Last week federal court judge Justice Steven Rares ruled that Optus’ TV Now service, which allows customers to record free-to-air TV and have it streamed back to their smartphone, tablet or computer at a more convenient time, was a legal form of time-shifting under section 111 of the Copyright Act 1968.

Even if competing telco Telstra had a supposedly-exclusive deal with the Australian Football League (AFL) to stream live video coverage of matches to smartphones. Even if the delay between an Optus customer starting to record a game and playing it back was just two minutes.

Telstra is paying the AFL $153 million over five years for this now-not-so-exclusive streaming right. Optus pays the AFL nothing, because they’re just providing a technical service through which individual customers make their own “solely for private and domestic use” recordings.

Josh Taylor covered it for ZDNet Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned me to write an opinion piece that was published this morning, Sport has to think outside the box. Do please read it. It seem to have struck a chord, because I’ve received a lot of compliments.

Then the ABC’s Linda Mottram asked me to chat about the issues on 702 Sydney. And here’s the audio, along with her subsequent chat with a talkback caller on the same topic.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But these program items usually aren’t archived on their website so here it is. And I will of course suggest that you listen to Linda Mottram’s morning program regularly.

I’m thinking of writing up some of my thoughts on how future sporting coverage could be done technically. Meanwhile, do you feel as I do that the days of cashed-up major sporting codes are about to end?

[Update 8 February 2012, 1015: The Sydney Morning Herald has published a follow-up piece this morning by rugby legend Roy Masters. Court has gambled with codes' futures. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to draw me a diagram of what the fuck he's talking about.]

The audio is ©2012 dmgRadio Australia, but here it is ‘cos it hasn’t been posted on the radio station’s website. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

In this disturbing and long-overdue return of The 9pm Edict podcast, you’ll hear about the legal problems with the 2008 Gay Softball World Series, face the facts about cuts to Australia’s stupidly-named Baby Bonus, and hear a bunch of people at the CBS Interactive party talk about their childhood heroes.

If you were at that party and just want to listen to yourself, fast forward to the 10 minute 40 second mark.

Yes, there are bad words. And bonus hypocrisy.

You can listen below. But if you want all of the episodes, now and in the future, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.

If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission. Extracts from The Breeders song Cannonball and the movie Forbidden Planet.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Given that this is being posted so late, suffice it to say that I went to Canberra again and I was too tired for much of anything by the end of the week.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 115, “SOPA: war on the internet continues”. CNET chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh outlines the controversy surrounding the US Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), and Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane from Crikey positions SOPA as yet another example of what amounts to a war on the internet.

Articles

Only two articles this week — well, that were published. There’s more to come, articles that were written but not published. Both of these, though, are from the Trend Micro Canberra Cloud Security Conference.

• Today’s cloud winners: the cybercriminals, CSO, 24 November 2011.
• Want government cloud? Rethink security!, CSO, 24 November 2011.

Media Appearances

• This kinda counts as media. I was on the panel for the media140+ Digital Anonymity event, the audio recordings of which I linked to earlier.

Corporate Largesse

• On Wednesday, breakfast was provided at the Trend Micro Canberra Cloud Security Conference. That was the historic Hyatt Hotel Canberra, though not their full and rather wonderful buffet.
• Also on Wednesday, I had lunch at The Chairman and Yip, Canberra, courtesy of Datacom.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: As I walked from Bunjaree Cottages to Wentworth Falls today, most of Railway Parade was lined with yellow flowers. The bees seemed quite interested. I'm also very impressed with the detail on the bee, given this was shot on a sub-$300 camera.]

I am so many different kinds of expert these days. On Friday I was on SBS TV’s World News talking about the UK’s High Court decision to order the country’s largest internet service provider BT to block access to a website that provides links to pirated movies.

The video of the news story is embedded in the website article.

SBS has also posted the complete 7-minute video of the interview they recorded.

Yes, I’m wearing a hoodie on national television. At least it was a clean hoodie. I’d taken a cab to SBS straight from the airport. It’s actually a small miracle I had any clean clothes with me at all. Besides, the cameraman chose the hoodie over my black shirt because he wanted to “break things up a bit”. The TV news has too many men in suits and business shirts for his liking, it seems.

In their Communiqué and Summary of Decisions [25kb PDF] they say:

R 18+ Classification for Computer Games

Ministers made a decision in principle, to introduce an R 18+ category for computer games. NSW abstained.

Ministers:

(a) agreed to take the Guidelines for the Classification of Computer games, as amended at the meeting, to their respective Cabinets

(b) agreed in principle, with the exception of the NSW Attorney General who abstained, that the Commonwealth introduce the proposed amendments to the National Classification Code to support the introduction of an R 18+ category

(c) agreed, with the exception of the NSW Attorney General who abstained, to commence drafting amendments to their enforcement legislation to reflect the introduction of an R 18 + category for computer games

(d) agreed that it would be desirable for classifications of existing games to be reviewed in light of the new classification Guidelines.

This leads to the interesting possibility that the federal government could legislate to create the R18+ category, but NSW could choose not to implement matching laws. The result would be that the games would be legal to sell everywhere in Australia except NSW.

A similar situation already exists for X-rated movies. The federal government passed the laws, but the states changed their minds later. So X-rated material is available in the ACT.

But as I say, there was precious little on cybercrime.

There’s what the communiqué said on that subject.

Cyber Crime

Ministers:

(a) noted the progress of the National Cyber Crime Working Group in developing a national response to cyber crime

(b) noted that a detailed proposal for the establishment of a national online reporting facility for cyber crime is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Model Computer Offences

Ministers:

(a) endorsed the Model Criminal Law Officers Committee’s conclusion that the model computer offences are adequate and do not require revision

(b) agreed that jurisdictions continue to monitor their computer offences and other laws relevant to cyber crime to ensure they keep pace with advances in technology.

The seemed more interested in being afraid of general internet use.

Suppression Orders – Internet Sites

Ministers considered the adequacy of the Court Suppression and Non-Publication Orders model Bill to deal with the publication of suppressed material on the internet by private individuals.

Facebook and Privacy

Ministers discussed concerns about parents being unable to access or otherwise deal with inappropriate content uploaded onto their child’s social networking pages (whether by the child themselves or by others).

When Ministers “considered” and “discussed” things but haven’t agreed on any concrete words or actions, once does wonder what has going on and what will actually happen next, no?

For background, here are the related ZDNet Australia stories, and I’ll post further linkage when I have the time. That’ll include a fairly full collection of media stories.

• AusCERT demo piques police interest
• Qld cops denounce ‘ethical hacking’

Note that the Facebook hack was not demonstrated at the AusCERT Conference but the Security BSides Australia conference. There’s a few more misconceptions in some of the media reportage, but I’ll do another post about them I figure.

There was a bit of media interest in my opinion piece for ABC Drum Opinion on Facebook regulation, including an interview for Panorama on Melbourne’s SYN Radio.

While they do eventually put some items on their own website, it doesn’t seem to have appeared yet. So here it is for your listening pleasure.

[The Conversations category is where I post the unedited versions of interviews I do, or the various media spots I do which aren’t podcast elsewhere. If you’d like to grab all of them in the future, subscribe to the RSS feed.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. Despite succumbing to a random fever for two or three days, I got quite a bit of writing done — and then forgot to post this until Monday. Sigh.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 79, “Cybercrime convention: civil liberties risk?”. Australia intends to sign on to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime. My guests? Cybercrime specialist Nigel Phair from the Surete Group, who’s previously been with the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. His second book has just been published, Cybercrime: The Challenge for the Legal Profession. And Electronic Frontiers Australia chair Colin Jacobs.

Articles

• How Al Jazeera leads the world in social media for news reporting, for Crikey, based on comments made by their head of social media Riyaad Minty at Digital Directions 2011.
• Apple: saving old media, or just making them its bitch?, for Crikey. This was based on material presented at Digital Directions 2011 and elsewhere. I simply don’t get this idea that Apple’s iPad will be the saviour of the media factories.
• Digital fingerprints the next privacy invasion?, for ABC Unleashed, a more personal opinion on the plans to sign on to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime.
• Two chefs, Next G and the ‘wireless’ confusion, for CRN Australia. My first article for this masthead is about the communication gap between IT vendors and their small business customers.

Media Appearances

• I was a guest on this week’s edition of The Fourth Estate, the community radio program and podcast, talking about Australia’s new journalist shield law.

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, where I've been living. I'll write more about this experience very soon.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. With three full working days occupied by conferences, I still managed to get a few things done. And not all of it was drinking.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 78, “Bionic eyes, gigabit Wi-Fi and the NBN”. This is my wrap-up of the NICTA Techfest, including an interview with Dr Terry Percival, one of the inventors of Wi-Fi, about potential future uses of the National Broadband Network. He reckons video will be the killer technology, with the world returning to non-written communication as the norm.

Articles

• Build the NBN, but be careful of the detail: Optus boss, for Crikey. Some of what Optus CEO Paul O’Sullivan had to say at the Kickstart Forum on Sunday.
• Journo shield law covers bloggers, independent media, for Crikey. The Evidence Amendment (Journalists’ Privilege) Bill 2010 was originally intended to give protection only to employee-journalists. Simple but effective amendments by The Greens extended protection to everyone who publishes news or commentary in any medium.

Media Appearances

• This week’s edition of the Business 21C Weekly podcast from Sydney community radio station 2SER was all about the Australian government’s plans for internet censorship, and I was one of the guests. The program also features web developer Scott David from Flock and the president of the Internet Society of Australia, Tony Hill.

Corporate Largesse

• The Kickstart Forum on the Gold Coast continued on Monday and Tuesday. My airfares and accommodation were paid for by the organisers, Media Connect. Monday’s lunch was sponsored by Samsung. There was also plenty of freebies from the vendors, though notably less than last year. And substantially fewer USB memory sticks. Should I bother reporting all this stuff? If nothing else, it’s interesting to document for posterity.
• On Thursday I attended the Digital Directions 2011 conference as their guest. They provided food and drink. Stories relates to the event will appear next week.
• The lovely folks at Saasu — well, their CEO Marc Lehmann — decided to give me a three-month extension on my subscription, just as a gift. I’d still say it’s a delightful online accounting system even without that.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view this morning from the front door of Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, where I'm living this week. I'll write more about this experience very soon.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

• Online privacy dangers: they’re not what you think, for Crikey. The article was based on an interview with Kevin Shaw, president of the International Association of Privacy Professionals – Australia and New Zealand (iappANZ) in the lead-up to their conference on 30 November, Silver Lining: The Privacy Umbrella of Cloud Computing.
• Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement: not so evil after all, for Crikey. The final text of ACTA was negotiated on Monday. This is my brief news story. It’s behind the paywall for now – you can read it with a free trial of Crikey — but it’ll emerge in two weeks.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 65, “Hello cloud, meet cookies. Goodbye privacy”. My interview with Kevin Shaw from iappANZ.
• A Series of Tubes episode 119. Ruckus Wireless engineer Steve Chung talks 802.11n streaming and I talk about the OECD’s comments on the National Broadband Network, privacy and crowdsourcing.

Media Appearances

• On Thursday I spoke with Paul Turton on ABC Radio’s Statewide Drive about the way hackers capitalise on news stories and the tragedy of people finding out about family deaths on Facebook. Alas, there is no recording.

Corporate Largesse

They have lovely biscuits at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: A close-up of my eyes, taken by Trinn ('Pong) Suwannapha, cropped out of the photo he took for my US visa application.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.

Articles

• Fairfax’s hypocritical web ‘spying devices’ beat-up, for Crikey. The “spying devices” in question are tracking cookies. Nothing new there. But the story was on the front page of the dead-tree slices. Why? Apparently politicians’ websites use tracking cookies. Shock! Horror! And Fairfax uses even more of them. Hypocrites.
• Senate to re-open bloggers versus journalists, for Crikey. A lightly-edited version of my blog post on the same topic.
• Indonesian e-commerce held back by uncertain laws, for Crikey. Based on material presented by leading Indonesian legal academic Dr Sinta Dewi.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 64, “The info commissioner’s fight: Govt 2.0″. My interview with the new Australian Information Commissioner, Professor John McMillan. The new Office of the Australian Information Commissioner came into being on 1 November and represents a significant change to the way the Australian Government will be handing its information — especially given the Declaration of Open Government earlier this year.

Media Appearances

• On Monday I spoke with Fiona Wyllie on ABC Radio’s Statewide Afternoons and the Fairfax tracking cookie beat-up and a father who installed a radio jammer to kill the internet so his kids wouldn’t spend so much time online. Alas, there is no recording. That’s a shame. It’s not often you’ll hear me giving parenting advice on the radio.

Geekery

• I learned how to use Google Site Search by plugging it into the Fender Australia website. It’s fairly straightforward, but it quickly shows you the problems with how your site is constructed. As an aside, if you’re a web developer visiting that site for the first time you’ll be horrified to see that in many places it uses tables for layout. That’s because the site was originally built in 2001 and has just been re-skinned a couple of times since. It’s also maintained manually, all 950 pages of it. There’s little business case for a major overhaul — the numbers are not compelling — but we’re planning to build a proper modern database-driven site early in 2011.

Corporate Largesse

None.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Old bar sign at the Town Hall Hotel, Newtown. Gender roles were a little different back then.]

Tomorrow’s Patch Monday podcast will be about data retention for law enforcement. Specifically, internet service providers (ISPs) retaining the metadata of all your online communications, possibly for years. I’d like your comments.

Here in Australia, it was revealed in June that the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) had been discussing these issues in secret with ISPs, law enforcement and other government agencies. I covered that in Patch Monday in July, Is Australia’s data retention idea that scary?

Since the AGD activities were revealed, and following the Google Wi-Fi sniffing incident, the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts has been running an inquiry into The adequacy of protections for the privacy of Australians online.

On Friday the committee heard evidence, and late in the afternoon the discussions turned to ISP data retention. Delimiter has published a summary, and a story explaining that the Privacy Commissioner won’t talk about those AGD discussions. ZDNet.com.au stories say the Privacy Commissioner is against the idea although Neil Gaughan, Assistant Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police reckon it’s really just the status quo translated to the new medium.

Here’s a recording of Friday’s Senate hearing, starting from when the AGD’s Catherine Smith introduced the topic. She’s Assistant Secretary, in charge of the Telecommunications and Surveillance Law Branch.

This was recorded off the internet, so there are some gaps where the audio stream re-buffered. I have cleaned up the sound but it’s otherwise unedited. I’m compiling a 10- or 15-minute summary for Patch Monday. This is really only for the political tragics — or those who simply can’t wait to hear the persistent questioning by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam.

If you’d like to provide an audio comment on this issue for Patch Monday, Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733 and leave a voicemail. The deadline is 8.30am Monday morning, Sydney time. The podcast is now online, but you cal still leave an audio comment for next week’s episode.

[Photo: SATA beehive data storage, adapted from an original photograph by Konstantinos Koukopoulos, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Audio: Many thanks to journalist Josh Taylor for providing the audio recording.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those suffering from early-onset dementia.

Articles

• Is Brisbane’s sewer broadband a crock of …?, for Crikey. Believing that the National Broadband Network will take too long to solve Brisbane’s internet problems, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman has signed a deal with the i3 Group to run fibre through the city’s sewers. As you do.
• Cloud security? Better get a lawyer, Son!, a 2000-word feature for ZDNet.com.au. As the intro says, “Moving your data into the cloud creates a raft of security challenges, but according to information security specialists, those challenges are less about hackers and more about data availability and signing the right contracts.”

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 61, “Microsoft exposes the botnet threat”. My guest is Microsoft Australia’s chief security advisor, Stuart Strathdee.
• A Series of Tubes episode 117. Richard Chirgwin’s podcast returns after a bit of a break. Apart from my usual natter about stuff, we hear from i3 Group’s CEO Elfed Thomas about that Brisbane sewer-based fibre project.

Media Appearances

• Again it’s not strictly “media”, but on Tuesday I took part in a lunchtime discussion about the future of book publishing, hosted by Blurb. I haven’t had time to write it up yet, but here’s Ross Dawson’s summary.

Geekery

• Wait for it…

Corporate Largesse

• Blurb paid for Tuesday’s lunch at History House on Macquarie Street. And very pleasant it was.
• I was invited to a few other things this week, but I was a tad crook and didn’t go. Ethics are restored, or something.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Staff of The Duke, Enmore, dress up for The Village People concert at the Enmore Theatre. I won't link to a higher-resolution version. We have suffered enough.]

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Articles

• How America could censor the internet… or not, for Crikey. The US is currently considering the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which my Crikey colleague Harley Dennett also wrote about today in The internet filter coming to the US — with barely any dissent. It’s about cutting off internet domains that are alleged to be involved with copyright infringement.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

Geekery

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been doing next week.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Making TV at Aria: Lisa Creffield of Sky News Business interviews Peter Baxter from AVG at Aria Restaurant, Circular Quay, Sydney, following a lunchtime media briefing.]