Yes, “bad things” happen online, just as “bad things” happen anywhere. But when Clive Hamilton screeches about all the naughty things he’s found online, it looks to me like a deliberate attempt to press our emotional buttons and avoid rational debate. And he does it repeatedly.

The police don’t try to stop drug trafficking by putting a road block in everyone’s street and searching every vehicle. No, they use intelligence — in both senses of the word — to work out where best to deploy their finite resources for maximum results.

They also allocate their resources between conflicting demands so society as a whole is best protected. Their risk assessments tell them to worry more about the suspected rapists, serial killers or violent thugs in their community than some kid with a few grams of weed.

The people who actually understand child protection continually remind us that the greatest threats to children are the same as they always have been — abuse in their own home by family and close family friends, poverty, and bullying by their peers. Why oh why do we have to keep repeating that, Senator Conroy?

• Online Ad Rates Picking Up | The Business Insider: Based on a review of data from 6000 web publishers, it appears that online advertising is up 35% since its low-point of December 2008. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.
• Love is Old-Fashioned, Sex Less So | A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective: Comparing the music in the Triple J Hottest 100 and The Guardian’s recent list of 1000 songs to hear before you die, the Mule comes up with the view that love is out of fashion. Also, chart pr0n.
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule | Paul Graham: This essay really speaks to me. If you’re a manager, then your schedule consists of those 1-hour blocks to beloved of scheduling software. But it you’re a maker, or someone creative, one hour is barely time to get started. A good discussion of how these two different working styles can be resolved.
• Too much networking? | msnbc.com: A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet. “An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, writes in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
• Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos | The Register: A campaign by US right wingers, designed to raise fears of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack they allege could cripple Western nations and lead to chaos, is targeting British politicians, with some success.
• God is not your bitch / This just in: It is hugely unlikely God cares much about your sex life | Mark Morford: A glorious rant about politicians and others exploit God to explain how they’re really, really going to change this time — amongst many other things.
• Best RSS feeds for information graphics | nicolasrapp.com: A collection of feeds which represents a nice mix of information graphics and data visualisations. (Is there a difference between those two terms?)
• Rebooting The News: A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.
• The atmosphere in the control room gets tense … | Twitpic: This photograph is an overview of the control room as ABC TV’s Insiders is about to be broadcast last Sunday. Even with the combination of roles and reduction of control room staffing levels, broadcast TV is still a complicated beast!
• The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone: An astoundingly harsh critique of the US economy and, in particular, Goldman Sachs. The piece begins: The worlds most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
• Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds | New Scientist: The “unruly mob” concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth.

• Conroy’s clean feed | Background Briefing: ABC Radio’s 45-minute exploration. “In the name of protecting children, the government will decree we’ll be forbidden to see ‘unwanted’ and ‘inappropriate’ things on the web. But exactly what that means is a secret, and the thin end of the censorship wedge. Reporter, Wendy Carlisle.”
• The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time | What’s My Pass?: Humans are remarkably predictable. Even when they think they’re being obscure.
• One Laptop per Child trial | Centre for Learning Innovation: ’Pong’s video about the first Australian trial of the OLPC, showing kids using the XOs in a primary school in rural New South Wales. Interviews with Pia Waugh and the educators involved. For soem reason, DET have cut the credits off the end, which seems a bit rude.
• The real facts about Telstra and the Fake Stephen Conroy | nowwearetalking: Telstra’s first official response comes via their blog.
• Telstra man behind Fake Stephen Conroy | smh.com.au: Leslia Nassar has revealed himself as the man behind Fake Stephen Conroy. And now the shitfight begins…
• Social networking & social norms | Aide-Memoire: My friend Kate Carruthers links to some interesting discussions about how we’re creating and negotiating new social norms for online social networks. A good a starting point as any.
• File Sharing Has Become the “New Normal” for Most Online Canadians | Daily Exchange: New Canadian research on attitudes to “file sharing”. 45% say people who use peer-to-peer file sharing services to download music and movies are regular Internet users doing what people should be able to do on the Internet. Only 3% believe file-sharers are criminals who should be punished by law.
• Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day | smh.com.au: Websites linking to Wikipedia and an anti-abortion website have been threatened with fines.
• ABC Mobile Web Site Failed Accessibility Test | Link: “Currently I am teaching mobile and accessible web design to second year and postgraduate students at The Australian National University in the course ‘Networked Information Systems’ (COMP2410). The ABC
  [Mobile] home page would not be of an acceptable standard for student work on this course.”
• You can’t spell Lowest Common Denominator without “ABC Mobile” | Department of Internets: A less-than-complimentary review of the ABC Mobile website.
• ABC Mobile: The new supposedly-mobile-friendly website from Australia’s ABC. But…
• We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!: Just like “Sexy People” but… with lasers! Lasers improve everything, right?
• Sexy People: Billed as “a celebration of the perfect portrait”, this collection of over-produced and overly-sentimental portrait photography reminds us just how bad the 1970s and 1980s really were.
• A gentle introduction to video encoding | dive into mark: A set of six articles providing an orientation to to issues involved in video encoding, written with a suitably cynical tone given the dog’s breakfast of formats available.
• Happy 20th Birthday WWW | Link: 13 March 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the CERN paper outlining what would become the World Wide Web.
• Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Amendment (Search Powers) Bill 2009 | NSW Parliament: This Bill proposes giving far more extensive search powers to NSW Police, including the ability to secretly enter premises next to the suspect without notifying the owner or tenant, and to secretly install monitoring software on third-party computers.
• Unicorns and Cupcakes: Two of the worst styles of kitsch collide in an explosion of… kitsch.
• An interview with an anonymous blog commenter | Joanna Geary: A regular commenter on the Birmingham Post‘s website, “Clifford” chats about his experience.
• australian screen: Australia’s audiovisual heritage online. “Explore over 1,000 Australian film and television titles produced over the last 100 years, with clips, curator notes and other information.”
• Gary Hayes Emerging Media Diagrams | Flickr: “A range of charts created by Gary Hayes across games, social networks, cross-media, broadband services, virtual worlds. Used in various presentations already and all marked as creative commons – attribution, non-derivative, non-commercial.”

$2.8 million, which the Howard government allocated to expand the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET), was instead used by Rudd to help create Conroy’s $44.5 million Rabbit-Proof Firewall.

That’s a shame, because OCSET’s entire annual budget in 2007 was only $7.5 million. Without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET. The rest…?

“Only half are likely to be investigated by child protection police,” reported the Daily Telegraph. “The rest will be farmed out to local commands or dropped”.

What a great way to “protect the children”, eh? Take money from the police, where it’d do some good, and burn it on a poorly-defined Internet filtering project. Anyone who knows anything about IT will tell you the same thing: without clearly-defined goals up front, you will go over budget, over schedule and in all likelihood, your project will never be completed.

[This article is based on material which first appeared in my subscriber-only Crikey piece Another nail in the coffin of Conroy's Rabbit-Proof Firewall on 15 January 2008 2009, and would not have been possible without Irene Graham's superb research at Libertus.net. Another part of it, with some fascinating discussion in the comments, is over here.]

• Mobile Broadband Downloads | Telstra Business: These are the drivers for the Sierra Wireless HSUPA card that Telstra’s NextG network have “seeded” me with. It didn’t hurt a bit.
• Bangkok governor 2008 vote | Bangkok Post: Mugshots of the 16 candidates for Governor of Bangkok, with the election to be held on 5 October 2008.
• Falling between the cracks | MISaustralia.com: Simon Sharwood’s fine article explaining how small businesses don’t get the IT products and services they need because the bigger players see them as being too small to worry about.
• NSW Police Present an Award | Fickr: When the crowd at the Marrickville Contemporary Art Prize overflowed into the street, this officer took the stage as if she were accepting an award and made the whole thing fun. It was an excellent example of community policing and she deserves to be congratulated. The video of this event was part of Stilgherrian Live episode 26.

• Newspapers that Twitter: July numbers | graphic designr: Statistics on how (American) newspapers are using Twitter.
• Why You Should Never Talk to the Police | Schneier on Security: Links to a 30-minute video presentation by Professor James Duane of the Regent University School of Law explaining why — in a criminal matter — you should never, ever, ever talk to the police. It doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or innocent, it isn’t possible for anything you say to help you. Also links to a video of Virginia Beach Police Department Officer George Bruch, who basically says that Duane is right.
• Over 400 forms used by the National Security Agency | The Memory Hole: Obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, blank copies of (supposedly) most of the forms used by the US National Security Agency.
• George Orwell Diaries | The Orwell Prize: George Orwell started his diaries in August 1938. They’re now being published as a blog, each entry posted exactly 70 years after it was originally written.
• Everything That Happens Will Happen Today | David Byrne & Brian Eno: Byrne & Eno’s first musical collaboration in 30 years. On single available free now, album available for free streaming or buy-to-download or physically on 18 August. A world tour follows.

A new semi-regular feature, Gentle Readers. Found Art. Objects which I’ve stumbled across in the street.

Today, a Returned Property Docket from the NSW Police Service. It records in detail (and fairly poor typing) exactly what was being carried by S– when he was detained at the Newtown police station, and which was subsequently returned at 2.24am on a Saturday morning.

A life, in summary.

Don’t worry, S–, I’ve shredded the original. Though if you were concerned about your privacy you wouldn’t have thrown it into the street.

Here’s a fascinating video from Canada, which seems to show police provocateurs trying to turn a peaceful demonstration violent.

This was shot on Monday afternoon at protests in Montebello, Quebec. It shows the tail end of a confrontation between Dave Coles (president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) and three masked men who were trying to throw rocks into the police line.

In the commentary, there’s evidence to support the provocateur theory.

• When accused of being police, the masked men just look confused rather than denying it.
• Standard police procedure is that once a suspect is cuffed, a mask would be removed so everyone can see their face and reliably witness subsequent events. At least one “protester” stays masked all the way to the police vans.
• The takedown seems remarkably relaxed, given that these guys pushed into a line of riot police.
• At 2.45, immediately after they start arresting the “protesters”, the police cameraman shuts his camera off.
• One of the three is wearing a t-shirt for Radio X — a right-wing Quebecois shock-jock channel. No lefty unionist would be caught dead in one of those, you’d think.

And this photo (left) of the takedown is interesting. Note that the “protester” is wearing boots with exactly the same tread pattern as the riot police.

There’s more on this story at the Toronto Star. Thank BoingBoing for the pointer.

It’d be interesting to ask NSW police whether they’ve ever used provocateurs in this way — particularly with APEC in Sydney very soon.

There may (may the gods forbid!) come a time when we need to label a government fascist and be taken seriously. So please, don’t devalue it by calling every little disruption of personal choice “fascist”. It’s a very poor media strategy.

This post was triggered by Sydney Indymedia. Slogan: “Don’t hate the media, be the media.” On Thursday they wrote about the NSW Ombudsman’s Review of the Police Powers (Drug Detection Dogs) Act 2001. Interesting stuff, especially the high false positive rate.

“No drugs were located in almost three-quarters of searches,” says the Ombudsman. So over two years, roughly 7,500 people were searched — usually in public — and names taken when no crime was committed.

That concerns me. When nine police and an expensive-to-train “sniffer” dog cruise King Street, Newtown, as they did yesterday, the vast majority of their time is being wasted. Most of the people turning out pockets and receiving the tut-tut glares of passers-by are innocent citizens going about their business. The meme that the streets are rife with drug dealers is reinforced — falsely.

I don’t blame those nine police. They don’t choose their assignments, and I suspect most of them would rather be chasing down crims. Or having a burger in the patrol car, depending on their adrenalin-junkie level.

Sydney Indymedia had to “stick it to the man”, though, and illustrated their report with a completely unrelated, vicious-looking police dog. Somehow they missed the point that the target of their anger should be the politicians who implement hypocritical laws against (some) drugs, not the hard-working boys and girls in blue.

But then that’d run counter to their image of the police as representatives of the fascist police state.

Sydney Indymedia throws around the f-word fairly freely, as well as “police state“. Earlier in the year — and I wish I could find the reference! — they actually said that protesters being moved away from the doors of Parliament House, Canberra, “just goes to show the kind of police state we’re living in.”

Sure. Whatever you say.

However this week’s Pinochet Medal for an Inappropriate Reference to Fascism comes from Dan Russell, debriefing users of a design tool at the end of a project.

She told me that my software, my baby, the thing I’d been working on for the past 2 years was “the most white male fascist tool I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.”

And what did she mean by this?

Our design tool “forced the user to do things in a particular order”… she did things in a different way, and the tool was forcing her to go along a different path.

Get a grip. That’s about as fascist as a ticket inspector asking you to take your feet off the train seats.

Let’s actually remind ourselves what fascism is about. Let’s read the Wikipedia entry on fascism. Let’s look at some photographs of Belsen.

If you’re critical of policing strategies, or of the path Australia is taking under the Howard government, then by all means criticise. But if you start by calling everything fascist, then it’s easy for your opponents to dismiss your arguments as hyperbole — and you lose.