The Helpdesk - A Tech Podcast For The Rest Of Us
Episode 102: The Right To Disconnect
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Episode notes
Right to disconnect
- Victoria Police have won the right to disconnect as part of the union's most recent negotiations.
- Apart from emergencies, they're not to be contacted outside of work hours unless it’s for a welfare check.
- Other unions are likely to follow - with work increasingly encroaching on our home lives, clocking off is getting harder.
Porter appointment to tech portfolio
- A follow up on the PM’s cabinet reshuffle last month, that saw Christian Porter, the former attorney general moved to the Industry, Science and Technology portfolio
- Tech industry leaders have told the AFR they won’t meet with the minister, invite him to things and will think twice about accepting any government grants.
- The principle complaint is the appointment is damaging to a sector that’s working to improve its gender diversity
- Other criticism includes: he lacks experience in technology and would be too focused on saving his political career and a defamation fight over the ABC’s coverage of the allegations, to properly lead the sector.
- It’s always tricky for business to comment on government, and they usually have a diplomatic line about just sticking to their business… and in this case many industry leaders declined to comment, because of their ties to the government.
Facebook
- Information belonging to more than 7.3 million Australians was leaked online as part of a massive data dump of 533 million facebook records.
- Facebook says the data was scraped due to a vulnerability that the company discovered and patched in 2019.
- The leaked data contains phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios and email addresses. It does not contain password information.
- But that information can be used by cybercriminals to impersonate someone online or get them to hand over passwords or credit card information.
- No company should be able to have that much information that can be accessed through a single exploit.
Andrew Laming
- The Guardian reports Liberal National MP Andrew Laming operates more than 30 Facebook pages and profiles under the guise of community groups to promote the LNP and attack opponents.
- For example, there’s the Redland Bay Bulletin – which uses a similar name to the local news site the Redland City Bulletin – was set up by Laming in October 2015 claiming to be a “community group”.
- None of the pages include political authorisation disclosures.
- According to the Australian Electoral Commission, political authorisation is required for information intended to influence the way electors vote in a federal election. Those rules were extended to include social media in 2016.
- The MP is is on leave from parliament to undertake empathy counselling following complaints about his behaviour towards women,
Canva valuation
- Australian start-up Canva is now valued at almost $20 billion australian dollars after raising $US71 million.
- This makes it one of the fastest growing
- The milestone comes with Canva on track to turn over $US500 million this financial year, a 130 per cent increase
- Founded in 2013, Canva has raised a total of nearly $US390 million to date..
Lauren Goode in Wired
- Tells the story of her cancelling her wedding in 2019, and being constantly reminded of it thanks to our phones.
- Also known as the ‘miscarriage problem’ - not built to take into account the edge cases… which actually add up to a lot of people.
- It’s a very well put together piece.
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