Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices.

A discussion on Emergency Accommodation in South Australia, including first hand experience from the journalist.

Mutual obligation is one of the last great shibboleths of Australian politics. Now the entire system is under scrutiny with potentially big implications for our welfare system.

Snippets

People are not “placed” on the floor – that is what you do with bags, boxes and rubbish. But that was the word used by the Northern Territory police to describe the sequence of events to the media. Tragically, painfully, I think it says a lot.

Almost a million more people voted yes in the referendum than voted for the Labor party in the recent election. The combined Liberal National party vote was about half the no vote. While the majority rejected the voice proposal because they didn’t know, didn’t care or thought it was unfair, this cannot be mapped on to the political snapshot that the election provided. The referendum was not a proxy election. The door to meaningful, symbolic and practical recognition can and must be opened again.

Key parts:

In 2017, Richard blew the whistle on the ATO for inappropriately, indiscriminately, and carelessly issuing garnishee notices that brutally emptied businesses’ bank accounts of money to settle ATO debts.

During the Court of Appeal proceedings, the prosecutors conceded that Richard was a whistleblower as that term is commonly understood. He had disclosed information to an authorised person pursuant to the terms of the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

It was also accepted that his disclosure was not dealt with properly by the ATO. The ATO botched the investigation into his claims and did nothing.

That is, they did nothing until their inappropriate activity was the subject of an ABC Four Corners program (Note that there is no allegation that Richard disclosed taxpayer information to the ABC). In an act of revenge, the ATO charged Richard, not for blowing the whistle, but for what he did in preparing his disclosure, namely using his mobile phone to take photographs of taxpayer information, covertly recording conversations with ATO colleagues; and uploading photographs of taxpayer information to his lawyer’s encrypted email account.

The Court of Appeal found that those preparatory acts were not covered by protections in the Public Interest Disclosure Act and,

Yesterday Queensland became the last state in Australia to sign on to the decade-long Better and Fairer Schools Agreement (BFSA) with the Commonwealth.

It means every state is on track to hit the minimum funding levels recommended all those years ago.

But exactly when those levels will be reached, what was agreed to in order to land the deal and the other basic terms have not been released, leading to calls for greater transparency (more on that later).

The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time.

Despite him blowing the whistle on the egregious use of power by the Tax Office with an understanding that he was protected, he wasn’t. He’s been caught out by inadequate laws that purported to shield him, but instead lured him into a situation where he and his family has suffered for seven years.