The Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has rejected claims he has not tried to contact members of the Exclusive Brethren religious group
The Indian high court has ordered Coke and Pepsi to produce the formulas for their soft-drinks, on the back of a report that says that Pepsi contains 30 times the amount of pesticide reported in 2003, while Coke’s level has gone up 25-fold — via Boing Boing
Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting, has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use… And that data should flow back from the police database to the loyalty card provider. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket
The federal government may tap the vast pool of social resources behind blogs and websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia to boost its online information services
Call centre and technology jobs have been the main target of offshoring to low-cost operations in places such as India and the Philippines, but journalism is in the sights of one of India’s largest offshorers
The House of Representatives voted on restricting access to social sites on public terminals. The bill, which passed the House in a 410-15 vote, would bar users from accessing sites like Amazon, MySpace, or Slashdot from terminals in libraries and schools. Adults would be able to ask permission
to access such sites — via Slashdot
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prohibits journalists from having unsupervised interviews with Hurricane Katrina victims who have been relocated to FEMA trailer parks, according to a report in the Baton Rouge Advocate
The Australian government has announced it wants cross media ownership laws and restrictions on foreign ownership removed by 2007
European regulators have hit Microsoft with a $357.3 million fine, citing the software giant’s continued noncompliance with its landmark 2004 antitrust ruling
Tony Blair’s flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project — via Charlie’s Diary
Claims that China harvests organs from live Falun Gong prisoners without consent — then destroys their remains — are real, according to a report from a human rights lawyer and a former MP in Canada. The document cites an organ price published online for a transplant centre in Shenyang City, China. Corneas are $30,000 US, kidneys $62,000 US, livers $130,000 US and lungs up to $170,000 US, which would make this a most profitable trade — via Boing Boing
Victoria will speed up the development of a AU$31.2 million high-speed fibre optic network for academics by piggybacking on an existing network used for railway services
France has given the thumbs-up to the defanged version of a controversial law that would have forced Apple Computer to open up its iTunes digital rights management to players other than its iPod
Family First senator Steve Fielding made a string of nuisance
calls to journalists yesterday to expose politicians’ power to bombard the public after they were exempted from new do-not-call laws
A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position. The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders — via Boing Boing
The US Government is set to transition to IPv6 in June 2008. The CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline. The latest additions, released in May, are a compilation of existing recommendations and best practices gathered from the Defense Department, which has been testing and preparing for the transition for years, the private sector, and the Internet research and development community
The 25 European Commission member states and nine accession countries have all signed up for a plan that could make e-accessibility mandatory — via digg
Google is now taking on that part of the Internet that has been notoriously difficult to navigate: US Government sites
The proposed services access card is essentially identical to the Australia Card proposal for a national identity card overwhelmingly rejected 20 years ago, according to a privacy study to be released today
The NSA is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in Internet technology — specifically the forthcoming semantic web
championed by the Web standards organisation W3C — to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals — via Slashdot
RSS – Posts