Amazon's Alexa Prize is a $2.5 million hunt for a bot that can talk about sports and celebrity gossip 'coherently and engagingly'.

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Reddit user kroopthesnoop posted photos of an alleged iPhone 7 Plus ordered by co-worker that "exploded" in its packaging.

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The US Food and Drug Administration hasn't had an OPM-style breach, but it's left plenty of doors wide open, says government watchdog GAO.

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Rigid storage platforms could become a single, universal solution for all a company's storage requirements thanks to the cloud.

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AWS service is aimed at applications that need vast amounts of parallel compute, like seismic analysis and genomics.

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A last-minute law suit aims stop the Obama administration from giving up its oversight of the internet's naming system.

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If all goes to plan, AWS will be the first hyperscale cloud provider to have infrastructure in all three of the EU's biggest economies.

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Telstra is continuing its involvement in the Asia-Pacific market, with another strategic investment seeing it back consumer financial websites in Indonesia and the Philippines.

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Samsung has apologized to consumers in China for causing worries over Galaxy Note 7 explosions, but maintains that the handsets sold there have no problems.

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Under-invested in and not fit for purpose, it was clear the Optus cable network needed overbuilding, but the Byzantine NBN wanted to back it to the hilt.

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Telstra's Retail business will be the latest to see job cuts, with 300 net roles potentially on the way out.

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The leaders of Samsung Electronics and SoftBank met in Seoul late Thursday to discuss cooperation in future technologies, according to reports.

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While Health Minister Sussan Ley has apologised for the breach in de-identified medical data, Australia's Attorney-General has come under fire for 'rushing' through legislation.

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Ziggy Switkowski has been reappointed by the Australian government for another three years as chair of the NBN board.

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ASG Group has confirmed it will be entertaining the AU$349 million offer made by Nomura Research Institute to acquire 100 percent of the Australian IT services firm.

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Tasmania is set to have a greater presence in Australia's startup ecosystem with the official opening of innovation hubs in Hobart and Launceston.

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Following Telstra by two years and Optus by one year, Vodafone has finally announced the closure of its 2G network in September next year.

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In a bid to eliminate distracted driving, Google is adding new voice capabilities to Maps.

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Researchers at Northwestern University develop a new 3D-printable synthetic bone that could one day could help transform major surgery.

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HP says its sorry for failing to tell its customers why it blocked third-party ink, but defended its reasons for doing so.

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The technology heavyweights have announced they are forming a not-for-profit organisation to educate the public, open up dialogue about AI technologies, and identify opportunities to use it to solve problems in the world.

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LG Innotek, LG Electronics' component supplier, has won a patent suit against Japan's Nidec over motors for optical disk drives.

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A review into the R&D Tax Incentive has said it could do more to encourage additional research and research spillovers into other sectors.

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Samsung will play new Galaxy Note 7 ads from Saturday in time for sales of the new batch of handsets. It also expects 80 percent of faulty models in Korea to be exchanged by then.

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Melbourne, Ballarat, and Bendigo citizens and visitors can now receive access to free Wi-Fi under a joint project between the Victorian government and TPG.

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Samsung Electronics and SAP have opened a joint research centre that will develop memory solutions for next-generation in-memory computing.

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The Australian Department of Health has confirmed an issue within a Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme dataset published on data.gov.au, but said no patient information is compromised.

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The Australian government will introduce amendments to the Privacy Act to criminalise the re-identification of de-identified data, with the law to take effect from Wednesday.

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The tech giant hasn't issued any further statements regarding exploding Note 7 battery claims in China, despite such reported instances now totalling five.

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After being on a series of rolling temporary appointments since July last year, Timothy Pilgrim is set to take on the mantle of Australian Information Commissioner alongside his role as Australian Privacy Commissioner.

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Boasting more than 40 million subscribers, Spotify is said to make a play on one of its rivals.

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Cyber-cops list cryptoware as their 'dominant concern' and warn that it will target more devices and aim for higher-value targets.

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Digital rights group EFF has launched a campaign to get HP to reverse its new technical block on non-HP and refilled ink cartridges.

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Your smartphone is doing more than keeping you in touch - it is also the 'smart' way to spread infection in the workplace according to new research.

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Google has rolled out new data-saving features targeting Android and Chrome users on slower mobile networks.

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After posting a 32 percent drop in second-quarter revenue, BlackBerry is ending all internal hardware development, including its iconic phones.

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Putin's edict for Russian government authorities to buy local rather than foreign software appears to be taking effect.

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Deakin University has unveiled the HeroSurg robot, giving surgeons the added sense of touch when they perform microsurgery via a computer.

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Up to 700,000 premises within Optus' HFC footprint or previously slated to receive FttN will instead receive high-speed broadband under NBN's FttDP network technology.

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Xiaomi has unveiled the Mi5s and Mi5s Plus smartphones at a launch event in Beijing, while also showing off the Xiaomi Mi TV S3, a TV with artificial intelligence capabilities.

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The Google Neural Machine Translation system 'surpasses' the results of all other machine-translation solutions currently available, with GNMT now being used for Chinese-to-English translations.

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Apple's iPhone 7 will join the fray late in South Korea against Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 and LG's V20.

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LG Electronics has cancelled plans to have curved OLED displays on the G6 next year due to supply capacity issues, reports local media.

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The ASX has completed a prototype post-trade solution using blockchain technology, and is looking to make a final decision on whether to implement it at the end of 2017.

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As the investigation into the botched August 9 Census continues, IBM Australia has scooped up more than 10 federal government contracts worth a total of almost AU$7 billion.

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Australia has jumped Singapore to come fourth on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's annual cyber maturity metric, but the country needs to act on its Cyber Security Policy promises to maintain its position.

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Microsoft is rolling out a preview of its promised OneDrive-SharePoint sync capability, but the capability won't reach the masses until early 2017.

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Over half of Note 7 handsets in Europe have been exchanged, and nine out of 10 customers so far have stuck with the Note 7, Samsung said.

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An Azure cloud deal promises to help passengers stay connected to work and social networks while in their cars.

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New strain of this two year old ransomware takes advantage of users syncing and sharing to spread infected files through the network

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​Is your open-plan office killing productivity? You might be able to fix that with a pull-down enclosure for private meetings developed by MIT and Google.

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Microsoft has not only beefed up Office 365 with AI features, but has also deployed a new AI-enabled virtual agent at all its US support centers.

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Microsoft will support its enterprise initiative with investment around deployment, services and support.

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Mozilla has proposed to stop trusting new digital certificates from Chinese certificate authority WoSign for one year.

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Apple's iPhones have double the electromagnetic waves absorption rate of Samsung's Galaxy series, according to data from South Korea's National Radio Research Agency presented during a committee hearing.

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Australian point of care digital media company Medical Channel has announced it has raised AU$25 million and acquired rival digital signage company Community Network.

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South Korean telcos will resume Note 7 sales on Wednesday for those who pre-ordered in August and did not receive their handset. Official sales for new customers, as previously announced, will begin October 1.

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LG Electronics has delayed the launch of its namesake mobile payment system to next year, according to local media, scrapping plans to have it on the V20.

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Huawei has launched its budget smartphone, the H phone, in South Korea, continuing its expansion in phones, PCs, and equipment in the country.

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Lenovo has confirmed it is making around 1,100 jobs redundant, with the cuts mostly impacting employees in its Motorola Mobility smartphone division.

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The US government is looking into whether Yahoo should have disclosed the attack to investors and the public earlier.

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Despite making light of Telstra's free data days earlier this year, Vodafone has responded to its own network outage with a gift of 2GB of extra data for all mobile customers.

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Cognitive systems and predictive analytics help online merchandisers understand customer needs and predict market trends, enabling them to optimize inventory and prices while satisfying more customers.

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Mapping company Here will use sensor data from Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles to show road conditions and accidents -- and to help you park.

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The Australian National University has successfully manipulated the interaction of light and atoms in an experiment which has brought the research team one step closer to quantum computing.

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An Optus report concludes that big established companies and startups should form mutually-beneficial relationships in order to thrive in the digital age.

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California-based mobile payments processing firm Square has launched its Bluetooth Low Energy contactless payments reader in Australia.

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Microsoft officials said Windows 10 has hit the 400 million 'active' device milestone, up from 300 million in early May.

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Microsoft's Bing app will now show AMP articles automatically, but it's not using AMP as a signal for its search algorithm.

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Google's Project Loon's navigation system gets a dose of artificial intelligence to improve its wind-prediction capabilities.

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New ransomware family discovered by takes aim at government targets

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Which operating system they are using is no longer a top priority for tech chiefs.

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A blunder that Apple made in iOS 10 has weakened the encryption of iPhone data when backed up to iTunes.

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An IDC survey sponsored by Cisco has revealed that Australian organisations have very low 'cloud maturity', with just 58 percent pursuing hybrid cloud.

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The world's largest radio telescope in China, which measures 500 meters across and was completed in July, has begun its testing phase.

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A router issue resulted in Vodafone customers being unable to use data over 4G services, with resulting congestion over 2G and 3G voice and text messaging services then occurring.

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With the official bodies that respond to information security issues mainly focused on national security, should there be an equivalent for everyone else?

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The tech giant has postponed the resumption of Galaxy Note 7 sales to October to make sure the recall is finished beforehand.

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Apple and Google both rely on powerful PR machines to generate interest in their products, but the release of the iPhone 7 compared to the forthcoming Google phone reveal Apple's secret weapon.

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