Australians can demand visitors to their homes run contact-tracing app The legislation underpinning Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app makes it possible to demand that visitors to private homes install the app before entry. The Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 contains a raft of provisions that make it an offence to discriminate on the basis that someone …
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I think the not allowing someone into the house unless they have the app is fine as an exception to the discrimination clause.
You can refuse somebody access to the premises for any reason, generally. If you tried to refuse them entry because they didn't have the app, you would be liable for discrimination, yet not letting them in, because you don't like them, don't want to hear about The Tower etc. is fine, so they could then claim discrimination... It is just how the law works.
M.A.L.S. for the win.
As a general provision, yes, providing it is worded well. There are homes that double as workplaces (eg, some day cares, some dental surgeries, vets, tax agents, etc), and if you take the "this is optional" thing seriously, you have to make sure customers and employees are free to decline without getting the sack. You would also want to be explicit in noting that no onus is on anyone to allow anyone else to view their phones to validate that the application is indeed running.
Yes, but aren't those houses still treated as commercial premises, if a business is being run out of them?
Probably you could refuse access to your private rooms, but the "commercial" rooms would be excluded from this and you'd have to let them in, whether they have the app or not.
Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission has fined Samsung Electronics AU$14 million ($9.6 million) for making for misleading water resistance claims about 3.1 million smartphones.
The Commission (ACCC) says that between 2016 and 2018 Samsung advertised its Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, A5, A7, S8, S8 Plus and Note 8 smartphones as capable of surviving short submersions in the sea or fresh water.
As it happens The Register attended the Australian launch of the Note 8 and watched on in wonder as it survived a brief dunking and bubbles appeared to emerge from within the device. Your correspondent recalls Samsung claiming that the waterproofing reflected the aim of designing a phone that could handle Australia's outdoors lifestyle.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) commissioner Reece Kershaw has accused un-named nations of helping organized criminals to use technology to commit and launder the proceeds of crime, and called for international collaboration to developer technologies that counter the threats that behaviour creates.
Kershaw’s remarks were made at a meeting of the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group (FELEG), the forum in which members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing pact – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the USA – discuss policing and related matters. Kershaw is the current chair of FELEG.
“Criminals have weaponized technology and have become ruthlessly efficient at finding victims,” Kerhsaw told the group, before adding : “State actors and citizens from some nations are using our countries at the expense of our sovereignty and economies.”
Updated Australia's federal police and Monash University are asking netizens to send in snaps of their younger selves to train a machine-learning algorithm to spot child abuse in photographs.
Researchers are looking to collect images of people aged 17 and under in safe scenarios; they don't want any nudity, even if it's a relatively innocuous picture like a child taking a bath. The crowdsourcing campaign, dubbed My Pictures Matter, is open to those aged 18 and above, who can consent to having their photographs be used for research purposes.
All the images will be amassed into a dataset managed by Monash academics in an attempt to train an AI model to tell the difference between a minor in a normal environment and an exploitative, unsafe situation. The software could, in theory, help law enforcement better automatically and rapidly pinpoint child sex abuse material (aka CSAM) in among thousands upon thousands of photographs under investigation, avoiding having human analysts inspect every single snap.
An Australian digital driver's license (DDL) implementation that officials claimed is more secure than a physical license has been shown to easily defaced, but authorities insist the credential remains secure.
New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, launched its DDL program in 2019, and as of 2021 officials there said that slightly more than half of the state's eight million people use the "Service NSW" app that displays the DDL and offers access to many other government services.
Now, a security researcher at cybersecurity company Dvuln claims he was able to brute force his way into the app with nothing but a Python script and a consumer laptop. Once inside, he found numerous security flaws that made it simple to alter the DDL stored in the app.
China has begun talking to ten nations in the South Pacific with an offer to help them improve their network infrastructure, cyber security, digital forensics and other capabilities – all with the help of Chinese tech vendors.
Newswire Reuters broke the news of China’s ambitions after seeing a draft agreement that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi is reportedly tabling on a tour of Pacific nations this week and next.
The draft agreement proposes assistance with data governance, training local police, and mapping the marine environment. Supply of customs management applications, possible funding of data links to island nations, and cyber-security assistance are also reportedly on the table.
Facebook whistleblowers have alleged that the company deliberately took down the presences of Australian government and emergency services organizations during negotiations on the nation's landmark pay-to-link-to-news laws.
In early 2021, Australia negotiated with Facebook and Google over the News Media Bargaining Code which required both to pay local news outlets for the right to link to their content. Google opposed the Code and embedded links to documents detailing its objections on its home page. Facebook said the Code was so unworkable that it would be forced to stop sharing news links in Australia – and demonstrated the effect by making it impossible for Australians to post such links.
But Facebook's actions also prevented sharing links to organizations like charities or Australia's Bureau of Meteorology in order to improve its negotiating position, according to a Wall Street Journal report that cites documents provided by whistleblowers.
Proceedings in the legal dispute between Epic Games and Apple have bogged down in Australia, and won't reach a courtroom until 2024.
A Monday ruling of the nation's Federal Court decided that, as Google and Epic are also fighting over essentially the same issues, it makes no sense for Epic and Apple to air their grievances separately, as was planned for November 2022.
The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is attempting to replace its core trading systems with a blockchain-powered alternative – an effort often touted as one of the world's most significant blockchain implementations. Unfortunately, the project has struck trouble, again.
The application in question is called "CHESS" – the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System. ASX trading data suggests it handles 39.7 million trades in an average month. The Register understands the platform was built in COBOL and runs on servers running the discontinued Itanium processors cooked up by HPE and Intel in the 1990s – a combination that saw the ASX announce a blockchain-based rebuild in 2017, with a planned go-live in 2021. That was subsequently revised to April 2022, then April 2023.
The ASX liked the idea of a blockchain-powered bourse because it would mean market participants could store their own copy of the distributed ledger that recorded the state of the market. Orders placed on participants' own systems would be mirrored across the network of participants, with all entries immutably recorded – just the way traders and regulators like it.
Australian technology distributor Dicker Data has decided to end its commercial relationship with Russian security software vendor Kaspersky.
CEO David Dicker told The Australian Financial Review the decision was taken out of a belief that Western nations have a responsibility to act, and because chief operating officer Vladimir Mitnovetski is Ukrainian so Dicker Data is therefore directly impacted by the illegal invasion.
Kaspersky confirmed that Dicker Data has chosen to end its relationship, and thanked the distributor for "hard work, dedication and support" since taking on the account in 2019.
NCS, a Singaporean IT serivces outfit part owned by state-controlled carrier Singtel, has advanced its plans to create an Asia Pacific regional services giant, but remained silent on how it will realize its vision of entering the Chinese market.
The company articulated its regional vision in July 2021 when it announced a plan to focus on "growing digital services, scaling its government and telco business segments and capturing new growth opportunities in the enterprise sector." Singapore, Australia and Greater China were named as prime targets where the group would capitalize on the "growth spurt" underway in the global digital economies.
"There isn't a more opportune time for us to make the pivot from a traditional ICT service provider to a digital and technology services firm in Asia Pacific," CEO Ng Kuo Pin said at the time.
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