For your information: Australian privacy law and practice

Among its key recommendations, this report calls for: • Simplification and streamlining: the Privacy Act and related laws and regulations are highly detailed and complex, making it difficult for businesses to understand their obligations and for individuals to know their rights. A basic restructuring of the Act is required, focused on high-level principles of general application, to be supplemented by dedicated regulations governing specific fields, such as health privacy and credit reporting. • Uniform privacy principles and national consistency: the Act should prescribe a single set of Privacy Principles—developed and spelled out by the ALRC in this report—to apply to all federal government agencies and the private sector. It is recommended that these principles also be applied to state and territory government agencies through an intergovernmental cooperative scheme—so that the same principles and protections apply across Australia no matter what kind of agency or organisation is handling the information. • Regulating cross-border data flows: the basic principle should be that an agency or organisation that transfers personal information outside the country remains accountable for it, except in certain specified circumstances. • Rationalisation of exemptions and exceptions: the Privacy Act should be amended to rationalise the complex web of exemptions and exceptions. Exemptions only should be permitted where there is a compelling reason—and the ALRC recommends removal of the current exemptions for political parties, employee records and small businesses. • Improved complaint handling and stronger penalties: the Privacy Commissioner’s complaint handling procedures should be streamlined and strengthened, and the federal courts should be empowered to impose significant civil penalties for serious or repeated breaches of the Privacy Act. • More comprehensive credit reporting: in addition to the limited types of ‘negative’ information currently permitted, it is recommended that some additional categories of ‘positive’ information should be allowed to be added to an individual’s credit file, in order to facilitate better risk management practices by credit suppliers and lenders. • Health privacy: apart from the general approach to simplification and harmonisation of privacy laws, the ALRC recommends the drafting of new Privacy (Health Information) Regulations to regulate this important field. Recommendations also are made to deal with electronic health records, and the greater facilitation of health and medical research. • Children and young people: consultations with children and young people indicated that they wish to retain control over the personal information that they post on social networking websites, but were unaware of the extent to which such information remains available even after it has been ‘deleted’. The ALRC recommends that regulators and industry associations intensify efforts to educate young people about these issues. • Data breach notification: government agencies and business organisations should be required to notify individuals—and the Privacy Commissioner—where there is a real risk of serious harm occurring as a result of a data breach. • Cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy: federal law should provide for a private cause of action where an individual has suffered a serious invasion of privacy, in circumstances in which the person had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Courts should be empowered to tailor appropriate remedies, such as an order for damages, an injunction or an apology. The ALRC’s recommended formulation sets a high bar for plaintiffs, having due regard to the importance of freedom of expression and other rights and interests

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Commerce Raiding

The sixteen case studies in this book reflect the extraordinary diversity of experience of navies attempting to carry out, and also to eliminate, commerce raiding. Because the cases emphasize conflicts in which commerce raiding had major repercussions, they shed light on when, how, and in what manner it is most likely to be effective. The authors have been asked to examine the international context, the belligerents, the distribution of costs and benefits, the logistical requirements, enemy countermeasures, and the operational and strategic effectiveness of these campaigns.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1039/thumbnail.jp

Hackers gonna hack: investigating the effect of group processes and social identities within online hacking communities.

Hacking is an ethically and legally ambiguous area, often associated with cybercrime and cyberattacks. This investigation examines the human side of hacking and the merits of understanding this community. This includes group processes regarding: the identification and adoption of a social identity within hacking, and the variations this may cause in behaviour; trust within in the social identity group; the impact of breaches of trust within the community. It is believed that this research could lead to constructive developments for cybersecurity practices and individuals involved with hacking communities by identifying significant or influencing elements of the social identity and group process within these communities. For cybersecurity, the positive influence on individual security approaches after the hacker social identity adoption, and the subsequent in-group or out-group behaviours, could be adapted to improve security in the work place context. For individuals involved in the communities, an increase in the awareness of the potential influences from their adopted social identities and from other members could help those otherwise vulnerable to manipulation, such as new or younger members. Further discussion on such information, as well as historical examples, will lead to informed behaviour by these communities. Whilst this may not cause the group behaviour to change, it would ensure there would be understanding and acceptance of consequences to unethical or illegal actions, which is hoped to discourage cybercriminal behaviour. The research employed a mixed methods approach, with online questionnaires and individual participant interviews. This approach primarily utilised the netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2015), with the results providing more qualitative information than originally anticipated. Informal data collection for this research included observation of relevant websites and forum discussions as well as observation at hacking related conferences; the subsequent surveys and interviews were conducted with volunteers from these communities. Formal data collection was initiated through a pilot study, carried out in early 2016, with 44 participants. This was followed by the first study survey in early 2017, completed by 155 participants. The second study was individual interviews, conducted with 14 participants throughout 2017. These interviews were analysed in the context of Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974). The third and final study was another survey, conducted early 2018 with 197 participants. Thematic analysis was conducted on all data. There was limited evidence of manipulation of group process or trust observed in forums or reported by participants. The adoption of a specific social identity does have strong and influential behavioural norms; however, the adoption of a specific social identity category does not prevent individuals from identifying and confirming to multiple categories which may use or accept different behaviours. The majority of particiapnts in these studies appeared to position themselves as positive deviants, acknowledging past or minor “black-hat” behaviour. This work contributes to the development and improvement of methodologies in online environments: this research was exploratory in accessing a hard to reach demographic that is often untrusting of outsiders. Adaptions to ethical procedures ensured complete anonymity for the participants, improving the participant recruitment rate. Key findings from this research demonstrate that hacking communities can be very positive and supportive for their members, functioning primarily as meritocracies. This is regarded by the communities as an important positive trait, in conjunction with online anonymity. The conclusions of this research consistently support the findings of previous studies

Rescuing Democracy

This book proposes a new institution — the ‘People’s Forum’ — to enable democratic governments to effectively address long-running issues like global warming and inequality. It would help citizens decide what strategic problems their government must fix, especially where this requires them to suffer some inconvenience or cost. The People’s Forum is first based on a new diagnosis of government failure in democracies. The book tests its own analyses of government failure by seeing whether these might help us to explain the failures of particular democracies to address (and in some cases, to even recognize) several crucial environmental problems. The essential features of a new design for democracy are described and then compared with those of previous institutional designs that were also intended to improve the quality of democratic government. In that comparison, the People’s Forum turns out to be not only the most effective design for developing and implementing competent policy, but also the easiest to establish and run. The latter advantage is crucial as there has been no success in getting previous designs into actual trial practice. It is hoped that this book may inspire a small group to raise the money to set up and run the People’s Forum. Then, as citizens see it operating and engage with it, they may come to regard the new Forum as essential in helping them to deliberate long-running issues and to get their resulting initiatives implemented by government. Smith also discusses how the People’s Forum must be managed and how groups with different political ideologies may react to it. An Afterword sets out the method by which this design was produced, to help those who might want to devise an institution themselves. The new concepts in environmental science that the book develops to test its diagnosis are applied in an Appendix to outline crucial options for the future of Tasmania. Similar options apply to many countries, states and provinces. As indicated above, those choices are currently beyond the capacity of democratic governments to address and in some cases, even to recognize. But the People’s Forum may lift them out of that morass

Renewables 2021 Global Status Report

The REN21 Renewables Global Status Report (GSR) provides an annual look at the tremendous advances in renewable energy markets, policy frameworks and industries globally. Each report uses formal and informal data to provide the most up-to-date information available. Reliable, timely and regularly updated data on renewable energy are essential as they are used for establishing baselines for decision makers; for demonstrating the increasing role that renewables play in the energy sector; and illustrating that the renewable energy transition is a reality

Весенние дни науки: сборник докладов Международной конференции студентов и молодых ученых (Екатеринбург, 20–22 апреля 2023 г.)

В сборник вошли материалы докладов, представленных на тематических секциях международной конференции студентов и молодых ученых «Весенние дни науки», которая состоялась в Екатеринбурге 20–22 апреля 2023 г. Организаторы конференции: Институт экономики и управления УрФУ. Сборник подготовлен Институтом экономики и управления Уральского федерального университета имени первого Президента России Б.Н. Ельцина. Адресован исследователям, студентам, магистрантам и аспирантам. Все материалы представлены в авторской редакции