Good morning, it’s almost the weekend. For now, we’ve got five things happening in the tech world you might be interested in.
1. A new launch date for NASA’s Artemis
NASA is targeting the next launch attempt of the Artemis I mission for Monday, November 14 with lift-off of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft planned during a 69-minute launch window that opens at 3:07 pm AEDT. There has been a number of delays in the mission so far. While we’re in space, though, it’s worth a tiny mention this morning that although SpaceX is yet to send Starship to orbit, it’s selling rides aboard the future megarocket. To billionaires, of course.
2. Australia-wide banking blunder
Many Australians were on Thursday morning confronted with strange behaviour on their bank accounts, with an industry-wide outage rendering many banks unable to transfer funds. The issue is affecting the New Payments Platform and Osko payments (the thing that allows you to send cash to friends in seconds). The outage was brought to our attention in a tweet from ANZ bank, but it has now been running for nearly 12 hours.
Hi everyone, we’re currently experiencing an industry-wide outage to New Payments Platform (NPP)/Osko payments made via Internet Banking, ANZ App and ANZ Plus. The processing of some payments may be delayed and some payments may fail… 1/2
— ANZ Australia (@ANZ_AU) October 12, 2022
3. Canva surpasses 100 million users
Australian startup darling Canva has announced that more than 100 million people in 190 countries are using its Photoshop competitor every month. The surge in growth follows the recent launch of Canva’s Visual Worksuite, with the platform gaining more than 15 million additional monthly active users as many realised the break from Google/Microsoft was possible. Canva launched in 2013.
4. Telco solidarity in wake of Optus breach
Telstra chair John Mullen and new CEO Vicki Brady offered support to Optus in their addresses to the carrier’s annual general meeting, iTnews is reporting. “May I just say that it is easy for third parties to be critical of companies who have suffered devastating cyber-attacks such as happened recently to Optus,” Mullen said, adding, “Let me be blunt, however, and say that it is easy to be critical when it isn’t you in the firing line.” Vodafone, meanwhile sent emails to customers telling them all how it’s keeping their data safe in the wake of the Optus data breach.
5. Google launches Career Certificates
Google yesterday launched ‘Career Certificates’, a bunch of online courses that it hopes will help upskill Aussies in tech-adjacent fields. The online courses, Google said, focus on IT support, data analytics, project management, digital marketing and e-commerce and UX design. It’ll cost $56 per month to Coursera for the admin and hosting fees, but Google will also provide 10,000 free scholarships with a focus on women and First Nations Australians so they can access the courses.
BONUS ITEM: Today, we learned that Aussie research company Cortical Labs assembled a small brain in a lab using stem cells from both human and embryonic mice, about 800,000 in total. The company claims the resulting neural network “learned” how to play a simulation of Atari’s 1972 tennis game, Pong.
— Cortical Labs (@CorticalLabs) October 12, 2022
See you tomorrow!