The New South Wales’ Attorney General, Greg Smith, has told Seven News yesterday that he wants to see Grand Theft Auto and other similar games banned, despite Australia introducing an R18+ classification rating for games, claiming that they are unsuitable.
Image by: Skye Inominatus/Flickr
The creator of the Great Firewall of China has come out to the public spotlight and is reported to have said that the firewall needs improvement if it needs to combat people trying to bypass the firewall in order to access sites blocked by the Government, such as Facebook and Twitter.
President Barack Obama is considering taking legal action against Wikileaks, which is currently based in Iceland, after more than 250,000 diplomatic cables were released in the wild.
In addition, the Justice Department has announced that it has an active criminal investigation on how the cables were leaked.
Wikileaks newest leak, promised to be seven times larger than the Iraq War Logs, have been revealed to be the diplomatic communications between the United States and its allies. The site, similar its previous leak, has given first access to the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, who all released the news at the same time.
Google’s collecting of personal data, including full emails and passwords to sites, while its Street View cars were driving around cities has been described to be a “significant breach” of privacy in the UK by its information commissioner.
ELECTION 2010: The National Broadband Network gets another political party tick of approval – this time from the Greens, after announcing in a statement that it will pledge its support for the multimillion dollar project that is at risk when the Liberals win the election.
The Parliament of Australia’s website has been taken down as part of an international operation against the proposed mandatory filtering plan that Kevin Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy wish to implement. As of the time of writing, the site remains down.
The European Union has given its approval to Orcale’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, the owners of several technologies like MySQL and Java, after finalising its investigation that was opened in September of last year.
A new law proposed by the Italian Government could see the citizens of Italy requiring a licence to upload videos to the Internet from the Communications Ministry, which could reduce the freedom of communications, according to lawmakers opposed to the new law.
First Kevin Rudd, then Barack Obama and now Yukio Hatoyama? Hatoyama, who is the current Japanese Prime Minister, has decided to join a long list of politicians who are hoping to gain some youth creditability by launching a blog and tweeting – especially when his government’s support rating has dipped after taking control from the long-running Liberal Democratic Party of Japan in September last year.
The year 2009 has been an interesting year for Australians. Not only we remember the political scandals like Utegate and the Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’s controversial lie detector stunt on radio; but we also remember how Australians got together and showed solidarity amongst one another via charity work after the Bushfires caused havoc to many Australians living in the countryside in Victoria.
NEWS IN BRIEF: President Barack Obama has chosen Howard Schmidt to take up the role as the national cybersecurity coordinator, according to an “administration official” talking to the Washington Post. The role will coordinate cybersecurity policy across the federal government – including the military agencies.
An inquiry that is reviewing the national DNA database will make allegations that police officers in England and Wales are routinely arresting people so that their DNA sample can be added to that same database; with the inquiry hinting that some of the DNA database could be racially motivated.
STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED.
The Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has given Telstra an ultimatum, structurally separate its retail and wholesale arms voluntarily within about 13 weeks or it will be forced to do so in one of the biggest shake ups to the telecommunication industry since 1997.
Announced yesterday, Australia is planning to share its fingerprints database of foreign criminals and asylum seekers with Canada and the United Kingdom, allowing all three countries’ relevant departments flag migrants who try to hide away from authorities, with assurances that the data will be protected.