Australia-Technology

Passengers heading in and out of Australia's international airports will be facing random screenings via new body scanners set to be deployed around the country from July, with the government insisting that passenger privacy and safety is at the top of the list when it comes to the new technology.

A millimetre-wave scanner shows a stick figure outlined with areas of interest highlighted in yellow.
(Credit: Department of Infrastructure and Transport)

Millimetre-wave body scanners will be deployed in all of Australia's international terminals from the middle of the year, as part of the government's $200 million push to make the skies safer.

Unlike controversial scanners used by the Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) in the United States, however, the new scanners headed for Aussie shores display a screened passenger as a stick figure, with no discernible features visible. This means that men, women and children will all show up the same, with only metal and some non-metal areas highlighted.

The scanners have the sign-off from the privacy commissioner, and they won't store any of the images, destroying them immediately in order to protect privacy.

The government has also addressed potential health concerns raised by the scanners, comparing the amount of radiation absorbed from the scanners to that of "passive exposure to a mobile phone used several metres away". However, this may come as cold comfort, if recent research from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the cancer-causing effects of radiation is to be believed.

While passengers will be randomly selected for the new scanners at launch in July, the government said that as time goes on, the Customs and Border Protection Service may incorporate the equipment into the standard-screening regime for passengers, with those objecting to the scanners for any reason other than a verifiable medical condition to be unable to board their flight.

Despite this proposed no-scan, no-fly policy, the government has no plans to deploy the scanners at the country's domestic airports.

The office of the minister for Infrastructure and Transportation told ZDNet Australia that the scanners will be looking for items that can slip through conventional metal detectors, like ceramic knives and other makeshift, non-conventional weaponry.

The scanners were trialled by the Department of Infrastructure and Transport prior to launch, in tandem with a trial of x-ray-scanning technology by the Customs and Border Protection Service. Unlike the millimetre-wave scanners, the customs trial was an opt-in screening, triggered only if customs agents had a high suspicion of passengers carrying drugs internally.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has called on the Federal Government to "reset expectations" that it will deliver e-health records to Australians by July this year.

(Littman image by Katrin Morenz, CC BY-SA 2.0)

AMA President Dr Steven Hambleton told a Senate hearing this morning that the government's proposed deadline for the launch of its personally controlled e-health record (PCEHR) system for all Australians by 1 July 2012 is "problematic".

"We have a real problem with the level of expectation that has been set ... and the actual ability for doctors to deliver on that day. Even if the legislation is passed [and] the framework is available, there are many, many practices that will simply not be able to communicate with that piece of software."

He said that many medical practices would also be concerned about their risks in terms of recording who has access to the record and when, stating that much of the software around today doesn't have the ability to do that.

He said that the AMA supports e-health records, but said it will be a few years before it is completely up and running.

"I think we need to reset expectations both in the profession and the public, so we understand that there's not going to be a comprehensive personally controlled electronic health record available, or indeed accessible, by most software on that day," he said.

Hambleton said that if the AMA wanted anything delivered by 1 July, it would be the sharing of medication lists. He said this would halve the consultation time for many elderly patients, and would reduce confusion among health practitioners that aren't often aware of the different names for both original and generic medications.

"If we can share accurate, up-to-date medication lists, this will save lives. This is so important ... so we don't prescribe things people are allergic to, so we don't prescribe things people are sensitive to," he said. "Most people are pretty happy to share their medication lists."

Hambleton said that the e-health system should be opt out instead of opt in, because if the information isn't there from the beginning, it would deter doctors from returning to the system to look for information in the future.

"The reality of patients having to opt in means that when the doctor looks for a record, they'll often find there isn't one," he said. "They'll quickly become reluctant users if they look for and can't find a record."

He said much of the implementation of the e-health system at this point has not been driven by the clinicians themselves, and this, too, would deter uptake.

"We've got to make sure it remains clinically driven, and can sit in the workflows as much as possible."

In the time since its creation, Hambleton said that the National E-Health Transition Authority's (NEHTA) communication with the medical industry has improved, and although NEHTA came under fire last month for stopping the roll-out of desktop software in the lead clinical trial sites because of issues with specifications, Hambleton said that this was the right move by the organisation.

"Recognising it now, rather than when we're trying to roll it out, was very good, and making a decision to stop the development is a good one. I'm very pleased that NEHTA: one, had the systems in place to recognise it; and two, took action quickly; and three, is actually communicating with their clinical leads and the profession," he said.

"I think we can see the benefits four or five years down the track, and I think it is going to be that long."

He said that decreasing NEHTA's funding after 1 July from hundreds of millions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars could be a mistake, as the authority will still be needed to bring health practices on board.

"Somebody needs to be sitting there to keep driving that momentum."

Later today, the inquiry will hear from the Medical Software Industry Association, the Australian Privacy Foundation, NEHTA and the Department of Health and Ageing.

Apple has temporarily blocked Motorola Mobility's attempt to have it withdraw several iPhone and iPad models from its online store in Germany, the latest twist in an extended legal duel over patents between the companies.

The sale of the devices was briefly halted after Motorola Mobility enforced a ruling that it won against Ireland-based Apple Sales International from a court in Mannheim, Germany.

The court had earlier ruled that Apple should not be using Motorola's mobile technology in the devices without a licence.

Motorola Mobility moved to enforce the decision, and Apple announced on Thursday that it was halting online sales. A few hours later, Apple said it had won a suspension from an appeals court in Karlsruhe.

"All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple's online store in Germany shortly," Apple said in a statement. "Apple appealed this ruling, because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry-standard patent seven years ago."

Apple says Motorola Mobility has refused to license the technology, even though Motorola agreed that it should be an industry standard.

In a statement on Friday, Motorola Mobility said it will continue to pursue claims against Apple. It said that Apple had refused to negotiate in good faith.

The devices in question are the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3Gs, the iPhone 4 and UMTS-capable iPads - but not the iPhone 4S.

Florian Mueller, an intellectual property consultant who has been reporting on the cases on his blog FOSS Patents, said that the wording of the Karlsruhe decision only suspends enforcement of the decision until the court can hear a response from Motorola.

"This is a very, very temporary suspension," said Mueller. "Apple could be in the same situation again a week or two down the road."

The two companies are also at odds over what Motorola Mobility says is improper use of its push-email technology that sends email to smartphones. The Mannheim court ruled in Motorola's favour on Thursday, but Apple said it would appeal, and that people using its phones would keep getting their email.

Facebook's IPO has been compared to Google as the next big opportunity to invest in a massive internet enterprise, but how much is hype and how much is realistic?

One thousand dollars of Google shares from 2004 would be worth about $6000 today. Not bad, considering we've been through a period of economic turbulence. So you can understand the enthusiasm to jump into Facebook, the online phenomenon that could give Google a run for its money.

It's a long bow, though, isn't it? Google is a US$193 billion company with revenues of US$38 billion. Facebook has one 10th of Google's revenue, yet it's expected that after listing it'll be worth half as much as Google. As the graph shows, a market valuation 27 times revenue (or 102 times earnings) is out of kilter with comparable tech stocks - and, really, out of kilter with common sense.

(Credit: Phil Dobbie/ZDNet Australia)

The Facebook Prospectus, released on the weekend, does little to argue the case for this enormous discrepancy. Revenue, it says, will come from advertising and payments. Facebook says its combination of "reach, relevance, social context and engagement" will drive up ad revenue. Yet, the nature of the site could make this difficult. Does advertising blend as smoothly into a social-networking environment as it does into a search situation? That might be why the prospectus says, "We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads".

There's less hype around Facebook's second revenue opportunity: online payments. That will, surely, only ever be a small slice of its pie. The prospectus points to an "industry source" putting this market at US$15 billion by 2014. Facebook will only get a share of that if it's in response to advertising on the site, which really makes its revenue a single-stream strategy. Risks are also noted in the prospectus: "The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business."

That major risk aside, we can expect some hype at the onset. The price is built on the opportunity rather than where the company is now. When Google listed in 2004, the company was worth US$23 billion, 218 times earnings. I'd argue, though, that it went to market with a clearer idea of how it was going to make money. Still, if Facebook sees the same growth rate as Google, we could be seeing a $600 billion company by the end of the decade. Is it worth the punt?

Google's Android operating system may soon receive the US Government's seal of security approval, according to a report from CNN.

Citing a source close to the project, CNN says that developers in a government program are working on smartphones that run a customised version of the OS with security improvements. Though the first batch of test devices is authorised only for storing confidential documents, phones and tablets capable of transmitting the documents over wireless networks could arrive in the next few months.

Michael McCarthy, a director for the Army's Brigade Modernisation Command, told CNN that the Army has been testing touchscreen smartphones at US bases over the last two years (a fact that CBS News also reported in December 2010). Though the Army has issued 40 of the modified smartphones so far, it will ship an additional 50 handsets and 75 tablets to service members by next month.

Instead of employing devices with unique hardware to complement it, CNN reports that the program uses commercially available phones while making security modifications to Android's kernel. In addition to showing the data that each application on the phone will utilise, the enhanced devices will also let the user control the specific data that can be sent over the network.

Soldiers on deployments will be the first group to receive the devices, with the program later extending to federal agencies and government contractors.

If the program proceeds successfully, a government adoption of Android technology would pose a threat to Research In Motion, which has long supplied its BlackBerry devices to federal officials, including President Barack Obama.

Via CNET

With patent lawsuits between technology players like Apple, Samsung and Motorola all the rage nowadays, one term is popping up more frequently: "FRAND". But what does it mean?

(Sign-up for #ArmsTreaty Legal Response Network by Control Arms, CC2.0)

FRAND is an obscure legal acronym that stands for "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory", and is based on the principle that fair licensing of intellectual property is often needed because sometimes certain ideas and patents just need to be shared for everything to work together properly. It's a fairly simple idea, but one that's been rocking the tech industry in recent years.

Apple loves FRAND, as it's become one of the company's most useful tactics in the courtroom. Samsung is under fire for potentially violating the principle in Europe. For years, Qualcomm was burdened with accusations that it violated the notion. Recently, FRAND is figuring into some of the most high-profile technology lawsuits, including the ones between Apple and the various Android handset manufacturers.

The use of FRAND begins with the inception of a standards body for a particular technology. Oftentimes, many companies have to come together and agree to a set of standards for a certain technology in order for that technology's various parts to work together. Specific to a few of the recent wireless lawsuits, FRAND relates to the agreed-on technology used to form the 3G cellular standard called UMTS. Several companies hold what are known as essential patents, and are obligated to license them to all the other participants in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner.

"The fear is that you can't have people talking freely about what they're going to implement and worrying that someone will come back and say, 'gotcha!'," said Mark Kesslen, a partner at Lowenstein Sandler, who heads up the law firm's intellectual-property practice.

Though all of this cooperation between different companies might smack of a monopoly, the FRAND principle is deeply rooted in preventing the abuse of power and the formation of a potential trust. The doctrine makes it difficult for one company to use its patents - particularly if they're more essential than others in the standard - to overcharge competitors on licensing fees and gain an unfair advantage.

One issue with the principle is determining what exactly is reasonable. The general idea is that a company needs to charge the same rate to every company looking to participate in the standard. Companies have a right to generate revenue off their patents, but it's debatable just how much money a company should be able to make, and how standard such a rate can be. Consequently, there isn't really a standard definition for "reasonable".

"The words sound great," Kesslen said. "But there's nothing really that defines what 'reasonable' is."

It's that grey area that Apple has fully embraced. Over the weekend, Apple was able to temporarily halt a ban on its products in Germany by invoking a FRAND claim against Motorola Mobility. Motorola had won the ban last month when a German court ruled that Apple had illegally violated an essential patent related to 3G UMTS technology. Apple claimed it had been attempting to work out an agreement but that Motorola had violated its obligation to act fairly in negotiating terms.

"Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago," said an Apple representative.

Motorola argued that it had approached Apple in 2007 with fair licensing terms and attempted to work out a deal for three years with little result.

But Apple's defence is fairly positive. Its argument that it is entitled to a licensing deal under FRAND was enough to win a speedy halt on Motorola's ban, despite Motorola's protests.

"Apple's refusal to negotiate in good faith, as well as their aggressive litigation campaign against Android, left Motorola Mobility with no option other than to seek to enforce the company's rights and patent portfolio," said a Motorola representative. The company added that it remains committed to licensing rather than litigation.

Apple and the Android players have opted to use different strategies in their patent offensives. Companies such as Motorola and Samsung have gone after Apple using industry-standard patents. While these are vitally important pieces of intellectual property, they also leave these companies open to FRAND claims by Apple.

Apple doesn't appear to have invoked any essential patents in its lawsuits against the Android companies, said Florian Mueller, a legal consultant who has done work companies such as Microsoft and runs the blog Foss Patents.

The counterargument is that because those patents are so essential, they make for a more potent case against Apple. FRAND could potentially just be a stall tactic for Apple.

Because FRAND patents are based on technology that everyone is supposed to have fair access to, the use of them in patent litigation comes with many pitfalls.

"The Android camp would like to leverage those kinds of patents to reach a state of mutually assured destruction, but that's a very problematic strategy," Mueller said. "The fallout from this would far transcend the current mobile patent wars."

For instance, Samsung's aggressive use of essential patents in its lawsuits could come back and haunt it, with the European Union focusing its antitrust lens on the company's recent activity. The EU's European Commission arm is attempting to determine if Samsung is charging unfair rates or holding back on access to patents to stifle competition.

The European Commission's decision on Samsung could have a ripple effect on how patents are used in litigation. FRAND was set up for the good of the industry. But the essential patents that fall under its guidelines have increasingly been used as weapons, which flies in the face of the original intent of FRAND. Mueller says FRAND does allow for a light form of patent enforcement - but not a more heavy-handed approach.

"FRAND patents are great parking meters, but [they're] not supposed to be used as guns," Mueller said.

Via CNET

With two billion people now online, we should probably start thinking about the kind of world we want to create. Enter the Society 5 project.

"This is a collaborative discussion. We believe the future of our society should be discussed and decided upon democratically," write the project's founders.

Society 5 plans to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society, initially as a blog at society5.net, and then as a book and beyond.

The founders are two Australians. Pia Waugh is well known for her advocacy of open-source software and government 2.0 issues, and, until very recently, worked as an advisor to Labor Senator Kate Lundy. Will Grant is a political sociologist and science communicator based at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

On this week's Patch Monday podcast, Grant explains that any future society we build must be based on the society we have today, in a politically achievable way - just as computer operating systems are rarely built from scratch; the basic layers of family and community - or the basic layers of program code - are retained, and extra layers of abstraction are built on top.

As the new online society evolves, players with competing interests will come into conflict - as we saw last week in Optus' Federal Court win over the National Rugby League (NRL) and the Australian Football League (AFL).

Grant also explains how the replacement of mass media with social media and now personalised search could lead to "filter bubbles", where we only hear about viewpoints that are already similar to our own.

To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian, or phone Sydney 02 8011 3733.

Running time: 27 minutes, 30 seconds

Following controversy, Apple has made changes to the end user licence agreement that binds its iBooks Author software.

iBooks Author
(Credit: Apple)

The legal agreement sparked ire following the software's introduction last month for its stipulation that books that were created with the free software would have to be made available only through Apple's iBookstore if authors intended to charge for them.

In the new version of the software that went out to users late last week, the company has modified the original language to state that the only works subject to that rule are files in the .ibooks format, files that only open up for the company's iOS devices.

"This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format," the end user licence agreement (EULA) now states.

"We updated the iBooks Author end user licence agreement to clarify the terms for authors regarding content ownership and distribution," an Apple representative said in a statement.

So what types of files can users sell outside of Apple's stores if they've made them in the software? That leaves PDF and plain text, neither of which work with some of the extra features - like 3D objects, widgets, quizzes and flash cards - that can be added to content created within the software.

Apple introduced its iBooks Author software at a private event last month alongside iBooks 2. The free software lets authors design digital versions of textbooks and other interactive titles for the iPad. It was launched in conjunction with the company's push to get textbook authors to create and distribute digital editions.

Shortly after its release, the licensing agreement came under fire from iOS and Mac developer Dan Wineman, who highlighted the section in question, comparing it to "Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can't freely sell it to Getty". The latest update clarifies that.

Via CNET

European Union officials have asked Google to refrain from implementing its plans to share user information across all of its services until the privacy implications can be analysed, but Google is standing its ground.

In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Article 29 working group of EU advisers on data protection issues, said: "We wish to check the possible consequences for the protection of the personal data of these [EU] citizens in a coordinated procedure," the Financial Times reported over the weekend.

The working group has asked French data protection watchdog CNIL to lead the investigation, the letter said.

But Google is not backing down on its policy modification, which was announced last week and is due to go into effect on 1 March. In a letter sent to Kohnstamm, Google privacy counsel Peter Fleischer wrote that the company is "happy to discuss this further" if the CNIL requests a meeting.

"As you will know, we had extensively pre-briefed data protection authorities across the EU prior to the launch of our notification to users on 24 January 2012," he wrote. "At no stage did any EU regulator suggest that any sort of pause would be appropriate. Since we finished these extensive briefings, we have notified over 350 million Google account holders, as well as providing highly visible notices to all our non-authenticated users."

The privacy policy changes won't affect users' existing privacy settings and no new or additional data about users is being collected, Fleischer noted. The change will allow Google to use the data it already has access to to provide more convenience and better services to users, he said. The move basically streamlines more than 60 different privacy policies of Google's into one.

Google has been able to combine information from a user's two different Google accounts, which enables users to add a Calendar appointment when a Gmail message includes data about a meeting. But Google's privacy policies have restricted the company's ability to combine information within a user's account for two services: web history and YouTube. So, someone searching Google for cooking recipes could not be shown suggestions for cooking videos on YouTube, Google said in its letter.

Google's new policy has raised legislative eyebrows the world over. Even the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, is looking into the policy shift, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review last week, while US lawmakers have already taken Google to task over the privacy policy changes, with some pushing the company to allow users to opt out of the switch.

Google executives appeared before a Congressional subcommittee last week to answer questions about the changes. Representative Mary Bono Mack, who heads up the House subcommittee doing the investigation, accused Google officials of not being "forthcoming" in their answers.

Google also has been taking heat for its decision to embed Google+ results in its main search page. After the news was announced last month, EPIC asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into whether the move violates federal antitrust rules and poses consumer privacy concerns.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC for access to a privacy report that Google recently submitted to the agency. The privacy report is required as part of a consent decree the FTC and Google announced in October to settle a complaint EPIC brought to the FTC in 2010 over the now-defunct Google Buzz social network service.

"Google promises access to the world's information, but it has not made available to the public the report it submitted to the Federal Trade Commission about the steps it takes to protect the privacy of its users," Marc Rotenberg, EPIC executive director, said in a statement.

Google said in a statement that the company could not comment on EPIC's FOIA request.

Meanwhile, Google clarified its privacy policy changes with respect to Google Apps for Government in response to concerns that it would compromise sensitive government data. The government contracts supersede the privacy policy in the old version and the new version, unless domain administrators turn on additional apps that are not in the core suite, Google said.

"Enterprise customers using Google Apps for Government, Business or Education have individual contracts that define how we handle and store their data," Amit Singh, vice president of Google Enterprise, said in a statement. "As always, Google will maintain our enterprise customers' data in compliance with the confidentiality and security obligations provided to their domain. The new Privacy Policy does not change our contractual agreements, which have always superseded Google's Privacy Policy for enterprise customers."

Separately, there is scrutiny over antitrust allegations in the US and Europe. The FTC and the US Senate have investigations under way focusing on concerns that Google unfairly promotes its own services in its search results. Meanwhile, the European Union is considering whether to file a formal antitrust complaint against Google based on similar complaints by rival search providers there.

Luke Hopewell contributed to this article.

Via CNET

It seems that applications take up a lot of the government's budget, year on year, which makes me wonder why more departments aren't following Queensland's Department of Education.

The department has released a tender for a vendor to construct a plan to rationalise 35 Microsoft Access and .NET applications, calling in an external vendor to take a snapshot of what the department's got under its hood. I'm sure it's part of the Department of Human Services consolidation.

It wants to use the money it requires to keep the applications up and running in other areas. The more it can kill off, the more it can spend somewhere else. It sounds sensible - especially when you consider data released by the Federal Government last week (PDF), which said that in the year to 30 June 2010, the applications service tower cost 36 per cent of the over $5 billion federal government IT budget.

That's almost $2 billion spent each year.

In that year, 52 per cent of employees working on public service IT were working on that area. And if you look at the people who were hired outside of the public service to work on the government's IT, 70 per cent of them worked on that area. Given that the Gershon report wanted to cut contractors down, wouldn't it be a good idea to have a good look at all these applications these people are managing?

Do we need them all? I bet the users think they do. But what if they could be convinced to move to something else that would suit their needs just as well, but would also help someone else, cutting one variant out of the mix? Unfortunately, as almost every shared services implementation has shown us, sharing has never been humanity's best trait. And many IT projects fail because of poor change management.

Then you've got to add consumerisation into the mix. End users don't want just one application to do what they need, they want the one that they like! And they like to be able to download it themselves and preferably onto their own device as well as onto the desktop. So securing and managing those applications looks like a nightmare. More people please, not less!

Is there any way to cut down the application bloat, which doesn't involve an extremely costly program that results in user uproar? Or are we just doomed to having 10 different applications to meet everyone's possible need and hiring the requisite number of people to manage them?