A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices — expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift from a darkened living room to a crippled nation.

In 2020, journalists asked Australian police forces whether they were using Clearview AI — the American company that scraped three billion social media photos without consent to build a facial recognition database. The answer, from several state forces and the AFP, was no.

Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. At that point, the denials stopped.

That sequence — quiet adoption, public denial, disclosure only under external pressure — is the pattern. Last week I wrote about the cultural conditions that make it possible: the institutional trust, the “she’ll be right” pragmatism, the absence of organised civil liberties infrastructure that might have generated friction. This post is the inventory. Here is what Australia has actually built, layer by layer — and what you can do about it.

Every few months, Australia’s business press discovers a new emergency. Right now it’s the capital gains tax. According to the usual commentators — founders, VCs, and their aligned media — Labor’s move to replace the 50% CGT discount with inflation-adjusted indexation is an act of vandalism against Australian ingenuity. Entrepreneurs will flee. Talent will dry up. The unicorns won’t come.

I’ve been working in and around Australian agtech and startups for the better part of two decades. I’ve watched the same arguments recycled through every policy debate: the R&D tax credit, the ESVCLP scheme, the startup visa. The answer is always the same — give us more upside, or we’ll take our toys elsewhere.

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of It Could Happen Here — Cooper Quintin and Colonel Panic from the EFF walking through the American surveillance state. Flock cameras on every corner. Cell site simulators at protests. Facial recognition with no accountability, built on databases scraped from your social media without asking. PenLink buying location data harvested from your phone’s apps and selling it to law enforcement — no warrant required, because it came from advertising networks instead of a phone carrier.

I’ve been living and working in Australia for a good while now, having moved from Europe with a healthy dose of open-source enthusiasm. Over the years, however, I can’t help but notice a stark difference between the two continents: the politically engaged, almost rebellious, hacker culture that is so vibrant in Europe seems to be missing its pulse here Down Under.

This has really hit home for me while watching the live streams from the 39th annual Chaos Computer Club Congress (39C3) in Hamburg. It’s one of Europe’s largest gatherings of hackers, activists, and creatives who don’t just write code, but actively question and shape the world it runs on. It’s a cultural phenomenon, not just a tech conference.

I came accross this article last week which I found quite interesting in terms of it’s impact on m-Learning.

University inks unmetered Web access deal with Bigpond

The unfortunate thing is that this is only limited to one particular
university and one provider only. It would be interesting to see if
there are any other institutions that are going down that track. How
about a general unmetering for the ‘edu.au’ TLD ?

Since I had to look all over�for the correct settings and there was a
lot of trial and error involved (specially for the Realm). Thanks to Engin Support that finally provided this info after logging a support request.

The screenshots are from a Nokia E65, but should be applicable for similar Nokia phones.

General

Profile name: engin
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point}
Public user name: sip:{phone number}@voice.mibroadband.com.au
User compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No