Australia’s lack of constitutionally guaranteed rights made a much higher level of censorship possible in Australia than in other democracies, constitutional law expert Professor George Williams said today. Australia does not have a Bill of Rights which protects free speech at a federal level,
said Williams, the Anthony Mason Professor of law at the University of New South Wales. We don’t have the protections that they have in every other democratic country. That means Australia might be subject to far more stringent regulations on the internet than would be possible in other democratic countries
Civil rights and online free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today criticised the government’s internet filtering report, claiming civil rights implications should be the focus rather than the technology’s impacts on internet speed and performance
Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to web sites containing criminal content. The banned sites will be selected by an independent classification body guided by complaints from the public, said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. A seven month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the filter to be 100% effective. However, that claim has been questioned and there has been opposition from some internet users. Twitter users have been voicing their disapproval by adding the search tag nocleanfeed
to their comments about the plans
First of its kind research conducted by Ynet in collaboration with surfers, bloggers suggests two of Israel’s largest internet service providers perform manipulation on file sharing traffic
Following an official press release recently that the Pirate Party of Australia is now accepting members, a scathing editorial was written in the Sydney Morning Herald. Such a response was expected, but this tone usually changes when they receive support from thousands of followers
Germany has unveiled the world’s most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres of cables, the supercomputer named Blizzard
is capable of 158 teraflops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second
The amount squandered by Victoria Police’s troubled IT department was more than $120 million, three times the sum detected by the Ombudsman, a former senior police manager says. Richard Kennedy, the force’s former manager of strategy and business relationships, said the IT department was systematically milked by IBM for years before any action was taken. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost, and the Ombudsman, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon and the auditor- general were repeatedly warned,
Mr Kennedy said. The whole thing is just an unbelievable disaster
Google and several other Internet giants are lobbying the UK government to drop a proposal that would allow the secretary of state to introduce new changes to copyright law. The proposal is part of Britain’s Digital Economy bill, a comprehensive package of legislation that contains other controversial measures, including a requirement for ISPs to track illegal file sharing and possibly suspend the accounts of repeat offenders. Last week, Google along with Yahoo, Facebook and eBay sent a letter to Peter Mandelson, first secretary of state and head of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), asking the government to drop the 17th clause of the bill
Italian tax police said Saturday that they had seized works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and other artistic giants in a crackdown on assets hidden by the disgraced founder of the collapsed dairy company Parmalat. Authorities estimated the 19 masterpieces stashed away in attics and basements were valued at $150 million. Parma Prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said that, based on wiretapped phone conversations, officials believed at least one of the paintings hidden by Calisto Tanzi in the area of Parma was about to be sold
The EFF, with the help of a group at the UC Berkeley Law School, has issued a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies, asking for their policy on the use of social media content during investigations. Having received no response, they’re now taking six government agencies to court
Cameroon (.cm) web domains supplanted those in Hong Kong as most likely to harbour malware, with more than one in three (36.7 per cent) of domains registered in the West African country hosting viruses or malicious code. The .cm used by Cameroon is a common typo for .com, a factor that security firm McAfee speculates may explain why cybercriminals have set up fake typo-squatting sites that lead to malicious downloads or spyware under the country’s domain
Rhino poaching around the world is on the rise despite efforts to protect the animals. The global surge in the illegal trade has been driven by demands from Asian medicinal markets, the study by conservationists concluded. It suggests that a decline in law enforcement is the main reason for the rise in poaching in Africa. The report found that 95% of rhino poaching in Africa since 2006 had occurred in Zimbabwe and South Africa
JB Hi-Fi’s web site was redirecting customers to malicious web pages over the weekend in a cyber attack that appears to have affected several other Australian websites in the lead-up to Christmas. The exact details of the attack are not yet clear as the retailer has refused to comment but users first started reporting problems on Friday night
German federal president Horst Köhler has refused to sign a law to block child pornography that passed Parliament earlier this year, stating that he needs more information
. In Germany, the federal president has the right to reject a law only if its passage violated the order mandated by the constitution, or if it is obviously unconstitutional — he can’t veto a law simply because he disagrees with it. The law was passed under a coalition government, but a different coalition took power before the law reached the president’s desk. Political observers guess that the political parties would like to get rid of the law without losing face, but since it has already passed the Parliament, they can’t simply abandon it — via Slashdot
The BBC has said it has no intention
of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet
After the report last week that Brazil’s e-voting machines had withstood the scrutiny of a team of invited hackers, reader ateu writes with news that a hacker has shown that the Linux-based voting machines aren’t perfectly safe; he was able to eavesdrop on them (translated from Portuguese) by means of Van Eck phreaking — via Slashdot
Australians who believed their home phone numbers were permanently protected from unsolicited marketing calls by joining the Do Not Call database may find themselves receiving fresh phone sales pitches next year, as the first entries on the national register expire. More than 4 million telephone numbers will be registered on the government database by the end of this year if growth patterns continue. But the three-year time limit on registrations will lapse for more than 1 million numbers, initially listed when the database opened in May 2007
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft’s Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government. The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit — via Slashdot
Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries
Private New Zealand aerospace company Rocket Lab completed its final ground-based test today and is now ready to launch New Zealand into the space race with its Atea-1 launch vehicle
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