Major sea ports around Australia have been shut down by operator DP World following what has been called a “cybersecurity incident.”
The container terminal operator made the decision late on Friday night, with access to ports heavily restricted on Saturday at Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Fremantle. “Our teams are working diligently to contain the situation and determine the impact on our systems and data,” DP World Australia said in a statement to the Australian Financial Review. “To safeguard our employees, customers and our networks, we have restricted landside access to our Australian port operations while we continue our investigation. “This is part of a comprehensive response which includes engaging with cybersecurity experts, actively investigating the incident and notifying the relevant authorities.” The hack follows another cybersecurity incident at Melbourne cryptocurrency exchange Coinspot on Thursday, in which more than $2m was taken from accounts. Another data breach in September caused the information of nearly 200,000 Pizza Hut customers to be leaked. Bookstore chain Dymocks also disclosed a data breach, in which customer data “may have been compromised,” also took place in September. DP World is a Dubai-based logistics company which operates cargo and port terminal services both in Australia and internationally. The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) recently voted on industrial action, extending their 24-hour rolling strike notice until November 20. There’s no suggestion the cybersecurity incident and the union actions are linked.
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Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse during a seven-year period at the height of his fame. Four women, including one who was just 16 at the time, have alleged sexual assaults occurred between 2006 and 2013, when Brand was working for BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4, as well as starring in Hollywood films. The comedian and actor also faces allegations of controlling, abusive and predatory behaviour, following a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4 Dispatches. Brand vehemently denies the allegations and in a video posted online, stated all of his relationships have been “consensual”, before accusing the media of a “co-ordinated attack”. It comes after Channel 4 Dispatches aired a 90-minute film titled Russell Brand: In Plain Sight on Saturday night, which saw four unidentified women detail their allegations, and other women speak of their experiences working with Brand on TV sets. It included Brand’s former personal assistant Helen Berger, who called him a “narcissist” in an interview for the programme. Meanwhile, Brand appeared as scheduled at the 2,000-capacity Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre in north-west London to perform a sold-out comedy gig on Saturday evening. His show, titled Bipolarisation, had been due to begin at 7pm, but was delayed by more than 45 minutes and lasted around an hour. While not directly addressing the allegations, audience members told the PA news agency Brand said he hoped they could “appreciate” there were things he could not talk about during the set. The allegations made against Brand include one woman who claims she was sexually assaulted during a three-month relationship with him when she was 16 and still at school. The woman described his behaviour towards her as “grooming” as he would allegedly provide her with scripts on how to deceive her parents into allowing her to visit him. In 2020, the woman contacted Brand’s literary agent at the time, who was also the co-founder of talent agency Tavistock Wood. A statement given to the PA news agency by Tavistock Wood said: “Russell Brand categorically and vehemently denied the allegation made in 2020, but we now believe we were horribly misled by him. TW has terminated all professional ties to Brand.”
2023 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
2023 FORMULA 1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP CONSTRUCTOR STANDINGS
FORMULA 1 ROLEX AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX 2023 - Race Results
FORMULA 1 ROLEX AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX 2023 - Top 10 Qualifying Results
Red Bull has officially announced Daniel Ricciardo’s return to its fold in a ‘third driver’ role for the 2023 Formula 1 season. Ricciardo’s return to Red Bull was all but confirmed during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend, when first Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko suggested the deal was done and then Ricciardo himself said it just required his final signature.
On Wednesday Red Bull formally announced that Ricciardo would rejoin it to “assist the team with testing and sim work, as well as commercial activity”. The Race understands that Ricciardo is likely to attend around seven grands prix next season in the role, including the three American rounds. “It is great to bring Daniel back into the Red Bull family,” said team principal Christian Horner. “He has enormous talent and such a brilliant character; I know the whole factory is excited to be welcoming him home. “In his role as test and third driver, Daniel will give us the chance to diversify, assisting in the development of the car, aiding the team with his experience and knowledge of what it takes to succeed in F1.” After being dropped by McLaren with a year to run on his contract, Ricciardo decided against chasing midfield race seats for 2023 and prioritised getting a reserve role at a top team so he could both take a degree of time away from F1 following two difficult seasons at McLaren but also showcase himself in the hope of getting a competitive 2024 opportunity. The Red Bull deal appears to be an ideal fit for his aims. Back in 2016, Australian startup Fomofx launched a digital whammy bar called the Virtual Jeff that could be mounted to just about any guitar, without having to modify the host instrument. Now the novel vibrato arm has gone Pro.
As before, the Pro doesn't involve breaking out the power tools to permanently modify the body, doesn't alter the string tension in any way (so no tuning nightmares), and it's made up of two main components. Most players will likely choose to mount the vibrato arm part of the setup behind the bridge or tailpiece for familiarity, but it could be placed anywhere that doesn't interfere with existing controls and hardware. The Virtual Jeff comes with a mounting block that's attached to the guitar using supplied adhesive tape and is reckoned to take just 10 seconds to install, then the whammy just slides on. The vibrato arm module then needs to be connected to a companion control box – though the company recommends a cabled connection between the Virtual Jeff Pro mounted on the host guitar and the control stomp on the floor, a 2.4-GHz mini-link transmitter is supplied. The host guitar's output jack also needs to be cabled up to the instrument input on the control box (though wireless systems like Line 6's Relay G10 are also supported). The player can set exactly how far up or down the pitch travels during a sweep, and can set up and switch between two different whammy presets. A new virtual capo mode is included for instant up-shifts but also drop tuning, and pickers can blend the original guitar sound with a pitched sound for "glorious chorus, metal sub-octaves, parallel harmonies and much more." A hold feature freezes the pitch during a bend to free up the picking hand. There are three footswitches atop the control box. The first is used to turn the system on or off, and two bypass modes are included. True bypass means that the system will not influence the guitar's output in any way, but the Pro also offers a studio-quality analog buffer for silent switching and to maintain a consistent tone. The middle footswitch hops between A and B presets, and the third is used to engage the virtual capo. It looks like you will need to invest in a separate A/B switch for the blend/hold feature though. Researchers from the University of Adelaide have found bots have had a major online presence during the war between Russia and Ukraine. The researchers analysed 5,203,764 tweets, retweets, quote tweets and replies posted to Twitter between 23 February 2022, and 8 March 2022, containing the hashtags #(I)StandWithPutin, #(I)StandWithRussia, #(I)SupportRussia, #(I)StandWithUkraine, #(I)StandWithZelenskyy and #(I)SupportUkraine. “We found that between 60 and 80 per cent of tweets using the hashtags we studied came from bot accounts during the first two weeks of the war,” said co-lead researcher Joshua Watt, an MPhil candidate in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Sciences. “This drove more angst in the online discourse and even impacted discussions surrounding people’s decision to flee or stay in Ukraine. “We observed increases in words such as ‘shame’, ‘terrorist’, ‘threat’, and ‘panic’. “Pro-Russian human accounts were having the largest influence on discussions of the war – particularly on accounts which were pro-Ukraine. “To our knowledge, this is the first body of published work which addresses online influence operations in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. “However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale. As a result, these environments can be used to manipulate discussion, as well as cause disruption and overall public distrust.” “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale." Fellow co-lead researcher, Bridget Smart, a Masters student in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, added: “Our research identifies that this is happening during the Russia-Ukraine war and provides a statistical framework which quantifies the extent to which this is happening. “This work extends and combines existing techniques to quantify how bots are influencing people in the online conversation around the Russia-Ukraine invasion.
“It opens up avenues for researchers to understand quantitatively how these malicious campaigns operate, and what makes them impactful. This research has identified that social media organisations may need to be better equipped for detecting and handling the use of bots on their networks. “It has identified that governments may need to have stricter policies on social media organisations, and that social media can be a vital tool during conflict.” The paper titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war” has been published in arXiv and will be presented at The International Conference on Social Informatics in Glasgow from 19-21 October. Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.
A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the corporate giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling crimes against the occupied Palestinian population. Google marketing manager and leading anti-Nimbus advocate Ariel Koren announced her resignation on Tuesday after what she described as a pattern of hostility and retaliation from management. After seven years with the company, Koren said she was presented with an ultimatum – move from San Francisco to Google’s Brazil office or quit – over her efforts lobbying against the project. “Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation towards me and many others,” Koren wrote in her resignation letter published on Medium. The secretive effort to provide an “all-encompassing cloud solution” powered by the company’s most advanced technology has seen Google abandon its prized transparency so much that employees have no idea what the tech they’re selling the IDF will really be used for, she claimed. |
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