An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Although tidal energy is still in its infancy, it could help to reduce Australia's dependence on fossil fuels... The island nation is only beginning to explore tidal power through a number of pilot projects. But this form of energy has one major advantage: its predictability. While the sun may not shine, or the wind may not blow, the sea moves in predictable tidal currents...

Among those harnessing this tidal potential is Sydney-based Mako Energy. The company makes underwater turbines ranging between two and four meters in diameter. One turbine operating in constantly flowing water can produce enough electricity to power up to 20 homes. Their design enables them to generate electricity even in slow-flowing water, meaning they could be used in rivers and irrigation canals as well as the ocean. "We're developing turbines at a scale where they can be deployed easily in remote communities, coastal businesses, island communities and resorts," Douglas Hunt, managing director of Mako Energy, told CNN Business...

So far, Mako's customers have predominantly been large industrial and government sites, but it wants to make its turbines accessible to energy customers big and small... "We want to contribute to an energy mix that is less reliant on fossil fuels, by empowering local businesses and communities to generate their own power from a predictable and abundant source that is hiding in plain sight — often flowing directly past communities," says Hunt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Google has raised a handful of concerns with Australia's pending Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill), including the Commonwealth's choice of phrasing, the avenues proposed for record-sharing, and the Bill being at odds with the purpose of the United States' Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act). [...] In a submission [PDF] to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) and its review of the IPO Bill, Google said while it encourages and supports efforts by the Australian government to negotiate an executive agreement, it said there are certain elements of the Bill that give it cause for concern.

"Especially when considering how the interception powers under this Bill could be used in tandem with technical capability notices under the controversial Telecommunications and Other Legislation (Assistance and Access) Act," it wrote. Making a recommendation to the PJCIS, Google said the Bill should not apply to service providers in their capacity as infrastructure providers to corporations or government entities, saying corporations or government entities are best placed to produce the requested records themselves. Under the Bill, designated communications providers are instructed to provide any requested communications and data to the requesting agency or the Australian Designated Authority. Google would prefer the authority to be a two-way channel.

Google also poked holes in the Bill's enforcement threshold. Civil penalties for non-compliance with an IPO establishes a framework for compliance. If a designated communications provider receives a valid IPO and the designated communications provider meets the "enforcement threshold" when the IPO is issued, the designated communications provider must comply with the IPO. Google labelled the two-step test that is the threshold, a "relatively low bar to meet." "Failure to comply with an IPO may lead to a civil penalty of up to AU$10 million for body corporates. The imposition of a mandatory obligation to comply with an IPO is contrary to the purpose of the CLOUD Act which is to lift blocking statutes, but explicitly does not create a compulsory obligation on service providers," it said. Specifically, the search giant said it was concerned by the attempt to impose a mandatory obligation on overseas-based designated communications providers that exists "only in the construct of an otherwise non-compulsory international agreement." Google is seeking further information about the role that eligible judges will play in approving IPOs that involve the interception of communications. It also wants the appeal options contained within the Bill to be strengthened.

Pioneering Australian scientist Robert May, whose work in biology led to the development of chaos theory, has died at age 84. The Guardian reports: Known as one of Australia's most accomplished scientists, he served as the chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom, was president of the Royal Society, and was made a lord in 2001. Born in Sydney on January 8, 1938, May's work was influential in biology, zoology, epidemiology, physics and public policy. More recently, he applied scientific principles to economics and modeled the cause of the 2008 global financial crisis. On Wednesday, his friends and colleagues paid tribute to a man who they said was a gifted polymath and a "true giant" among scientists.

Dr Benjamin Pope, an Australian astrophysicist and student at Oxford from 2013 to 2017, said May was a role model, and meeting him was a highlight of his university career. "I became aware of his achievements almost as soon as I learnt anything about physics in university," Pope told Guardian Australia. "My first contact with computer programming was at the University of Sydney, in first year physics, where the example is to recreate Robert May's experiment with the bifurcation diagram and the logistic map. "His bifurcation diagram is one of the iconic diagrams in physics," he said. "[And] he made what was between three or four independent discoveries that lead to chaos theory. You might have heard of the butterfly effect ... May's is probably the other foundational, computational model of chaos."

"What Australia and New Zealand have already accomplished is a remarkable cause for hope," reports the New York Times, in an inspiring article shared by Slashdot reader tflf (also republished here and here): The results are undeniable: Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve. Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world. New Zealand's own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million...

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians. "It meant we could have a test up and running quickly that was reasonably comparable everywhere," Dr. Collignon said. The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workersâ¦

Both nations are now reporting just a handful of new infections each day, down from hundreds in March, and they are converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations.

"Australia's coronavirus tracing app, dubbed COVIDSafe, has been released as the nation seeks to contain the spread of the deadly pandemic," reports ABC.net.au: People who download the app will be asked to supply a name, which can be a pseudonym, their age range, a mobile number and post code. Those who download the software will be notified if they have contact with another user who tests positive for coronavirus... Using Bluetooth technology, the app "pings" or exchanges a "digital handshake" with another user when they come within 1.5 metres of each other, and then logs this contact and encrypts it.

The data remains encrypted on a user's phone for 21 days, after which it is deleted if they have not been in contact with a confirmed case. The application will have two stages of consent that people will have to agree to: initially when they download the app so data can be collected, and secondly to release that data on their phone if they are diagnosed with the virus. If a person with the app tested positive to COVID-19, and provided they consent to sharing the information, it will be sent to a central server. From here, state and territory health authorities can access it and start contacting other people who might have contracted coronavirus...

The app is voluntary and it will be illegal to force anyone to download it.
In addition, Australia "will make it illegal for non-health officials to access data collected on smartphone software to trace the spread of the coronavirus," reports Reuters, citing comments Friday by Prime Minister Scott Morrison "amid privacy concerns raised by the measure." Australia has so far avoided the high death toll of other countries, with only 78 deaths, largely as a result of tough restrictions on movement that have brought public life to a standstill. The federal government has said existing "social distancing" measures will remain until at least mid-May, and that its willingness to relax them will depend on whether people download the smartphone "app" to identify who a person with the illness has had contact with...

Morrison also confirmed a local media report which said the data would be stored on servers managed by AWS, a unit of U.S. internet giant Amazon.com Inc, but added that "it's a nationally encrypted data store".
"The spec for it is very privacy-positive," writes Slashdot reader Bleve97, adding "It will be interesting to see what it looks like once it's been disassembled in a sandbox and played with!"

And Slashdot reader betsuin has already installed it (adding that the app "does not require GPS... I've installed, GPS is off on my rooted device."

Today is Anzac Day, a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand for those who served, marked on the anniversary of the 1915 campaign that led to the first major casualties for Australian and New Zealand Army Corp forces during World War One.

"More than 87,000 Turks died, along with an estimated 44,000 men from the British Empire and France, including 8,500 Australians and nearly 3,000 New Zealanders," remembers the BBC, "one in four of the Kiwis sent to Gallipoli."

Taking special note is free and open source software engineer Daniel, who is also a Debian developer, who writes: In 1981, the movie Gallipoli made the career of Mel Gibson. In 2018, The Guardian lamented that Australia had reached peak Anzac after committing $500 million to expand a war memorial.

At the other end of the spectrum, a group of students in Kosovo organized a very low-budget Remembrance Day hackathon in 2019 and it has now been used as the foundation for a data-driven online Anzacathon while traditional memorials will remain closed due to coronavirus.

The video helps us reflect not only on the legacy of the Anzacs but our own plight today.
Living in Europe, Pocock describes the origins of the project. "Last year I had asked myself: are there any sites where there is only one Australian casualty, where nobody has visited them for Anzac Day?"

The activities list on the Anzacathon page now suggests updating its list of lone Anzac graves around the world, by sharing your own information from the Anzac honour roll of your school, village, company, or club.

As coronavirus infections tore across the U.S. in early March, a Silicon Valley executive called the survival shelter manufacturer Rising S Co. He wanted to know how to open the secret door to his multimillion-dollar bunker 11 feet underground in New Zealand. From a report: The tech chief had never used the bunker and couldn't remember how to unlock it, said Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Co. "He wanted to verify the combination for the door and was asking questions about the power and the hot water heater and whether he needed to take extra water or air filters," Lynch said. The businessman runs a company in the Bay Area but lives in New York, which was fast becoming the world's coronavirus epicenter. "He went out to New Zealand to escape everything that's happening," Lynch said, declining to identify the bunker owner because he keeps his client lists private. "And as far as I know, he's still there."

For years, New Zealand has featured prominently in the doomsday survival plans of wealthy Americans worried that, say, a killer germ might paralyze the world. Isolated at the edge of the earth, more than 1,000 miles off the southern coast of Australia, New Zealand is home to about 4.9 million people, about a fifth as many as the New York metro area. The clean, green, island nation is known for its natural beauty, laid-back politicians and premier health facilities. In recent weeks, the country has been lauded for its response to the pandemic. It enforced a four-week lockdown early, and today has more recoveries than cases. Only 12 people have died from the disease. The U.S. death toll stands at more than 39,000, meaning that country's death rate per capita is about 50 times higher.

The underground global shelter network Vivos already has installed a 300-person bunker in the South Island, north of Christchurch, said Robert Vicino, the founder of the California-based company. He's fielded two calls in the past week from prospective clients eager to build additional shelters on the island. In the U.S., two dozen families have moved into a 5,000-person Vivos shelter in South Dakota, he said, where they're occupying a bunker on a former military base that's about three-quarters the size of Manhattan. Vivos has also built an 80-person bunker in Indiana, and is developing a 1000-person shelter in Germany. Rising S Co. has planted about 10 private bunkers in New Zealand over the past several years. The average cost is $3 million for a shelter weighing about 150 tons, but it can easily go as high as $8 million with additional features like luxury bathrooms, game rooms, shooting ranges, gyms, theaters and surgical beds.

"Social media giants Facebook and Google will be forced to pay Australian media companies for sharing their content or face sanctions under a landmark decision..." reports the New Zealand Herald: The move comes as the media industry reels from tumbling advertising revenue, already in decline before the Covid 19 coronavirus outbreak collapsed the market. Australia will become the first government to impose a legal regime including financial penalties for digital platforms that profit from content produced by the news media.

The federal Government has instructed competition watchdog, the ACCC, to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants to adhere to. Writing in the Australian newspaper this morning, treasurer Josh Frydenberg said it was "only fair" that the search engines and social media giants pay for the original news content that they use to drive traffic to their sites.

Long-time Slashdot reader robbyyy writes: Facebook has been accused of violating its users rights by tracking users internet activity even after they have logged out of the platform. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that users could now pursue them under various privacy and wiretapping laws.

Facebook is still dealing with the legal ramifications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal both in Australia and around the world.
"Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Facebook set an expectation that logged-out user data would not be collected, but then collected it anyway," the judge wrote. "In addition, the amount of data allegedly collected was significant...

"In light of the privacy interests and Facebook's allegedly surreptitious and unseen data collection, Plaintiffs have adequately alleged a reasonable expectation of privacy."

The New York Post reports that a COVID-19 vaccine "may be six months away, according to a researcher leading a team of scientists in England." "I think there's a high chance that it will work based on other things that we have done with this type of vaccine," Sarah Gilbert, a professor of virology at Oxford told The Times of London. "It's not just a hunch and as every week goes by we have more data to look at. I would go for 80 percent, that's my personal view."
Gilbert added that if they can find places that haven't imposed a lockdown, "we will get our efficacy results very quickly."

America and Israel have also reported encouraging progress on a vaccine. And in the Netherlands and Australia, researchers are testing the effectiveness of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine developed in the 1920s (with more tests being scheduled for Africa, and experiments in the U.K.) UPI reports researchers in the Netherlands "have started recruiting 1,000 healthcare workers, who are at high risk for COVID-19, in eight hospitals who will receive either the BCG vaccine or a placebo."

The Times of London reports that the U.K. government "signalled that it would be willing to fund the manufacture of millions of doses in advance" if the results of professor Gilbert's research looked promising. "This would allow it to be available immediately to the public if it were proven to work.

"With ministers struggling to find a strategy to exit the lockdown, long-term hopes of a return to normality rely on a vaccine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Surveys conducted by scientists at Australia's James Cook University and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority show that a summer of extreme heat has caused the reef, which is a World Heritage Site, to suffer a mass bleaching of unprecedented scale. Corals from the far north to the southern tip of the 1,400 mile-long ecosystem are experiencing severe impacts. It was also one of the reef's worst mass bleaching episodes in terms of intensity, second only to 2016, which killed half of all shallow-water corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef. Unlike the summer of 2016, when an intense marine heat wave coincided with one of the strongest El Nino events on record, this past summer brought a bleaching event without any assistance from the Pacific climate oscillation.

As heat built across the reef in February, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority began reporting pockets of bleaching in the far north toward the end of the month. By early March, vast swaths of the ecosystem had accumulated eight or more "degree heating weeks," a metric scientists use to describe recent cumulative heat exposure. At this threshold, reef scientists expect to see widespread bleaching and mortality from thermal stress, according to NOAA. Researchers decided to conduct aerial and waterborne surveys to assess the extent of the damage. The surveys, which took place during the last two weeks of March, quickly confirmed the reef has undergone its third mass bleaching event in the past five years. "This year, some 35 percent of the 1,036 reefs the scientists surveyed experienced moderate bleaching, while a quarter were severely bleached," the report adds. "Scientists saw severe bleaching on coastal reefs from Torres Strait in the far north to the southern border of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, at levels only eclipsed during 2016."

What's troubling to see is bleaching in the south, which has managed to escape the previous two events. "In the northern and central Great Barrier Reef, these corals were largely annihilated by bleaching in 2016-17, transforming vast swaths of the reef into a 'highly altered, degraded system,'" reports The Washington Post, citing a 2018 paper in the journal Nature. "Now the south seems poised to slide into a similar ecological disrepair."

According to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power, marking another record. The Guardian reports: Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the U.S., with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world's oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity generation capacity built in 2019 was renewable. The world has invested about $3 trillion in renewables over the past decade, according to Irena, but annual investments must double by 2030 to tackle the climate emergency.

The Irena data shows the increase in new renewable energy capacity slowed slightly in 2019 - from 179GW to 176GW -- but that new fossil fuel power also fell. The total green energy installed to date around the world grew by 7.6%, with the UK's total rising 6.1%. The UK is now 11th in the world for installed renewables. New solar power provided 55% of the new capacity, most of which was installed in Asia, with China, India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam leading the way. Other major increases were seen in the U.S., Australia, Spain, Germany and Ukraine. Wind power made up 34% of the total, with almost half in China and significant additions in the U.S. Global wind power capacity remains just ahead of solar, with 95% being onshore turbines. Other green technologies -- hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal and marine energy -- all grew modestly year-on-year. While small compared with solar and wind power, geothermal energy -- tapping the heat of deep rocks -- is growing, with Turkey, Indonesia and Kenya leading the way.

"From face-shields to respirator valves, 3-D printer owners pitch in to the efforts to provide PPE to Australian hospitals," writes davecb (Slashdot reader #6,526).

It's not only happening in Australia. But the Guardian talked to Mat Bowtell, a former Toyota engineer in Australia who's using fourteen 3D printers to manufacture thousands of face shields for healthcare workers. And citing 3D printing, the director of a not-for-profit working with the government says the country has an "incredible onshore capability" to respond to the pandemic: "The 3D printing capability onshore is a massive distinguisher for Australia to step up to the crisis," he said. When asked how else 3D printing might be deployed in practice, Goennemann points to the supply of ventilators, which are needed to assist breathing in the most seriously ill Covid-19 patients... Goennemann says Resmed, the main ventilator manufacturer, could struggle to get parts due to the disruption of global supply chains. That's where 3D printing can help. "I don't want to speak on behalf of Resmed, but that's an area where we have critical supply, and parts can be 3D printed onshore rather than being procured offshore," he said...

For Bowtell, the decision to shift his production to face shields had nothing to do with profit. It was about doing what he could in the most extraordinary of times. "It's about survival at the moment," Bowtell said. "Just helping people to get through this together."
Reuters also reported that one Italian company used its 3D printers to manufacture valves for respirators for its local hospital. And a paywalled article at Fortune also describes the team building an open source ventilator, while also noting that more than 4,800 people with 3D printers "have, via a public Google Doc, signed up to help print everything from face shields to ventilator parts for their local hospitals."

They also highlight Budmen Industries, an upstate New York company selling 3D printers that has now also printed 1,492 face shields for New York medical workers. And finally there's the CoVent-19 Challenge, "an open innovation 8-week Grand Challenge for engineers, innovators, designers, and makers" on the GrabCAD Challenges platform, to create "a rapidly deployable, minimum viable mechanical ventilator for patients with COVID-19 related ventilator-dependent lung injury."

Everything is so dark, but the internet -- for all its bad and broken parts -- is helping to keep us together in a way that has never happened before, writes Joshua Topolsky in an essay on Input Mag. Two excerpts from the essay: What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be. At a time when politicians and many corporations have exhibited the worst instincts, we're seeing some of the best of what humanity has to offer -- and we're seeing it because the internet exists.

I was 12 the first time I logged onto whatever was called the internet then. There were no websites to speak of, not really. No ecommerce, no banner ads, no data tracking, no spyware. iPhones hadn't been invented yet; we called apps "programs"; and I had an EGA monitor on my PC (a whole 16 colors of range). But the first time I telnetted into a chatroom about raves, made new friends in Australia, or downloaded files to load into a music tracker, I felt the same elation that I feel now. This force, propelled by people, connected by copper and light, letting us make new connections. Connections we need now more than ever. We're here together, for how long we don't know. But we're not alone. Not anymore.

An Australian astrophysicist has been admitted to hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose in an attempt to invent a device that stops people touching their faces during the coronavirus outbreak. The Guardian reports: Dr Daniel Reardon, a research fellow at a Melbourne university, was building a necklace that sounds an alarm on facial contact, when the mishap occurred on Thursday night. The 27 year-old astrophysicist, who studies pulsars and gravitational waves, said he was trying to liven up the boredom of self-isolation with the four powerful neodymium magnets.

Reardon said he placed two magnets inside his nostrils, and two on the outside. When he removed the magnets from the outside of his nose, the two inside stuck together. Unfortunately, the researcher then attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them. "As I was pulling downwards to try and remove the magnets, they clipped on to each other and I lost my grip. And those two magnets ended up in my left nostril while the other one was in my right. At this point I ran out of magnets." Before attending the hospital, Reardon attempted to use pliers to pull them out, but they became magnetized by the magnets inside his nose. At the hospital, a team of two doctors applied an anesthetic spray and manually removed the magnets from Reardon's nose. "Needless to say I am not going to play with the magnets any more," Reardon said.

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The first official mission for the new U.S. Space Force lifted off from Florida at 4:18 p.m. EDT on Thursday into a virtually cloudless sky with a military communications satellite aboard. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket emblazoned with the Space Force chevron logo carried the satellite toward orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Stations Complex 41.

The payload on board is the sixth in a constellation of next-generation satellites known as Advanced Extremely High Frequency or AEHF. The satellite system, developed by Lockheed Martin, has upgraded anti-jamming capability. Northrop Grumman is the manufacturer. The new network provides global coverage for national leaders and tactical warfighters operating on the ground, at sea or in the air, Lockheed said. The anti-jam system also serves international allies such as Canada, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the Center for Translational Atomaterials (CTAM) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new graphene-based film that can absorb sunlight with an efficiency of over 90 percent, while simultaneously eliminating most IR thermal emission loss -- the first time such a feat has been reported. The result is an efficient solar heating metamaterial that can heat up rapidly to 83 degrees C (181 degrees F) in an open environment with minimal heat loss. Proposed applications for the film include thermal energy harvesting and storage, thermoelectricity generation, and seawater desalination.

The 3D structured graphene metamaterial (SGM) is composed of a 30-nanometer-thick film of alternating graphene and dielectric layers deposited on a trench-like nanostructure that does double duty as a copper substrate to enhance absorption. More importantly, the substrate is patterned in a matrix arrangement to enable flexible tunability of wavelength-selective absorption. The graphene film is designed to absorb light between 0.28- to 2.5-micrometer wavelengths. And the copper substrate is structured so that it can act as a selective bandpass filter that suppresses the normal emission of internally generated blackbody energy. This retained heat then serves to further raise the metamaterial's temperature. Hence, the SGM can rapidly heat up to 83 degrees C. Should a different temperature be required for a particular application, a new trench nanostructure can be fabricated and tuned to match that specific blackbody wavelength. "The new material also uses less graphene by significantly reducing the film thickness to one third, and its thinness aids in transferring the absorbed heat more efficiently to other media such as water," the report adds. "Additionally, the film is hydrophobic, which fosters self-cleaning, while the graphene layer effectively protects the copper layer from corrosion, helping to extend the metamaterial's lifetime."

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

It might not show much of a family resemblance but fossil hunters say a newly discovered creature, that looks like a teardrop-shaped jellybean and is about half the size of a grain of rice, is an early relative of humans and a vast array of other animals. From a report: The team discovered the fossils in rocks in the outback of South Australia that are thought to be at least 555 million years old. The researchers say the diminutive creatures are one of the earliest examples of a bilateral organism -- animals with features including a front and a back, a plane of symmetry that results in a left and a right side, and often a gut that opens at each end. Humans, pigs, spiders and butterflies are all bilaterians, but creatures such as jellyfish are not. Dr Scott Evans, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the research, said: "The major finding of the paper is that this is possibly the oldest bilaterian yet recognised in the fossil record. "Because humans are bilaterians, we can say that this was a very early relative and possibly one of the first on the diverse bilaterian tree of life."

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scott and colleagues in the US and Australia report how they made their discovery in sandstone at sites including fossil-rich Nilpena. They say careful analysis ruled out the possibility that the fossils were actually formed by the action of currents or from microbial mats. The animal has been named Ikaria wariootia in reference to an Indigenous term for Wilpena Pound, a nearby landmark, and the Warioota Creek that is close to the sites of the find.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: More than two years after winning an electricity bet, Elon Musk's resulting Australian solar and wind farm is an almost total success. The facility powers rural South Australia, whose population density falls between Wyoming and Alaska, the two least dense U.S. states. In 2016, South Australia experienced a near total blackout after "an apocalyptic storm -- involving 80,000 lightning strikes and at least two tornadoes," Vox explains. In the aftermath, a Conservative politician blamed the push for renewable energy for the extent of the blackouts. For those even passingly familiar with Musk and Tesla's online presence, the rest won't be surprising. The head of batteries at Tesla said he was sure the company could do better, an Australian billionaire asked if he was serious, and Musk jumped in to promise his team was. The rest is history. Musk reached his goal 40 days early, and the Australian billionaire funded the project as promised. We can argue about whether or not private citizens should have to rely on a billionaire angel investor to get a steady supply of power or make the shift to renewable energy, but in this case, the bet benefited a shortchanged rural population beginning almost immediately.
[...]
Just 1.7 million people live in South Australia, which is a nice size to consider a test market for technology like this. Rural grids tend to be left behind, because the ratio of required hardware and infrastructure is still so high per consumer -- much more-so than in a big city, where the same short length of wiring could power thousands of homes. And building a facility that acts as a battery can help smooth out the natural ebbs and flows that come both from renewable energy technology and from the spread out, failure-prone nature of more rural grid sections. This smoothing has saved South Australians a ton of money, already much more than the $50 million cost that Tesla passed on to its Australian investor. The battery facility "reduced network costs by about $76 million in 2019," Bloomberg explains, "savings [Garth] Heron, [Neoen's head of development in Australia] said would be passed on to businesses and households in the state. The battery's introduction also slashed the cost to regulate South Australia's grid by 91 [percent], bringing it in line with other regions in the nation."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Australia's privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach -- which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the tech giant's share price yet only led to Facebook picking up a $5B FTC fine. Should Australia prevail in its suit against the tech giant the monetary penalty could be exponentially larger. Australia's Privacy Act sets out a provision for a civil penalty of up to $1,700,000 to be levied per contravention -- and the national watchdog believes there were 311,074 local Facebook users in the cache of ~86M profiles lifted by Cambridge Analytica . So the potential fine here is circa $529B. (A very far cry from the 500k pound Facebook paid in the UK over the same data misuse scandal.)