Tag: australia

Australia will give your personal data to anyone

Posted on November 3, 2014 by - News

van-diemens-land-film1-thumb-630xauto-37783The former British penal colony of Australia is so concerned that terrorists might want to take over its super-hot, poisonous creature-filled, desert that it is going to bring in one of the most elaborate forms of internet monitoring in the world.

Both coppers and communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull have suggested that Australia’s data retention bill will make China look like a liberal hippy commune in comparison.   Under the move, the government is going to hang on to all your browsing history and give it to whoever can get a court order.

However, it seems that terrorists are not the main target of the law. It seems that the whole thing is designed to protect corporates and movie studios from piracy.

Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin said that stored telecommunications metadata would be used to go after people who infringe copyright online.

Turnbull then clarified the position saying that if film studios want to use metadata to sue Torrenters, all they would have to do is ask the courts to give them access to it.  However this makes things even worse.

Currently the Aussie ISPs are resisting legal action trying to force them to reveal subscriber information through the courts to a copyright troll. The logic is that the courts would hand over all your browser history to anyone with the dosh to establish a court case.

It could mean that metadata could be demanded in family law cases and insurance cases. After all what is the best way to make sure your partner should not have custody if it can be shown to a court that he or she spends their days on porn or dating sites.

What is even more alarming is that so far this daft law has not been noticed by the Great Aussie public and no one seems to care.

American gamers tell Aussie women to get back to the kitchen

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

aussie minersCorrection: Sarkeesian cancelled a planned speech at Utah State University (USU), which is in Logan, Utah and is a different university than the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Apologies.

Women video game developers and critics in Australia are being threatened with rape and murder by American and Canadian gamers as the dispute that has gripped the global gaming community  goes global.

Sydney-based independent video game developer and critic ‘Sarah’ said she had received threats as a part of the movement after she voiced her opinion on an online gaming forum.  They were pretty blunt about what they were going to do to her for daring to make games that did not depict women as whores or sex objects.

“They were saying that they were going to rape me, they were going to kill me… They ran to friends of theirs, got them together … and started tweeting threats at me,” he said.

Sarah believed the perpetrators had set up a system that sent multiple threats to her account automatically.

Fortunately, they were not that clever. One posted a picture that allowed Sarah to figure out their name because they would screen capped it with their Facebook account in the background so I was able to find out the attackers name, and get a sense of who the other guys were.

They are all young, and they are all from the US and Canada and are all keen to spread their backward brand of misogyny to countries where women are treated a little more equally.

“That was almost a bit more terrifying – that they were this loose group of people that one of them could call up the others and they would attack.”

Unfortunately, because they were not Aussie misogynists they could not be arrested and charged with threatening behaviour.

The movement originated from a debate about whether video game journalists were too close to the industry, but then took a more threatening turn.

Earlier this month American feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian was attacked by people claiming to be from the gamergate movement shortly after posting an online video about the portrayal of women in games.

She was forced to cancel a speech at the University of Utah, after an anonymous threat from somebody who said they were planning to carry out a mass shooting at the event.

Big Tech taken to task Down Under

Posted on February 11, 2013 by - News

strayaTop tech companies are being called to task by an Australian committee that argues the country is getting a raw deal by unfair price discrimination.

Aussie MP Ed Husic moaned to the Australian that by some estimates, prices for Australia can be 60 percent more than in the States. He and the committee will be putting Apple, Microsoft and Adobe on 22 March, according to the BBC. Although the firms have replied in writing, until now they have not bothered to meet any representatives in person.

Although price differences aren’t as drastic in the USA and the UK, there is still a gap – with the only difference usually being in pound sterling rather than the dollar. Depending on what action the committee takes, there is the potential to set the bar on international price differences, and whether they should be altered in line with currency values.

Husic told the Australian that, considering IT is so widely used in both business and consumer segments, prices for hardware and software can “have a major commercial and economic impact”. He said that bringing IT prices down and “easing the bite of price discrimination” should be an “important micro-economic priority”. Of course, convincing conglomerates that tinkering with their margins is a good idea will be easier said than done.

The bigger picture, however, will be that if pricing is more competitive, consumers and businesses won’t hesitates as much to buy – even in challenging economic conditions.

Apple turned resellers into hostile competition

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - News

skippysonny_1334Apple might have scored an own goal down-under by culling its channel savagely and pushing its own retail model.

Last year, Apple fired more than 200 Australian resellers. Many of them had been selling Apple gear for years. The sackings came without warning or explanation.

One Sydney reseller told CRN Australia that all he got was a two line email terminating his reseller status. It ended his connection to Apple which brought $5 million worth goods to Australian businesses, health organisations and not-for-profits.

Another reseller who was dropped from Apple’s list was Sydney reseller Complete PC Solutions. Director Frank Triantafyllou said Apple made up figures which claimed his outfit had not sold enough products. Not only was that untrue, but what he found was that Apple was not really behaving like a partner.

His company often found he was competing against Apple’s own sales team and would find that product was not being made available for him to sell.

In one case he wanted 100 iPads for a school customer but was told by Apple he wasn’t authorised to supply that particular product.

The feeling down under is that Apple has peaked and it is losing business opportunities because it can’t handle the channel. The reason it can’t handle its channel is because it can’t give up control.
Apple’s policy appears to be one of forcing customers to go direct. This is helped by the development of its own retail channel. While this boosts the company at a local level it means the loss of huge numbers of sales.

Apple also failed to notice that those 200 resellers suddenly turned from committed advocates to actively hostile competition.

What the resellers have done is to recommend to their installed base of customers products which are not blessed by Apple. Talking up the merits of rival products seems to be working.

For example, HP’s ElitePad business tablet is being pushed for having a number of superior features for businesses, including better touch control, better keyboard, battery life, faster processing and of course Windows 8 and Flash compatibility.

Instead of pushing Apple, they have established an idea, which we are seeing among Apple resellers in Europe too, that Apple is a spent force.

One Roman reseller, which had been a keen Apple supplier for a decade, said that he started recommending other products because Apple’s time was over.

“It used to be that Apple was seen as infallible, and perhaps under Steve Jobs it was, but now cracks are appearing,” he told ChannelEye. “We could have put up with them being arrogant before, but now it is just annoying.”