Choice has highlighted the use of facial recognition technologies by Kmart, Bunnings and The Good Guys. Bunnings uses the tech at select stores to "identify persons of interest who have previously been involved in incidents of concern", Kmart for "loss prevention or store safety purposes" and The Good Guys invade customer privacy for "security, theft prevention, and managing and improving the customer experience". Choice reckons "these retail businesses are disproportionate in their over collection of this information", which is likely a breach of the Privacy Act and are referring them to the Australian Information Commissioner, which will probably amount to fuck all as the law and regulator on this stuff is weak as piss.
The abandoned Que River lead and zinc mine in Tasmania is going to turn into a huge Bitcoin mine after a company called Tasmanian Data Infrastructure purchased it. The actual mine is of no use to the new owners, it's the 40MVA transformer and proximity to a TasNetworks substation, along with the cool climate and cheap hydroelectricity that's attracted them. TDI aims to install three containers, each with 650 ASIC Bitcoin miners inside and eventually the mine will host 10,000 miners. What a waste of good hydroelectricity. Wonder what kind of security this site has? Can't be that hard to manufacture explosives can it? Bob Brown isn't busy these days is he?
Cloudflare has noticed a few countries deliberately shutting down or restricting access to the internet as secondary school students prepare for exams. They say it's to help kids study and avoid cheating. I doubt it works, but that's the justification. Syrian internet traffic drops to zero on the days before exams. Sudan is similar, but keeps some traffic flowing, likely for public sector/finance reasons. Algeria used to 100% shutdowns, but after realising they were losing US$3.4m of economic activity every hour the internet is down, they've restricted access to certain sites instead of a wholesale shutdown. Can you imagine ACMA telling ISPs in Australia to turn off the internet because the kids are doing the VCE tomorrow? Absolutely mental.
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