Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) welcomes the decision by the Attorney-General to include consideration of the doctrine of fair use of copyright material in the final terms of reference for the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC) Review of the Copyright Act in the digital environment.
EFA was one of a number of advocacy groups that sent submissions to the Attorney-General calling for consideration of the doctrine of fair use to be included in the ALRC review — via redwolf.newsvine.com
EFA welcomes the recommendation from the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) of the Federal Parliament that Australia should not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at this time.
EFA Secretary Kim Heitman said, The Committee is to be congratulated for its astute assessment that the ACTA treaty should not be ratified while debate rages in Europe and the US on its terms. In particular, the requirements that member countries introduce draconian provisions criminalising normal Internet users and refrain from expanding fair usage rights are contrary to the public interest and the economic interests of Australians.
EFA believes that the Committee were correct in rejecting the assertion from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that the ACTA treaty would not require changes to Australian law. While the final text was bland, in the light of the High Court decision in the iiNet case, the international interests that drive these discussions will push for Australia to introduce legislation to impose a graduated response (“three strikes”) punishment for downloaders — via redwolf.newsvine.com
NBN Co will only offer satellite services to residents in the regional town of Napoleons, after the Golden Plains Shire Council rejected the company’s plans for a tower to deliver fixed-wireless LTE services in the area.
NBN Co had eight proposals for 40-metre towers before the Golden Plains Shire Council in regional Victoria, and although the council has approved six so far, it was the first council to reject a National Broadband Network (NBN) tower on 21 May 2012, stating that the planned tower for Napoleons would have a big visual impact on the area.
An alternative arrangement could not be reached between NBN Co and the council, and, subsequently, NBN Co has said that the residents in Napoleons will get NBN Co’s satellite service instead. The news was first reported by The Courier — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Telstra has admitted to tracking the websites visited by Next G mobile customers, as part of the development of a voluntary internet filtering system.
The tracking was first picked up by members of the Australian Network Operators group, who noticed that requests made to a web server from port 80 on a Telstra mobile device, would immediately be followed by a request from an IP address in the US, hosted by Rackspace.
After inquiries on the anomaly by ZDNet Australia, Telstra today came clean and admitted that it is working on a new cybersafety tool called Smart Controls, that will block certain sites from appearing on Telstra mobiles that are signed up for the service — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Earlier this month Google developer advocate Tim Bray proposed a new HTTP Error status code aimed at shining a light on web censorship.
Bray’s new Error 451 would work somewhat like the Error 404 pages you’ve probably seen. But instead of telling you that the page could not be found, an Error 451 response would let you know that the page you were looking for had been censored.
The number is a tribute to author Ray Bradbury (commenters on a Slashdot thread independently suggested 451 as well).
As it stands, most web-blocking tools return a 403 error (which means access is forbidden) when denying access to censored pages. For instance, UK ISPs, which are now required to block The Pirate Bay, typically return a 403 error code when doing so — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating took a swipe at German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday and warned Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy were likely to leave the EU common currency in the years ahead.
Speaking at the inaugural Eureka Congress in Melbourne, Mr Keating said the four countries which have been struggling with higher bond yields in recent weeks would leave the union rather than ceding control to EU headquarters in Brussells.
Mr Keating targeted the German Chancellor for particular criticism suggesting: A lack of political will to change is the biggest problem. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is intellectually limited and she is taking the whole world down.
In a vintage performance, Mr Keating aimed a line of invective at the leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott, dubbing him an pre-copernican obscurantist
.
If the public takes him they will get a large kick in the bum and they will deserve it,
Mr Keating said.
However, the famously sharp-tongued politician was almost as hard on the current minority Labor government suggesting: They just don’t have a convincing and persuasive narrative— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The United States Attorney’s office has intervened in a dispute over a dinosaur that went up for auction at the end of May with a demand that the skeleton be turned over to the US government, so that it can be returned to Mongolia.
Palaeontologists and Mongolian officials have maintained that the skeleton, which belongs to a type of tyrannosaur called a Tarbosaurus bataar, was taken illegally from their country.
The skeletal remains of this dinosaur are of tremendous cultural and historic significance to the people of Mongolia, and provide a connection to the country’s prehistoric past. When the skeleton was allegedly looted, a piece of the country’s natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place,
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It is late afternoon in Bangor, North Wales, and a group of seven teenagers is wandering down to the city centre. Spared lessons because of a teacher-training day, they have have been doing what young people tend to do on a day off school — not much.
Too young to go for a pint, too old to hang around with their parents, the friends have so far visited the shops, sat in the park and talked about the football. The only unusual thing about their day is that they have to be off the streets by 9pm – or risk arrest.
Last night a curfew came into force in the centre of Bangor that bans under-16s from being in the area without an adult.
It is the first order of its kind to cover an entire city centre in the UK and has already been condemned by human rights groups who have labelled it more North Korea than North Wales — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Tony Abbott. Opposition Leader
Originally aired on ABC TV’s 7.30: 14 June 2012
A nine-year-old blogger has won a food fight with authorities in her Scottish town, after an online outcry prompted officials to lift a ban on posting photos of her school lunches.
Martha Payne’s images of uninspiring school meals — one consisted of two croquettes, a plain cheeseburger, three slices of cucumber and a lollipop — drew international attention. The blog, set up about six weeks ago as a writing project and to help raise money for a school-meals charity, has drawn more than two million hits — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Ethiopian government has passed legislation criminalising the use of VoIP services like Skype and Google Talk. Anyone using these services within the country now faces up to 15 years in prison. Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of national security concerns
and to protect the state’s telecommunications monopoly. The country only has one ISP, the state-owned Ethio Telecom, and has been filtering its citizen’s Internet access for quite some time now to suppress opposition blogs and other news outlets. … Reporters Without Borders also reports that Ethio Telecom installed a system to block access to the Tor network, which allows users to surf the Web anonymously. The organisation notes that the ISP must be using relatively sophisticated Deep Packet Inspection to filter out this traffic — via Slashdot
When it comes to tackling San Francisco’s entrenched panhandling problem, City Hall has tried just about everything: laws banning aggressive panhandling and sitting on sidewalks, teams of service providers who attempt to get beggars off the streets, and an employment program to get them hired at nearby businesses.
But it’s never tried puppies — until now.
Starting 1 August, the city — in a program believed to be the first of its kind in the country — will attempt to lure panhandlers to give up their cardboard signs and metal cups in exchange for a small stipend to foster problematic puppies at the city’s Animal Care and Control, making them ready for adoption — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has inaccurately claimed that 4G mobile broadband has the potential to be far superior
to the fibre technology which Labor’s National Broadband Network policy features, in a controversial interview in which he also claimed that it could cost Australians up to $1,000 to connect to the NBN.
The claims were made in a radio interview which Hockey gave with the ABC’s Statewide Mornings show on ABC 936 in a visit to Tasmania last week. The host, Leon Compton, asked Hockey a number of questions about the Coalition’s own approach to the NBN. In one segment of the interview, Hockey spoke extensively about the potential of wireless technologies to serve the nation’s future broadband needs — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I’m sitting waiting for the House of Commons to start debating a Law Against Trolls or, as they would call it, an amendment to the Defamation Act. It would basically let internet providers off the hook for the publication of their content, so long as they signed up to divulge the identity of any of their users. To warrant such a disclosure, the injured party would have to show that their reputation had been significantly damaged; then they would be given the offender’s identity, and would be free to pursue a civil case. Online abuse still won’t be a criminal offence, even if the bill is passed. It has wide support in parliament, so is not intended to be a very heated debate: I want to watch it to see how many MPs actually know what a troll is.
The term is widely misused: Frank Zimmerman, who received a suspended sentence for asking Louise Mensch which of her children she wished to remain alive, is not a troll, he is a hater (the death threats take him beyond the realm of ordinary hater into criminal hater; but that’s his category nonetheless). You can hear haters described in song by Isabel Fay, but they’re not the same as trolls, even while many people (Fay included) use the terms interchangeably (I’m not being a hater when I say that, by the way; I’m being a pedant). Trolls aren’t necessarily any more pleasant than haters, but their agenda is different – they don’t just want to insult a particular person, they want to start a fight — hopefully one that has a broader application, and brings in more people than just the object of their original trolling. The term derives from a fishing technique – say your stupid thing, watch the world bite — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Websites will soon to be forced to identify people who have posted defamatory messages online.
New government proposals say victims have a right to know who is behind malicious messages without the need for costly legal battles.
The powers will be balanced by measures to prevent false claims in order to get material removed — via redwolf.newsvine.com
We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.
So two years ago we launched the Transparency Report, showing when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. We started off by sharing data about the government requests we receive to remove content from our services or for information about our users. Then we began showing traffic patternsto our services, highlighting when they’ve been disrupted.
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons ofdifferent proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Several governments in the Asia-Pacific region responded to the Arab Spring protests with a clampdown on dissent, Amnesty International said.
Leaders from China to Thailand employed a range of methods to silence critics, the group said in its annual report.
But activists were increasingly able to use new technologies to voice their opinions, it said.
The rights group also noted positive changes in countries including Burma.
Despite serious obstacles
, many human rights defenders and activists in Asia were still able to navigate their way towards greater respect for their rights
, said the 2012 report on the state of the world’s human rights — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Pakistan on Sunday blocked access to Twitter in response to blasphemous
material posted by users on the microblogging and social networking website, a senior government official said.
This has been done under the directions of the Ministry of Information Technology. It’s because of blasphemous content,
said Mohammed Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) — via Reuters
According to a recent investigation by the Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden’s telecommunications giant Teliasonera is the latest Western company revealed to be colluding with authoritarian regimes by selling them high-tech surveillance gear to spy on its citizens. Teliasonera has allegedly enabled the governments of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan to spy on journalists, union leaders, and members of the political opposition. One Teliasonera whistle-blower told the reporters, The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance. … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.
The investigative report, titled Black Boxes
, in reference to the black boxes Teliasonera allowed police and security services to install in their operation centres — which granted them the unrestricted capability to monitor all communications—including Internet traffic, phone calls, location data from cell phones, and text messages—in real-time. This has caused concern among Swedish citizens and Teliasonera shareholders, who had previously been assuaged by assurances from the telecommunications company that they follow the law in the countries in which they are operating. After a meeting with Peter Norman, Sweden’s Minister of Financial Markets, the chairman of Teliasonera’s board of directors issued a statement, announcing that they had launched an action programme for handling issues related to protection of privacy and freedom of expression in non-democratic countries, in a better and more transparent way
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter has told the BBC it now wants to work closer with government and policymakers in the UK.
The site has revealed that there are over 10 million active tweeters across the nation.
The site’s UK general manager Tony Wang said it is a priority to protect and defend
the voice of those users — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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