Medical abortion is about to become more widely available across Australia, after not-for-profit sexual health organisation Marie Stopes International won the right to use the so-called abortion pill
RU486 in its clinics. From today the drug, also known as mifepristone, will be offered as an alternative to surgical abortion by 14 doctors at MSI’s nine centres in Victoria, NSW, the ACT, Western Australia and Queensland. It will be used only at less than nine weeks’ gestation, under prescribing and import rights granted by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Marie Stopes said the TGA had relaxed rules compared with previous prescribing rights
Looking into Iran’s portion of the Internet is not an easy task. But the network security firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger quantities of data than before
A teenager sent by his parents to a boot camp to cure his Internet addiction died after he was beaten by camp supervisors. The three teachers who allegedly beat Deng Senshan, 16, were detained by local police Sunday, according to Deng Fei, the boy’s father, a businessman from Ziyuan county
The long-absent PC brand Gateway has been re-launched in Australia, attempting to target the fashion-conscious consumer. Acer, who acquired Gateway in 2007, has positioned the cow-patterned brand at the style-conscious, realigning the Acer brand for the tech-savvy, while its Emachines division will be targeted at the budget-oriented
user. There are no plans to bring the Packard Bell brand into Australia. Unlike in the past, Gateway machines will be found in retail stores rather than a direct sales model, with Harvey Norman listed as the major launch partner
Malaysia is considering the establishment of an Internet filter, similar to China’s abandoned Green Dam
project, a source familiar with the process told Reuters on Thursday. News of the proposal emerged within days of police arresting nearly 600 opposition supporters at a weekend rally denouncing a government that has ruled this Southeast Asian country for 51 years. A vibrant Internet culture has contributed to political challenges facing the government, which tightly controls mainstream media and has used sedition laws and imprisonment without trial to prosecute a blogger
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on 3 August in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe
, and that Prince’s companies encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life
Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs has been granted release from his prison sentence on compassionate grounds. Biggs, 79, is severely ill in hospital with pneumonia and doctors have said there is not much hope
for him
Telstra could face a fine of up to $300 million after admitting to the Federal Court it was guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in denying competitors access to its copper network
ITV has sold Friends Reunited for ¬£25m, despite having agreed to pay a total of £175m for it in 2005. The buyer is Brightsolid Limited, which is owned by DC Thomson, Dundee-based publisher of comics such as the Beano
Optus has blamed a spam attack on an email outage that occurred between late Wednesday and Thursday morning. Optus’ IT security systems had detected an influx of spam directed towards its mail servers. Its engineers rebooted its email servers at around 10pm Wednesday night
Westpac and St George banks have joined the National Australia Bank in discounting their overdrawn fees
Australia Post will no longer be accepting packages that contain lithium batteries by air. The batteries have been classified as dangerous, leading the International Civil Aviation Organisation to enact more stringent controls. This follows on the exploding laptop batteries debacle of 2006, prompting a recall, and further recalls in 2008 and 2009. Lithium batteries may still be sent by road, but only if they are lithium-ion and rated for 2 grams, 100-Watt-hours or under. Most devices should fall under this requirement, although in the
official document
(PDF) Australia Post mentions that Equipment will not be safe to send if it contains more than two batteries/four cells — six-cell batteries being common in laptops
A major network technology vendor has revealed the potential for Labor’s $43 billion national broadband network to radically reshape the internet and pay-TV industries. Ericsson Australia and New Zealand multimedia strategy chief Kursten Leins said the network was likely to contain the intelligence and design that would allow the NBN company to let IPTV players bypass internet service providers and bolt directly on to the fibre access network. That would remove a crucial economic obstacle to the success of IPTV — the ISP broadband tariffs that sit between IPTV players and consumers
Chicago resident Amanda Bonnen sent a 16-word tweet on Twitter about mould in her apartment, and now the landlord has sued for $50,000. A spokesperson for the landlord said, We’re a sue first, ask questions later
organisation. Horizon wants Bonnen to pay $3,125 per word for publishing false and defamatory information on Twitter
A eucalyptus-like tree that grows in New Zealand is still defending itself from a giant bird that died out about 500 years ago. The lancewood tree changes its appearance twice in its lifetime — an adaptation, a new study suggests, that prevented it from being eaten by flightless moas. As a seedling, the lancewood tree (Pseudopanax crassifolius) sprouts small, brown, blotchy leaves. Then, as a sapling, its leaves grow into footlong spears with tiny barbs along the edge. Finally, the adult lancewood, which can reach a height of 20 meters, sports rounded, nondescript green leaves. Many scientists think that the tree evolved these metamorphoses to avoid moas, the main herbivores on the islands and a relative of emus and ostriches that humans hunted to extinction
More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government’s ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment
Russia’s most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security. In partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s political party, the lobby created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services
The identities of more than four million Britons are being offered for sale on the internet. Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. At least a quarter of a million British bank and credit card accounts have been hacked into by cybercriminals, exposing consumers to huge financial losses
They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you’re dead. The cliché doesn’t seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein’s new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It. It’s an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans
The Queensland Police plans to conduct a wardriving
mission around select Queensland towns in an effort to educate its citizens to secure their wireless networks. Wardriving
refers to the technique of searching for unsecured wireless networks by driving the streets armed simply with a laptop or smartphone seeking network connections. When unsecured networks are found, the Queensland Police will pay a friendly visit to the household or small business, informing them of the risks they are exposing themselves to
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