Australia: global village idiot (again)?
Australian Internet pioneer Geoff Huston thinks our data retention laws will result in our web browsing history being retained and thinks this relegates us to global village idiot status. Again. I recall from some years back, when we were debating in Australia some national Internet censorship proposal de jour, that if the Internet represented a […]
EFA supports call to avoid criminalisation of cryptologic research
EFA supports the call by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) for amendments to the Defence Trade Controls Act to include clear exemptions for scientific research and for education. Australia’s Defence Trade Controls Act was recently updated and now prohibits the “intangible supply” of encryption technologies, and hence subjects many ordinary teaching and research activities […]
Vale Caspar Bowden
It was with great sadness that we heard of the death last week of Caspar Bowden, privacy activist. Caspar had a long history of privacy advocacy, and was particularly notable in both the fight for public access to strong cryptography in the 1990s and the current fight against mass surveillance. He was co-founder and director […]
Save Domain Privacy
There is a serious threat to domain name privacy, and you can help. As you may have heard, an ICANN working group is considering how privacy and proxy services should work for domain names. It will cover all generic domain names, so not necessarily country domains such as .au, but including .com and the other […]
The security paradox: individual privacy versus digital driftnets
This article, by Suelette Dreyfus, University of Melbourne and Shanton Chang, University of Melbourne was originally published in The Conversation. See the original article. The great irony of the Abbott government’s plan enforce the mandatory data retention legislation is that while this is being done to make us safer, in fact it creates new data security […]