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Wednesday, April 17, 2013 

Last Friday, following over two years of lawsuit over failure to participate in general election, Anders Holmdahl attended a High Full Court of Australia hearing with an audio-link from Canberra to Adelaide, South Australia, claiming voting is a right, not a duty, citing the Australian constitution. However the Justices dismissed the application for leave to appeal against conviction, ruling it had “no prospect of success” over a point that the Commonwealth Electoral Act was enacted within power.

Anders Holmdahl was represented by Kevin Borick, QC, the president of the Australian Criminal Lawyers Association, throughout the process.

Anders Holmdahl cited “fundamental distinction” between the words vote, which he defined as “exercise of free will”; right, “something you are privileged to be granted”; and duty, “something you are required to do”. After a 20-minute discourse with the lawyer representing the applicant, Justice Kenneth Hayne said, “An appeal to this Court would enjoy no prospect of success. Special leave to appeal is refused.” and adjourned the Court. Justices Stephen Gageler, Patrick Keane were also present at the hearing and participated in the verbal discourse, also enquiring the lawyer about their reasoning but not specifying reasons other than what Hayne J said. Wikinews contacted both Anders Holmdahl and the High Court and confirmed there was no other documentation of reasons behind the judgment.

The standard High Court procedures involve hearing each matter by a single Justice and only escalating it after a special leave to appeal is granted. The current case had been irregular, as the matter had been escalated to the Full Court (three Justices) directly.

The appeal also had exhausted lower means of appeal before being lodged in High Court; the Supreme Court of South Australia had dismissed it on September 24, 2012. It cited that the Australian Constitution allows each state to enact their own election laws, and the Federal Parliament has the power to make laws “with respect to … matters in respect of which this Constitution makes provision until the Parliament otherwise provides”. The Court concluded that the Commonwealth Electoral Act was legislation enacted within power.

Prior to escalation to the Supreme Full Court of South Australia, in May 2012, a single Justice Gray had forwarded the matter for consideration of Full Court (three Judges) at his discretion. This happened several months after a Magistrate had recorded the conviction following a trial in February 2012. Anders Holmdahl originally pleaded not guilty during his first Magistrates court appearance in December 2011 regarding the August 21, 2010 election.

The electoral system of Australia requires all citizens to enroll. Then they must vote at each general election — election of members of the House of Representatives and Senate of the Parliament of Australia. At the time of the election, Anders Holmdahl was enrolled as an elector on the Commonwealth Electoral Roll for the Division of Hindmarsh.

The High Full Court hearing was a last instance of appeal with further escalation only possible at international level. Anders Holmdahl had decided to take the case before the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Sunday, December 25, 2005 

The famous Greek lawyers, Sakis Kechagioglou and George Nikolakopoulos have been imprisoned in the Athens’ jail of Korydallus, as they were found guilty of graft and corruption. As a result of this, a big scandal within the Greek legal community has been raised through the exposure of illegal actions that judges, lawyers, solicitors and attorneys have done during the previous years. A few weeks ago, after the information published by the journalist Makis Triantafylopoulos in his popular Television show “Zoungla” in Alpha TV, the member of Parliament and lawyer, Petros Mantouvalos was abdicated as members of his office had been involved in illegal graft and corruption. Moreover, top judge Evangelos Kalousis is imprisoned as he found guilty of corruption and degenerate behaviour.

Except from journalists’ research about scandals in the legal Community of Greece, accusations from well-known lawyers and attorneys such as the famous Athens’ lawyer Alexis Kougias, against colleagues have as a result a greater dialogue and discussion in the country upon this important issue.

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Thursday, September 27, 2007 

Three American men were arrested after they robbed a jewelry courier at gunpoint today. The robbery was made at a McDonalds restaurant in Factoria, Washington at approximately 9:40 a.m.

The men drove away but the courier was lucky enough to provide a description of the white van and the robbers, who were pursued by local police towards Interstate 90 in Snoqualmie, Washington, east of Factoria, where the van was stopped. The three men were arrested and the van was searched by a K-9 unit.

The value of the jewels is unknown.

Wednesday, August 2, 2006 

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto found that teenagers demonstrate a strong command of grammar in their text messaging.

The study found that while informal forms such as acronyms like “lol” (laughing out loud) are used in text messaging, more formal language constructs that are not usually used in spoken language were also used in messaging. For instance, the word “said” was used in messaging instead of “was like”, a common informal spoken phrase.

The study found that instant messaging language does mirror patterns in speech, but also uses constructs from a wide range of diction.

Prof. Sali Tagliamonte, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, said parents and teachers shouldn’t be concerned that this new medium is corrupting young people’s grammar. “I don’t think parents have to worry, because they’re really showing that they are creative and that they have a mastery of the language. They are not using ruinous language,” he said. “What these kids are doing is showing us that they have a really good command of the English language, so much so that I was really blown away by how fluidly they operate,” he added.

The research was presented today at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States.

Friday, May 16, 2008 

A major security hole was discovered in the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) of the Debian version of OpenSSL. OpenSSL is one of the most used cryptographic software, that allows the creation of secure network connections with the protocols called SSL and TLS. It is included in many popular computer programs, like the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Apache web server. Debian is one of the most used GNU/Linux distributions, on which are based other distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix. The problem affects all the Debian-based distributions that were used to create cryptographic keys since the September 17, 2006. The bug was discovered by Luciano Bello, an argentine Debian package maintainer, and was announced on May 13, 2008.

This vulnerability was caused by the removal of two lines of code from the original version of the OpenSSL library. These lines were used to gather some entropy data by the library, needed to seed the PRNG used to create private keys, on which the secure connections are based. Without this entropy, the only dynamic data used was the PID of the software. Under Linux the PID can be a number between 1 and 32,768, that is a too small range of values if used to seed the PRNG and will cause the generation of predictable numbers. Therefore any key generated can be predictable, with only 32,767 possible keys for a given architecture and key length, and the secrecy of the network connections created with those keys is fully compromised.

These lines were removed as “suggested” by two audit tools (Valgrind and Purify) used to find vulnerabilities in the software distributed by Debian. These tools warned the Debian maintainers that some data was used before its initialization, that normally can lead to a security bug, but this time it was not the case, as the OpenSSL developers wrote on March 13, 2003. Anyway this change was erroneously applied on September 17, 2006, when the OpenSSL Debian version 0.9.8c-1 was released to the public.

Even though the Debian maintainer responsible for this software released a patch to fix this bug on May 8, 2008, the impact may be severe. In fact OpenSSL is commonly used in software to protect the passwords, to offer privacy and security. Any private key created with this version of OpenSSL is weak and must be replaced, included the session keys that are created and used only temporary. This means that any data encrypted with these keys can be decrypted without a big deal, even if these keys are used (but not created) with a version of the library not affected, like the ones included in other operating systems.

For example any web server running under any operating system may use a weak key created on a vulnerable Debian-based system. Any encrypted connection (HTTPS) to this web server established by any browser can be decrypted. This may be a serious problem for sites that requires a secure connection, like banks or private web sites. Also, if some encrypted connection was recorded in the past, it can be decrypted in the same way.

Another serious problem is for the network security software, like OpenSSH and OpenVPN, that are used to encrypt the traffic to protect passwords and grant the access to an administrative console or a private network protected by firewalls. This may allows hackers to gain unwanted access to private computers, networks or data traveled over the network, even if a not affected version of OpenSSL was used.

The same behavior can be applied to any software or protocol that use SSL, like POP3S, SSMTP, FTPS, if used with a weak key. This is the case of Tor, software used to offer strong anonymity on the TCP/IP, where about 300 of 1,500-2,000 nodes used a weak key. With 15-20% of weak Tor nodes, there is a probability of 0.34-0.8% circa to build a circuit that has all tree nodes weak, resulting in a full loss of anonymity. Also the case of only one weak node begin used may facilitate some types of attack to the anonymity. The Tor hidden services, a sort of anonymous public servers, are affected too. However the issue was speedly addressed on May 14, 2008.

The same problem also interested anonymous remailers like Mixmaster and Mixminion, that use OpenSSL to create the remailer keys for the servers and the nym keys for the clients. Although currently there is no official announcement, at least two remailer changed their keys because were weak.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010 

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement today calling for an end to Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip which it calls a “…collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.”

The statement gives an overview of what the Red Cross views as a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The ICRC describes how the blockade has seriously impoverished the people of Gaza, as well as denying them basic access to housing, food and health care. The ICRC claims the blockade has almost totally destroyed Gaza’s economy, which is kept on life support by an elaborate tunnel system used to smuggle in goods. Even though Israel has stated that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, the ICRC said that the country still denies Gazans access to their fishing grounds, causing great economic hardship.

Outlining the condition of the health care system in Gaza, the ICRC stated that electricity blackouts are on average seven hours a day, meaning that hospitals must run on generators. Generators can take two to three minutes to start, a luxury many patients cannot afford. To make matters worse fuel supplies for the generators are erratic, and the ICRC reported that already three times in 2010 Gaza’s hospitals have run out of fuel.

The statement also highlighted a potential risk to Gaza’s water supply. According to the ICRC, only 60% of Gaza’s 1.4 million inhabitants are connected to a sewage collection system, and raw sewage is dumped into the Wadi Gaza river, posing a great health risk to many families living alongside the river, where overused aquifers results in drinking water unfit for consumption with “high levels of nitrate, chloride and salt”.

The ICRC has urged for the rights of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who is held prisoner by Hamas, to be respected. On Israeli-held prisoners, the ICRC state that “Over 800 Gazan detainees in Israeli prisons have been prevented from meeting face-to-face with their loved ones since June 2007.”