Anecdotal History of Annandale

Marghanita da Cruz, author of the book series "Anecdotal History of Annandale", will chat about writing Sydney's history, 3pm Saturday 3 September 2016 at Tetch Gallery, 245 Parramatta Road, Annandale, Sydney, NSW.

Australian ICT 2020

Andrew Johnson, ACS CEO just asked the delegates at the Australian Computer Society 2016 Conference to consider ICT in the world of 2020. In amongst driver-less and flying cars, Andrew asked if we would be able to provide Internet access to all the Australian population and have sufficient students with the required STEM skills. 

It happens that I wrote "Canberra 2020: World Information Capital" for Informatics Magazine (September 1993), helped run the "Foundations of Open: Technology and Digital Knowledge Local 2020 Summit" for Senator Lundy in 2008 and wrote "Australian Higher Education in 2020" (2013). One thing I have learned from a previous attempt at future history, "Australia: The Networked Nation" (2005 from 1996), was how wrong such predictions can be.

Rather than just predict the future, I suggest ICT professionals are in the business of making the future. At a number of venues before the end of the year I will be speaking on the future of education, as it can be. This is starting with "Learning to Teach On-line with an E80 Blend" at the Australian National University, in Canberra, 7 September 2016. Other times, cities and countries to follow.

Computing is about people

The theme emerging from the Australian Computer Society Canberra Branch Conference is "Computing is about people" (suggested  by Jeff Mitchell). This emphasis on people was in Jon Cumming, ACT Chief Digital Officer, plenary keynote, then Maria Milosavljevic, Chief Innovation Officer at AUSTRAC and now Loise Smith from ACS is now presenting on Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

ACS Canberra 2016 Conference

Greetings from the ACS Canberra 2016 Conference.

8.30	9.00	Arrival Tea & Coffee (BALLROOM FOYER)
9.00	9.05	Conference opening (BALLROOM) - Conference Chair, Dr Tim Turner
9.05	9.25	Conference Address Data Fuels Innovation and the Digital Economy; But who owns and controls Data? Anthony Wong President, Australian Computer Society
9.25	10.15	Plenary Keynote (BALLROOM) Drones, Droids and Robots - Which one are you? Jon Cumming Chief Digital Officer, ACT Government
10.15	10.35	Tea & Coffee Break and Exhibition (GALLERY FOYER)
		Security (Derwent Room)	Leadership (Fitzroy Room)	Education (Murray Room)	The Future of Work (Swan Room)	Data Management (Torrens Room)
10.35	11.15	Session 1	Session 1	Session 1	Session 1	Session 1
		James Turner	Zoe Routh	Dr Maria Milosavijevic	Flavia Nardini	Chris Bradley
5 minutes		Change over
11.20	12.00	Session 2	Session 2	Session 2	Session 2	Session 2
		Ambarish Natu	Gill Savage	Chris Hamling	Mark Stevens	Glen Bell
12.00	12.40	Lunch
12.40	1.30	Plenary Keynote (BALLROOM) DDR, IWAR, HIoT – what more do you need to know? Dr Trish Williams
5 minutes		Change over
		Professionalism (Derwent Room)	Leadership (Fitzroy Room)	Education (Murray Room)	Analysis and Design (Swan Room)	Data Management (Torrens Room)
1.35	2.15	Session 3	Session 3	Session 3	Session 3	Session 3
		Denver Bunzel	Anna Perdriau	Tim Bell	Haydn Thomas	George Mouratidis
5 minutes		Change over
2.20	3.00	Session 4	Session 4	Session 4	Session 4	Session 4
		Dr Richard Lucas	Sharyn Csanki	Dr Therese Keane	Mandy Slater	Lloyd Robinson
3.00	3.20	Tea & Coffee Break and Exhibition (GALLERY FOYER)
3.20	4.00	Session 5	Session 5	Session 5	Session 5	Session 5
		Louise Smith	Michael Hawkins	Su-en Williams	Mia Horrigan	Dr Alexander Hall
5 minutes		Change over
4.05	4.55	Plenary Locknote (BALLROOM) Robotics, AI and the future of work: Public policy in the second half of the chess board Miguel Carrasco Partner and Managing Director, The Boston Consulting Group
4.55	5.15	Conference Address Robotics and the Future of Work Andrew Johnson CEO, Australian Computer Society
5.15	5.30	Closing Remarks Dr Tim Turner Conference Chair
5.30	7.00	Cocktail reception (GALLERY FOYER) - Social networking drinks
7.00	10.00	Gala Dinner (BALLROOM) Conference Dinner Address Andrew Barr MLA ACT Chief Minister
Conference End

House of Games at New Theater Sydney

The play "House of Games" is set in a Chicago poker club, where it is hard to know who is conning who. Set in the present day, Kate Shearer plays a therapist drawn into this seedy world to help one of her patents.

Kate Shearer makes a very believable Harvard trained therapist, who's frosty exterior begins to melt.  The rest of the cast struggle with their American accents, although they are playing con-artists, so are they acting at sounding fake?

Set Designer John Cervenka's poker club perhaps need some neon "Budweiser" signs and more clutter, whereas the therapist's office is suitably minimal. Costume Designer Deborah Mulhall succeeds with the look of Chicago high and low life. Playwright Richard Bean, provides some humor (especially at the expense of bankers), but they play has an untidy conclusion, with a new character and at the end.

"House of Games" is on at the New Theater, Newtown Sydney, until 10 September 2016 (my ticket was courtesy of the New Theater).

Chat with Anthony Feint

Entry29 hosted a "fireside chat" today at the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) with Anthony Feint, founder of Pen.io

Anthony described how he dropped out of university because he wanted to "build things" and went on to start several tech companies. He suggests that universities need to allow students to build and produce a portfolio of work.

ps: One advantage Australian university students have is that they can work in the USA for a year.

Droids Roll into Canberra Next Week

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) 2016 Annual Conference is Tuesday 23 August. The conference program has sessions on Security, Leadership, Education, Future of Work and Data Management.

Jon Cumming, Chief Digital Officer of the ACT Government will open the conference and Andrew Barr, ACT Chief Minister will speak at the dinner.

ps: The conference theme is Drones, Droids and Robots and Dr. Tim Turner Chairman of ACS Canberra, quipped in B2B magazine that Daleks were his first memory of a robot. But this is technically incorrect as Daleks are not robots, they are cyborgs: part organic and part mechanical. ;-)

RAND Report on Cyber War with China

In the RAND report "War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable" Gompert, Cevallos and  Garafola assume a regional conventional war, using ships, submarines, aircraft, spacecraft and also cyber-war. RAND is a US based think tank, which also has a Canberra Office.

The authors suggest that "Escalating cyberwarfare, while injurious to both sides, could worsen China’s economic problems and impede the government’s ability to control a restive population." (p. xiv). Also that "We also assume that China would not attack the U.S. homeland, except via cyberspace, given China’s minimal capability to do so with conventional weapons." (p. 11) and:

"In the future, cyberwarfare against military, dual-purpose, and civilian systems could figure importantly in a severely intense war. ... Whether with kinetic or nonkinetic (namely, cyber) weapons, the highest targeting priority for China would be U.S. strike platforms, bases, and force concentrations in the region." (p. 19). 

Also the report warns that cyber-attacks could escalate to nuclear war:

"... it is important for the United States to be aware of potentially dangerous ambiguities involved in attacks on targets that the Chinese could regard as strategic: attacks on missile launchers, even if intended only to degrade China’s theater-range missile capabilities; attacks on high-level military C2, even if intended only to degrade China’s conventional-operational capabilities; cyberwarfare attacks on strategic systems;" (p. 30)

The report warns of the cost of cyberwar and the difficulty of preventing it harming civilian systems which support military operations:

"Would both countries not be tempted to crash telecommunications or air-traffic control or energy-distribution systems that support fighting, or interfere with government-service networks?" (p. 49)

What this report fails to address is the effect of deliberate attack and collateral damage on other countries. Cyber-attacks are difficult to confine to one geographic area and will likely effect interconnected international systems and national and local ones well away from the conflict. In addition both sides may well make use of cyber-attacks on third countries, as a way to send a low risk political signal.

Australian Government Needs a Planned Response to Cyber Attack

The security of government information systems is the responsibility of government ministers, not IBM or the ABS. What should be of concern is not just that there was a successful denial of service attack on the Australian Census, but the apparent lack of a planned and practiced response from the relevant government ministers and their staff. Had this been a more serious attack, such as one on critical infrastructure threating lives, the poor performance by ministerial level of government could have been disastrous.

At the senior levels of government there need to be plans in place for who says what and when. These plans need to be tested in exercises, just as is done for natural disaster planning, which Australian state and local governments do well. Internet Australia (IA) members are discussing what form of submission to make to the likely Parliamentary inquiries into this matter. I suggest the Australian Computer Society (ACS) join with IA on this and try to widen the discussion to cover Internet security more generally. ACS and IA need not agree on every aspect, buy could loosely coordinate, as was done for the Internet regulation inquiries of the 1990s, as  described by Chen (2000, p. 161).

Reference

Chen, P. J. (2000). Australia's online censorship regime: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and governance compared. Retrieved from
https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/38780/65881_00000240_01_AOCR.pdf?sequence=1#page=162

Australian Population Census Computer System Problems

I had a call from ABC Radio this morning about the ABS announcing they had suffered denial of service attacks from overseas.  Perhaps the ABS staff need to go down to the foyer of their building and break the glass on the display case, with the punch card machine in it. I used a machine like that thirty years ago to write programs for the Census and it worked fine. ;-)

But seriously,  keep in mind this is not a safety critical system: no lives are endangered. People can fill it in tomorrow, or the day after, or get a paper form. But the minister needs to be asked if sufficient resources were given to the ABS and were they allowed to use their preferred method of data collection, which would be surveys, not a census.

At 9:50pm Census night I tried the ABS site at 10pm and still got:

"Thank you for participating in the Census. The system is very busy at the moment. Please wait for 15 minutes before trying again. Your patience and cooperation are appreciated. [code 9]"

The Census error message web page is 117 Kbytes, with 49 Kbytes of Javascript and 52 Kbytes of CSS, which seems a bit much just to display a few hundred characters of error message. But presumably this code is cached and reused throughout (in which case, it is not too large). The CSS uses Pure v0.5.0 . 

ps: My comments on the 2006 eCensus.

Time to Virtualise the NBN?

Sorensen and  Medina in "The End of Australia’s National Broadband Network?" (June 2016) deliver what some describe as a scathing assessment of the NBN. The Coalition Government first set out to build a copper broadband network for cities and terrestrial wireless for regional areas in 2007. Then a new ALP government canceled the contracts for the copper broadband, and also abandoned its own hybrid policy (2007), instead switching to FTTP fibre for cities. A later Coalition government then adopted the ALP's previous FTTN hybrid policy, scaling back the FTTP. This is hardly the first case in which a project is in difficulties due to political indecision.

The parts of the NBN which the politicians did not tinker with have gone well: the wireless for regional areas and satellites for remote. In my view the debate over FTTN v FTTP for homes in the city is of less importance, due to mobile broadband. It may not be worth installing fibre or copper for broadband to homes, as it is not homes where the consumer now wants the broadband, but on the mobile device in their hand.

References:

Coalition: Australia Connected: Fast affordable broadband for all Australians, Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Media Release 80/07, 18 June 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070621082132/http://www.minister.dcita.gov.au/media/media_releases/australia_connected_fast_affordable_broadband_for_all_australians

ALP: New Directions for Communications - A Broadband Future for Australia – Building a National Broadband Network, March 2007: https://web.archive.org/web/20070606203548/http://www.alp.org.au/download/now/a_broadband_future_for_australia.pdf

Sorensen,  Lucia Gamboa &   Medina, Andrew. The End of Australia’s National Broadband Network?, Tech Policy Institute, June 2016. https://techpolicyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Sorensen_Medina_TheEndofAustraliasNationalBroadbandNetwork.pdf