Links for 22 December 2008 through 27 December 2008

27 December 2008 in Daily Links by del.icio.us | 2 comments

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 December 2008 through 27 December 2008, gathered despite great personal risk:

Christmas ruined as Sarah Palin shoots Rudolph | NewsBuiscuit: The headline says it all. This satirical website is well worth exploring.
A danger to journalism | BuzzMachine: A wonderful rant about the anti-journalistic practice of not allowing links. Jeff is rather strong on “the link economy”.
www.santasm.net: Santa and his Elf… well… see for yourself. Perhaps get the kids to leave first.
How It Works …. The Computer (Ladybird books, 1978) | Boing Boing Gadgets: A wonderful parody of a 1978 book about computers. Wonderful. There are bees.
Internet filtering plan may extend to peer-to-peer traffic, says Stephen Conroy | News.com.au: Senator Conroy’s logic seems to have gone like this: The biggest objection to the filter is that it can’t stop peer-to-peer file sharing while The Bad Guys use that, not the web. So we’ll block peer-to-peer. Alas, that really, really won’t work, because it would mean having to unravel every single direct connection between two computers to see what was inside the tubes. If it’s encrypted, that takes a supercomputer. I’ll write more about this soon.
This is how news breaks from now on | Ross Hill: A nice, quick overview of how journalism is changing thanks to new tools like Twitter.
Murder on the Madoff Express? | sydwalker.info: A nice overview of the Bernie Madoff saga and how US$50 BILLION could “go missing”.
The bad news | Inside Story: “Are Australians abandoning the news? Drawing on new survey material Sally Young looks at the drift away from conventional news and the evidence about where audiences are going.”

Possibly related posts

Tags: bernie madoff, censorship, journalism, satire, stephen conroy, twitter

2 comments

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Alex on 27 December 2008 at 11:29 pm

I am keen to see what you write about the peer-to-peer filtering. I am quite sure some companies in the US throttle torrent traffic. I do not know enough about the topic to make an absolute comment, but surely Conroy could legislate the full-filter equivalent, i.e., “throttle to 0 kb/s”.

It would seem a heavy thing to do, but can you really rule it out, considering how autocratically the Rudd Government has treated the issue so far?

Also, I’ll point out this is the logical conclusion of events when the main arguments against filtering is “it won’t work, because …” and not “government filtering of media is ethically wrong!”

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Stilgherrian on 28 December 2008 at 10:01 am

@Alex: You raise a good point. Most people involved in the discussions, even the geekfolk “fighting the good fight”, have little real clue about the technical aspects. I will make sure to write this backgrounder some time before 5 January.

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