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
The American Civil Liberties Union is helping three teenage girls fight back against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who has threatened to charge the girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves. In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, ACLU lawyers accuse District Attorney George P Skumanick, Jr of violating the civil rights of the girls. The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute the minors is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head
iiNet is steadfastly refusing to admit that any of its users engaged in illegal downloading, despite forensic evidence presented by movie studios that apparently shows the date and time of thousands of individual copyright infringements. In the Federal Court today, where iiNet is being sued in a landmark case by seven major movie studios and the Seven Network for allegedly permitting customers to download movies illegally, iiNet’s lawyers said they would clarify their position on the issue by next Wednesday
An Ontario court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The required information includes email and IP addresses. The case arises from a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman, the anti-hate fighter, against the site and the posters. The court focused heavily on the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, which contain a strong duty of disclosure on litigants
Police have raided a Wikileaks associate’s homes in Dresden and Jena after the web site published a list of banned web sites. Theodor Reppe owns the German domain registration for wikileaks.de, one of the many URLs used by the whistleblowing web site
Privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom want to close down Google Street View, only days after the service was launched in the country. Google has already received hundreds of requests to take down photos of various areas in the UK and could even face legal actions
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
iiNet has pulled out of the federal Government’s internet filtering trials. iiNet only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the filter was flawed and a waste of taxpayers’ money, iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. Mr Malone cited drawn-out negotiations with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), constant changes in policy, and last week’s leak of a secret internet blacklist as reasons for pulling out
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 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a sophisticated search tool that allows the public to closely examine thousands of pages of documents the organization has pried loose from secretive government agencies. The documents relate to a wide range of cutting-edge technology issues and government policies that affect civil liberties and personal privacy
Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the world wide web, said that he was concerned about the emergence of user profiling on the internet and snooping
. The British computer science professor and guru underlined that one of the biggest challenges is to ensure that information available online is used transparently for the specific purpose that its owner intended or consented to, avoiding privacy pitfalls
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
Vodafone has signed a deal with three of the UK’s biggest record labels in a bid to offer customers Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free music on their mobiles. Vodafone said the deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI would allows customer to download tracks from a catalogue of millions
Major security vendors Symantec, Sophos and Kaspersky yesterday said their products would block legalised hacking attempts by NSW Police under new legislation as they would any other security threat to users
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