, a parliamentary committee has concluded.

• IT talent war driving ‘unsustainable’ wage growth, report says

  A shortage of IT professionals in the region is driving ‘unsustainable’ wage growth and leaving smaller firms unable to compete for talent, says a report from tech role recruiter Halcyon Knights

• Anti-piracy bill takes aim at ‘cyberlockers’, search engines

  The government has introduced a bill that will significantly widen the scope of Australia’s site-blocking laws.

• Victoria Police to fit 220 patrol cars with number plate recognition cams

  ​Victoria Police has signed a $17.3 million contract with Motorola Solutions to fit out 220 patrol cars with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology.

• New anti-piracy laws to target search engines

  The government wants to significantly expand the scope of laws that currently allow copyright owners and licensees to seek court orders forcing Australian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block their customers from accessing sites that facilitate online piracy.

• Apple allows A/NZ users tool to see what data it has collected

  Apple has rolled out an online tool allowing users to download, change or delete all the data that the iPhone maker has collected on them.

• GitHub asserts independence from Microsoft during Universe event

  At GitHub Universe in San Francisco, the open source code repository company announced a new 'Actions' service described by head of platform Sam Lambert as the most significant feature for its community since pull requests, while other executives asserted the company's independent status ahead of its expected buyout approval from Microsoft this week.