ASIC is finally going to get the power to intercept phone calls in its pursuit of insider traders, years after the US authorities were given the right to use phone taps to pursue convictions. Minister for Corporate Law Chris Bowen yesterday released draft legislation that will also increase criminal penalties for insider trading and sharemarket manipulation. Following a period of exposure for discussion, the federal government should be able to pass the increased powers into law later this year
Struggling to make next month’s rent, you might be tempted to dig out some necklaces and rings you don’t wear and try to sell it to your friendly neighbourhood jeweller. But you might actually be buying a ticket to a sick magic show. The jeweller performs a blistering series of slight of hand tricks, whipping out calculators, spouting off fees, keeping your eye on the supposedly worthless diamonds under a tenth of a carat while double-deducting for the base metal. By the end, you slink out in a dizzied blur, accepting 1/5th of what the piece is actually worth. In this exclusive excerpt from the latest issue of Harper’s, ex-jeweller Clancy Martin takes you on a journey to the dark underbelly of the jewellery game — via The Consumerist
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has pledged to tear through the statute book
to restore civil liberties after taking up his seat next to David Cameron in the House of Commons for the first time. In his first major speech since becoming the coalition Government’s champion of political reform, Mr Clegg will wage war on Labour’s “obsessive law-making” accusing the previous government of turning ordinary people into criminals by creating thousands of “pointless” criminal offences. He also offered the public a say in which should be repealed
Smartphones that offer the ability to remote wipe are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can’t look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government’s proposed internet filter. The Age has been told that Assange’s passport is classified normal
on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it
Hollywood’s landmark copyright battle against Perth internet provider iiNet will resume in the Federal Court on 2 August. The full bench of the Federal Court will over four days hear an appeal against Justice Denis Cowdroy’s ruling in favour of iiNet last February. At the time Justice Cowdroy found that the ISP couldn’t be held liable for copyright breaches carried out by its customers. iiNet, which has lodged its own notice of contention against some aspects of the ruling, has been defending the allegations since November 2008
Two privacy watchdogs are writing to Google asking why the internet company has been collecting information about household wireless networks. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) says the internet giant has been taking down the data as it drives through Australian neighbourhoods taking photos for its Street View service. By clicking on a map Google’s Street View allows internet users to view a photo of the streetscape. EFA and the Australian Privacy Foundation are worried the data gathered during this process could be misused
eBay Australia sellers will no longer be forced to offer PayPal as a payment mechanism following the intervention of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC). Two years ago, eBay made two significant moves — it tried to mandate that sellers offer PayPal and pushed for PayPal to be the only electronic payment platform on ebay.com.au. The second proposition drew the ire of both buyers, sellers, the ACCC and even the Reserve Bank but the first idea went through largely unchallenged. Since then the ACCC has been investigating complaints that eBay may have engaged in conduct that could contravene the Trade Practices Act by forcing sellers to offer PayPal, its subsidiary
Last month it became apparent that several Hollywood movie studios had threatened to take legal action against the owner of ISP CyberBunker, the current bandwidth provider for The Pirate Bay. Now, according to fresh information from a reliable source, the studios have come good on their threats
There have already been plenty of questions over who owns
the ebooks you’ve bought, with stories of remotely deactivated books and remotely deactivated features — neither of which happens when you have a real physical book. But there are also other concerns opened up by newly activated features. Apparently one new feature — sent in by a few concerned readers — is that Amazon will now remotely upload and store the user notes and highlights you take on your Kindle, which it then compiles into popular highlights
In some tilt against the windmill of fan fiction, George R. R. Martin makes the false claim that [H.P. Lovecraft] let so many others play in his sandbox, he essentially lost control of his own creations…[and] Those copyrights are ultimately all that separates an [Edgar Rice Burroughs] from a HPL.
Martin is wrong about many other facts in that post—copyrights do not need to be defended to be maintained, that’s trademark—but he is gloriously wrong about Lovecraft. Indeed, he is so gloriously wrong that I must once again recycle my favorite publishing joke — via nihilistic kid
An attorney for Google slammed a controversial intellectual property treaty on Friday, saying it has metastasised
from a proposal to address border security and counterfeit goods to an international legal framework sweeping in copyright and the Internet. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is something that has grown in the shadows, Gollum-like
, without public scrutiny, Daphne Keller, a senior policy counsel in Mountain View, California, said at a conference at Stanford University
A court decision ruling that the supply of software through a digital download mechanism is not a supply of goods
has been upheld in the Supreme Court of NSW, setting a precedent that software downloaded via the internet is not protected by the Sale of Goods Act
Following pressure from the US Government, Canada is preparing to ram through a revamped copyright bill that will have disastrous consequences for consumers. The Government is hereby ignoring the public consultation held last year, where many Canadians spoke out against harsher copyright legislation
When a piece of software is automatically installed on your computer without your knowledge, it’s called malware. But what do you call it when Facebook apps are added to your profile without your knowledge? We discovered Wednesday that this is actually happening, and stopping it isn’t as easy as checking a box in your privacy settings. If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there’s no notification, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings
RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users, a German court ruled yesterday. The Dusseldorf Court of Appeals overturned the earlier decision of a local district court in a case brought by the movie outfit Capelight Pictures
Red Hat and Novell won a verdict in a case brought by a Texas company that claimed their Linux-based products infringed patents for ways to share icons across computer workstations. IP Innovation, a unit of Acacia Research, accused Red Hat and Novell of infringing three patents that cover a computer-based graphical user interface that spans multiple workplaces, and lets users access icons remotely, according to court documents. A jury in Marshall, Texas, yesterday sided with Red Hat and Novell’s defence that the patents were invalid
SF writer Peter Watts, a Canadian citizen, was sentenced three days ago in a Port Huron, MI court. There’s not a lot of detail in the story, and although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples) he was not ordered to do any time in jail, was freed, and has returned home to his family. The judge in the case was, I believe, as sympathetic as the legal system would allow him to be — via Slashdot
It is no secret that pro-copyright lobbyists are exploiting child pornography to get file-sharing sites pulled offline. They have done so for years. Their ultimate goal is to use child porn as an excuse to impose a global Internet filter, and with a new directive being presented in the EU their strategy seems to be paying off. In 2007, a year after the Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s servers in Stockholm, there was a seminar in the same city titled Sweden — A Safe Haven for Pirates?
There, in a room filled with like-minded souls, Johan Schlüter of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group took the stage with the ultimate plan to curb piracy. Child pornography is great,
he said enthusiastically. It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites
Kevin Rudd has put another election promise on the backburner with his controversial internet filtering legislation set to be shelved until after the next election. A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday the legislation would not be introduced next month’s or the June sittings of parliament. With parliament not sitting again until the last week of August, the laws are unlikely to be passed before the election
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