Australia

Qantas is investigating reports of customers having access to other passengers' information on their app.

In a statement issued this morning, the airline said it would provide more information as soon as possible.

"Qantas is investigating reports of an issue impacting the Qantas app this morning," a spokesperson for their airline said.

The scale of the issue has not yet been confirmed.

Luckily I can't afford to travel anywhere so this won't affect me, but probably will others.

UQ students standing in solidarity with Palestine

UQ has a very strong relationship with US weapons manufacturer Boeing. Students are protesting this relationship, as well as showing general support for Palestinians, by staging a camp-in on campus.

Some photos I took of the camp as I walked past them this morning.

edit: 2nd & 3rd images linked for Lemmy:

https://cdn.masto.host/twitsocial/media_attachments/files/112/362/144/247/591/418/original/70aa8cf3d02f9d49.jpg

https://cdn.masto.host/twitsocial/media_attachments/files/112/362/144/512/785/162/original/bea15f2b29263696.jpg

Someone else feel free to repost or put them inline for Lemmings' convience.

@australia

At the same time, the government will process faster proposals in non-sensitive areas from known investors with a good compliance record.

Hi all, there is a new e-petition started by the guys at Stop Killing Games. This has been started, in no small part, thanks to Ubisoft making the game "The Crew" unplayable for all owners world wide.

Excerpt from their website:

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.

Petition Request:

• Require software sold in Australia to remain in a functional state after the end of the product’s support period, continuing to operate without any intervention from the publisher.
• Require publishers selling additional features/assets for their software to leave said software in a functional state after the end of the product’s support period, so customers can continue to utilise features/assets they purchased without any intervention from the publisher.
• Establish that these requirements supercede software End-User License Agreements, as many such licenses attempt to strip customers’ right to ownership over their purchased goods, as guaranteed under schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010.

Obviously, if you own "The Crew", you can go right to ACCC or your states/territory consumer protection body to make a complaint. The website even has a guide to file a complaint to the ACCC.

Video from the guy who is starting the campaign: The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games.

If you feel strongly enough on this issue, please go ahead and sign the petition. I think it would be great if the government could get their eyes on this and make some legislation around this so game publishers can't weasel their way out of us owning our purchased game software.

Just look at Valve, they were pretty much forced to make a refund policy for us.

The e-petition closes on the 20th of May at midnight. Thanks for your time 😀

The report found a key cause of the outage was a problem with Optus's 3G network.

During the outage, Optus's 4G and 5G towers shut down, meaning emergency calls were diverted to other network's towers — known as camping on.

But the network's 3G base towers did not shut down, so those calls got lost along the way.

"Some devices … attempted to make emergency calls via those [3G] towers (rather than look to camp on to another network), even though no mobile service was being supplied by the Optus network," the report said.

...

The recommendations include:

• Obligate telcos to shut down their towers during outages, allowing triple-0 calls to be carried by other networks
• Establish a "Triple Zero custodian" whose sole responsible is to make sure the system is working
• Force telcos to share real-time information about outages with emergency services organisations and authorities
• Force telcos to file a timely post-mortem on major outages to the regulator and the government — including what caused it and steps being taken to resolve it, with a clear and detailed timeline
• Review the government's contract with Telstra to run the triple-0 system, with any changes to be made within a year
• Introduce an industry-wide approach to responding to consumers affected by large-scale outages
• Establish an agreement between telcos requiring them to help each to manage and resolve outages
• Review all legislation and regulation relating to triple-0

For Murrawah Johnson, the impacts of the climate crisis and the destruction of land to mine the fossil fuels that drive it are more than simple questions of atmospheric physics or environmental harm.

“What colonisation hasn’t already done, climate change will do in terms of finalising the assimilation process for First Nations people,” the 29-year-old Wirdi woman from Queensland says.

“[It is] totally destroying our ability to maintain a cultural identity, cultural existence and to be able to pass that on.”

Johnson is one of seven global winners of the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activism – described as the Nobel for the environment movement - announced at a ceremony in San Francisco.

My mate works for an Indian company and got WFH forever. I was in shock because I never thought any company can give a work from home option forever ? Does any Australian company gives you such an option ? If so, please name those companies and job titles so that I can start applying for jobs there.

Feels bad man

Thousands of people are set to take to the streets this weekend in 17 rallies across Australia calling for greater action on a growing epidemic of women killed in violent attacks.

Organised by advocacy group What Were You Wearing (WWYW), the first rallies will be held in Ballarat and Newcastle on Friday.

Saturday’s rallies will be held in Sydney and Adelaide, and on Sunday rallies will take place across the country in Melbourne, Bendigo, Geelong, Coffs Harbour, Wagga Wagga, Orange, Perth, the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Brisbane and Canberra.

“Enough is enough,” the rallies’ organisers posted to social media. “The number keeps going up and this is why we are protesting this weekend. Fight with us for change.”

Archive/non-paywall link.

Do Australian courts have the right to decide what foreign citizens, located overseas, view online on a foreign-owned platform?

Anyone inclined to answer “yes” to this question should perhaps also ask themselves whether they are equally happy for courts in China, Russia and Iran to determine what Australians can see and post online in Australia.

This is the problem with global “take-down orders”, an issue we now must confront in light of the Australian eSafety commissioner demanding that social media platform X (formerly Twitter) remove videos of a violent stabbing at a church in Sydney.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8904479

A Queensland council is under investigation by the state government after at least 350 million litres of raw sewage spilled into a Gold Coast river. 

Wildlife Queensland Gold Coast and Hinterland branch president Sally Spain labelled the spill one of the biggest "environmental disasters this city has ever faced".

I'd think surfin' turd rather then surfing bird ? What the fuck ?

Only because some local reported it ?

Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law” as the rift deepens between Australia and the tech platform over the removal of videos of a violent stabbing in a Sydney church.

On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally containing the footage of the alleged stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel on 15 April. The eSafety commissioner had previously directed X to remove the posts, but X had only blocked them from access in Australia pending a legal challenge.

Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.

“Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”

“What the eSafety commissioner is doing is doing her job to protect the interests of Australians. And the idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out of touch Mr Musk is,” he said.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8872514

The ‘solar gardeners’, who mostly live in cities hours away, are getting returns of $505, possibly higher, locked in for the next decade, depending on the electricity market

The returns are credited directly to their electricity bills.

• In short: The 2024 Anglicare Australia Rental Affordability Snapshot has recorded its lowest ever amount of affordable rentals across the country.
• Its annual report, released today, shows the number of affordable rentals available for different Australian households on low incomes.
• The report has found housing availability has not recovered since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic – with average rents $200 a week higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Australian travellers are taking to the skies in record numbers, outstripping pre-pandemic levels for the first time.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/life-after-oil/2016/02/11/how-far-can-we-get-without-flying

Hour for hour, there’s no better way to warm the planet than to fly in a plane

• In short: The southern lights were visible to stargazers in Adelaide in the early hours of Saturday.
• Many more detected the light show in Tasmania, and photographers and aurora chasers shared their photos on social media.
• What's next? The phenomenon is set to become more frequent ahead of the solar maximum in July 2025.