The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Gary Taig editor@melbpc.org.au |
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The 2005 photo competition is hotting up. I have no direct evidence that professional photographers are becoming members just to win that fabulous Nikon camera, but one thing is certain; if you don't enter you'll never be in the running.
PC Update Content
This month it was a fight to make 64 pages and overall, there is generally less content becoming available. We have a few very good articles arriving each month and they're written by a dedicated bunch of people without whom PC Update would be in real strife at the present time. We need more material, and more advertisers so that I can assemble the resources needed to impact on the page count, and to bring the number of contributions back up to an acceptable level. Do you have a successful history in PR? Can you sell advertising? Can you sell, period? We desperately need someone to get out there and press the flesh, spread the Melb PC gospel and bring in the sponsors. Please call me if you think you could meet that challenge.
Privacy vs Security
During the past two weeks there has been growing public discussion on the old subject of the Australia Card. I felt a shudder up my spine as memories of the late 1980s discussions all came flooding back. Let us hope that the leaders of our society today don't overreact and use this unfortunate period the world is going through as a basis for further degradation in the rights and privacy of the Australian individual.
Fifteen years ago, in 1990 I wrote in PC Update about databases and two of the concluding paragraphs of that article bear repeating.
The Australian Government, determined in its efforts to catch a few cheats very nearly removed every last bit of privacy any of us ever had, with the Australia card. No matter how good their intentions might have been, once established the Australia Card System would have paved the way for future Governments to pry into the lives of the average Australian in a way that most of us would regard as totally unacceptable. The Australia Card debate saw the introduction of parallel Legislation designed to protect our privacy and when the Government finally succeeded in 1988 in passing the Tax File Number Legislation, they were forced to pass parallel Legislation to offer some protection against this sort of intrusion. The Privacy Act was passed and this is supposed to regulate the flow of assembled data between Government Agencies. It has limited affect on data held by Private Agencies.
Perhaps Social Engineering is not that far away after all. How long will it take? The technology is there! The capacity is very close behind it. In less than SOyears there won't be a single person in this country, perhaps even the world, who is not just another number on some massive Government Database. The index key will be name, place and date of birth supported by some other unique item such as fingerprint, maybe even our DNA Signature, gathered by a hospital at birth, totally beyond our control. This database could be updated every time we purchase something, every time we move house or apply for a job, every time we travel anywhere. Almost every single thing we do can be recorded in a database, and available. Let's hope the Privacy Act 1988 is further developed in parallel with the advances in modern technology.
It's not so much the total privacy I'm concerned about these days, the banks own most of us anyway and obtaining confidential information about others is almost as easy as falling off the proverbial log. I am reminded though that recently we relinquished much of our Australian copyright law and succumbed to the greater power across the Pacific in order to boost a few exports. God forbid that they would ever do likewise with our personal data. We must fight to maintain and strengthen our Privacy Act and never, ever permit it to be traded... for anything.
Internet Battle
Before it dies away completely, do a Google search on the subject of the United Nations taking over control of ICANN and see how many different slants you can find on the fight. I can't imagine the USA willingly giving up the power it holds over the Internet and its traffic, so the argument is sure to die a natural death. But I would love to be a fly on the ICANN wall.
Reprinted from the August 2005 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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