Geek Weekly: Technology Decisions' quirky tech stories for 6 October

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

Footy photo fail. The 51,000 followers of the NRL’s twitter feed got more than they bargained for on Sunday night when a pornographic image somehow was retweeted to them. Deleted within 60 seconds, the tweet nonetheless has sparked an investigation, with NSW Rugby League checking to see if it was a malicious act, the result of a hack or an accidental retweet of spam.

Banks behaving badly. Customers of St George Bank, Bank of Melbourne and Bank SA were left fuming over the weekend, and not just because of the heatwave. A routine IT upgrade on parent bank Westpac’s mainframe in the early hours of Sunday resulted in a data corruption that took until Monday night to fix. Customers were unable to access accounts via normal means, and the long weekend in several east coast states meant that branches were not open for manual transactions. Westpac said it was “very sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused many customers”. That’s alright, then.

So what’s the solution? Still on banking failures, Pat McConnell, honorary fellow at the Macquarie University Applied Finance Centre, has a few pieces of advice on how to fix the string of IT issues that have plagued the banking industry lately — including getting the banking and industry regulators to take these failures seriously and start holding the banks to account.

Nuclear nightmare. Experts are increasingly worried about the threat of cyber attacks on nuclear power stations. A new report from Chatham House details the risks and also includes testimony from insiders who say such facilities have already been attacked. “What people keep saying is ‘wait until something big happens, then we’ll take it seriously’. But the problem is that we have already had a lot of very big things happen,” says one contributor to the report. “There have probably been about 50 actual control systems cyber incidents in the nuclear industry so far, but only two or three have been made public.”

Quantum computing. IEEE Spectrum has just published a lengthy interview with David DiVincenzo (considered one of the founders of quantum computing) in which he discusses his time at IBM and his concept for the future of qubits. Very interesting stuff. Meanwhile, Google has installed a new suite of D-Wave Systems quantum computing gear, only to find that most of the power consumed has to be devoted to keeping it cool.

Knot funny. Finally, if you’re a bit challenged when it comes to tying secure knots, perhaps you need to invest in one of these flying knot-tying beasties.

Image courtesy redspotted under CC