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technotes<br />
» HARRY DOMANSKI LOOKS AT THE NUMBERS<br />
DRIVING THE BIG TECH NEWS<br />
2 years<br />
US$292<br />
million<br />
AMOUNT THAT MICROSOFT’S SURFACE<br />
REVENUE DROPPED LAST QUARTER.<br />
HOW LONG IT’LL BE BEFORE WE CAN NAP IN OUR SELF-DRIVING CARS,<br />
ACCORDING TO ELON MUSK.<br />
At his talk at the TED <strong>2017</strong> conference, tech mogul Elon Musk unveiled plans for building<br />
a new subterranean traffic system and answered a number of other questions on the<br />
future of transport. When questioned on autonomous vehicles, Musk seems to think we’re<br />
only about two years off being able to safely nap in our self-driving cars and, given the<br />
pioneering exploits of Musk’s Tesla Inc. in this field, this bold claim could be closer to reality<br />
than it may seem.<br />
Microsoft earnings have dipped in the last<br />
quarter, with the company claiming the<br />
sluggish performance is due in part to the<br />
“lower than expected” sales of its Surface<br />
units, which saw a revenue drop of 26% or<br />
US$292 million compared to the previous<br />
quarter. Defending the shift, Microsoft has<br />
suggested increasing competition in the<br />
2-in-1 market has had an impact and the<br />
company is hopeful that the next quarter<br />
will see improvement thanks to the release<br />
of new Surface products such as the<br />
Surface Studio and Surface Laptop.<br />
25 million<br />
NUMBER OF SCANNED BOOKS<br />
IN GOOGLE’S DATABASE, WHICH THE<br />
COMPANY CAN’T MAKE PUBLIC<br />
DUE TO COPYRIGHT.<br />
Google’s project to digitise a nearexhaustive<br />
list of global literature began<br />
in 2002 and ended in 2011 before it was<br />
released to the public, as the project was<br />
legally deemed to be in breach of copyright<br />
laws by US courts. This means that there<br />
are now over 25 million digital books<br />
(as searchable and copy-pasteable as web<br />
pages) sitting on around 50 petabytes<br />
worth of drive storage somewhere on<br />
Google’s premises, all just waiting for legal<br />
authorisation to flick the switch.<br />
10 www.apcmag.com<br />
53%<br />
PERCENTAGE OF US MILLENNIALS WHO<br />
STREAM PIRATED TV SHOWS AND FILMS<br />
A survey conducted by market researchers<br />
Launchleap has found that Americans aged<br />
18–35 are more likely than not to stream<br />
pirated video content. 53% of respondents<br />
owned up to getting their shows this way,<br />
and 93% of these respondents didn’t feel<br />
guilty about doing so. That’s perhaps due<br />
to the fact that 70% of those surveyed also<br />
streamed content legally, via services such<br />
as Netflix, suggesting that millennials are<br />
happy to pay for fairly-priced content —<br />
but perhaps not for multiple services or<br />
just to watch exclusives.<br />
86%<br />
THE PERCENTAGE OF AUSTRALIAN<br />
CYBER ATTACKS THAT ORIGINATE<br />
FROM WITHIN OUR OWN COUNTRY.<br />
In a recent report published by NTT<br />
Security, a massive 86% of all cyber<br />
attacks targeting <strong>Australia</strong>ns over a<br />
12-month period actually originated<br />
from within the country, while a further<br />
9% were from the US. The vast majority<br />
of hacks were achieved via remote<br />
administration or file sharing, with around<br />
40% of the total attributed to each<br />
method, and around 93% of the overall<br />
attacks utilised a Trojan to gain access<br />
to the victim’s sensitive data.
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