A ban on publishing the names of all drink drivers in the Wellington region has made the crime an “anonymous offence” and could lead to an increase in drink-driving, police say. After nearly a decade of publishing a list of all excess blood-alcohol convictions, The Dominion Post no longer receives information from the police, who…
Facebook Cornering Market on E-Friends
Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million. Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It’s a sleek application that acts as…
Court orders sheriff to turn over password
We’ve seen a few cases in the past few years where someone was ordered to turn over a password to a computer system or the encryption key. But now a dispute over the security of a law enforcement database has two county agencies in Maricopa Arizona battling in court and a judge threatening the sheriff’s…
AU vehicles forced to carry a tracking device
An innovative way to unclog our roads or a Big Brother plan to keep watch over motorists? That is the debate sparked by a paper recommending vehicles be forced to carry a tracking device so they could be charged extra for driving on main roads and during peak hour. The proposal to introduce so-called telematic…