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Showing posts with label Australian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australian. Show all posts
Monday, 30 September 2013
Friday, 30 August 2013
Australian Sex Party gets no love from Google's AdWords
The Australian Sex Party, a political organization, has a hard time getting some love from Google.
The search engine has rejected several AdWords advertisements related to the party's position on marijuana legalization and voluntary euthanasia. AdWords is Google's pay-per-click product that shows advertisements related to keyword searches and content.
The Australian Sex Party, founded in 2009, is fielding 54 candidates in Australia's upcoming federal election, which will take place on Sept. 7. The party also supports same sex marriage, the decriminalization of personal drug use and better public transport.
The Sex Party has requested a manual review of its AdWords advertisements, which were placed through Google's automated systems, said Fiona Patten, the group's president.
"We are not saying 'Buy marijuana here'," said Patten who is a senate candidate for the state of Victoria. "We are not promoting anything illegal. We are a political party."
One of the ads that was rejected read: "Sex Party. Regulate and Tax Marijuana. Your Life, Your Choice," followed by the party's website address. Patten said her group has budgeted AU$30,000 (US$26,800) to $50,000 for digital election-related advertising, the majority of which will be spent with Google.
A Google spokesman in Sydney said the company does not comment on individual advertisers, but that it was looking into the matter.
Patten said even if the advertisements are approved, the Sex Party has lost out on several days of advertising prior to the election. Even if Google spends 24 hours reviewing an advertisement, "you're losing a considerable amount of time," she said.
"If we are not able to share our policies via online methods, that really limits how we can get our message out there in this election," Patten said. "As a small party, you do have to rely on getting your message out in online forums. We can't afford the television advertising, the radio and print advertising that the major parties can budget for."
Last year, Facebook rejected advertisements bought by the group, but after a manual review, allowed them to be shown, Patten said.
It's not the first time the Australian Sex Party has encountered difficulties in buying ads with Google.
In the run up to a 2010 election campaign, Google rejected some of the party's advertisements due to the use of the word "sex." In July 2012, Google rejected the group's advertisements because the ads showed a donation button, which is not allowed if the advertiser does not have a tax-exempt status.
Australian political parties are not eligible for tax-exempt status. The misunderstanding was resolved only one day prior to a by-election.
As a result, the Australian Sex Party filed letters of complaint in September 2012 with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The ACCC rejected the complaint, while the DOJ never responded, Patten said.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
Australian who boasted of hacking to plead not guilty to charges stemming from raid
A 17-year-old Australian who in February claimed to have breached networks at Microsoft and Sony will plead not guilty to charges stemming from a police raid on his home.
Interestingly, none of the charges lodged against Dylan Wheeler relate to his claims to have breached the networks and extracted software tools used to develop games for the XBox One and PlayStation systems.
According to documents shared by Wheeler, he is charged with possession of child exploitation material, dishonestly obtaining credit card information, possession of identification information with the intent of committing an offense, and disobeying a data access order to reveal his passwords.
Wheeler said Friday he also faces a weapons charge related to a stun gun that police seized from his family's home, and possession of drug paraphernalia.
He told Perth Children's Court on Friday how he intends to plead, and said he will formally plead not guilty in a hearing scheduled for Nov. 11.
Wheeler maintains he is innocent, and believes the charges are in part retribution.
The police "were pissed off at the fact that I went to the media," Wheeler said.
Western Australian Police in Perth declined to comment on the case.
Eventually, Wheeler said, he expects hacking charges to be filed against him. He has been open about his probes into Microsoft's and Sony's networks, and said he told Microsoft about weaknesses in its network.
"To my knowledge they [Microsoft] fixed up a lot of the problems they had," he said, while Sony "did try and fix the issues."
But Wheeler did provoke Microsoft. In August 2012, he posted an eBay listing for a "Microsoft Xbox Durango Development Kit." That same month he was visited by an investigator with Microsoft's IP Crimes Team.
In February, he placed another eBay auction listing for a "Durango" PC. The listing expired on Feb. 19, the same day police raided his family's home, seizing three Apple computers, a 1TB hard drive, credit cards, his mobile phone and a stun gun, among other items.
Wheeler's lawyer, Marc Saupin, said Friday that Australian legal rules prevent counsel from commenting about an ongoing case.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Australian startup's software tracks how companies execute strategy
In new jobs after graduating from university, Eric Perriard and Tom Wright found their employers could articulate grandiose strategies for their businesses. But there was little connection to how the average employee could help out.
Perriard, who worked in human resources for a manufacturing company, and Wright, in banking, found that HR systems were fine for performing technical tasks related to employees. But HR software couldn't track if a company's broad strategy was on the mark throughout the year and how employees felt they fit into the big picture and performed.
"There is nothing to cascade the strategy down to people -- to really translate the CEO's or organization's missions to every person down from middle management to the people in the field," Perriard said.
Perriard and Wright's company, Sydney-based Responsis, has built a cloud-based web service called Cascade. For employees, Cascade keeps them in tune with how they can help the goals of the organization, and for management, ensure everyone's work remains aligned with the company's strategy.
There are other products, such as SAP's Successfactors, that try to tackle this problem. Perriard said Sucessfactors focuses on appraisal and people management, but doesn't help to solve issues around executing company strategies.
Cascade is Web-based dashboard. An employee, for example, can see the company's broad goals and then more specific ones in their business unit. They can define their own goals, which fit into a neat, visual hierarchy in Cascade.
A company's chief strategy officer -- an increasingly fashionable title in organizations -- can see diagrams of employees and which ones are working on tasks that fit into the overall vision. Cascade creates a percentage that shows how strategically aligned an organization is, or the "overall cascade" in which strategic themes are filtering throughout a company.
Perriard said Cascade isn't an HR system, but it certainly can be used by HR. Wright said interest has typically come from managing directors, strategy officers and CFOs because they're the people that come up with the strategies.
"They want it so they have can visibility -- so that they can say, 'I took the time to create this particular strategy, now I want to know how is that being implemented right down to the front line'," Wright said.
Cascade is intended to help companies catch when things start to go astray. A company may kick off the year with a new set of strategies but actually only figure out in August or September that they're not going to meet, say, a revenue goal until it is too late to change.
Cascade isn't designed for bosses to micro-manage people. It's also not a project management tool. Employees would likely update their work and goals once a month or so in Cascade, while management would keep a closer eye on how groups of people are working towards the strategy.
"You can immediately see in a very visual way how aligned your organization is," Wright said. "Within the first month or so, you will have a very good indicator of whether or not you are going to succeed."
In true startup fashion, Perriard and Wright coded the first iteration of Cascade, which was released in February. Now they have a lead developer and are both moving toward the business side.
Cascade is hosted on Amazon's cloud infrastructure in Australia. Since Cascade handles very sensitive data, the data is encrypted using 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). To assuage concerns with using cloud storage, Cascade consulted Israeli cryptography experts to implement partial homomorphic encryption.
Encrypted data is descrambled with a key, and management of those keys poses a great security responsibility. Cascade's implementation allows the data to be decrypted with a still-encrypted key, Wright said.
It requires a lot of CPU power, but it means a third party does not have to be trusted with the key. If Cascade was compromised, attackers would only get encrypted data and an encrypted key, which would be useless, Wright said.
The system "allows what everyone thought was impossible," Perriard said. "It allows you to have the most encrypted data at rest without a third party. So it's brilliant. You save costs, and you have the most secure data at rest."
In what may be a rarity in the startup world, Cascade actually turned down a venture capital offer of investment. They didn't even know what their company was worth, Wright said.
"I think from our perspective, we agree it was the right thing to turn it down," Wright said.
"We took the radical, opposite approach, which was literally: everything we don't know how to do, we have to learn it. Tom had to learn some graphic skills, I had to do some video editing," Perriard said. Everything that was too much of an investment to learn, we outsourced it."
That outsourcing included the drawing of meerkats, which grace their Responsis logo, and the homomorphic encryption technology, Wright said.
Aside from themselves, they just have two full-time employees. A 60-person contract team helps with support. They've also landed customers, including from UNICEF Australia and a major player in the credit card business. To allow them to continue without VC funding, Cascade charges $120 per user per year, paid one year in advance.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
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