ADVOCACY, POLICY & NEWS
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National Facial Recognition: towards the Panopticon
The latest mass shooting in Las Vegas over the weekend has provided an opportunity for Prime Minister Turnbull to increase focus on the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability at the Coalition of Australian Governments counter-terror meeting scheduled to occur tomorrow (5th October). The Attorney General’s Department states that the National…
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Why the marriage equality poll is a privacy issue
What is it about August 9th? Last year it was that evening of national beating-your-head-against-your-laptop as the Census website went down, and stayed down. This year, the government decided the mark the anniversary of #censusfail by handing the architects of that omnishambles, the ABS, the hospital pass of 2017: responsibility…
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ACLU To Court: It’s Legal To Tell Bob To Eat Shit
So we fully expected the ongoing to lawsuit filed by coal boss Bob Murray against comedian John Oliver to lead to some truly captivating moments (it already has!), but the West Virginia chapter of the ACLU has leapt into the case with wild abandon and made sure that people were…
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Streisand Effect helps Sci-Hub to acquire almost all scholarly literature, dooms traditional academic publishing
Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand…
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Discussing the government’s encryption plans
Our Executive Officer Jon Lawrence joined Jane Hebiton on Perth’s RTR FM yesterday to discuss the government’s plans to force providers to give access to encrypted communications. You can listen to the podcast here.
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Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web
Last week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body publicly announced its intention to publish Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—a DRM standard for web video—with no safeguards whatsoever for accessibility, security research or competition, despite an unprecedented internal controversy among its staff and members over this issue. EME is a…