Tech Trend 247

A company headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand has played an integral role in global mass surveillance, according to a new report.

Based on documents and emails leaked to The Intercept, Endace has quietly been selling its technology to government agencies, allowing them to gather vast quantities of "private emails, online chats, social media conversations, and internet browsing histories."

Founded in 2001, the company claims to deliver "the world's best network monitoring and recording systems," producing technology that can help clients intercept and monitor online traffic. It boasts "100 percent accurate capture and storage of network traffic." 

TVNZ, which also worked on the story, reported that Endace founder Ian Graham shed light on how some of its technology worked in a 2004 news story.

"[Endance had] developed equipment that allowed customers to 'see a copy of all the internet traffic passing that point.' He said 'we put a time stamp on it and feed it to software which gets out the information that the user needs.'"

According to a leaked client list, customers apparently include government agencies in Australia, Canada and Israel, among others. 

The Intercept also reported Endace had sold assets to DGST, the Moroccan spy agency, which has been implicated in serious human rights abuses.

Corporate clients also include Australia's largest telco company, Telstra, as well as AT&T in the U.S.

On its website, Endace says it works with "5 of the top 10 global telcos" and "Top US, European and APAC government and defence departments."

One important customer according to The Intercept, is UK spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). 

"The records of Endace sales are confirmed by internal GCHQ documents, provided by Snowden, which describe the company's data capture devices being used as part of mass surveillance programs ... documents from 2010 and 2011 repeatedly mention the Endace products while discussing the capture of "internet-derived" data to extract information about people's usage of services such as Gmail, Hotmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook."

In order to capture ever growing amounts of internet traffic for GCHQ, Endace began work on a product called Medusa, with the ability to hoover traffic at up to 100 gigabits per second from trans-continental undersea cables.

According to the report, it's also possible Endace used public money from the New Zealand government to develop the surveillance gear for GCHQ.

The Intercept has published the leaked documents on its site.

A surfer from the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia, has captured footage of the aftermath of a car fire he claims was caused by his week-old iPhone 7 on Thursday. 

Mat Jones told media outlets he wrapped the phone in some clothes on the seat of his car, while he went for a surf. By the time he returned, his vehicle was severely fire damaged. 

Jones is adamant the flaming Apple product was responsible for the starting the blaze, telling 7 News he had not damaged the phone or used a dodgy charger since buying the new model. 

"Here's the phone. Total burnout," he says in the video he recorded of the incident. 

"As I look into my car you could not see inside the car. All the windows were just black," he said according to the news program. "Ash was coming from inside the pants. Once you unwrapped the pants, the phone was just melting inside of it." 

While there's currently no evidence to suggest that the iPhone 7 "exploded" as some publications are claiming, it wouldn't be the first alleged explosion on record, the most recent Australian example being when a Sydney man fell off his bike and onto his butt, claiming his iPhone exploded on impact like a "mini bomb."  

Overcharging, puncturing or otherwise severely damaging the phone are all possible reasons why an iPhone 7 might catch fire. 

Chances of this happening could very well be heightened if the phone were placed in an excessively hot environment, such as in the back of a hot car on an Australian beach.

Apple has confirmed to Mashable that they are aware of Mat Jones' complaint and are investigating the incident.  

The southern right whale was given its name because tragically, it was the "right" whale for whaling. The animals tended to swim close to shore, making them easy marks for whalers who hunted them to the brink of extinction. 

Thanks to drones, researchers are helping the southern right whale make a comeback while keeping an eye on the effects of climate change.

Researchers from Murdoch University, supported by WWF Australia, are monitoring the whales as they breed in the Great Australian Bight in the country's south.

Fredrik Christiansen, a researcher at Murdoch University, told Mashable southern right whale populations are recovering, albeit slowly. In Australia, they are thought to number only around 3,500.

"Although the humpback was hunted almost as much, the humpbacks are 10 times as many now as the southern right whale," he said. "They are still endangered. There are still populations in the North Atlantic where they are critically endangered."

When the whales visit Australia, they typically breed and aggregate along the south coast of the country from late May to late October. That gives scientists the opportunity to use drones to monitor their health.

Christiansen said the technology has proved invaluable. "To get this kind of information before you would need a helicopter or a plane — it was expensive, noisy and involved some risk for the operator," he added.

The team fly DJI Inspire 1 Pro drones off the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight with the permission of the Aboriginal Lands Trust, allowing them to minimise disturbance to the animals while getting high resolution images and measurements.

After months of monitoring, the team found female southern right whales lose an extraordinary amount of body mass while feeding and fattening their calves. Some females lose more than half a metre in width roughly, Christiansen explained, while the calves can grow more than two metres (seven foot) in length.

"When the whales leave, the females look quite emaciated," he said. "There is so much energy being transferred between the female and the calves, especially when they're not feeding." During this time, the mother whales rely entirely on their fat stores.

Ultimately, the team hope to discover how climate change will affect the whales. For example, how krill production in their Antarctic feeding ground — the abundance of which will likely be affected by the rise in sea temperature and receding sea ice — will affect their condition once they arrive in Australia.

Monitoring these factors can tell scientists about the probability of the whales surviving and reproducing. Southern right whales only calve every three to four years.

"We can also compare our population to other populations to see if the Australian population is doing better," he added.

To continue the work, the WWF is campaigning to raise additional funds.

"This [drone] technology is getting picked up all over the world by whale monitoring groups," Christiansen said. "In a few years, we're going to know the condition of most baleen whale populations around the world."

The U.S. is objectively behind countries like Australia in digital banking "by whatever metric you choose," according to Stripe cofounder John Collison, but that head start may not last forever. 

As president of a global payment company, in Sydney recently to launch the marketplace tool Stripe Connect, Collison was in a position to help me understand the digital divide between American and Australian banking.

Having lived in both countries, the difference feels striking. While I'd been paying landlords and sending friends dinner money online in Australia for years, suddenly in the U.S. in 2014, I found myself searching each month for a stamp and an envelope to mail off my housemates' rent cheques.

It's not all cheques and cash: America finally began rolling out chip cards and terminals widely in late 2015 — an innovation so traumatic it inspired a BuzzFeed post titled: "Credit Card Chips Are The Absolute Fucking Worst." In Australia, the world's largest user of contactless (tap-and-go) payments, many may be wondering what the fuss is about.

Collison suggested two main culprits for the digital banking discrepancy: First up, the curse of the early adopter. 

"The U.S. started modernising and computerising its banking much before most other countries," he explained. "Those [mainframe] computers worked pretty well and they're good enough, and so the result is, we're still running on those mainframes, which is ridiculous."

Other countries have been able to learn from and surpass the U.S., and even make Australia look like it's caught in the payment past. Cash transfers are being digitised mobile-first in countries like Kenya, which has the M-PESA network allowing money to be transferred via SMS. 

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world," Collison said.

The other possible cause, pointedly in contrast to Australia's situation, is the highly fragmented banking market in the U.S. 

"Everyone banks with banks like the 'First State Bank of Omaha' ... and here you have the big four," he said, referring to the National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and Westpac, which together are said to account for an incredible 80 percent of the Australian market.

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world."

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there are at least 6,016 banking institutions in the U.S. That's a lot of bodies to pull kicking and screaming into a digital network at once. 

This is not to downplay the mangled rollout of chip cards in the U.S., which has been widely acknowledged to be a mess. 

Unlike Australia, which uses contactless payments, or chip and pin typically for items over A$100, the U.S. opted for chip and signature despite it being less secure. As Ian Kar reported in Quartz, that may have been part of an attempt by the U.S. to save money, but lack of education has also plagued the transition.

"Payment experts have been openly complaining about the lack of education on how and when customers should use chip cards," Kar wrote. "The Aite Group notes in a report from June 2014 that banks and retailers in Australia ran full-page newspaper ads explaining the benefits of chip cards and how to use them when the country added EMV."

Falling behind on mobile payments

Despite its love of cheques and apparent hatred of chip cards, the U.S. may be set to leapfrog Australia and move straight to mobile payments. 

The growing demand for mobile payments is insatiable, suggested Ben Pfisterer, the Australian country manager of merchant payment provider Square. "They're actually in the process of leapfrogging contactless cards, or trying to ... straight from magstripe to chip cards and phones in the same leap."

And that's where Australia may be left behind. A report released by research firm RFi Consulting in mid-2016 found only 24 percent of Australians said they would try using mobile payments, compared to 77 percent in the U.S who said they were "extremely likely to use the technology," the ABC reported.

"It is probably because contactless credit and debit cards have been so successful and the incremental benefits are not enough — or been explained well enough — to make the jump," RFi managing director Alan Shields told the publication at the time. "You would be lucky if you get the right card from the right bank that connects with the right phone at the moment."

While Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay have launched locally, the major banks are not wholesale on board with each provider.

To further complicate the picture, a number of Australia's largest banks applied to Australia's competition watchdog in July to negotiate collectively with providers of third-party mobile wallets — enemy number one: Apple. They want to get their own banking apps on Apple's hardware, which Apple has strongly resisted.

That's a dangerous impasse, Pfisterer suggested. In his view, there's a lesson in how Australia moved smoothly to contactless cards over the past decade. It was the liability shift in 2014 that he thinks became the tipping point. From August 2014, only PINs and not signatures were accepted.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap."

"They put a liability shift in that if you didn't accept chip cards you'd be liable as a merchant," he explained. "The whole market was incentivised to move. It's a really easy next step to go 'we've got this technology, what should we do about it?' That's where contactless cards came in."

Now 59 percent of Australians have made a purchase with contactless cards, according to RFi Consulting, but only 10 percent said they had used a mobile wallet.

It was also a lucky confluence of events — Australia managed to find the right balance of cards and available terminals. "If you get too many cards and not enough terminals, people will stop using their cards," he said.

In contrast, too many mobile payment providers and not enough bank cards to use them with could prove enough of an inconvenience that consumers fail to see the appeal.

So could Australia leapfrog the U.S. again and move straight to wearable payment devices? Probably not, Pfisterer said.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap," he said. "I think wearables were identified years ago as the next generation a little too soon. That mass population device has not really come through."

Still, we're all just at the tip of the iceberg. "What's next is where it gets really exciting," he said.

In its quest to make itself indispensable, Uber is keen to slide itself into your daily commute.

On Monday, the company announced a partnership in Australia with the travel planning app TripGo, which lets users request an Uber ride to the closest ferry terminal or train, bus or tram station in time for the next departure.

The new service is available in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, Sunshine Coast and Sydney. While the company would like to partner with other Australian transport apps, an Uber spokesperson told Mashable there are no current negotiations underway.

The last mile gap

With this collaboration, Uber is targeting what's known in transport planning parlance as the "first or last mile gap." That's the inconvenient distance between someone's home and a transport hub, which often keeps them driving their own car.

In Sydney, data provided by Uber to Mashable indicates that 10 percent of Uber trips start or end within 200 metres (656 feet) of a "medium frequency public transport hub." In Brisbane, it's nine percent, in Melbourne, eight percent, and Perth, five percent.

Uber has undertaken similar collaborations with travel apps in other countries. In the U.S., it has teamed up with the transit tracking company TransLoc to let users create a journey combining Uber and public transport, as well as order a car in-app.

According to Geoffrey Clifton, lecturer in transport management at Sydney University, these integrations will be particularly useful for people who live in the outer suburbs, where there are longer distances to get home from the train station or bus stop.

Public transport works best when there is a density of population or activity, he suggested, which typically means there are better services closer to the city during peak times and during daylight hours. Those living in further flung areas can be left out, especially at night.

"There isn't really a fully integrated night network [in Sydney], whereas cities like London have that," he said. "Anything that helps fill that last mile gap is useful, and some of these new technologies will have a big benefit there."

Australian cities have by and large pushed poorer communities to the outer suburbs, while the wealthy have taken over urban centres. Is there a risk the government could forgo investment in public transport in these areas if they see private services like Uber stepping in?

It's unlikely, in Clifton's view. "Some people talk about Uber-like services replacing public transport all together, and I think we're very far away from that happening," he said. "I can't see people switching to Uber being enough to cancel a bus service.

"It might even go the other way — people being more confident to take public transport at night if they know they've got some way of going that last mile home."

Nevertheless, the technology gap — whether people in less-served areas always have the technology to order an Uber — or the extra cash to pay for it is another question.

What's in it for Uber?

Well, Uber wants you to know you can always use Uber, but there's more to it than that.

According to Matthew Burke, associate professor at the Cities Research Centre at Griffith University, the company is also trying to diversity its local offering. For Uber, introducing a suite of options that allow it to play an increasingly vital role in someone's commute is "a bit of a no-brainer."

"Uber recently failed in China. Many people have said that was protectionism on behalf of the Chinese state, but I actually think [Didi Chuxing], the competitor, was a better product," he said, pointing out that Didi already had a range of transport integrations, including a bus shuttle service.

"I think [Uber has] been slower than many others in this space ... and this is in part because of working out its legality as it entered the market [in Australia]," he added.

It's also a way for the ride hailing giant to get a head start on competitors. Although Uber does have some homegrown rivals such as GoCatch, it's not facing off a powerful, established product such as Didi in Australia, but that situation may not last forever.

"Those rivals will comes, and those rivals will come in niche areas. For instance, there's a group in Shanghai who only do airport runs," Burke explained. "We're going to see, I think, diversification in the market."

Ultimately, Burke sees Uber and public transport working together to evolve a transport situation that has remained largely static thanks to Australia's reliance on the privately owned car.

That's Uber's point, too: "Aligning ridesharing with public transport systems is one of the smartest ways to help people move around the city without the need for costly infrastructure developments or owning a personal vehicle," David Rohrsheim, general manager of Uber Australia, said in a statement.

It may soon be time to let go of owning a car, and in bad news for the labour market, maybe even the human driver.

"Uber is part of a set of transport that will see more and more of us changing our relationship with the car," Burke added. "I think we'll start to see more and more use of these services, more and more for the collectivised car, and less two car or three car households.

"Still, it's going to be difficult to untangle that."

Apple's new operating system may let you order an Uber with Siri and other fancy things, but let's be serious: It's all about the new and improved Messages.

Apple has given the once tired app a complete overhaul, complete with GIFs, full screen effects and predictive emoji. And stickers. Thousands of stickers for you to use, rather than needing to form complete sentences.

The new release has been embraced by a number of Australian developers and brands. Clara Reeves, president of Hipster Whale, the Melbourne gaming studio that created mobile arcade hopper game Crossy Road, told Mashable the stickers were a perfect extension for the game's marketing efforts. 

"Anything that brings social and sharing integration into the game is great, because it lets people make it their own," she said.

If you download Crossy Road, you will have free access to the sticker pack.

Reeves said the team will also potentially integrate the stickers as a mechanism back into the game. Players could be rewarded with additional stickers or animation in new levels, for example, or the studio could release special stickers to coincide with new game themes.

"Players have always enjoyed the characters in Crossy Roads, so being able to bring them into Messenger is just something fun we wanted to do," she added. "I think it's always really cool — just watching people with a new tool — we'll see some creative and funny things created with iMessage and stickers."

If you take your patriotism super seriously, here are five of the best local-made sticker packs for you to download straight away.

1. Crossy Road

Crossy Road was created in Melbourne, but it's now made it all the way to Disney. In 2016, the company brought out Disney Crossy Road and has won a slew of gaming prizes along the way. If you're an addict, your dedication can now be shared with friends through endless sticker use.

2. Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Yes, it's a New Zealand-made film, but who won't find the need for a sticker about the "skux life?" Only eggs, probably.

3. Qantas

Qantas is one of the first local corporates to jump on the sticker trend, but you have to admit, that roo is pretty cute.

4. Cricket

Cricket. It's the Australian past time. What more do you want?

5. Fruit Ninja 

Created by Brisbane-based studio Halfbrick, the mobile game Fruit Ninja has been a smashing international success. One minute you're slicing fruit in Fruitasia and and the next you're sharing character stickers with mates to properly convey the devastation of a low score. Fruit Ninja 100 percent of the time, basically. 

One day away from launching its iPhone 7, Apple has some good news out of Australia.

A new report suggests the Apple Watch has captured more than 50 percent of the smartwatch market in the country, followed by the Samsung Gear and Fitbit Blaze.

That's after a slow start for the smartwatch category generally. According to technology analysis firm Telsyte, smartwatch sales made up one third of the wearable technology market in the first half of 2016 compared to less than a quarter in early 2015.

Sales of smartwatches grew by 89 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with first half of 2015.

While there was reluctant uptake of the product initially, growth can partially be attributed to the number of apps available, Telsyte Managing Director Foad Fadaghi told Mashable. 

"We saw something similar with iPads. The first generation only sold modest numbers," he said. "Consumers thought of them as large iPods. Then we saw an increasing number of apps that made them useful."

One particular feature of the Apple Watch that makes it attractive to the Aussie consumer is contactless payments, he suggested. Australians already have a high uptake of contactless payment cards and devices, and the ease of use of Apple Pay on the smartwatch makes it particularly appealing.

The other Australian trend supporting an uptick in the smartwatch market is the explosion of people buying smart fitness bands. "Consumers that are ultra-fitness savvy have graduated in many instances to smartwatches — not just Apple but other devices," he added.

It's been well documented that the Apple Watch has not been a killer success for Apple and consumers are still getting comfortable with the idea of electronic wearables. 

In the first half of 2016, a little more than one million smart wearable devices were sold in Australia.

"It's still a modest amount of devices being sold, but substantially more than last year," Fadaghi said. "It's still a smaller part of the market — it's still early days for the whole product category."

Australia has always proved a solid backer for Apple products, generally being quick adopters of technology with higher levels of disposable income than most other English-speaking countries.

"Australia is a smaller market, and Apple has a higher market share in smartphones here than the U.S., it's always been considered a fertile ground for Apple," Fadaghi added. "You'd expected Apple Watch uptake to follow that pattern."

It's not all good news for the giant from Cupertino, California. Apple has fallen behind Samsung in smartphone sales, although that company is now facing its own crisis after a number of reports about the Galaxy Note7 exploding while charging. 

Android devices accounted for 62 percent of unit sales in the first half of 2016, according to Telsyte.

Apple will be hoping for a bounce from the iPhone 7 launch, as long as people aren't too made about the rumoured loss of the headphone jack.

The Williams' residence in suburban Melbourne is home to three dogs and five humans. Life is often chaotic as each member of the household negotiates for space and attention. It's one of many Australian homes where animals are an integral part of family and domesticity.

Over the past few months, parents Andrew and John tell us, the dogs have been misbehaving, damaging furniture and belongings while people are at work and school. Andrew has approached the situation by installing webcams and purchasing a pet wearable device called "Whistle" for his dog Tigger, a German short-haired pointer who he rightly suspects is the main culprit.

Whistle, according to its website, "marries GPS tracking and pet wellness in one band." Attached to Tigger's collar, it connects to a smartphone app that allows Andrew to track and evaluate Tigger's exercise, play and rest in real time. Whistle is part of a burgeoning pet wearable market that is "revolutionalising pet health and wellbeing," according to one pundit. 

While at work, Andrew can now keep a "friendly" eye on Tigger. He has developed a solution to the dogs' misbehavior that involves locking certain rooms and providing particular play spaces to reflect Tigger's daily rhythms.

Our observations of the Williams family are part of a multi-city research project into domestic practices around digital media, mobile media and games. When we first began our research, we presumed we would focus on human practices and perceptions. But animals kept getting in the way.

Australia has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world, with nearly five million households including one or more pets. As our work progressed, it became clear that humans and their pets are entangled in various forms of intimacy and kinship, often in digitally mediated ways.

We have observed (or heard tales of) cats playing with iPads and keyboards, of dogs watching television or participating in video calls. One of our Perth participants Anna describes how she frequently Skypes with her Blue Heeler Abby (with her partner's help) when she's away on work trips.

Abby will paw the laptop in anticipation of the evening call when Anna is absent; she gets excited, wags her tail, "talks" and presses her nose against the screen. It is quite well known that some dogs "see" screens while some don't, Anna says, as she shows us the many YouTube videos people have uploaded of their skyping dogs.

As the size of technology shrinks, wearable devices have become hugely popular, from iPods to fitbits. Spurred by the Quantified Self (QS) movement (the use of self-tracking apps and wearables to monitor biometrics and improve daily functioning) and gamification, global shipments of wearable devices are expected to reach 110 million annually by the end of 2016. Pet wearables are now worth A$2.62 billion (US$1.99 billion) a year of this global market and the Australian market is tipped to grow.

Pet wearable devices enable surveillance and tracking through devices such as Pod 2, Buddy, WÜF and Nuzzle; monitoring of heart-rate and sleep patterns (Inupathy, PetPace) and may feature geofencing capability and virtual boundary alert systems that let owners know when their pet wanders too far (eg DogTelligent).

Pet owners can "gamify" their pet's exercise with a reward system and leaderboard that ranks their results compared to other pets. 

They can download an augmented reality app that sees through obstacles such as furniture to locate their pet. Or they can record and vicariously experience their pet’s perspective and movement remotely via wearable cameras.

As we explored Andrew's problem-solving strategies further, it became clear that he had gleaned a complex sense of Tigger's character and behaviour in the home when humans were at work. Andrew explained that particular rooms, couches and beds had different associations for Tigger (for example, he would retreat to the main bedroom when anxious). Through tracking Tigger, he said, he had gained a deeper sense of his pet's moods.

Pet wearables and monitoring systems are also implicated in an ethics of care and surveillance. They originate from a genealogy of care that engages paradoxical notions of constraint and guardianship. Indeed, our relationship with domestic animals is often fraught with ambiguity; pets are both nature and culture, instinctual and social, controlled yet nurtured, at the same time possessions and companions.

Our kinship with domestic animals is deeply informed by what we might call "careful surveillance," either within the domestic sphere as we observed in the Williams household, or away from home.

For instance another study participant, Paul, and his beagle Millie often go for walks together. But Paul told us he worried about Millie wandering off, and so had avoided going for walks at night. Then he purchased a Halo Belt for Millie, which lit up at night. It meant he could always find her in the dark and lessen the chance of her scaring other people in the park, such as night joggers. 

The term "careful surveillance" refers to our emotional bond with domestic animals, our protective concern and love for our pets. 

But surveillance must also be a "careful" practice, in terms of its effects upon both human and animal. As we increasingly involve our pets in the gamification and quantification of everyday life — assisted by new technologies — we should reflect on the relationship between concern and control.

• Five things you need to know on your first day of school – as a teacher
• When does a benign experience become psychotic?
• Is economists' view of people as rational still credible?
• Why London won't lose its crown as Europe's financial capital

This article originally published at The Conversation here

Searching for a way to help children with autism, researcher Gail Alvares came up with a fairly simple equation.

"We like games, we know that kids like games, so why don't we develop something that could become an additional part of therapy," she told Mashable Australia.

As part of her work at the University of Western Australia and the Telethons Kids Institute, a medical research organisation based in Perth, Alvares is working on a video game project aimed at teaching kids with autism vital social skills.

The game, currently dubbed Frankie and Friends, is intended to help such children begin to process social information — an idea Alvares described in an article for ABC News.

"One of the difficulties that some children with autism may experience is paying attention to social information with people," she explained to Mashable Australia. "They may not make eye contact with people or they might pay more attention to objects than people or faces."

If parents, teachers or therapists had learning tools that could start to shift that attention, to help children with autism prioritise people and particularly their faces in social interactions, it could have a significant impact.

Made for children ages 5 to 12, Alvares' three games focus on a sausage dog named Frankie who needs help finding his friends. 

"All three [games] target particular social skills that we think at least some kids with autism would find challenging," she said. "There are things like understanding emotions, or being able to pay attention to faces over objects, and also a skill called joint attention, which is being able to follow somebody else's gaze."

The games are intended to be fun, so kids don't actually realise they're training. There's also no language component and no written instructions. 

"This is specifically designed with children with autism in mind, because we know that in amongst the spectrum of kids with autism, there is a wide variety of cognitive abilities and language abilities," she added.

While the game is very promising, Alvares said the research team wants to ensure it's truly effective through extensive trials before making it available to the public. 

The idea of serious gaming (i.e. gaming with a purpose other than entertainment) is an emerging field within autism intervention and therapy. However, few games have proven to be effective in her opinion. 

Worse, many of them are not engaging nor fun, and aren't designed with children's enjoyment as a priority.

"We're giving these games to children to test at home and measuring using eye tracking where they're actually looking in a real social environment," she said.

Alvares is conscious that parents of children with autism are already asked to do so much. "We hope to make it commercially available if we can show some evidence. Parents of kids with autism are already being charged enormous amounts of money for so many things — therapy or anything that might have the hint of having some effect."

Once Frankie and Friends is up and running, the team hopes it can become a platform to start developing a range of other games targeting issues that children with autism might have difficulty with. That could even be going to the dentist or the hairdresser. 

"Things that we might take for granted children may do, children with autism might find really challenging," she explained.

Far from wasting time, these video games could provide kids with autism help with some of their toughest problems.

Remember when the Oxford English Dictionary declared "😂 " Word of the Year 2015? It seemed novel at the time but it's only grown in legitimacy since and with it, real-time trackers that log emoji use universally.  

But enough universality. A creative agency in Sydney wants to get specific, tracking the use of emojis across the island continent that is Australia, as it happens.

The Works have launched a real-time data tracker to monitor the way Australians use emoji. While tracking the Top 50 live, they've also compiled lists of what emoji the nation is using most to spice up their text life.

Top of the list, unsurprisingly is the cry-laughing yellow face. 😂. Presumably because Australia is a country of jokers. In second place is the anatomically incorrect but well-meaning red heart. ❤️

Agency partner, Douglas Nicol likened the use of emoji with a dialectical evolution of language, saying in a statement, "It's the natural evolution of the language ... In the same way as we have regional dialectics, we are seeing evidence of regional use of particular emoji."

Aside from monitoring which emoji are most frequently shared, the tracker also calculates which state has the widest breadth of emoji use, and which are strongly used just in that state. For example South Australia with it's many vineyards seems to enjoy the red wine emoji, while Canberra (somewhat alarmingly) enjoys the coffee and soon-to-be replaced pistol emoji.

Dr Suresh Sood of University of Technology Sydney's Advanced Analytics Institute, sees emoji has a new medium with an old message. "This is not new but a continuance of expressing oneself through the power of myth as expressed by Joseph Campbell, Jung and Shakespeare," he said. 

Take that, emoji haters. 

Pokémon Go players in Sydney, Australia, may have three less PokéStops from which to get their Poké Balls, Razz Berries and potions.

The western suburb of Rhodes had been inundated with avid Pokémon Go fans since the game launched in July, leading residents to complain about crowds, rubbish and noise. In response, the local Canada Bay council began a campaign to have its PokéStops removed, and it appears to have emerged victorious from this particular battle.

According to Fairfax Media, three intersecting Poké Stops placed in Peg Paterson Park — which reportedly had been responsible for attracting hordes of Pokémon Go players — simply vanished sometime on Monday. 

Whether this is thanks to the recent game update or a separate change by the game developer Niantic is unclear. 

Mashable reached out to Niantic for comment but the company did not immediately respond. 

The council had submitted requests to Niantic to have the PokéStops removed, and encouraged residents to do the same. "The recent phenomenon of Pokémon Go has seen unprecedented numbers of people flocking to Rhodes," Deputy Mayor Helen McCaffrey said in an August newsletter. 

"I would like to thank residents, building managers and businesses for their support and patience as we all try to find an appropriate solution to the ongoing issues of noise, traffic and rubbish, as a result of the game's popularity."

Irate residents had posted pictures of trampled grass and rubbish on the council's Facebook page, ostensibly left behind by gamers. Others shared videos of crowds of people spilling off the footpath and cars circling the neighbourhood as they hunted Pokémon.

"Walking the dog at night suddenly feels like I'm in an ep of Dr Who or Torchwood or the walking dead or some post apocalyptic zombie phone reality where ‪#‎pokémongoaddicts‬ have taken over the kids park and cross roads without looking for cars," another posted.

The PokéStops and Gyms in Pokémon Go were chosen from a data set created by the players of Niantic's previous augmented reality game, Ingress. For the most part, public artworks, historical sites, and unique buildings and local businesses were chosen, Niantic CEO John Hanke told Mashable Australia when the game launched.

Hanke also said the game aimed to keep people safe while getting them out of the house and interacting with the real world. "We're trying to strike a good balance," he said.

Hopefully Niantic will reveal how it decides which PokéStops to remove. There may be some cemeteries and memorials that would like to know.