back to article Australia's future technology headlines … for 2018!

Today's the last day anyone from Vulture South will show up for work until January 3rd. So while we're at the beach, cricket and bottom of a beer glass, we leave you with our almost-traditional prediction for technology news in the year after next Without any further ado, let's get into it. Google dodges Google Tax Australia …

  1. synicalx

    "For the 19th month in a row, hacked light bulbs and fridges have contributed to the largest DDoS ever recorded. Next up after this break - When Drones Attack"

  2. GrumpyOldBloke

    Australia sniffs around the UK's Snooper's Charter

    Further faux security will be waved through by a useless government and a spineless opposition bipartisan on National Security. What will be interesting is One Nation, the emerging third force. We have seen Pauline in parliament helping to justify the ridiculous new national security fence - which should be called the don't abseil into the forecourt and embarrass the big talking government and its muppets in shiny uniforms memorial fence. Pauline also speaks positively on a national ID card. I think that she will be someone that the LNP can work with to further the national security narrative. Tony Abbot in a skirt.

  3. Mark 65

    My prediction

    Turnbull won't be there. They love a good back-stabbing in politics.

  4. Glen Turner 666

    My prediction: WPIT

    The acronym WPIT will become known outside Canberra. The Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation is essentially the replacement of the Model 204 database and applications code originally established by the Department of Social Security in 1983. The code has survived name changes (to Human Services/Centrelink), umpteen ministers, and 35 years of budgets and mini-budgets of changes (all of which had to be live by a particular date, a date usually set for political or accounting reasons rather than as the result of an implementation plan, so we're not talking a lot of programming to a deadline with no nice-to-haves which might ease future maintenance or migration).

    The cost of rewriting this code to run on a replacement system is said by the government to be $1b to $1.5b. $1.5b seems optimistic: even on simple SLOC-based measures the 30m lines of code will cost roughly $2b. It's hard to see how it could be lower, as a lot of the measures for reducing cost aren't available for this task (eg, incremental feature delivery). All this technical discussion hides that Australia doesn't have many people with management experience of this scale of project and management is where the real risk hides (the seeming over-optimism about future project costs is a worrying sign).

    This is high stakes IT: the scale; the risk to clients; the macroeconomic risk. Stuff this up and there's no saving your government and your country could enter recession.

    The Minister appears competent, which is a good start. But of course if he's too good then he won't be content to stay at DHS for the decade this job will take.

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