Echoes of America’s racial history

Recent Articles

• Patch Monday: iiNet: The whys and what nows

  09 February 2010 in Film, Internet, Media

  The iiNet decision was clearly the biggest IT news story last week, so this week’s Patch Monday podcast includes a comprehensive explanation.
  My special guest is Peter Black, who teaches internet law at the Queensland University of Technology. But before you get to listen to him, you can endure my summary of Justice Dennis Cowdroy’s full [...]

• Crikey: iiNet’s win over the movie industry

  09 February 2010 in Film, Internet, Media

  It’s almost old news now, but last Thursday the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers (ISPs) are not responsible for the copyright infringements done by their customers.
  The full decision by Justice Dennis Cowdroy is almost 200 pages long, yet I found it relatively easy to read and learned a lot.
  I’ve written three stories for [...]

• Liberal Senator Barnett proposes abolishing fair trials

  08 February 2010 in Politics

  Tasmanian Liberal Senator Guy Barnett today called for an end to fair criminal trials. Well, effectively.
  In Senate Estimates today, Senator Barnett discovered that the government had spent around $10 million on the legal defence of nine people charged with terrorism offences. They were eventually found guilty. So Senator Barnett reckons that legal defence was a [...]

• Mark Day perpetuates Internet us-and-them

  08 February 2010 in Internet, Media

  Once upon a time Mark Day (pictured) was relevant. As publisher of The Australian from 1977 and then its Editor-in-Chief, he ran what is still Australia’s only true national newspaper and didn’t fuck it up.
  But today his column Net-gen forces state-sanctioned double standard tries to perpetuate the divide between old and new media, casting it [...]

• Zombie Generation: The spreading infection

  07 February 2010 in Internet

  “If you had to identify the biggest single issue confronting the security and safety and the confidence of the internet these days, particularly in the commercial space, you could only point to zombie botnets as the major concern,” says Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA).
  On Wednesday, ZDNet.com.au published my feature story [...]