Australia’s use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the destruction of much of the life on the planet
, a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama. The head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power
The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives a coach and horses
through privacy laws. The hacking is known as remote searching
. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room
The richest repository of cultural material in the country would have to be the ABC — so it is exciting and maybe even alarming to hear that Auntie is experimenting with the idea of opening up its archives so that members of the public can access and even re-use and remix the material. The experiment is taking place under Pool, the social media project developed within Radio National. Pool is a groundbreaking experiment in User Generated Content. Users can upload text, music, photos, videos, documentaries or whatever and the content is made available for others to view and use
A blogger from India recently wrote a piece about the new surveillance laws of India and the arguments used to pass it as well as some of the provisions that were mentioned seemed surprisingly similar to that of laws being brought forth to legislators in countries like Australia, Britain and what is currently being talked about in the United States
Fantasy author Terry Pratchett is now a real-life knight after being awarded the highest recognition in the Queen’s new year honours list
Schools have installed CCTV cameras and microphones in classrooms to watch and listen to pupils as young as four. The Big Brother-style surveillance is being marketed as a way to identify pupils disrupting lessons when teachers’ backs are turned. But data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner has warned the surveillance may be illegal and demanded to know why primary and secondary schools are using this kind of sophisticated equipment to watch children
The prevalence of American-made goods in Iran has led US officials to crack down on the cottage industry of smugglers in nearby Dubai who purchase everything from iPhones to Bratz dolls to sell in Iran. But the biggest share of HP printers, among the most visible of US goods here, come not through smugglers, but through a series of international transactions that enable HP to sidestep US sanctions
Previously thought to be limited to HTTP and HTTPs web traffic, the touted Australian Internet filter will also target P2P traffic. In response to a comment posted by a user on his department’s blog, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy has admitted that BitTorrent filtering will be attempted during upcoming trials
A new MacGyver-esque mobile phone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute have modded a mobile phone into a portable blood tester capable of monitoring HIV, malaria, leukemia and detecting diseases. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past
In a detailed open letter to Senator Conroy, the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) said today that it couldn’t support the proposed net filtering scheme on technical grounds
Australia’s biggest online entertainment retailer, EzyDVD, has been put into receivership. Receiver Ferrier Hodgson says the Adelaide-based company has 70 full-time staff in South Australia and about 150 casual employees nationally
The Times of London reported on Sunday that Amazon is making its staff work seven days a week and threatening them with the sack if they take time off sick
. Seattle-based Amazon disputes the report as inaccurate. A Sunday Times reporter took a temporary seasonal job with Amazon and worked there for seven days as a packer, the Times report said
The investment community delivered a savage vote of no confidence in the management of Telstra yesterday after the telco was dramatically kicked out of the tender for the federal Government’s $15 billion national broadband network. The move, which casts doubt over Telstra’s future earnings and profit margins, came as tensions emerged between the company’s board and management, as almost $6 billion was wiped off the company’s market value yesterday
Police have arrested Mark Chopper
Read over an altercation this morning involving an iron bar at a Collingwood pawnbrokers
A British Steam Car is a step closer to breaking the longest held speed record after completing a number of successful runs. After a first successful low-speed run last week at Newton Park, the car was shipped to the MoD’s Thorney Island facility near Portsmouth for a series of higher speed runs this week
The UK government has changed its mind: it now supports retroactive copyright term extension for musicians, up from 50 to 70 years. The end result for the majority of aging artists? A paltry £30 per year
Wikipedia functionality has returned for Brits after the country’s internet watchdog reversed its decision to prevent users in that country from visiting a Wikipedia page containing an image of a naked child
The Government’s plan to censor the internet is in tatters, with Australia’s largest ISP saying it will not take part in live trials of the system and the second largest committing only to a scaled-back trial. And the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has written to critics saying that the so-called live
trials would be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers
. Greens Senator Scott Ludlam said this was a sign the Government was slowly backing away from the heavily criticised policy
Wikinews has learned that at least six of the United Kingdom’s main ISPs have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors on websites operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, amongst up to 1200 other websites. The filters appear to be applied because Wikimedia sites are hosting a Scorpions album cover which some call child pornography. The Scorpions are a German rock band who have used several controversial album covers and are perhaps best known for their song, Rock You Like a Hurricane
Community advocacy group Get Up says the Federal Government’s commitment to internet censorship will slow down speeds and hurt the economy. The Federal Government will place mandatory filters on the internet as part of its cyber-safety plan, but Get Up says it will bring speeds to a crawl and limit productivity. Meanwhile, Telstra chief operating officer Greg Winn says the federal Government’s attempt to censor the internet is akin to trying to boil the ocean
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