In a response to a report on age verification for online gambling and pornography, the federal government has said it will consider whether work on a national digital identity system should be extended to include such verification processes. The Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs recommended that the Digital Transformation Agency explore extending any identity system to include third-party verification tools for online services and the recommendations have been met with "in principle" support.https://www.zdnet.com/article/canberra-considers-its-digital-id-for-use-in-verifying-age-before-accessing-porn/A global meatpacking company, JBS Foods, with operations in Australia, has had its plants shut down in Australia and North America this week after what is now known to be a ransomware attack. This follows the recent attack in on a fuel pipeline in the US which found that even after paying the ransom it was faster to restore from backups than using the decryption process supplied by the attackers. As targets increasingly seem to include critical services like fuel, food and health, governments are being called on to do more to fight back – including taking action against cryptocurrency avenues that are used for ransom demands.https://www.itnews.com.au/news/cyber-attack-on-meatpacker-jbs-foods-is-ransomware-565357In a great example for one possible future of the ridesharing industry, a cooperative of 2,500 New York drivers has created a new company that will give everyone better rates of pay and claims rides will be cheaper for users. It launched this past weekend, with drivers being paid 10% above minimum wages for the industry as well as profit share via dividends to the collective ownership group. Sounds like what ridesharing should actually sound like.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/technology/nyc-uber-lyft-the-drivers-cooperative.htmlMore Computex news, with Nvidia revealing its latest top of the line GPUs with the RTX 3080 Ti cards claiming another 50% increase in performance over the previous flagship 2080 Ti cards that were also a huge leap over the previous era. Nvidia pointed to a lot of new games adding ray-tracing support with Doom Eternal looking particularly shiny. Nvidia also revealed some big advances in how its processing power will be used in enterprise data centres and in AI processing.https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/31/computex-keynote/In AMD's Computex news, the company was bullish about its own new RDNA2 GPUs, which it announced will be heading into Samsung smartphones through a new collaboration on Exynos processors, which will enable ray-tracing and variable rate shading on mobile phones. Its new processors will also be heading into new Tesla Model S and X infotainment systems which will deliver processing power not far behind a PS5, enabling people to play the latest AAA games inside the car... which they probably really shouldn't be doing?https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2021-05-31-amd-showcases-industry-leading-innovation-across-the-high-performanceIn other tech news, the gaming division of Kingston Technology, HyperX, has been acquired by HP. HyperX has built a big business in PC gaming peripherals like headsets, keyboards and mice. HP has its own gaming brand, Omen, so it will be interesting to see whether the brands remain separate or unify in coming years.https://press.hp.com/us/en/press-releases/2021/hp-inc-completes-acquisition-of-hyperx.htmlIn science, wonderful news for Australian fauna with word that Tasmanian devil babies have been born in the wild on mainland Australia for the first time in 3,000 years. The cute carnivores have been breeding in captivity in a special rewilding project for the past decade and in 2020 the first group was released from captivity into a sanctuary where the first group of joeys have been born.https://www.livescience.com/tasmanian-devils-born-in-australia.htmlFinally, in videogames, the World of Warcraft...

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