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RuddNet Day 3. The armchair-expert “network engineers” who infest Whirlpool, people who’ve never built a network more complex than the one linking their porn stash to the TV, are suddenly spouting off about national-scale infrastructure not just there but everywhere. Pity their friends.

So began the article I wrote for Crikey on Thursday 9 April.

As John Safran once said, thanks to the internet, “We can all now chip in and pool our ignorance.” The Dunning-Kruger Effect operates full force. As always.

And nowhere was that ignorance better represented than on Twitter.

I’m such a hypocrite. I’ve previously slagged off journalists for simply copying comments from Twitter without adding any value. And this piece is, essentially, a summary of what’s been said on Twitter. Oh dear. Anyway, you too can be a journalist by following the same technique. The Crikey piece explains how.

You can use Twitter Search to find every tweet mentioning “nbn”. But for a richer experience, the much prettier Twitterfall lets you view an animated twitterstream, pearls of wisdom dropping as Manna from Heaven.

Just imagine. With the NBN it won’t just be typed words, you’ll be able to see and hear all this in living colour and surround sound. Ah, $43 billion…

I’ll probably have a summary of some of the better commentary when I return to work mode on Tuesday.

Stilgherrian’s links for 11 March 2009 through 18 March 2009, posted after considerable delay in some cases:

Stilgherrian’s links for 25 February 2009 through 02 March 2009, gathered with gin and joy.

  • Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture | Times Online: Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country’s privacy watchdog has warned.
  • Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers | New Scientist: “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” says researcher Benjamin Edelman.
  • Chatham House Rule | Wikipedia: A rule for running a meeting where people can speak freely but their confidentiality is respected. The rule itself is: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” The Wikipedia article gives the background.
  • Australian Internet Filtering Debate at Kickstart 2009 | Midnight Update: A video of the Internet Filtering debate at Kickstart 09 from the weekend, including Bernadette McMenamin from Child Wise, Anthony Pillion from Webshield, Geordie Guy from EFA, and Mark Newton. I’ll write more upon this later, maybe.
  • Internet Study 2007 | ipoque: A report on the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, Voice over IP, Skype, Joost, instant messaging, media streaming such as YouTube, from a traffic point of view.

Here are the web links I’ve found for 23 February 2009, posted with a headache and gin.

  • Winners gallery 2009 | World Press Photo: What it says. As always, some very fine photojournalism.
  • Twitter is the new cat poo | First Blog on the Moon: Crikey cartoonist First Dog on the Moon has written a brilliant piece about Twitter and what might be called Twitterwhoring. Something he’s rather good at himself.
  • Victorian Bushfire Events | Premier of Victoria, Australia: A map of local fundraising events for the Victorian bushfires, the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history, put together with help from a little firm called Google.
  • Crisis of Credit : clusterflock: A nice animated film by Jonathan Jarvis showing how we got into the Global Financial Crisis. Some people have called is a “visualisation”. It’s not, as the imagery isn’t a proper mapping of the data, but it does help explain.
  • Where Clive Hamilton accuses me of trying to silence him | Websinthe: A bizarre story, this. Clive Hamilton confuses a call for better accountability with an attempt to silence him. It’d be funny, except that Hamilton gets unfettered access to major media in Australia, wrapping himself in a university’s cloak of respectability as he makes his pronouncements, and then proceeds to ignore the valid criticisms put to him.
  • ‘Sexting’, teen culture, technology, scandal | Salon Life: “What’s more disturbing — that teens are texting each other naked pictures of themselves, or that it could get them branded as sex offenders for life?” Apart from portraying sexually healthy youths as “hormonally haywire teenagers” and a few other tabloid clichés, this article clearly outlines the problem of current child pornography laws in the context of pervasive digital media.

Photograph of Clive Hamilton

Well, he is! As part of The Australian‘s “super blog” on Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall plans, Clive Hamilton has remixed his favourite old party piece. This time his rant is entitled Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians. Have a look. It’s a giggle.

OK, back? Cool.

Now I’ve dismantled most of Hamilton’s logical fallacies, baseless slurs and misinformation before, here and over at Crikey. Still, if Clive wants to sing the same old tune I’m happy to hum along one more time…

Clive, you started by saying, “Here is the kind of situation the Government’s proposed internet filter is aimed at,” and then provide a detailed description of an unsupervised schoolboy looking for porn.

Is it?

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The Australian Christian Lobby’s Jim Wallace is on the Fairfax news sites today, telling the same old lies to support compulsory Internet filtering. Sigh.

Since Wallace promotes himself as a representative of good Christian values, I’ll allow that he may just be ignorant rather than a deliberate liar. Ignorance is no sin: it can be cured with knowledge. But he does use the familiar fraudulent propaganda techniques: misrepresenting his opponents; cherry-picking numbers; failing to explore the implications of those numbers; citing the same suspect Australia Institute report; and wrapping it up in the same old “protect the children” cant.

Those of us who’ve been covering this issue for more than a year now are getting sick of responding to the same easily-rebutted debating tricks. But, as I keep saying, politics is a marathon event. So if Jim’s rolling out the same material, we’ll point out the same flaws.

Again.

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Stilgherrian’s links for 12 January 2009 through 18 January 2009, gahered with care and moistened with love:

Cnut of the Week graphic

It’s less than three hours until tonight’s edition of Stilgherrian Live (9.30pm Thursdays Sydney time), so we’d better get some nominations together for “Cnut of the Week”.

It’s the same rules as usual. We’re after people (or abstract forces of nature, or organisations or whatever) who’ve been futilely trying to hold back the tide of change.

My first nomination will be Starbucks for leaving taps running all day — ignoring the change to more environmentally-friendly methods and, incidentally, practising a weird kind of Seattle-based neocolonialism by thinking their own “global policy” is more important than the local laws where they operate.

Who do you nominate, and why?

It’s also “The Blue Edition”, mostly in support of Blue Day 2008, but perhaps we’ll show some blue movies too. Watch and see.

Did publishing a list of porn site search terms change the pattern of traffic to this website? Not much.

The most common search terms apart from my own name are still “heath ledger jokes”, “steve irwin jokes”, “used knickers” and “corey delaney”. The only ones I could see “young pussy”, “asian pussy”, “strip pork gams porn”, “sex fuck cartoon milf jimmy neutron”, “latina asian hardcore free no charge gratis porn sex amateur” and, my favourite, “deep throat black hung transsexuals no membership free access”.

[Update: Actually, there is an increase in traffic. It's not showing up in the search analysis, but that page of search terms is getting 200 visitors a day.]

I’m fascinated by the rich variety of the human sexual experience — and by the widespread denial about same.

For all that Cardinal Pell, bless his little silk knickers, thinks that sex only happens between (one) man and (one) woman who are married, have the lights turned off, and are not enjoying the experience but are breeding to better the Catholic Church, actual experience proves the complete opposite. Humans have and enjoy sex in pretty much every combination that can be imagined.

I was therefore fascinated with a massive spam comment which I’ve just deleted, which purported to list “What people search for” on the porn sites it was promoting.

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