We got a bit more detail on why France arrested Mr. Telegram, Pavel Durov, thanks to a press release from French prosecutors. Sounds like the French have a lot of crimes they're looking into that involve the use of Telegram and are probing old mate to see if he will hand over any data about the people using Telegram to launder money, sell drugs, distribute kiddie porn and so on - things that absolutely happen on Telegram - but nothing about a specific crime or anything. TechDirt has a good article hypothesising what the French are up to and The Conversation has some good background info on why Telegram is a target. It's a really messy situation considering Pavel's history in Russia and the use of Telegram in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The communications minister announced the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages Industry Standards) Direction 2024, which requires ACMA to "make new rules to ensure telcos keep customers informed and updated regarding major outages, for example, through website updates, email updates to customers, social media updates and radio and television news bulletins". We don't know what specifics ACMA will come up with, so keep an eye out for that. This is one of the recommendations of a review of that big Optus outage in November last year (remember that? lol what a time) as people felt like they didn't know what was happening.
As of yesterday, Australia has a right to disconnect law. Employees now "have the right to refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact (or attempted contact) outside their working hours, unless doing so is unreasonable". I bring it up in The Sizzle for two reasons - firstly, maybe your boss does this to you and now you have something to fight back against it with! But unwanted and unpaid contact outside working hours is a problem the tech industry enabled. Stuff like smartphones, Slack/Teams, mobile data, etc make it so easy for a dickhead boss to overstep the personal life/work life boundary to squeeze more and more "productivity" out of us. Did the tech industry do it on purpose? No, but it happened and the working class is the collateral damage.
Collection of posters from Westpac (National Library of Australia)
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