Secrecy, privacy, security, intrusion

That’s not how it worked in this documentary I once saw!

Tell ‘em they’re dreamin’! (And yes, I agree we need a Bill of Rights.)

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During my years at Uni I came across a case whereby a State Govt wanted to acquire some land for a transport (rail) corridor. They negotiated with all the Landholders to pay a fair price (ok fair by their reckoning). All were paid but one older person held out seeking a higher amount, but in the meantime the Govt passed a Law that then placed all the land as Crown Land as at a particular date (Notice of Acquisition). The older person was unable to get compensation and they sought relief in the Supreme Court, which held that although they had not been paid, the land indeed now belonged to the Govt and the Govt did not have to then pay fair compensation. So the Castle are “dreamin” that they could keep their land against a Federal Govt acquisition :slight_smile:

For VicRoads these are the steps:

What does the land acquisition process include?

Contact will begin

If your land will be impacted by proposed works on-going contact between VicRoads and you will begin. We will discuss the road proposition and how your land may be affected.

Project approval announced

Once the project has been formally approved the public will be notified through a notice in the Victorian Government Gazette.

Formal Acquisition Process begins

You will receive a Notice of Intention to Acquire (NOITA). The NOITA will include an outline of the land required by VicRoads.

Notice of Acquisition

You will receive a Notice of Acquisition which vests the land outlined in the NOITA in VicRoads’ name, meaning you are no longer the owner of that portion of land.

Possession

Once we reach the possession stage you will no longer be able to use or access the land that VicRoads has acquired.

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That disgusts me - even if the person was being greedy. The government has a moral duty even if not a legal duty, and an act of grace payment would be appropriate in such circumstances. One can only assume that the older person ended up on a government pension living in government-subsidised housing, and the net benefit for taxpayers was zero or negative.

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I agree it was dreadful, but notice how from the VicRoad outline that money is no consideration to acquisition. Even in the notes to the process a person may argue the value in VCAT or the Supreme Court but they can’t argue the change of Title to VicRoad.

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I do not remember any government accepting its moral duty since all governments operate within the laws to do whatever suits them; and many of our governments ignore the laws and pass retrospective legislation to absolve themselves; and others just ignore the laws until sued by a citizen and they fight to minimise their liability to the end case.

Therein lies a hole in our form of government that if a minister/agency violates the law there is no clear cut and easy way to hold them accountable, and more often than not the most serious outcome would be demonstrated by choppergate or robodebt. Then the ‘penalty’ for ignoring court orders regarding asylum seekers?

Vehicles for seizing/taking citizens land for ‘public good’ (as defined by the government of the day) is common in all countries. The compensation is usually the lowest justifiable value, the current value of the land not its ambit future value, and not a negotiated high end amount compensating for the value it might have risen to a decade or two hence.

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The concept of being a model litigant, and the reason behind permitting act of grace payments, are both aimed at the moral duties of governments as opposed to strict legal obligations.

Of course, the government has failed in many cases to act as a model litigant, and acts of grace are extremely rare - but the provisions are there.

The links I provide are to Commonwealth guidance, but most states and territories have similar rules.

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While in the public service the rules were to be a model [fill it in] but as you wrote,

I have read that the Russian constitution when read at face value makes the US constitution look lame in many, many respects. It is about the implementation more than the words when one lives under a document or set of rules. In some countries you need to bribe the policemen after he gives you the speeding ticket and it goes away; in others that becomes bribery and lands one in jail quickly. In some countries one needs to negotiate or offer a bribe before the ticket is written as once it is written it cannot be ‘lost’, in others bribery lands one in jail quickly. Yet the rules as written are common :wink:

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The rules are there I feel as a only a means to placate the population as in “See we do have ex-gratia payments as we do understand we can make lawful but hurtful mistakes” but the application takes at times years to be resolved, if it ever happens at all. Getting the payment often costs more than the payment received and more often than not requires the involvement of legal practitioners with their added bills.

Morality plays a very little part in the process and often it is the “public shaming” or the threat of such that drives the process to a payment outcome. It often isn’t until you have been in the gristmill that you begin to understand both the difficulty and the reality of why and what these provisions to make payment is about.

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It is important to note that s51(xxxi) applies only to the Commonwealth government, not to state and territory governments.

So you can’t directly compare the Commonwealth compulsorily acquiring an asset with a state compulsorily acquiring an asset.

So “The Castle” only makes sense when it’s the Commonwealth doing the acquiring.

Some people think that this is unfair and that the “just terms” provision should apply to all compulsory acquisitions.

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Many years ago, a young engineer who had worked for the Main Roads in Qld told me about a case when they were re-aligning a section of the highway north of Babinda which had a very dangerous bend leading to a very dangerous bridge.

They needed to resume the front portion of an adjacent cane farm including the dilapidated old high set farm house but the woman who owned it refused to accept their low ball offers and held out until she got what she wanted.

She ended up with a brand new high set house being built a little further back and the engineer said that when they demolished the old house, it was made from all sorts of rubbish including sections of old cane train tracks.

He had high praise for her actions in standing up for what she wanted.

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Section 122 of the Constitution means that the CoA has the power to over-ride any Territory.

“The Parliament may make laws for the government of any territory surrendered by any State to and accepted by the Commonwealth, or of any territory placed by the Queen under the authority of and accepted by the Commonwealth, or otherwise acquired by the Commonwealth, and may allow the representation of such territory in either House of the Parliament to the extent and on the terms which it thinks fit”

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As a side note, this is why the NT voted against becoming a state. The existing states do not want to give new states the same representation in the Senate as they have. (Tasmania has half a million people, but the same Senate representation as NSW with its nearly eight million.)

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Are you saying the NT voted the way the other States wanted to their own detriment?

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Yes, the Party in power were overseen by the same Party in power in Federal Govt from memory. They also voted for Euthanasia but it was overturned by the opposite Fed Govt party who were in power.

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Obfuscation? What are you talking about? All that seemingly strange and unreadable text is simply information in binary, could be an image, or a Java program, encoded in very standard base64 format.

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Base 64 certainly sounds reasonable, as at a quick glance it appears that all the relevant characters map - but why did it end up in the downloads folder rather than sitting in the browser cache? (And no, I am not going to bother even trying to translate it into anything human-readable.)

Were it a Java applet you have a problem - assuming you still have Java installed.

As I stated, I lean towards paranoia when seeing such things - but I am simply a sample of one and do not know everything.

And I would encourage all Internet users to set their browsers to prompt for downloads.

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It’s an ad generator using executable gifs no more than one or two pixels in size to generate the ad by running java scripts. When they have errors they pretty much fail. It is pulling script data from Pastebin. It all uses GoogleSyndication which is the Adsense network to display ads on pages. Safe? probably not as most professional Ad developers test before posting, but even then there are “evil” ads out there that redirect traffic etc.

window.mraid creates an Ad (stands for Mobile Rich Media Ads Interface Definition) as Android doesn’t like vpaid (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) .

As for the f.txt file it is created by Chrome if it doesn’t have the extension installed or the code is defective to run it. Why would you anyway :slight_smile:

And finally why I would be happy it wasn’t rendered:

" Some time around the summer of 2014, IT Security Engineer Michele Spagnuolo (apparently employed at Google Zurich) developed a proof-of-concept exploit and supporting tool called Rosetta Flash that demonstrated a way for hackers to run malicious Flash SWF files from a remote domain in a manner which tricks browsers into thinking it came from the same domain the user was currently browsing. This allows bypassing of the “same-origin policy” and can permit hackers a variety of exploits."

If you have them run (it’s automatic) it is likely why you might see the BitCoin scams among others that I don’t see.

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Flash is dead, so should no longer be a problem. Its official death is 31 December 2020, but most browsers already disable it by default.

I seem to recall there are also ways to get around the same origin policy in JavaScript (the most obvious being via an iframe - for example, an ad that is drawn from a different Internet location to the main page). That said, JavaScript does not have quite as many fundamental design flaws as Flash.

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Sorry the article was a few years old but carried the point of same origin policy hacks. Further up I noted the code was trying to pull java scripts from pastebin by using executable gifs (I didn’t go further into it to see what scripts were pulled). While Java itself may be safer in some senses, it is still used to write malicious code and compromise devices.

MRAID allows the ad (and the scripts that generate it) to be run/displayed within various Apps that are hosting it without having a need to be specifically coded for the particular Android system or App. Used legitimately it allows for rich media ads to be displayed in any MRAID compliant device and avoid extra coding for each particular (propriety) system and different Apps. Used maliciously, well people have experienced those results often enough.

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Really? While it’s certainly accurate advice at least one site seems to love Flash.

https://maps.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au/maplet/?config=config/mymaps/myplace/undergroundservices.xml

Hope this local council has a ‘plan-B’.
Access to local government mapping needed for property and development information still insists on Flash, despite various browsers attempting to block or warn?

Are there other examples?

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