Geek Weekly: Our top tech stories for 11 August 2015

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

Aussie tech into orbit. Researchers at The University of Queensland are aiming to grab a slice of the satellite market with a new three-in-one rocket design. Stage one is a rocket called the Austral Launch Vehicle that will boost the second stage, SPARTAN, to a speed of Mach 5. SPARTAN would then take over and boost the payload package to Mach 10, from where the latter would be released into orbit. The team said 95% of the system would be re-usable. Sub-scale test flights are due by the end of the year.

The web is killing you. Experts are calling it cyberchondria. You feel a twitch or an ache, research it on the internet, conclude that you have cancer and then spiral into a bad case of anxiety. Dr Reeva Lederman, quoted in Fairfax newspapers, said “The big problem is when people go online imagining that they have an illness, decide they do have it and then buy drugs online to treat that illness… People have an expectation that they can live their whole lives online. That’s the ultimate problem with cyberchondria.”

Spider vans tackling potholes. Almost 70% of US roads are rated as being in poor condition. There’s not enough money to fix all the problems at once, so officials have turned to tech — vans equipped with GPS, laser scanners and multiple cameras — to help triage the road network. And it’s a big job. “Our roads are in pretty tough shape,” Mark Glock, Phoenix, Arizona’s deputy street transportation director, told Bloomberg. “Our annual budget is US$23 million. We are on a 65-year cycle and we know pavement only lasts 35 years. We’re very limited in our treatments.”

Right hand vs left hand. One of the worst hacking events came to light not long ago, wherein the personal data of millions of US government employees and contacts was stolen. Now, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the US Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general has accused his own department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) of hindering the investigation. In a memo to the OPM’s director, inspector general Patrick McFarland said the OCIO “has created an environment of mistrust by providing my office with incorrect and/or misleading information” and questions “whether the OCIO is acting in good faith”. The moral of the story? Trust no-one, it seems.

Stop worrying about hacks. That’s the advice from the aptly named Andrew McAfee, co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, who told CNBC that you “can’t make a completely reliable computer system. These crashes are the price we pay for having these systems. I think that’s a price worth paying.” Even when digital security firm Gemalto says 1 billion data records were stolen in 1500 attacks in 2014, a 78% increase over the previous year? And when hacking is estimated to cost at least US$375 billion a year? So when should we start worrying then?

Shut down, turn off. What would happen if your IT systems suffered such a major attack that you had to turn everything off and go back to using typewriters and fax machines? Just ask the people at oil company Saudi Aramco who, three years ago, had to do just that. Chris Kubecka, a consultant brought in to help fix things, goes through the whole scenario in an interview with Information Week. Worth reading. Particularly if you still sell typewriters and fax machines.

Car hackers. In a previous Geek Weekly, we reported on how researchers were able to take control of various types of cars by remote control, even forcing one into a ditch. Now, the team behind the hacks has presented its techniques at a recent Black Hat conference. The ease with which they were able to do it is quite frightening.

Image: Artist's impression of the SPARTAN launch vehicle, courtesy UQ.