Defendants' liability for pure mental harm to third parties in Australia : still a work in progress

In Australia, both common and statutory law allows compensation for negligently occasioned recognised psychiatric injury, but distinguishes between pure mental harm and consequential mental harm. This column briefly discusses the concept of pure "mental harm" and the major Australian cases relating to defendants' liability to third parties for causing them pure mental harm (Jaensch v Coffey (1984) 155 CLR 549 [PDF]; Tame v New South Wales; Annetts v Australian Stations Pty Ltd (2002) 211 CLR 317 [PDF]; Sullivan v Moody (2001) 207 CLR 562 [PDF]; and Gifford v Strang Patrick Stevedoring Pty Ltd (2003) 214 CLR 269 [PDF]). The analysis focuses on judicial approaches to determining liability in these cases, especially causation. Lack of guiding principles and precise tests for attribution of liability are illustrated by Kemp v Lyell McEwin Health Service (2006) 96 SASR 192 [PDF]. This case is analysed first in the context of common law, and then in the light of the reform legislation contained in the Civil Liability Act 1936 (SA) and similar provisions in other jurisdictions.

Reconsidering the scope of the equitable mortgage arising from deposit of title documents

This article examines the underlying fairness of applying equitable security presumptions to the deposit of title documents belonging to third parties. It argues that within such transactions, the focus of the equitable jurisdiction must be upon the intention of the owner of the title documents rather than presumptions arising from the fact of the deposit. It suggests that there is no logic in applying equitable presumptions, founded on the principles of part performance, to infer a security intention in transactions involving third party title documents. The fact that the parties to a loan advance may have intended to create a mortgage between themselves does not mean that the third party owner of the title documents also intended to create a mortgage. In third party transactions, the objectives of the equity jurisdiction are best achieved through a comprehensive assessment of the intention of all parties and the abolition of presumptions based upon the bare fact of title deposit.

A review of terrestrial bird atlases of the world and their application

We reviewed 272 bird atlases (standardised surveys intended to document the distribution of birds) from around the world. Atlases we located were conducted in 50 countries from six continents with most (82.4%) from Europe and North America. Atlases were mostly run by ornithological societies (67.1%), had amassed at least 27.9 million records of birds over an area roughly 31.4% of the land area of the Earth, and had involved at least 108 000 contributors. They had a modal data collection period of 4 years (some ran over several decades) and varied greatly in scale, covering local areas to entire continents (21 km² – 10 390 000 km²); atlases that covered larger areas involved more observers and generated more records. Most atlases (88.3%) were constrained to particular seasons, and most of these focussed on the main local breeding period (81.0%). Spatial sampling units ranged from 0.02 km² (2 ha) to 3092 km² and temporal units of sampling varied from 20 minutes to several years. Little information is available on the application of data generated by atlases. We focussed on five major atlases for which information was available. We located 97 scientific publications drawing on data from these five major atlases; papers most frequently focussed on bird distribution (26.8%), ecology (20.6%) and land-use planning (17.5%). Atlas books were cited often, 7–31 times per year. Provision of data to third parties from two major atlases (one from Australia and one from Britain and Ireland) was frequent and remarkably similar. Data were requested mostly for environmental impact studies (almost half of all requests), conservation policy and planning (~20%), research (~20%) and other mapping (~13%). Despite the uses we describe, atlas data seem under-utilised.

Nature of new order rights to minerals : a rubikian exercise since passing the mayday rubicon with a cubic zirconium?

The Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act 28 of 2002 has created new categories of rights to "minerals" that may be granted to applicants by the Minister of Minerals and Energy. In this article the nature of these rights will be examined. The legislature has labelled prospecting rights and mining rights to minerals as limited real rights in the MPRD Act. The remaining rights to minerals are not labelled. Provision is made for registration or recording rights in the revived Mining Titles Registration Act 16 of 1967 (as amended). Registered rights are claimed to constitute a limited real right binding against third parties. Discrepancies and contradictions regarding the nature of rights to minerals are created by the two statutes. It is concluded that only upon clarification of the provisions of the two sister statutes, would the nature of rights to minerals be more evident. The proposed amendment of section 5(1) of the MPRD Act would be in line with property doctrine based upon the common law and is to be welcomed.

Interjurisdictional allocation of multinational banking income : aligning taxation principles with economic activity

This thesis argues that one type of multinational entity – the multinational bank – poses particularly significant challenges to the international tax regime in terms of its current profit allocation rules. Multinational banks are a unique subset of multinational entities, and as a consequence of their unique traits, the traditional international tax regime foes not yield an optimal interjurisdictional allocation of taxing rights. The opportunity for tax minimisation, achievable because of the unique traits, and realised through exploitation of the traditional source and transfer pricing regime, results in a jurisdictional distribution of taxing rights which does not reflect economic reality. There are two distinct ways in which the traditional international tax regime fails to reflect economic activity. The first way that economic activity may not be reflected in the distribution of the taxing rights to income from multinational banking is through the application of traditional source rules. The traditional sources rules allocate income where transactions are completed rather than where the intermediation services are arranged. As a result of their unique commercial role as financial intermediaries, by separating intermediary economic activity from legal transactions with third parties, multinational banks may distort the true location of the activity giving rise to income. The second way in which the traditional tax regime may fail to reflect economic activity is through the traditional transfer pricing regime requiring related or internal transaction to be undertaken at an arm’s length price. The arm’s length pricing requirement is theoretically deficient in its failure to recognise the highly integrated nature of multinational banking. In practice, the arm’s length pricing requirement is also difficult, if not impossible, to apply to multinational banks because of the requirement of comparability. The difficulties associated with the current model have resulted in a subtle move by multinational banks towards global formulary apportionment. This thesis concludes that, for the international taxation of multinational banks, the current source regime should be replaced with a system that allocates profits for tax purposes on the basis of income source, with source determined using a unitary taxation or global formulary apportionment system. It is argued that global formulary apportionment is a theoretically superior model that provides both jurisdiction to tax and allocated profits on the basis of the economic activity that generates the income.

Security Issue challenging facebook

The advancement in Internet and bandwidth has resulted in a number of new applications to be developed; many of these newer applications are described as being Web 2. A web 2 application such as Facebook has allowed people around the world to interact together. One of the interesting aspects of Facebook is the use of third parties applications and the interactions that this allows.

Not surprisingly, the problems that exist in the real world such as theft, fraud, vandalism also exist in online environment, and Web 2 applications are not exception to these issues. This paper explores and categorises several security issues within the Facebook environment. It contributes to practice and research by emphasising the importance of security awareness for businesses and the general public in the use of Web 2 applications such as Facebook.

A privacy preserving service broker architecture for data sharing

The problem addressed in this paper is how to ensure data privacy concerns when data is shared between multiple organisations. In domains such as healthcare, there is a need to share privacy-sensitive data among autonomous but cooperating organisations. However, security concerns and compliance to privacy regulations requiring confidentiality of the data renders unrestricted access to organisational data by others undesirable. The challenge is how to guarantee privacy preservations for the owners of the information that are willing to share information with other organisations while keeping some other information secret. Therefore, there is a need for privacy preserving database operations for querying data residing at different parties. To address this challenge, we propose a new computationally efficient framework that enables organisations to share privacy-sensitive data. The proposed framework is able to answer queries without revealing any useful information to the data sources or to the third parties.

Case Study from Australia Post : towards the online economy with netPOS

Examines how the "old economy" of the traditional postal service has changed over time and how Australia Post is adapting to the many pressures that threaten its existence. With increasing adoption of e-mail as a means of communication, increased competition as a result of deregulation, and the strain of servicing a country with huge distances between inhabited locations and low population density, Australia Post needed to find a solution that would ensure the long-term viability of its business. The retail sector, with its 4,000-plus post office outlets, processed many different types of across-the-counter financial transactions, including banking transactions and utility payments. A project team was established to address the fundamental issue of how to structure the IT infrastructure to enable retail outlets to generate future revenue flows for Post. However, having established the Internet-based infrastructure to connect the extensive chain of retail outlets, the question was whether this new infrastructure would successfully entice third parties to buy into the model.

Augmenting trust establishment in dynamic systems with social networks

Social networking has recently flourished in popularity through the use of social websites. Pervasive computing resources have allowed people stay well-connected to each other through access to social networking resources. We take the position that utilizing information produced by relationships within social networks can assist in the establishment of trust for other pervasive computing applications. Furthermore, we describe how such a system can augment a sensor infrastructure used for event observation with information from mobile sensors (ie, mobile phones with cameras) controlled by potentially untrusted third parties.

Zero permission android applications - attacks and defenses

Google advertises the Android permission framework as one of the core security features present on its innovative and flexible mobile platform. The permissions are a means to control access to restricted AP/s and system resources. However, there are Android applications which do not request permissions at all.In this paper, we analyze the repercussions of installing an Android application that does not include any permission and the types of sensitive information that can be accessed by such an application. We found that even app/icaaons with no permissions are able to access sensitive information (such the device ID) and transmit it to third-parties.

The nature and scope of rights of removal

The rationale underlying the fixtures and accession presumptions is the need to protect the value of the chattel as well as the need to protect third-party interests. The destruction of the independent legal status of an attached chattel is generally deemed appropriate where the value of the co-mingled asset will be diminished if the chattel retains a separate legal title and this would generate unfairness because third parties have dealt with the co-mingled asset on the basis of its overall value. Rights to remove have evolved under both common law and equity to moderate the scope of these presumptions. Common law will uphold the right of a tenant to remove chattels that have been attached to leased premises during the currency of the lease. Equity on the other hand will uphold the right to remove affixed chattels in circumstances where the enforcement of such an entitlement is consistent with contractual intention and transactional fairness. This article examines the different rights of removal that have evolved under Australian law to date and the emergent statutory framework supporting these rights. It discusses the historical purpose and structural utility of these entitlements within a land framework that supports fixtures presumptions. Rights of removal, whether validated at law or in equity, confer positive entitlements upon the holder to access and remove affixed goods in circumstances where, because of the fixtures and accession presumptions, those goods no longer retain any separate legal status. The capacity of the holder to enforce this right against third parties is illustrative of their distinctive proprietary perspective.

Attribute-based signatures with efficient revocation

Based signatures (ABS for short) allow an entity to sign messages with a fine-grained control over identity information. The signature attests not to the identity of the individual who endorsed a message, but instead to a claim regarding the attributes he/she holds. ABS has been well investigated since its introduction but little has been done on the revocation in ABS. In this paper, we divide ABS revocation as fine-grained attribute-revocation and coarse-grained user-revocation. The latter is the focus of this paper, and we present a concrete design-to address the issue of coarse-grained user-revocation in ABS without the need of any other third parties.

Evidence-based psychiatric practice: doctrine or trap?

Medical practice has rapidly shifted towards an 'evidence-based' approach. While there are acknowledged clear benefits to this, a number of pitfalls are frequently not appreciated. Perhaps the most important limitation is the extent to which the current body of data is inadequate for many common clinical decisions. Algorithms risk being developed, frequently by third parties, without acknowledgement of these limitations and with substantial implications for clinical independence and the quality of patient care. This paper discusses potential problems of the evidence-based approach and suggests possible guidelines for the management of clinical decisions given the limitations of data-based guidelines.

An efficient anonymous remote attestation scheme for trusted computing based on improved CPK

 The platform remote attestation (RA) is one of the main features of trusted computing platform proposed by the trusted computing group (TCG). The privacy certificate authority (CA) solution of RA requires users to pay for multiple certificates, and the direct anonymous attestation (DAA) solution leads to inefficiency. TCG RA also suffers from limitations of platform configuration privacy. This paper proposed a RA scheme based on an improved combined public key cryptography (ICPK) (abbreviated to RA-ICPK). RA-ICPK is a certificate-less scheme without using public key infrastructure CA signature or DAA signature, which combines commitment scheme, zero-knowledge proof and ring signature (RS) to own the property of unforgeability and privacy. RA-ICPK is mainly based on elliptic curve cryptography without bilinear pair computing, and only carries out zero-knowledge proof one time. RA-ICPK need not depend on trusted third parties to check trusted platform modules identity and integrity values revocations. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

The constitutional rights of children and the Prevention of Organised Crime Act 121 of 1998

The Prevention of Organised Crime Act 121 of 1998 [POCA] embodies a serious attempt by the South African government to effectively police and curb organised crime, money laundering and criminal gang activities in South Africa. The Act provides inter alia for a range of crippling fines and for orders such as confiscation and forfeiture. Asset forfeiture and confiscation orders can affect the rights of third parties directly and indirectly in a number of ways. Young persons and children can beaffected indirectly because asset forfeiture and confiscation orders may violate the right to parental care of the dependent young persons and children of the person who is subject to the order. This brief article will investigate aspects of the protection afforded to the rights of children when such orders are made in terms of the provisions of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.