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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 17 - 22 APRIL 2023
Hello and Welcome,
Meeting TODAY
2023/04/15 — 14:00-16:00 — April, Sat — Web Design
Hi everyone;
Our Web Design meeting is today at 2 pm in the Woolley room at SMSA, or you can join via Zoom.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82634658712
Meeting ID: 826 3465 8712
Passcode: webdesign
Firstly, I'm sorry about last month. My laptop ran out of power. I found a power board and turned on the power switch, but the computer failed to charge.
Bob and I tried to get Zoom to work on the Club's PC, but it proved challenging.
Eventually, I noticed the power board had separate switches for each plug, but then it was a bit late.
So, this month John Lucke will show us his recent changes to our club site.
Here's some of what he has done.
These are some of the recent changes:
"On all pages": A new banner image and nav background colour.
The inclusion of: <footer> Sydney PC & Technology User Group Inc. © <span class="now"></span> </footer>.
This also needs the CSS class inclusion of .now::before {content: "1987-2023";}.
"Main" page: No change.
"Home" and other "Meetings" pages: Simple updated text content and images.
"Members & Visitors" pages: No changes.
"Quick Links" pages: No changes.
After that, we will have a second attempt to look at alt text. Alt text is the note placed on an image to tell people what they should see — if the picture doesn't load.
I found an article on the common mistakes made when writing text.
We will also discuss what we can do this year.
See you all this afternoon,
— Steve South.
Meeting This Week
2023/04/18 — 10:00-12:00 — April, Tue — Tuesday Group
Important message — Ed.
Hi, Club Members:
I'm not sure what the fate of our Tuesday meeting will be as there seems to be minimum interest from members.
However, I can prepare a half hour presentation/discussion at our next meeting to help fill in some of the time now that the computer problem has been fixed.
— Tim Kelly
Please come along and give us your ideas — Ed.
Meetings Next Week
NO MEETINGS
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official SydneyPC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm. — next meetings: May, July and September 2023.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
Microsoft releases 97 fixes on Patch Tuesday; one for a zero-day
See the iTWire article by Sam Varghese | Wednesday, 12 April 2023, at 09:24 am.
Microsoft Patch Tuesday
Microsoft has released 97 fixes, one of which is for a zero-day, on its Patch Tuesday for the current month.
The zero-day has been given the ID CVE-2023-28252. Security firm Tenable's senior staff research engineer Satnam Narang said this was an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System.
"It was exploited in the wild and it is the second CLFS elevation of privilege zero-day exploited in the wild this year, and the fourth in the last two years," he added.
"It is also the second CLFS zero-day disclosed to Microsoft by researchers from Mandiant and DBAPPSecurity (CVE-2022-37969), though it is unclear if both of these discoveries are related to the same attacker.
"Over the last two years, attackers appear to have found success targeting CLFS in order to elevate privileges as part of post-compromise activity."
Narang said while this was the only flaw exploited in the wild, Microsoft has rated nearly 90% of the vulnerabilities as Exploitation Less Likely, while just 9.3% of flaws were rated as Exploitation More Likely.
Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at security firm Rapid7, said a total of 114 vulnerabilities had been fixed in all.
He said there were 45 separate remote code execution vulnerabilities patched, a rise from an average of 33 per month over the past three months.
"Microsoft rates seven of this month's RCE vulnerabilities as Critical, including two related vulnerabilities with a CVSSv3 base score of 9.8," Barnett said.
Captain Cook College fails in Court appeal over funding for online diploma courses
See the iTWire article by Gordon Peters | Thursday, 06 April, 2023, at 2:49 pm.
The Full Federal Court has dismissed an appeal by Captain Cook College against a decision in July 2021 that it had engaged in a system of unconscionable conduct to secure additional government funding for online diploma courses under the former VET FEE-HELP loan program.
The Court also dismissed Captain Cook College's appeal against findings that it had made false or misleading representations and failed to comply with the requirement for unsolicited consumer agreements in promoting and supplying its courses to five individual consumers.
The Court allowed Captain Cook College's appeal in respect of findings of unconscionable conduct involving four of those consumers but upheld the finding in respect of one consumer.
In a statement released by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) the Commission said the Full Court upheld the trial judge's findings that Captain Cook College's parent company, Site Group International Limited (Site) and Blake Wills (the former COO of Site) were both knowingly concerned in Captain Cook College's system of unconscionable conduct, but reduced the period in which this involvement took place.
"We welcome the upholding of the Court's finding of systemic unconscionable conduct by Captain Cook College as well as the finding that Site and Mr Wills were knowingly concerned in this conduct," ACCC Commissioner Liza Carver said.
"We brought this case because there was clear evidence that Captain Cook College enrolled vulnerable and disadvantaged consumers in courses they were unlikely to ever complete or receive any vocational benefit from despite incurring a large VET FEE-HELP debt. Over 90 per cent of those consumers did not complete any part of their online course, and about 86 per cent of them never even logged into their course."
"Captain Cook College sought to maximise its profit at the expense of students who were left with a debt, and at the expense of the Commonwealth, which made substantial payments under the VET FEE-HELP scheme, which was funded by taxpayers," Commissioner Carver said.
The case against Captain Cook College, Site and Mr Wills will now return to the trial judge for a hearing on the orders sought by the ACCC, including orders for pecuniary penalties and costs.
VET FEE-HELP was an Australian Government loan program that assisted eligible students to pay their tuition fees for higher level vocational education and training (VET) courses at the diploma level and above, undertaken at approved VET FEE-HELP providers — and the program was replaced by VET Student Loans from 1 January 2017.
Telstra fails to meet ACMA’s caption requirements
See the iTWire article by Kenn Anthony Mendoza | Tuesday, 11 April, 2023, at 09:20 am.
The Australian Communications Media Authority has issued telecommunications provider Telstra a remedial direction for breaching captioning rules related to its subscription television licence.
According to ACMA, last February, Telstra reported to the telco regulator that it had not met the required captioning target for 14 channels broadcast by Telstra Pay TV last 2021-2022.
The channels included Aurora, BBC Earth, Boomerang, CBeebies, CGTN Documentary, Discovery Turbo, DreamWorks, FOX Arts, FOX Docos, Foxtel Movies Drama, Good, Lifetime Movie Network, National Geographic Wild and TVSN.
The non-compliance occurred due to Telstra’s failure to submit captioning category nominations for its movie and general entertainment services to the ACMA as required.
Some categories allow for lower level of captioning targets, however when no category nomination is received by the ACMA, a 100% captioning target must be applied.
In addition, Telstra submitted its annual compliance report for 2020-21 late, 65 days after the required date of 28 September 2021.
Under the terms of its remedial direction, the ACMA advised Telstra must take actions directed to ensuring that it does not breach the captioning rules or is unlikely to breach these in the future.
These include reporting to the ACMA by 1 June 2023 about the administrative processes and practices it has in place to enable compliance with its captioning obligations.
This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 06 April 2023.
Fun Facts:
A four-legged robotic system for playing soccer on various terrains
See the MIT article by Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL Publication Date: April 3, 2023.
"DribbleBot" can maneuver a soccer ball on landscapes such as sand, gravel, mud, and snow, using reinforcement learning to adapt to varying ball dynamics.
AI Soccer Robot
If you've ever played soccer with a robot, it's a familiar feeling. Sun glistens down on your face as the smell of grass permeates the air. You look around. A four-legged robot is hustling toward you, dribbling with determination.
While the bot doesn't display a Lionel Messi-like level of ability, it's an impressive in-the-wild dribbling system nonetheless. Researchers from MIT's Improbable Artificial Intelligence Lab, part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), have developed a legged robotic system that can dribble a soccer ball under the same conditions as humans. The bot used a mixture of onboard sensing and computing to traverse different natural terrains such as sand, gravel, mud, and snow, and adapt to their varied impact on the ball's motion. Like every committed athlete, "DribbleBot" could get up and recover the ball after falling.
Programming robots to play soccer has been an active research area for some time. However, the team wanted to automatically learn how to actuate the legs during dribbling, to enable the discovery of hard-to-script skills for responding to diverse terrains like snow, gravel, sand, grass, and pavement. Enter, simulation.
A robot, ball, and terrain are inside the simulation — a digital twin of the natural world. You can load in the bot and other assets and set physics parameters, and then it handles the forward simulation of the dynamics from there. Four thousand versions of the robot are simulated in parallel in real time, enabling data collection 4,000 times faster than using just one robot. That's a lot of data.
The robot starts without knowing how to dribble the ball — it just receives a reward when it does, or negative reinforcement when it messes up. So, it's essentially trying to figure out what sequence of forces it should apply with its legs. "One aspect of this reinforcement learning approach is that we must design a good reward to facilitate the robot learning a successful dribbling behavior," says MIT PhD student Gabe Margolis, who co-led the work along with Yandong Ji, research assistant in the Improbable AI Lab. "Once we've designed that reward, then it's practice time for the robot: In real time, it's a couple of days, and in the simulator, hundreds of days. Over time it learns to get better and better at manipulating the soccer ball to match the desired velocity."
"If you look around today, most robots are wheeled. But imagine that there's a disaster scenario, flooding, or an earthquake, and we want robots to aid humans in the search-and-rescue process. We need the machines to go over terrains that aren't flat, and wheeled robots can't traverse those landscapes," says Pulkit Agrawal, MIT professor, CSAIL principal investigator, and director of Improbable AI Lab." The whole point of studying legged robots is to go onto terrains outside the reach of current robotic systems," he adds. "Our goal in developing algorithms for legged robots is to provide autonomy in challenging and complex terrains that are currently beyond the reach of robotic systems."
The fascination with robot quadrupeds and soccer runs deep — Canadian professor Alan Mackworth first noted the idea in a paper entitled "On Seeing Robots," presented at VI-92, 1992. Japanese researchers later organized a workshop on "Grand Challenges in Artificial Intelligence," which led to discussions about using soccer to promote science and technology. The project was launched as the Robot J-League a year later, and global fervor quickly ensued. Shortly after that, "RoboCup" was born.
Compared to walking alone, dribbling a soccer ball imposes more constraints on DribbleBot's motion and what terrains it can traverse. The robot must adapt its locomotion to apply forces to the ball to dribble. The interaction between the ball and the landscape could be different than the interaction between the robot and the landscape, such as thick grass or pavement. For example, a soccer ball will experience a drag force on grass that is not present on pavement, and an incline will apply an acceleration force, changing the ball's typical path. However, the bot's ability to traverse different terrains is often less affected by these differences in dynamics — as long as it doesn't slip — so the soccer test can be sensitive to variations in terrain that locomotion alone isn't.
The bot could also navigate unfamiliar terrains and recover from falls due to a recovery controller the team built into its system. This controller lets the robot get back up after a fall and switch back to its dribbling controller to continue pursuing the ball, helping it handle out-of-distribution disruptions and terrains.
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There's still a long way to go in making these robots as agile as their counterparts in nature, and some terrains were challenging for DribbleBot. Currently, the controller is not trained in simulated environments that include slopes or stairs. The robot isn't perceiving the geometry of the terrain; it's only estimating its material contact properties, like friction. If there's a step up, for example, the robot will get stuck — it won't be able to lift the ball over the step, an area the team wants to explore in the future. The researchers are also excited to apply lessons learned during development of DribbleBot to other tasks that involve combined locomotion and object manipulation, quickly transporting diverse objects from place to place using the legs or arms.
"DribbleBot is an impressive demonstration of the feasibility of such a system in a complex problem space that requires dynamic whole-body control," says Vikash Kumar, a research scientist at Facebook AI Research who was not involved in the work. "What's impressive about DribbleBot is that all sensorimotor skills are synthesized in real time on a low-cost system using onboard computational resources. While it exhibits remarkable agility and coordination, it's merely 'kick-off' for the next era. Game-On!"
The research is supported by the DARPA Machine Common Sense Program, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the National Science Foundation Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator. A paper on the work will be presented at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
Meeting Location & Disclaimer
Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
Information for Members and Visitors:
Link to — Sydney PC & Technology User Group
All Meetings, unless explicitly stated above, are held on the
1st Floor, Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney.
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