Oh Mazda! For Victorian driver’s…

Zoom doom! Bestseller Mazda fails driving test

Date  November 4, 2012

David McCowen

Guidelines surrounding speedometers have stopped people from using the best-selling car to try for their licence.

AUSTRALIA’S best-selling car cannot be used in the VicRoads licence test – despite being approved for use in other states.

It’s the latest blow for novice drivers who are already forced to apply for a special exemption to drive the many modern low-power, fuel-efficient, turbocharged cars.

New drivers must tackle some of the strictest rules in the country before they are allowed on the road, as VicRoads guidelines surrounding speedometers have stopped people from using the best-selling Mazda3 to try for their licence.

Mazda owner Owen Shemansky was told this year that his wife could not use their car to take her driving test as its speedometer was not visible from the passenger seat.

”We bought the Mazda before she was even going for her learner’s licence. We were thinking she would take the car and use it when the time comes,” Mr Shemansky said. ”They knocked us back on the day [of the test] … they turned us away on the spot.”

Mr Shemansky said he was frustrated. ”Buying a brand-new car in Victoria, you’d think a consumer could have a reasonable expectation that it could be used in Victoria for a driver’s test.”

Shrouds around the Mazda3 dashboard limit the view of its speedometer from the passenger seat. A VicRoads spokeswoman said some cars were not suitable for driving exams because the entire speedometer ”must be easily visible to the testing officer from the front and rear passenger seat”. She said a supplementary speedo could be fitted to test cars, but that GPS speed readouts were not allowed and would not be considered in the future ”unless they can be proven to be as accurate as speedometers”.

Provisionary drivers already cannot take the wheel of turbocharged cars such as Volkswagen’s base-model 1.2-litre Golf without applying for special exemption, but can drive Toyota’s 3.5-litre Aurion with double the power.

David Stannus, owner of Australian Design Rules consultancy firm Protech Developments, said VicRoads was out of touch with technology and that GPS units provided a more accurate measurement of speed. He said most dashboard speedometers had a 4 per cent error margin.”GPS will give you an accuracy of 0.5 per cent,” he said.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/zoom-doom-bestseller-mazda-fails-driving-test-20121103-28r5a.html#ixzz2BAnzWNH3

This eBook rights stuff must be stopped!

If one buys a hardcopy of a book, one is permitted to do with it what one wants. To read it, to give it away, to bequeath it, to do with it, absolutely anything one wants.

These same rights must be applied to digital versions! Especially when many digital versions cost the same or nearly the same as the printed copies!

I will no longer buy online books from organisations who can delete my access to them, at their whim!

Although I appreciate the convenience of digital reading, I will not be held to ransom by organisations that take my money, and can retake their goods at any time!
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An ebook enigma: here one day, gone the next

Date  November 3, 2012

Linda Morris

Ebooks don’t grant ‘tangible’ ownership, as with any hard-copy book. Photo: Reuters

BUYERS of ebooks may have no greater legal rights than ”tenant farmers” it has emerged following the case of a Kindle user whose digital library was wiped by Amazon.

The fine print in online agreements inserted at the behest of publishers to protect authors’ copyright, licences readers to the digital files but does not grant ”tangible” ownership, as with any hard-copy book.

These conditional ebook licences are policed and can be revoked at the discretion of the ebook retailer, as a Norwegian Kindle customer discovered when in October they allegedly violated Amazon’s terms and conditions and had their digital library deleted, then reinstated.

Additionally readers are physically prevented from transferring content to friends and immediate family, or between devices, by encryption software called Digital Rights Management, devised to protect a creator’s copyright from piracy and prevent buyers from on-selling the digital file for profit.

The case of ”repossession” has been seized on by the copyright activist and Canadian science writer Cory Doctorow, who sells DRM free copies of his own books to argue for unshackled ownership of ebooks.

On his blog spot Boing Boing, Doctorow said digital licensing deals circumvented the right for books to be transferred, sold or bequeathed to another person, rendering the reader a mere ”tenant farmer”.

Readers’ limited rights are one of the major pitfalls with ebooks as sold by some retailers, according to Jon Page, president of the Australian Booksellers Association.

”This is not the first time Amazon has done something like this. They famously removed George Orwell’s 1984, yes, the irony, from everybody’s Kindles after they discovered they didn’t have the rights to sell the ebook. People woke up one morning and it was gone from their library. This is very easy for the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google to do because they force their customers to store ebook purchases in their walled garden or cloud through their devices and apps.”

Retailers like Kobo and ReadCloud make it easier for their customers to download ebook files to their home computer so the customer can keep a copy of the digital file on their own closed system, Page said.

”But it does highlight the fact that ebooks are software and that you are purchasing a licence to read … a licence that can be revoked”.

Anne Fitzgerald, professor of law at Queensland’s University of Technology, says the prevailing view that digital products should be licensed rather than sold was under challenge in many legal jurisdictions. The actor Bruce Willis had begun proceedings in the US claiming he should be able to leave his digital music collection to his children.

”The inability to legally on-sell or on-distribute digital products may be something which consumers consider in determining whether to purchase a hard copy or a digital product – this will apply to books, but also to products such as CDs.”

The fantasy, science fiction and horror publisher Tor books, and the Australian digital only imprint Momentum have asked retailers to drop restrictions on readers from transferring their ebooks between devices.

Ultimately, however, the convenience of digital reading outweighed most people’s concerns, Momentum’s publisher Joel Naoum said.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/an-ebook-enigma-here-one-day-gone-the-next-20121102-28ppb.html#ixzz2B4Zl8DMi

 

Identity theft coming to a venue near you!

Identities ripe for the taking

Date  October 5, 2012

Jane Lee

 THOUSANDS of thieves are working full-time to steal Australians’ identities, the Biometrics Institute says.

Terry Aulich, chairman of the institute’s Australian privacy committee, said it would take an expert to completely rebuild a person’s identity.

”But a lot of identity fraudsters are out there now, whose full-time job is to create false identities. There are hundreds if not thousands in Australia,” Mr Aulich said.

The warning came as ANZ yesterday unveiled its plan to introduce ATM biometric scanners to prevent card skimming.

The institute, which represents biometric companies and users of biometric services and products, such as passports, shared Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim’s concerns that the increased use of licence and biometric scanners in clubs and pubs exposed people to the risk of identity fraud.

Mr Aulich said such scanners, unlike those in places like airports and banks, were often in highly insecure environments.

”Once you get that technology at a cheap price and it’s going to pubs and clubs, it could fall into the wrong hands … We don’t want it to move into areas where there isn’t appropriate security alongside it,” he said.

”We’re concerned that it is often younger people handing over their information without any real knowledge … about what could happen to their information if it is misused.”

Mr Aulich said thieves used different pieces of personal information, such as birthdays, home addresses, licence numbers and credit-card details, to steal people’s identities. And ”spoofing” someone’s fingerprint – taking a copy and attaching a different name to it – was the simplest form of identity fraud, he said.

”Fingerprints have no meaning on their own … The majority of the Australian population do not have their fingerprints on record anywhere.

”[When people scan their fingerprints at] clubs and pubs, it might be the first time they have them on record.”

Australian Hotels Association Victorian chief executive Brian Kearney said most clubs and pubs used licence scanners, not fingerprint scanners.

A police spokeswoman said they had never encountered breaches of information from scanners in pubs and clubs.

Bill Horman, a former Victorian deputy police commissioner, said ID scanners had been very effective in deterring violence in pubs and clubs.

”It won’t come as any surprise to me if ultimately the requirement to have a patron-ID scanner becomes a special condition of a venue’s liquor licence.”

Mr Horman said clubs should allow patrons to demand their details later be destroyed.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/identities-ripe-for-the-taking-20121004-2729k.html#ixzz28ONfo8SF

Facebook Publishes Private Messages!

France summons Facebook over private messages rumour

September 26, 2012, 2:43 am

NEWS

AFP ©

PARIS (AFP) – The French government on Tuesday summoned Facebook managers to explain rumours that some users’ privacy had been breached with private messages posted publicly on the social network.

Facebook denied that such messages were appearing on the users’ “Timelines” which can be accessed by a large Internet audience.

But a French minister said doubt remained and urged users to file complaints if they felt their privacy had been violated.

In a joint statement, Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg and the junior minister for the digital economy, Fleur Pellerin, said Facebook managers had been summoned before France’s CNIL data watchdog to explain the rumours.

“Clear and transparent explanations must be given without delay,” they said.

“This incident underlines once again the importance of protecting personal data in the digital world and the lack of transparency in handling them.”

The meeting between Facebook managers and CNIL officials began at lunchtime and ended after several hours.

Facebook said on Monday it had investigated complaints from members and denied the reports of private messages being made public.

“A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline,” the California-based social network said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.

“Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages.”

Concerns that private Facebook messages from 2007, 2008 or 2009 were being posted for public viewing spread wildly on Twitter on Monday after a story first appeared in the free French daily Metro.

“Facebook management is unable to give us any explanation of what happened,” Pellerin said on i-Tele television. “Today complete confusion reigns and Facebook’s explanations are not very convincing.”

“If there is ever any real certainty that private messages were made public and that there was a breach of confidentiality… I would advise people to file a complaint. This is unacceptable,” she said.

But experts rubbished the claim.

“The 9/11 of private life has not happened,” said Vincent Glad from Slate.fr, the French incarnation of the US-based online current affairs and culture magazine.

Glad said a similar rumour circulated in Finland last year and was denied.

US technology news website Techcrunch said: “We have found no evidence that the allegedly exposed posts were actually private messages. Our Facebook specialist … found that email receipts show allegedly exposed messages were in fact Wall posts, and the posts do not appear in users’ Facebook Messages inbox.”

Katie Rogers, the social news editor of the Guardian newspaper, said she “went through archived posts on my Facebook timeline from 2008 and 2009 and cross-checked them against my private message inbox. There was no overlap.

“This is more a story about psychology than privacy — we have forgotten how much our experience of Facebook has changed in a short time,” she wrote.

A French Facebook user said two private messages had cropped up on her Timeline among many other public ones wishing her a happy birthday.

“One of them was from a colleague on maternity leave… and the other was from a friend, a very private message about her boyfriend who had ditched her,” she told AFP.

Facebook has about 26 million users in France.

Being charged for two messages when you only sent one?

Hmmmm, didn’t know this was happening, so beware!
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Bill shock turns smile upside down

Date September 20, 2012 – 12:37PM

Lucy Battersby

Telecommunications reporter

His smile doesn’t come cheap.

How much is a smiley face worth?

It turns out it can cost SMS users twice as much to add some emotion to their messages, depending on which punctuation marks are used to construct that happy, sad or angry face.

Because unknown to nearly every smartphone user, including those who work in the telecommunications industry, texters who include the bullet point symbol in their messages are charged twice, unless their message is under 70 letters. BusinessDay has also found that small picture icons — known as emojis or emoticons — have the same impact.

Melbourne man Toby Passauer discovered the quirk after including a combination of punctuation marks to end his messages with a big-nosed smiley face, like this: =●)

“When comparing the bill to my phone, I noticed that [Telstra] were double charging for single texts. I went through the whole bill and found it over and over again. I started noticing a pattern on the messages that were double billed — I had used the bullet point,” Mr Passauer said.

He discovered the bullet point was splitting his messages into two 70-character messages.

Staff at an Apple store told him charging was the responsibility of the provider — Telstra.

“But I said, your phone is causing this, not the provider. And Telstra said it is the phone manufacturer not us. No one would take responsibility and thousands of people would have no idea that it affects the characters and causes one message to become two,” Mr Passauer said.

Global standards about character sizes in short-message-service (SMS) are responsible for this confusion.

‘A little technical’

A Telstra spokesman said SMS character limits vary depending on encoding. With some understatement, he said the explanation was “a little technical”.

“The limit to an SMS message is set by the maximum number of bits an SMS message can carry. This is 140 octets, or more precisely 1120 bits. If 7-bit encoding is used then this allows the customer to use 160 characters per message. In this case the 7-bit alphabet cannot represent the “bullet point” so the default encoding is switched to 16-bit [and] this only allows for 70 characters.”

The international mobile industry body that sets these standards, GSM, said there were only 128 characters available for the entire of the seven-bit encodable range and these are quickly exhausted by special additions like accents, umlauts and cedillas and other alphabets.

“The spill over is defined to be carried in UCS-2 encoding which uses two bytes (so 16-bits) per character. This means that the message length is reduced from 160 characters to 70,” a GSM spokeswoman said.

“There is no way to chop and change between UCS-2 and 7-bit since the encoding type is set at the beginning of the message. So if you include a character that has to use UCS-2 in a message, the whole message becomes UCS-2.”

But there is no warning for consumers about which symbols will cut their texts in half, such as popular small pictures like emojis.

And it is still a mystery why some handset manufacturers include a single 16-bit character in their keyboards. iPhones and some Samsung phones are affected by this quirk, but HTC and Nokia smartphones do not appear to have bullet points in their punctuation.

Comment is being sought from Apple and Samsung.

While neither Telstra nor Apple could resolve Mr Passauer’s problem, both offered him store credits as compensation.

And Mr Passauer has stopped using the bullet point: “I do a smiley face without a nose,” he said. Like this: =)

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/bill-shock-turns-smile-upside-down-20120920-2687a.html#ixzz26zOw0pP2

Malicious web sites!

Don’t search online for Emma Watson

Date   September 11, 2012

New York

Actress Emma Watson is the “most dangerous” celebrity to search for online. Photo: Getty Images

Emma Watson is the favourite celebrity bait for cyber criminals trying to lure internet users.

McAfee said yesterday that the Harry Potter star is the “most dangerous” celebrity to search for online.

That’s because many sites use Watson to trick users into downloading malicious software or to steal personal information.

When searching for the 22-year-old Watson, there’s a one-in-eight chance of landing on a malicious site.

This is the sixth time the Intel-owned security technology company has conducted the study, which was last year topped by Heidi Klum.

Female celebrities are far more likely to be utilised by cyber criminals: late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was the only male in the top 20.

Others among the riskiest celebrities to search online are Jessica Biel, Eva Mendes, Selena Gomez and Halle Berry.

AP

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/dont-search-online-for-emma-watson-20120910-25o1y.html#ixzz2653znO4n