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
YouTube confirmed its web site was being blocked in China, although the California firm offered no explanation for why Chinese authorities were barring access to the popular video-sharing service
Many moons ago, it seemed that the geek world stopped with every new Linux kernel release. Those days have long since passed and the most striking feature of the 2.6.29 release is the replacement of Tux the penguin with Tuz the Tasmanian devil. Born as the mascot for the 2009 instalment of linux.conf.au, Tuz was destined to go worldwide when Linux creator Linus Torvalds agreed that the 2.6.29 release should use the little guy as a replacement for the standard Tux image that appears during the start-up of Linux, in order to raise awareness about the plight facing the devil species
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
TelstraClear, Telstra’s New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers — a teenager known as Akill
. Nineteen-year-old Owen Thor Walker became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cyber crime investigation spanning the United States, Europe and New Zealand and dubbed Bot Roast
. New Zealand police finally caught him last year and he admitted to being the ring-leader, code-named Akill, of a group known as the A-Team
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
Last week Google further expanded their Street View imagery in Australia so you can visit even more cities, towns and rural areas. In particular, they’ve included new imagery in parts of Sydney, around Port Lincoln in South Australia, in rural New South Wales, and in many parts of Queensland including wilderness areas around the Staaten River national park, and around Taylor’s Beach, Tweed Heads, and Cairns
Scientists in Britain plan to become the first in the world to produce unlimited amounts of synthetic human blood from embryonic stem cells for emergency infection-free transfusions. A major research project is to be announced this week that will culminate in three years with the first transfusions into human volunteers of synthetic
blood made from the stem cells of spare IVF embryos. It could help to save the lives of anyone from victims of traffic accidents to soldiers on a battlefield by revolutionising the vital blood transfusion services, which have to rely on a network of human donors to provide a constant supply of fresh blood
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
A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers, including up to 60 Australian numbers. The discovery by a local IT industry worker was made by mistake. Apart from being the result of poor security, it may also have been aided by a side-effect of the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone
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
Google has launched the UK version of its Street View service, which allows users to browse a selection of pictures taken along city streets. Street scenes in 25 UK cities from Aberdeen to Southampton can be viewed using the service. The Netherlands version of the service also launched on Thursday, bringing the number of countries covered to nine. The imagery available comprises video taken along 22,369 miles of UK streets by customised camera cars
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 Home Office has admitted that it has been trying to force ISPs to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) blacklist, even though it doesn’t know what the organisation does. Speaking exclusively to Computer Shopper, a Home Office spokesman thought the IWF deletes illegal websites and doesn’t look at the content they rate. He also revealed that the government’s measures to ensure that the IWF is blocking illegal content only consist of meeting with the IWF fairly regularly for updates on how they’re doing
Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions’ (formerly Diebold’s) electronic voting and tabulating systems — used in some 34 states across the nation — fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That’s the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier’s Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier’s tabulator system, GEMS vs 1.18.19
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
The 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is to become the first major US paper to go solely online. The paper will print its final edition today after its owner failed to find a buyer. The web site will be run solely as a source of local news and opinion, rather than an internet incarnation of the former newspaper
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