Elon Musk’s Starlink ‘coming to Australia’
New data hints that the SpaceX satellite internet provider will soon launch Down Under, taking on the likes of Telstra and the NBN.
Hello and welcome to The Download, The Australian’s technology blog for the latest tech news.
David Swan 4.40pm: Elon Musk’s Starlink ‘coming to Australia’
New data hints that Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet provider Starlink will soon launch Down Under, taking on the likes of Telstra and the NBN.
According to a Reddit thread on Monday, SpaceX recently changed the name of its Australian subsidiary from “TIBRO AUSTRALIA” to ”STARLINK AUSTRALIA”, while a coverage map shows that areas of Darwin and Tasmania are already covered by Starlink’s high-speed internet services.
The Starlink constellation will consist of thousands of satellites, providing high-speed internet from the end of this year.
The company is aiming to provide fast and cheap internet access across the globe, particularly to areas that are currently underserved by reliable internet.
Its CEO Elon Musk has said the program will initially target the US and Canada, and it’s now thought that Australia will be part of the company’s plans.
SpaceX this week launched 80 satellites into orbit.
“Once these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to roll out a fairly wide public beta in northern US and hopefully southern Canada,” Musk tweeted this week.
“Other countries to follow as soon as we receive regulatory approval.”
According to the Reddit thread, Starlink has received ACMA permits for four ground station locations across remote parts of Australia.
If it was to launch in Australia, Starlink would go head-to-head with NBN’s Sky Muster satellites which service much of rural Australia, as well as retail providers including Telstra.
“With performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable,” Starlink says on its website.
SpaceX was contacted for comment.
Chris Griffith 12.30pm: Nuheara to build earbuds for HP
Perth-based audio start-up Nuheara has snagged $2 million in funds to develop special earbuds for global tech firm HP.
Nuheara in a statement to the stock market says it has achieved a phase II extension of the collaboration agreement it had with HP. “On successfully completing a proof of concept, Nuheara has now been awarded a $2 million phase II purchase order for works associated with the development and engineering of an ear bud variant specific to HP’s confidential use case,” the Nuheara statement says.
It says phase I was previously awarded for accompanying software services. “This next stage of the HP collaboration agreement is the result of Nuheara’s globally recognised leadership in hearables innovation,” says Nuheara CEO Justin Miller.
“We are looking forward to deepening this strategic OEM partnership over the coming months.”
Nuheara is one of three Australian firms that have made a name internationally by creating headphones and earbuds with sound that adjusts to the wearer’s hearing capability. They typically do a hearing test using an app and this is applied to the audio. Sound is boosted at frequencies where the wearer’s hearing is weakest and softened where hearing is strongest.
Audeara (Brisbane) and Nura (Melbourne) provide similarly tailored hearing products.
Nuheara announced its latest IQbuds2MAX earbuds at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, shortly before the pandemic.
8.20am Tech firms set new pandemic precedent: if workers move to cheaper housing areas, they earn less
Tech workers fleeing the San Francisco Bay area to work remotely amid the pandemic are facing a new reality: pay cuts.
Over the past several months, COVID-19 has shaken traditional notions of where employees can work. In Silicon Valley, which has a relatively high cost of living and an employee base with access to state-of-the-art remote-work tools, companies are devising plans for a future with decentralised staffs. In some cases, changes can include cutting salaries by 15 per cent or more depending on where someone moves.
The nascent pay-cut movement stands to create tension between some of the most profitable companies in the world and skilled employees who enjoy high salaries.
Companies point out that changing pay based on the local cost of living is standard practice for many organisations, including the federal government — with decisions to raise or lower salaries related to housing costs and other factors. Letting someone take a San Francisco salary to Wyoming could be considered unfair to present and future remote hires in cheaper cities who might receive a lower wage.
But Silicon Valley companies have spent years going beyond standard corporate norms to endear themselves to their workers. In an era where companies rain free food, massages and yoga studios on their software engineers, the cold rationality of geography-based pay risks alienating employees used to being courted.
“If anyone should be standing up for high pay, equal pay and great talent, it should be these companies — I find it to be pretty hypocritical,” said Jason Fried, chief executive of Basecamp LLC, a Chicago-based maker of workplace software that has a remote workforce. Tech companies are so profitable they can easily afford to do what is right, he said. “You’re hiring a person and the skills they bring.”
In May, Facebook said it was shifting toward a substantially remote workforce over the next decade and that location would affect compensation. A spokeswoman for Facebook declined to share any salary data by market. Twitter was among the first to announce it would allow employees to work remotely permanently, has said it has a competitive approach to pay localisation.
More companies have followed suit. Microsoft said last week that it will let some employees work remotely on a permanent basis, according to a blog post. Some will be allowed to move domestically in the US, pending approval, but benefits and pay might change based on the company’s compensation scale by location.
Payments company Stripe has started offering employees leaving San Francisco, New York or Seattle a one-time bonus of $20,000 to relocate, but they would have to take a pay cut of as much as 10 per cent. For employees at VMware, a cloud software provider, moving from the Bay Area to Denver could mean a cut of as much as 18 per cent.
The Wall Street Journal
Chris Griffith 9:30am: CSIRO offers a compelling reason for contactless payments
Australia’s national science agency CSIRO has given Australians more reason to stop using banknotes and swap to contactless payments with credit/debit cards, smart phones and smart watches.
CSIRO, in a paper, has included paper and polymer banknotes among common surfaces where COVID-19 can survive for up to 28 days. Given it’s not the usual practice for people to wipe their banknotes with disinfectant before tendering them, it’s a worrying conclusion.
“At 20 °C, infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus was still detectable after 28 days post inoculation, for all non-porous surfaces tested (glass, polymer note, stainless steel, vinyl and paper notes),” the paper says.
“Data presented in this study for banknotes is significantly longer than reported for other respiratory viruses such as Influenza A (H3N2) which demonstrated survival up to 17 days at room temperature [39],” it says.
Tech minded types using contactless payments are not off the hook. CSIRO found that glass, such as that on mobile phone screens, is another medium where COVID-19 can survive for up to 28 days.
“It is important to note that after 28 days, infectious SARS-CoV-2 was also recovered from stainless steel, vinyl and glass, suggesting survivability on paper or polymer banknotes was not very different from the other non-porous surfaces studied.”
The research, undertaken at the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) in Geelong, found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, survived longer at lower temperatures, tended to survive longer on non-porous or smooth surfaces such as glass, stainless steel and vinyl, compared to porous complex surfaces such as cotton.
In the end, transmission is primarily be aerosol where SARS-CoV-2 can survive for up to three hours. “The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be primarily via aerosols and recent studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 is able to remain infectious in airborne particles for greater than 3 h,” the paper says.
“Establishing how long the virus really remains viable on surfaces enables us to more accurately predict and mitigate its spread, and do a better job of protecting our people,” says CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall. “Together, we hope this suite of solutions from science will break down the barriers between us, and shift focus to dealing with specific virus hot spots so we can get the economy back on track.”
7.40am Twitter to reign in retweets ahead of US poll
Twitter will make it harder for posts to go viral ahead of the US election, including by putting limits on how users can retweet.
The moves also include pointing users viewing certain tweets to credible content. They are among the boldest yet for the social-media platform and are designed to slow the spread of misinformation.
Where users previously hit a button to reshare, or “retweet,” items, they will now be directed to a screen that will encourage adding commentary before resharing posts. If users don’t write anything, their post will still appear as a traditional retweet — but the change “adds some extra friction” in the process, according to a company blog post.
Twitter has begun experimenting with this change for some users and will roll it out to all users on October 20. The change will last at least through the end of the week of the US election.
“We hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts,” Twitter’s legal, policy, trust and safety head Vijaya Gadde and product lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote in a blog post.
Social-media companies have been scrambling to clamp down on potential confusion and ways their platforms can be abused to undermine the integrity of the political process in the U.S.
Facebook has said it would suspend all political advertising after the polls close on November 3, something that other platforms including Twitter and TikTok have already implemented, and many platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have taken steps to ban QAnon, the fast-growing conspiracy movement.
Twitter previously conducted experiments to encourage users to read articles before sharing them on the site.
Additionally, Twitter plans to display a new prompt that provides credible information when users attempt to retweet a post that Twitter has identified as containing misleading information. This change starts next week.
Twitter currently labels tweets that contain misleading information about COVID-19 and US elections, among other items. Tweets that receive these labels are de-amplified in Twitter’s algorithm, and the company, in some cases, will remove these tweets.
Twitter said a subset of the tweets that receive misinformation labels will be made harder for users to share and feature a suggestion that users add their own context before reposting them. These new warnings will apply to tweets that are labelled as containing misinformation and posted by users who have outsized influence on the platform, such as US political figures and US-based users with more than 100,000 followers.
In a bid to slow the spread of tweets, the company is tweaking its algorithm to stop tweets from appearing in feeds simply based on the amount of likes they receive. Currently, the tweets that users see are arranged via an algorithm that includes content from accounts they follow as well as tweets that other users like.
Other changes are designed to add more context rather than slow the spread of content. Twitter said it will only surface topics in its personalised trending topics tab for users in the US if they include an explanation. This change will require Twitter’s curators to review the trending topics more closely — and add descriptions of links to articles for the items that are included.
Twitter’s list of trending topics has come under scrutiny for promoting content at times stemming from misinformation campaigns intended to make certain ideas appear more popular than they really are.
Twitter also said the company plans to label any tweets that falsely claim a win for any candidate and remove tweets that encourage violence or call for people to interfere with polling places or election results. To determine the results of an election in the US, the company said it will require either an announcement from state election officials or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls.
The Wall Street Journal
Chris Griffith 7:10am: Why Google really opposes final offer arbitration
Oracle has hit out at Google’s history of frustrating regulators by using every legal manoeuvre it can to challenge government decisions and delay court settlements. Its lashing of Google comes as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) devises a platform that will see Facebook and Google make payments to media companies for news content they use is searches and other services.
The ACCC has raised the idea of using “final offer arbitration” to provide a more level playing field between the big tech firms and media companies in negotiations. Final offer arbitration also would stop big tech firms continually going to court with the effect of frustrating and derailing proposed settlements.
Oracle executive vice-president Ken Glueck last week wrote a stinging expose of Google’s modus operandi. “Google has mastered the art of winning by kicking the can down the road,” Mr Glueck said. “It can afford to play the long game. Deny every claim, appeal any adverse decision, run out the clock on every opponent — including government regulators.”
Mr Glueck said internal document disclosures during the ten-year Oracle-Google litigation offered a revealing look inside Google’s corporate inner sanctum.
“In Google’s case it’s not a flattering picture,” he wrote. “They (documents) reflect a world view in which intellectual property protections, especially copyrights, are inconvenient and costly barriers to Google’s exploitation of others’ creations. This is true for both Google’s unauthorised use of third party technology like Java to build and run its platforms and its unauthorised use of third party content like news articles, reviews, books, images, and songs to draw users to its ad-supported services.”
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