Friday, October 19, 2018

The Employer Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern World

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
 - Oscar Wilde especially at the Bluest Mountains on Earth ...

Everyone talked about General Wallenstein in  1618 when the 30 Thirty Year war started. General who tried to become King of Bohemia... Via Lidka at Loubkovice Neratovice








Oh Dear. Scott Morrison's Website Has Been Taken Over By Trolls

Scottmorrison.com.au - the official website of Australia's current prime minister - has been brazenly purchased by an internet prankster for $50. It appears the PM's social media team forgot to renew the domain name.The site has since been stripped of all contents and now plays the punk ditty ‘Scotty Doesn’t Know’ on a loop over a picture of Scott's smiling face. Wow. Just... wow. The embarrassing website switcheroo was spotted late last night by the Melbourne-based author Tom Taylor









Sotheby's and spectacle. Banksy’s autoshredding stunt reinforces how contemporary art is not so much about art but the documentation of an event Rich Gossip in ford 


Bags of cash totalling $100,000 brought into an office to buy a suburban home. Fees for 457 visas for bogus jobs. Companies phoenixed by the dozen.



Sounds like what Potter Stewart said about pornography — you may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it.




“…In fact, electronic surveillance of employees, through technologies including not just video cameras but also monitoring software, has grown rapidly across all industries. Randolph Lewis, a professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Under Surveillance, Being Watched in Modern America, pointed to software that makes it possible for employers to monitor employee facial expressions and tone of voice to gauge their emotional states, such as rage or frustration. Among more conventional surveillance methods, employers can track employees’ website visits, and keep tabs on their employees’ keystrokes. Employers can also monitor employees’ personal blogs, and read their social-networking profiles. In one case in California, a sales executive at a money-transfer firm sued her employer, claiming she had been fired for disabling an app that used employer-issued cell phones to track workers via GPS, even when they were off the clock.

The Digital Transformation Agency is at public loggerheads with one of Australia’s most influential national security policy think tanks, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, over claims its digital identity rollout needs strict legislation to stop a Chinese-style social credit system.
The DTA on Thursday hit back hard at an analysis brief penned by the head of ASPI’s international cyber policy centre, Fergus Hanson, which also bleakly warned the government risks a repeat of the Australia Card and Access Card flops because of poor public education and understanding of the schemes.

While most Americans know about social media bots, many think they have a negative impact on how people stay informed – “Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many Americans have expressed concern about the presence of misinformation online, particularly on social media. Recent Congressional hearings and investigations by social media sites and academic researchers have suggested that one factor in the spread of misinformation is social media bots – accounts that operate on their own, without human involvement, to post and interact with others on social media sites. This topic has drawn the attention of much of the public: About two-thirds of Americans (66%) have heard about social media bots, though far fewer (16%) have heard a lot about these accounts. Among those aware of the phenomenon, a large majority are concerned that bot accounts are being used maliciously, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted July 30-Aug. 12, 2018, among 4,581 U.S. adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel (the Center has previously studied bots on Twitter and the news sites to which they link)

Twenty-three years of marriage, this is how we did it: Kate Forster is a Melbourne MEdia Dragoness and author

Why one Block apartment is proving much popular than the others

While the ultimate winners are yet to be decided, one couple's apartment has received tens of thousands more views than the others.
  • by Melissa Heagney

How data helped visualize the family separation crisis

Govpass on brink of becoming the next Australia Card debacle: report

The roll-out of a digital ID scheme risks being the latest failed attempt at tech reform, a defence think tank says.


“Early this summer, at the height of the family separation crisis – where children were being forcibly separated from their parents at our nation’s border – a team of scholars pooled their skills to address the issue. The group of researchers – from a variety of humanities departments at multiple universities – spent a week of non-stop work mapping the immigration detention network that spans the United States. They named the project “Torn Apart/Separados” and published it online, to support the efforts of locating and reuniting the separated children with their parents.
The project utilizes the methods of the digital humanities, an emerging discipline that applies computational tools to fields within the humanities, like literature and history. It was led by members of Columbia University’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, which had previously used methods such as rapid deployment to responded to natural disasters.
The group has since expanded the project, publishing a second volume that focuses on the $5 billion immigration industry, based largely on public data about companies that contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The visualizations highlight the astounding growth in investment of ICE infrastructure (from $475 million 2014 to $5.1 billion in 2018), as well as who benefits from these contracts, and how the money is spent.
Storybench spoke with Columbia University’s Alex Gil, who worked on both phases of the project, about the process of building “Torn Apart/Separados,” about the design and messaging choices that were made and the ways in which methods of the digital humanities can cross pollinate with those of journalism…”

US government refrains from calling China a currency manipulator

The US government has refrained from naming China or any other trading partner as a currency manipulator.

Bogus psychiatrist caught using forged documents

Fake doctor exhibited 'behaviour that is completely inconsistent with the standards of honesty and integrity expected of a health practitioner'.