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• Whoops: Government dished out too much money for data retention

  A grants program designed to help telcos defray the initial capital costs of complying with the government’s data retention regime was not implemented “to an appropriate standard having regard to the risks involved and the policy outcomes being sought,” a less-than-flattering audit has concluded.

• Banking still needs workhorse tech – don’t dump mainframes just yet

  In industries like financial services where IT systems are high-volume and mission-critical, news of mainframes’ demise is greatly exaggerated (to paraphrase W.C. Fields) – at least for the near term.

• MP warns of cyber threat to Australian elections

  The shadow assistant minister for cyber security, Gai Brodtmann, has called for the government to classify Australia’s election systems as a “critical infrastructure sector” under the Trusted Information Sharing Network in order to “overlay the appropriate scrutiny and assurance mechanisms to assure the Australian people of the cyber resilience of their democracy”.

• Gold Coast plans to open up expanded fibre network to telcos

  The Gold Coast is planning to offer ISPs and backhaul providers access to its expanded fibre network in the hopes of reaping a financial reward for the Queensland city.

• Why Salesforce is open sourcing the AI technology behind Einstein

  Salesforce is open sourcing the machine learning technology behind its Einstein AI platform.

• Lawsuit over Google location tracking

  Google has been accused in a lawsuit of illegally tracking the movements of millions of iPhone and Android phone users even when they use a privacy setting to prevent it.

• CBA blames data centre woes for outage

  The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has attributed a major outage of its online banking services yesterday to an “issue” with one of its key data centres.

• Supply chain Woolworths’ next major tech challenge

  Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci says continuing the implementation of JDA’s supply chain management platform will be the “big IT initiative” for the retailer following the completion of its 1Store program.

• NBN: Aussie Broadband calls for some fixed wireless to be replaced with FTTN, FTTC

  Uptake of NBN Co’s fixed wireless network means the service is entering a “second phase” that requires “a significant government-funded capital injection and a clever approach to ongoing upgrades,” according to retail service provider (RSP) Aussie Broadband.

• Horizon Power IT manager accused of corruption

  Horizon Power technology manager Paul Thomas corruptly exploited his position to have the utility pay Trusted Solutions IT, a company he owned, a report from Western Australia’s Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) has alleged.

• Funds to help AirTrunk expand Australian data centres

  Data centre operator AirTrunk says has secured $850 million in financing to undertake a “major expansion” of its Sydney and Melbourne data centres.

• NSW expands digital driver’s licence rollout

  New South Wales’ trial of digital driver licences will be expanded to encompass Sydney’s east, the state government announced today.

• New Payments Platform: RBA chief blames big banks for sluggish PayID adoption

  Reserve Bank of Australia governor Dr Philip Lowe says that take-up of the PayID system — which is based on the New Payments Platform — has so far been “less than earlier industry projections”.

• IBM, Maersk launch blockchain-based shipping platform with 94 early adopters

  After launching a proof of concept earlier this year, IBM and Maersk have unveiled TradeLens, the production version of an electronic ledger for tracking global shipments; the companies say they have 94 participants piloting the system, including more than 20 port and terminal operators.

• CBA confirms problem with Visa transactions

  The Commonwealth Bank of Australia says some Visa transactions are not being processed due to a technical issue.