Nuclear News Network

10/20/2015

Aussie radio team declares their show a ‘Kardashian-free zone’

NOVA radio hosts Kate Ritchie, Tim Blackwell and Marty Sheargold have officially declared their show a “Kardashian-free zone”.
Discussing a recent report that the Kardashian clan rushed to Lamar Odom’s hospital with cameras for their reality show in tow, the national drive team yesterday vowed to never discuss the famous family on air again.
“Well that’s what I’ve proposed to the team,” said co-host Marty Sheargold.
“I said as a show, let’s stop talking about these people, because they’re awful, awful human beings, the Kardashians. We’ve talked about them enough.”
But there’s one exception.
“Unless we’re covering off the death of one of them,” said Sheargold.

“As I always say, it’s a funeral I’d attend to make sure they’re dead.”
The radio show was inundated with callers and tweets supporting their stance, with one listener saying on air, “They’re disgusting ... they’re what is wrong with the world”.
Co-host Tim Blackwell admitted he has a soft spot for one of the Jenner’s before agreeing to the ban.
“Does this mean that privately I can’t look at Kendall Jenner’s Instagram because I’d still like to follow her?” he said.
And when asked if she was willing to enforce the Kardashian-free zone, former Home and Away star Kate Ritchie said, “I just do what you guys tell me to”.

10/20/2015

Constellation Cup: Diamonds win again against Ferns

Christchurch The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Australia's Constellation Cup netball dominance over New Zealand continued at Christchurch's Horncastle Arena on Tuesday night with a 50-44 victory over the Silver Ferns.
It was Australia's ninth straight Constellation Cup win against the Silver Ferns, with New Zealand's last victory in a game in the series coming in September, 2013.
In the first meeting of the sides since Australia's success at the Netball World Cup final two months ago, the Diamonds were again too clinical, seizing the initiative at the start of the second quarter and not looking back.

Australia have somewhat of a new look to their squad following the retirements of experienced midcourter Kim Green and defenders Julie Corletto and Bec Bulley.
You can guarantee with the Diamonds, there is always someone ready to step in and replace them.
Sharni Layton made the most of her starting opportunity at goal defence, with some uncompromising play. Paige Hadley was also industrious at wing attack, regularly finding her shooters.
New Zealand coach Wai Taumaunu fielded a predictable starting seven with Jodi Brown handed the nod at goal attack, with the experienced Maria Tutaia sitting out the series. Things started to go awry for the Silver Ferns at the beginning of the second quarter.
After making a horror start to the Netball World Cup final, New Zealand would have been happy with how they started the game.
They raced out to a 4-2 lead, with Kayla Cullen picking up a turnover from Hadley and Caitlin Bassett missing her first attempt of the game for Australia.
Brown had her moments early on in the shooting circle with Bailey Mes, facing plenty of pressure from the Australian defenders.
New Zealand's strong full-court defence defence forced Australia into a couple of early mistakes, but it did not take long before the Diamonds were into their work.
Australia scored four straight goals to hit the front, with their midcourt beginning to find it easier to send the ball through to the tall timber of Bassett under the hoop.
Holding a 14-13 advantage after the first quarter, Australia began to take control in the second term.
The Diamonds capitalised off New Zealand's mistakes and built a comfortable buffer.
Game two in the series is in Auckland on Thursday, before the final two games in Australia

10/20/2015

Tiny Irish data agency in the spotlight over Facebook case

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) is responsible for auditing and reviewing the privacy settings of dozens of tech companies that have their European headquarters in Ireland, drawn by low taxes and a well-educated workforce.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple and Microsoft are just some of the household names under the DPC's remit, which has come under scrutiny after a landmark European Court of Justice verdict this month.
The ECJ ruled invalid an agreement allowing Facebook to transfer European citizens' personal information to the United States, and an Irish court will on Tuesday begin considering whether to launch an investigation into the deal.
Max Schrems, the Austrian legal student who challenged the agreement, had argued it did not properly protect Europeans' data from access by spy agencies, in the wake of revelations of mass digital eavesdropping by the US National Security Agency.
It is from an unlikely location—the small rural town of Portarlington, 90 kilometres (56 miles) from Dublin—that the watchdog coordinates its policing of the world's giant tech multinationals.
On the town's Main Street, locals are quick to offer directions to the DPC's modest offices, but few have paid much attention to the work that goes on behind its walls.
"We would always drive by and know it's there, but you wouldn't think too deeply about it," said local student Tom Morris, 21.
The DPC moved to Portarlington as part of a push to decentralise government agencies in the mid-2000s and encourage employment outside Ireland's main cities.
"Portarlington was never an economic hotspot," said pensioner John O'Byrne. "Any jobs are welcome."
When the DPC was set up in 1998, it would have been hard to foresee how Internet companies would come to dominate everyday life or how Ireland would become a European hub for the world's tech giants.
Critics have pointed to the DPC's rural base, small staff and minuscule budget as evidence that Ireland has failed to take seriously its responsibilities at the vanguard of Europe's data protection regime.
"There was no doubt there was a shortage of resources, whether for financial or other reasons," said Simon McGarr, a solicitor working with Digital Rights Ireland.

In the past 18 months, coinciding with the appointment of Helen Dixon as the new commissioner, Dublin has moved to beef up its approach.
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny created a data protection portfolio in a cabinet reshuffle last year.
Last week an extra 1.1 million euros ($1.25 million) was allocated to the DPC, bringing its 2016 budget to over 4.7 million euros, compared to 1.8 million euros two years ago.
Staff numbers have doubled—but there are still only about 50 of them, compared to more than 300 million Facebook users in Europe.
This year the DPC opened a second office, giving it a presence in Dublin close to "Silicon Docks" - the area where many of the tech giants are located in the capital.
Too lenient?
But with multinational investment a key component of the Irish economy, critics have accused the DPC of taking a lenient approach towards the companies.
It is a "business protection authority and not a data protection authority," said Max Schrems, the young Austrian privacy campaigner whose war on the EU-US transfer deal prompted it to collapse.
But Data Protection Minister Dara Murphy contested the charge.
"It's inaccurate and unfounded that we have a light touch regulation, because we don't have," Murphy said.
"Our data commissioner is independent. All decisions are subject to the laws of Ireland and European laws," he told AFP.
He added: "There's a significant economic benefit to the country having these companies here and we're more than happy to provide adequate first class regulation."
But there is no doubt the DPC favours a collaborative rather than combative approach to regulation.
"The office proactively engages with industry, helping to shape how companies work with data, rather than simply watching for transgressions," a DPC spokeswoman told AFP in an emailed statement.
Schrems said: "The idea that being friendly with companies is going to help is just childish."

10/15/2015

Cyber crime costs average $4.9m: Ponemon Institute

The average economic impact of cyber crime on Australian organisations increased from $4.2 million last year to $4.9 million according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2015 Cost of Cyber Crime Study.

The study, which was sponsored by HP Enterprise Security, examined the costs incurred by 28 Australian organisations who were victims of cyber crime. Costs ranged from $792,932 up to $18 million.

Business disruption continued to represent the highest external cost in Australia, followed by the costs associated with information loss. On an annual basis, business disruption accounted for 38 per cent of total external costs, down 2 per cent from last year. Costs associated with information and revenue loss accounted for 58 per cent of external costs, an increase from 54 per cent in 2014.

The average time it took to resolve a cyber attack increased from 23 days last year to 31 days, with the average cost incurred by organisations now $419,542.

Malicious insider attacks could take up to 50 days to contain, the report said.

The most costly cyber crimes were those caused by malicious insiders, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and malicious code. These attacks accounted for more than 45 per cent of all cyber crime costs per organisation on an annual basis.

The study also found that organisations are now committing 20 per cent of their security budget allocation to the application layer, up from 16 per cent in 2014.

Commenting on the report, HP Software enterprise security products general manager Shane Bellos said that as organisations invest in mobile, cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT), the attack surface for more sophisticated adversaries continues to expand.

10/15/2015

Samsung releases Gear S2 smartwatch to woo Aussies this Christmas

http://www.news.com.au/technology/samsung-releases-gear-s2-smartwatch-to-woo-aussies-this-christmas/story-e6frfrnr-1227567490922

SAMSUNG launches its newest smartwatch in Australia today with a design strategy that it hopes will enable it to win over consumers this Christmas.

10/15/2015

Melbourne ‘city loop’ phone coverage activated at last

Melbourne is regularly pegged as one of the world’s most liveable cities, with its ‘city loop’ now in the 21st century too, with full 3G and 4G connectivity.
For years, if you ventured forth into Melbourne’s city loop when on public train transport, and you wanted to use your mobile phone, you had a major problem: no coverage.

Sacrilegious thought this was to Melbourne’s tech-savvy train travellers, there wasn’t much that could be done about it until the ‘powers that be’ got off their collective dial tones and damn well did something about it.

The coverage is 3G for voice and 4G for data, although presumably if you have a 4G VoLTE capability switched on with your provider, and presuming you have a compatible phone, the… presumably you will get VoLTE 4G voice calls too.

In any case, the Victorian State Government and its Minister for Public Transport, Jacinta Allan, have finally joined transport operators and mobile phone carriers at Parliament Station to confirm that, after days of testing, and entire millennia of waiting, ‘passengers now have access to high-quality 3G voice and 4G data coverage throughout Melbourne’s 12 kilometres of rail tunnels and underground stations.’

The Minister or her staff or someone over there cheekily notes ‘the new mobile phone service emulates mobile carrier coverage in the Hong Kong, Singapore and Montreal underground rail systems, and exceeds the quality of coverage found in many other capital cities around the world.’

Of course, with Melbourne and Sydney arch frenemies, there is of course not a skerrick of a mention that Sydney got its act together back in April 2013, when its city loop went mobile enabled at long last, as reported by iTWire at the time.

So, who is delivering this project? We’re told it is ‘Victorian rail asset owner VicTrack.’

Work is not yet complete - ‘further work will be undertaken over the coming 12-18 months that will enhance 4G data services, increasing capacity and data speeds even further.’

Minster for Public Transport Jacinta Allan said: “The Andrews Labor Government has achieved what the Liberals promised but never delivered: mobile coverage in the city loop.

“This ends years of frustration for passengers, who would be in the middle of a conversation only for their phone to cut out when they entered the loop.

“Passengers can now text, talk and stream from their phones or tablets anywhere in the city loop.

“The Andrews Labor Government has delivered mobile coverage in the loop, and is getting on with the major public transport projects Victoria needs, like Melbourne Metro Rail and the Level Crossing Removal Project.”

So, friends, countrymen and Melburnians, lend me your ears no longer in the City Loop, but place them to your phones with abandon as the sweet sound of voice calls call, or glue your eyes to your screens as the data flows at long, long last.

10/10/2015

Facebook finally launches Messenger on the Apple Watch

After teasing it at the Apple Watch event in September, Facebook has finally delivered the watch version of its Messenger app.

The social network quietly rolled out the Apple Watch app in an update to the Messenger app Thursday. The update also adds support for iOS 9 features, including universal search and multitasking for iPads.

The watch version of the messaging app supports watchOS2, the latest version of Apple's software for the Apple Watch. It actually manages to squeeze in quite a bit of Messenger's functionality into it.

You can't type out full responses to messages but you can choose from a list of canned answers, send your location, "like," post stickers or record a voice message with the watch's built-in microphone. On the receiving side, you can also check out photos, videos and voice messages.

Though the app supports Facebook's stickers, animated stickers and animated GIFs will only appear as static images on the watch app.

While not technically Facebook's first watch app — that distinction belongs to Instagram — Messenger will be a welcome addition for many users. Apple teased what appeared to be a watch version of the main Facebook app back in March, but such an app has yet to appear.

For Android users, Messenger is also compatible with Android Wear. The Android Wear app, which rolled out earlier this year, also allows you to record and send voice messages and send "likes" from your wrist.

10/10/2015

Selena Gomez growing up

Selena Gomez has come out for the first time and revealed in an interview to Billboard that she suffered from lupus two years ago and underwent chemotherapy for the same. At that time, she wouldn’t address the issue, and her PR people steadfastly refused to confirm or deny reports.

Selena Gomez “didn’t understand” what was happening when she was first diagnosed with Lupus. That’s what my break was really about.

But Gomez said she underwent chemotherapy, suggesting she has a more serious form of the disease. “Sometimes I had no idea how to say what I wanted to say”. “I’m in chemo. You’re a-holes.’ I sheltered myself away until eventually I sure was self-assured and comfy again”. I wasn’t gonna let that be the story. The symptoms are often non-specific and vary widely, such as fatigue, joint pain, swelling, fever, and rashes, especially what’s called a “butterfly rash”, which stretches across both cheeks and looks like a sunburn.

Sophomore albums are notoriously tricky propositions, but Selena Gomez’s second solo venture, “Revival“, breezes through to the finish line – the dance floor -with 11 almost impeccable tracks that skip from the 1960s to the ’80s to right this minute.

She also shared the best piece of advice she was ever given, telling her fans: “Everything happens for a reason”. I’ve been working since I was 7.

When a person has lupus, according to the medical director for the Lupus Foundation of America, Dr. Joan Merrill, his or her “immune cells are rapidly dividing … to create inflammation”.

Selena Gomez is on the mend! “But with lupus, the immune system attacks healthy tissue in virtually every organ – including the skin, kidneys, lungs, and brain”.

Gomez fired back with indisputable confidence the next day, posting a selfie that showed off her gorgeous curves.

If you love Selena, you know exactly what we mean about her delicious pop songs. I believed a few of the words they were saying. That makes it her most successful United States single yet. Selena Gomez describes Revival as a body of work motivated by “hate” and a lot of that venom is directed towards tabloid gossip sites.

“Lupus medication actually causes most women to gain weight”, she tweeted.

“In retrospect, when you talk with these patients, it could have been misdiagnosed lupus”, he said.

Selena: I just spent my whole career doing that I think a little bit it was just so nice to be able to be like ugh I don’t care this is where I am. It’s about how I feel.

10/10/2015

Apple Pay coming to Starbucks shops at long last

KFC and Chili's will also accept Apple Pay by next spring.

Apple just landed a major coup for Apple Pay: Starbucks is officially on board, and will start allowing you to pay for your lattes with just a tap of your iPhone or Apple Watch at all 7,500 stores by next year. The coffee chain will be piloting Apple Pay in select locations over the next few months, so keep an eye out to see if your corner Starbucks is one of them.

But that’s not all: You’ll also be able to pay for a bucket of fried chicken with Apple Pay when the payment service comes to KFC by next spring, Apple Pay Vice President Jennifer Bailey announced at Re/code’s Code/Mobile conference on Thursday.

Bailey said KFC “has a special place in my heart—it was my first job ever” and that Apple is “seeing a lot of support for quick-service restaurants with a need for fast payment.”

It’s unclear if loyal Starbucks customers will earn points on their purchases if they use Apple Pay instead of their Starbucks card to pay for coffee—Bailey declined to comment on the specifics at Code/Mobile, but we expect that point will be cleared up before the widespread roll-out.

In an interesting twist, a sit-down restaurant is also part of the wave of new Apple Pay Partners: Chili’s plans to accept Apple Pay for tableside transactions by next spring. That’s a first.

Why this matters: With Best Buy already supporting Apple Pay at all of its 1,400 stores and Target planning to accept Apple’s mobile payment service in-store sometime soon, it looks like Apple Pay is finally making headway. Recent reports indicate that the majority of Apple Pay-compatible device owners haven’t even attempted to use the service, but that could be because it’s not yet available in many of the places you shop. These partnerships, plus Apple’s work with Square on an Apple Pay-compatible reader for small businesses, could finally jump-start Apple Pay’s mainstream use.

09/30/2015

Lady Gaga has been named Billboard's Woman of the Year for 2015.

The Grammy Award-winning popstar will be presented with the honour at the Women in Music event on December 11.

Previous recipients of the award include Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Pink.

The awards will be aired on Lifetime on December 18. Liz Gateley from Lifetime said: "We're delighted to partner with Billboard on this special event, bringing it to a mass audience for the first time ever.

"Lady Gaga is an extraordinary artist, emblematic of the strength, courage and fortitude that Lifetime celebrates, and we are thrilled to offer our platform to recognise her in every way she deserves."

09/30/2015

A woman walks past the Grand Hotel in Brighton carrying a cut out of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in Brighton, England. The four-day annual Labour Party Conference is expected to attract thousands of delegates with keynote speeches from influential politicians and over 500 fringe events.

09/30/2015

Android now has 1.4bn active users, 300m on Lollipop

Android maintains its long lead as the world's most widely used operating system.

Apple has sold more than one billion iOS devices since 2007, Microsoft is chasing one billion Windows 10 devices by 2018, but Google is way ahead now with 1.4 billion active Android users.

The new official figure for active Android users is up 400 million from the one billion active users it announced in June 2014 and the 900 million it counted in mid-2013.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the new milestone on Tuesday as the search giant unveiled the new Nexus 5X from LG and the Nexus 6P from Huawei, which both ship with Android Marshmallow 6.0, the latest version of the mobile operating system due for release this week.

Pichai said many of the users are coming from emerging markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia, ZDNet's sister site CNET reported.

He also noted that 10,000 companies have adopted Android for Work, as part of Google's effort to deliver a more secure and manageable Android for the enterprise.

The new figures comes amid some turmoil among established Android OEMs, such as Samsung and HTC, which have seen their share of shipments slip to not just Apple but also relative newcomers such as China's Xiaomi, which runs its own flavour of Android, and Huawei.

As analyst firm Gartner noted in its second-quarter smartphone report, Android grew 11 percent year on year to 82 percent but it was the lowest growth in its six-year history, off the back of a weak quarter in China.

Still, the number of active Android users makes Google's ecosystem by far the biggest on earth. Apple announced at the beginning of this year it had sold one billion iOS devices but that doesn't equate to active users. Asymco mobile analyst Horace Dediu estimated when iOS unit sales reached 700 million units in 2013 that the number of devices actually in use was about 500 million. He predicted it would take until 2018 for Apple to crack the one billion active user mark on the assumption that each iOS device owner had two iOS devices.

Another way to look at it is though version fragmentation, by comparing how many devices are using the most current OS. On that count Apple may be ahead of Android in total active users, thanks to the swift uptake of each new software update when it's released.

With Google's new figures out, and 20 percent currently running Lollipop, it means just under 300 million Android users have installed the latest version. However, Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans estimated that with iOS 9 already running on 52 percent of Apple mobile devices, Apple has 350 million to 400 million on its latest mobile OS.

Besides that, iOS owners spend more on apps than Android users do. Mobile analytic firm App Annie noted in its second quarter report that App Store revenues are about 70 percent higher than Google Play, thanks largely to Chinese consumers who are both keen on the App Store but also don't have access to Google Play. If a report from The Informationearlier this month is correct, the Huawei Nexus device could help change this.