My great objective as a parliamentarian was to dramatise the deficiencies and devise practical government programs to deal with them. It was a cause that went to the heart of our way of life.
Gough Whitlam recalls his values as a parliamentarian (Brett highlighted those moments on 2 Dec 1972)
The New And Decidedly Improved IRS 'Fact Sheet' Frequently Asked Questions
Emperor Charles V’s secret code cracked after five centuries Guardian
A Machiavellian machine raises ethical questions about AI Financial Times
Washington Post Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts [title should be “reopening the gates of hell” – “Elon Musk plans to reinstate nearly all previously banned Twitter accounts — to the alarm of activists and online trust and safety experts. After posting a Twitter poll asking, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” in which 72.4 percent of the respondents voted yes, Musk declared, “Amnesty begins next week….” [I never saw a poll and have been on Twitter since 2008 – the poll was just like so much that is going on since the Musk purchase of Twitter – horse hockey.” [Many long term Twitter users, famous and not in any way – but diligent about posting (me) have lost many of their followers. This has nothing to do with the banishment of bots.]
Hundreds of Australian bank accounts shut down over links to teenage sextortion
Annual Privacy Governance Report 2022
Published: November 2022 View Executive Summary (PDF) – View Full Report (Members-Only)
“This report is meant to serve as a point-in-time “check-in” for the privacy profession. What does the average privacy office look like in 2022? We asked our global membership to complete the 29-question governance survey. Over the course of 10 weeks, more than 700 responded from more than 40 countries. This year’s research focused on five key foundational areas of governance:
- Governance and operating model: The organizational structures, roles and responsibilities for managing the collection, use, retention, disclosure and disposal of personal data.
- Privacy strategy and planning: The activities undertaken by the privacy office to determine the strategic direction of the privacy office and its associated planning activities.
- Compensation management: The annual process of determining the compensation of privacy office staff.
- Budget management: The processes and activities supporting the development, approval and spending of annual privacy budgets.
- Performance metrics and monitoring: The processes and measurements to understand how the organization is performing against privacy strategy.”
Poland projection of the day
If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II.
That is by Ben Sixsmith. Poland remains a underrated nation.
Redacted Documents Are Not as Secure as You Think
Wired: “Popular redaction tools don’t always work as promised, and new attacks can reveal hidden information, researchers say. For years, if you wanted to protect sensitive text in a document, you could grab a pair of scissors or a scalpel and cut out the information. If this didn’t work, a chunky black marker pen would do the job. Now that most documents are digitized, securely redacting their contents has become harder. The majority of redactions—by government officials and courts—involve placing black boxes over text in PDFs. When this redaction is done incorrectly, people’s safety and national security can be put at risk. New research from a team at the University of Illinois looked at the most popular tools for redacting PDF documents and found many of them wanting. The findings, from researchers Maxwell Bland, Anushya Iyer, and Kirill Levchenko, say two of the most popular tools for redacting documents offer no protection to the underlying text at all, with the text accessible by copying and pasting it. Plus, a new attack method they devised makes it possible to extract secret details from the redacted text.”
Source: Story Beyond the Eye: Glyph Positions Break PDF Text Redaction, Maxwell Bland, Anushya Iyer, and Kirill Levchenko, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. 14 November 2022.