Australia’s spies are to have their intelligence gathering capacity boosted by a new highly classified IT and communications project being run by the Defence Signals Directorate, which includes database and storage, real time processing and intriguingly, a variety of radio interface technologies. It’s a safe bet that any data gathered will be happily passed on the US and vast bulk will be corporate espionage for a fee and not actual security work
The Federal Government had rejected mandatory filtering of the internet to stop child pornography and has opted instead to undertake an education and information campaign to teach parents about the perils of the internet
Beijing had received criticism for choosing Microsoft for the three-year, $3.6m deal instead of homegrown software providers, with an official from the Chinese Science and Technology Ministry calling the deal a threat to national security. Chinese law stipulates that domestic software should be favoured in such deals. Nearly two weeks after the contract was signed, the Chinese government’s procurement office announced that it has changed its mind
According to State Department documents, the retarded monkey boy has opposed security measures for new microchip-equipped passports that privacy advocates contended were needed to prevent identity theft
A database of badger DNA is being created to snare criminals who set dogs on the animals and dig-up setts. The RSPCA project, which will cover England and Wales, is the first of its kind for a wild species. It is hoped the database will help bring successful prosecutions against people who dig and bait the animals — via Paul Mellen
Tasmania has become a signatory to an International Seed Conservation Program. The Millennium Seed Bank project aims to collect and conserve 10% of the world’s seed-bearing plants by 2010. So far 16 countries are involved in the project, with 7,000 species of plants already stored in a seed bank in England. The manager of the Tasmanian project, Steve Harris, says seeds from 800 species of native plants will be collected from around the state
An amateur palaeontologist has unearthed the biggest dinosaur to be discovered in the British Isles — and possibly Europe — from a cliff overlooking an Isle of Wight beach. Scientists who have just finished analysing the dinosaur’s two neck bones believe it grew to about 66 feet long and weighed up to 50 tons. It lived around 130 million years ago when Britain was subtropical and still connected to Europe and North America
A security expert who audited the Japanese National ID Card system and found it to be terribly designed and implemented was prevented from presenting his findings at a technology conference after the Japanese government intervened and threatened the conference organisers — via boingboing
Nineteen countries, including Australia, have agreed to cancel 80% of the debt Iraq owes them. The deal secured for the Paris Club of creditor nations ends a trans-Atlantic dispute and probably sets the framework for debt pardons from other creditors
The parliamentary motion to impeach Tony Blair for gross misconduct
over the war against Iraq will be published next Wednesday, the day after the Queen’s speech. It will be the first to be tabled in 198 years, since Lord Melville, a close friend of the then prime minister, William Pitt the younger, faced impeachment for misusing public money in running the Admiralty. Senior parliamentary officials, including legal advisers to the Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, on Wednesday night approved the wording of the text as meeting parliamentary rules, allowing the motion to be tabled on the first day of the new session
The US Marine Corps launched an investigation into possible war crimes after video footage taken inside a mosque in Fallujah showed a Marine shooting dead an unarmed Iraqi insurgent who had been taken prisoner
At a security roundtable discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Ben English, Microsoft’s security and management product manager, told attendees that IE undergoes rigorous code reviews
and is no less secure than any other browser. Because IE is ubiquitous, you hear a lot more about it, but I don’t think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there,
English said. Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia’s managing director, agreed, saying he does not believe IE’s market share is under attack following the recent high-profile debut of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser — via Darren Barefoot
Yasser Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize winner revered as the Palestinians’ greatest champion by some and reviled as an opportunistic terrorist by others, died in a Paris hospital today. His passing marked the end of an era in modern Middle East history, and some hoped it could spur new efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. As can be expected, John Howard committed his usual bumbling faux pas on Arafat’s passing
A Sydney man, Nick Marinellis, has been sentenced to more than five years in jail for defrauding millions of dollars in an international e-mail scam. The Sydney District Court was told Marinellis was the mastermind of an operation which defrauded people around the world by promising lucrative business contracts, lottery wins or inheritance payouts if people first sent money for expenses
Robert Andrew Street, a Melbourne financial adviser, caught up in a Nigerian investment scam has been sentenced to five years and three months’ jail after he used AU$1 million of his clients’ money to pay the fees
required by the scammer
The retarded monkey boy has caused uproar in Greece with his decision to recognise the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as Macedonia
After two days of silence on the hundreds of tons of missing plastic explosives in Iraq,the retarded monkey boy defended himself by stating that the explosives might have been removed before the US invasion. The photos seem to suggest otherwise — via BoingBoing
The retarded monkey boy‘s web site [via anonymous IP] now blocks all non-US traffic. I’m sure the US citizens who live or work abroad are thrilled — via BoingBoing
Proposals by the Security Service to place CCTV cameras in Westminster’s corridors of power have outraged MPs who fear that the proposals for protecting the Commons will enable MI5 to pry into their affairs
In a decision aimed to response to the retarded monkey boy‘s tighter sanctions, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro announced the end of the circulation of the US dollar within the territory of the island acting from 8 November
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