The Rudd Government has committed to establishing a dedicated ABC children’s digital television channel, ABC3
Germany’s cabinet has agreed a draft law to block access to child-porn web sites, Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said Wednesday. The government signed agreements last Friday with the country’s main Internet service providers (ISPs) — representing 75 percent of the German market — to block around 1,500 sites per day with illegal images of children. Internet users hoping to download child porn will instead be met with a large red stop
sign, warning of the impact of paedophilia on the victims. They will not have their personal details or IP addressed recorded
The Queensland Government has outlined plans to offer a Wi-Fi service on the state’s trains as part of a roll-out of real-time security monitoring technology
President Obama yesterday announced a series of steps aimed at easing the US relationship with Cuba, breaking from policies first imposed by the Kennedy administration and stepping into an emotional debate over the best way to bring democratic change to one of the last remaining communist regimes
Last week, the French Parliament passed a new law requiring Internet service providers to cut off Internet access for persistent copyright offenders. Since the parliament voted in favor of the law, everyone — including the most fanatical critics — believed that it would easily pass through Senate and the National Assembly — but it didn’t. After a two hour discussion, the law was rejected by the National Assembly with 21 votes against and 15 votes in favour. According to early reports, the Socialist deputies changed their initial position and decided to vote against the law after witnessing the mass opposition from the French public
The federal Government has terminated the tender process for its national broadband network project and will instead look to partners to build a $43 billion fibre to the home network. A new company, National Broadband Network Corporation, will be created to build the network. It will be jointly owned by the Government and the private sector, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said. Mr Rudd said not one of the private bidders for the NBN’s request for proposals met the government’s requirements. None of the bids offered value for money,
Mr Rudd said. The panel noted the rapid deterioration of the global economy had a significant impact on the process
Fears that over 100 jobs from Western Australian Energy company Synergy would be outsourced to an Indian IT company were yesterday laid to rest. Western Australian Shadow Minister for Energy Kate Doust had said earlier this week that Synergy was negotiating with an Indian company with the goal of sending IT jobs abroad. Energy Minister Peter Collier said he would take the concerns to the company and yesterday announced a plan developed with Synergy to make sure no Western Australian jobs would be sent overseas as part of Synergy’s business transformation program to introduce new SAP-based customer care and billing systems
Sweden will allow gay couples to be legally married from next month. Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to recognise same-sex marriage, becoming the fifth country in Europe to do so. Sweden was one of the first countries to give gay couples legal partnership
rights, in the mid-1990s, and allowed them to adopt children from 2002. The new law lets homosexuals wed in either a civil or religious ceremony, though individual churches can opt out. The law was passed by 226 votes to 22 and will come into force on 1 May
Someone has put the Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy up for auction on eBay. Item number 180342524797 is described as the big mouth of Broadband and Communications in Australia — The uneducated idiot that plans to filter all internet content at an ISP level for end users. The rightful owner will have full use of Mr Conroy — As you see fit. (Although It is recommended only bringing him out for sexual pleasure at parties.) He has failed the Australian Government as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. The asking price is around $8?000, or best offer. but send me your thoughts, No reasonable offer refused. He will be delivered via FedEX Courier Service to your doorstep where you can do with him as you wish. More Images are available via email on request — Including Nooooodes. Signed, K Rudd
The UK’s libel laws mean more and more web sites globally will be forced to respond to threats of litigation with the strategy of take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again
Application fees will be scrapped, cabinet documents will be made available sooner and a pro-disclosure culture encouraged under a Rudd Government overhaul of Freedom of Information laws announced today. Under the changes, announced by Cabinet Secretary and Special Minister of State John Faulkner in Sydney, all application fees will be abolished, and all charges for a person seeking access to their own information will be removed. The first hour of decision-making time will be free for all FOI requests, and there will be a five-hour charge-free decision-making period for requests made by not-for-profit organisations and journalists. Cabinet documents, which are currently kept secret for 30 years, will be available after 20 years, and the period for which cabinet notebooks are kept under wraps will be shortened from 50 to 30 years
Following a mountain of bad publicity and strong objections from just about everyone except the entertainment industries, New Zealand’s proposed guilty upon accusation
Section 92A anti-piracy law has been scrapped
Wikileaks claims it now has up to date ACMA blacklists of banned web sites dated 11 March and 18 March — only days old. The site’s leak yesterday of the supposed ACMA blacklist from August 2008 prompted ACMA and Senator Conroy to call it a fake. This is not the ACMA blacklist
, said Conroy. There are some common URLs to those on the ACMA blacklist. However, ACMA advises that there are URLs on the published list that have never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA investigation, and have never been included on the ACMA blacklist.
But Wikileaks has pressed on, obtaining what it claims is an up-to-date blacklist. Between the 11th and yesterday, [ACMA] did an enormous cleanup of the list
, it said. Where the list previously contained over 2000 URLs, and Conroy and the ACMA claimed ‘See! Our ‘current list’ never contained that many URLs’, this new list is about the size the ACMA claimed it to be. ACMA/Conroy in a media release stated that there were 1061 URLs for August 6, 2008. The 18 Mar 2009 list, having apparently being cleaned up, now contains 1172
Three civil liberties groups have asked a US appeals court to strike down a US government request to obtain stored mobile phone location tracking information without showing probable cause. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have filed a brief asking the US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the US Department of Justice’s request that courts give permission for it to obtain historical mobile-phone tracking information without a court-ordered warrant showing probable cause
The Queensland dentist included on the Australian communications regulator’s blacklist of prohibited web sites has demanded that the list be cleaned up, as he is now being associated with child porn peddlers and sexual violence sites. Whistleblower site Wikileaks published the top-secret ACMA list today. Web sites contained on it will be blocked for all Australians once the government implements its mandatory internet filtering scheme — originally pitched as targeting only illegal
content — later this year. But, as experts have long warned the government, having a top-secret blacklist of banned sites is dangerous because there is a real danger that Australian businesses could be added to the list in error, with little recourse
ACMA’s secret list of banned web pages has reportedly been leaked to Wikileaks.org. The list, which contains hundreds of links to supposed banned content such as child pornography, also lists large online poker sites, YouTube pages and even some Wikipedia links. The Australian government plans to use this list as a basis for its mandatory ISP filtering scheme. According to Wikileaks, the list contains 2,395 webpages (dated 6 August 2008) and was taken from a government approved censorship software maker
The Home Office has admitted that it has been trying to force ISPs to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) blacklist, even though it doesn’t know what the organisation does. Speaking exclusively to Computer Shopper, a Home Office spokesman thought the IWF deletes illegal websites and doesn’t look at the content they rate. He also revealed that the government’s measures to ensure that the IWF is blocking illegal content only consist of meeting with the IWF fairly regularly for updates on how they’re doing
Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions’ (formerly Diebold’s) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That’s the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier’s Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier’s tabulator system, GEMS vs 1.18.19
Legislation to boost NSW Police covert searching and computer hacking powers looks set to go ahead after facing almost no opposition in the lower house of the NSW Parliament earlier this week
Governments looking to silence critics and stymie opposition have added DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks to their censoring methods, according to a security expert speaking at the Source Boston Security Showcase. As the use of DDOS for political gains increases, expect the Internet to become more militarized said Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks
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