A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. It was another massive week of writing this week, including a trip to Melbourne.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 98, “Games, crime, porn and Facebook (laws)” A long chat with Peter Black, lecturer in media and internet law at Queensland University of Technology about R10+ computer games, a legislated right to privacy, the spread of “voluntary” internet filtering against the Interpol blacklist, laws relating to cybercrime, and calls to bring Facebook under control. It was recorded at the Hotel Gearin in Katoomba.

Articles

• Politics of NBN pricing: comparing potatoes and pomegranates, Crikey, 25 July 2011.
• Poll-driven knee-jerk reactions: the latest political craze, ABC Drum Opinion, 25 July 2011.
• Cyber Storm III security exercise key findings released, CSO, 25 July 2011.
• The keyboard is dead, Technology Spectator, 26 July 2011.
• Skills shortage risks NBN benefits: NetApp, ZDNet Australia, 27 July 2011.
• Media’s internet cluelessness is unacceptable and they will die, Crikey, 28 July 2011.
• ‘Impossible’ new wireless tech an NBN-killer? Not quite, not yet, Crikey, 29 July 2011.

These next few articles are all from the IBM Pulse 11 event in Melbourne. As the disclosure below points out, I travelled to this event as IBM’s guest.

• IBM pushes Tivoli for cows and guns, ZDNet Australia, 27 July 2011. I’m particularly pleased with this headline, which is a reference to the Dana Lyons song, Cows with Guns.
• IBM tech intercepts packets to control apps, ZDNet Australia, 28 July 2011.
• Telstra GOC saves $1.5m with single sign-on, ZDNet Australia, 28 July 2011.
• IBM halves Woolworths maintenance calls, ZDNet Australia, 28 July 2011.

Media Appearances

• On Wednesday I was on ABC Triple’s national current affairs program Hack talking about LulzSec and Anonymous calling for a boycott of PayPal.
• Also on Wednesday, I was interviewed by ABC Radio’s PM program on the hack of a wholesale internet service provider that was widely reported as a hack of the National Broadband Network.
• On Friday I was interviewed by SBS TV’s World News about the the UK 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.

Geekery

• Over at my business Prussia.Net we launched the new Australian website for Guild Guitars. It’s built in WordPress.

Corporate Largesse

• On Tuesday I attended a briefing for media and analysts at Bilson’s Restaurant in Sydney where NetApp paid for the food and drink.
• On Wednesday and Thursday I attended IBM’s Pulse 2011 event in Melbourne as IBM’s guest. They paid for airfares, taxis, accommodation and various meals.

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: Skyscrapers ay Circular Quay, Sydney, photographed from the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 29 July 2011.]

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.

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

• ABC iView Downloader | Whirlpool Forums: Tools and tips for downloading the Flash videos from ABC TV’s iView and SBS Australia. Handy if you don’t have the bandwidth for live streaming, and for timeshifting beyond the limited time ABC and SBS offer.
• 85 wordpress plugins for blogging journalists | Online Journalism Blog: Not a bad list for trimming down the number of choices out there.
• Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Wired: A good summary of Twitter’s history and potential for the future — especially if it’s still new to you.
• What price the pace of modern life? | guardian.co.uk: Michael White describes his 14-hour day as a journalist, comparing it with the equally-busy if not even busier politicians, and wondered whether this pace is the right thing.

I’ll be at the Media140 Sydney conference all day Thursday and Friday. If you’re not going, you can still watch everything on the live stream.

I’m taking part in a panel starting at 5pm Thursday, Sydney time: Do Journos Do it Better? Journalists in SocMedia Communities. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m hoping this moves beyond the stale “bloggers vs journalists” (non-)debate.

My fellow panellists are freelance journalist, columnist and blogger Mia Freedman; new media consultant and recovering journalist Bronwen Clune; Valerio Veo, who heads up online news and current affairs at SBS; social media consultant Laurel Papworth; and late addition Dr Lawrie Zion from La Trobe University.

The moderator is Julian Morrow, co-founder of The Chaser, so I suspect they’re looking for a lighter, end-of-day discussion — particularly as there’s a more serious-looking panel earlier in the day called Social Media: Death or Salvation of Professional Journalism?

(I’m not sure why it can’t be both, death and transformation, but still… every headline has to be a binary opposite to turn it into winners and losers. Sigh.)

My own 5-minute rant is summarised in this tweet:

Who cares if journos do It better if It is outdated and no-one wants It? Whatever “It” is. Journalism ain’t newspapers, radio or TV.

Yes, it’s quite deliberate that “It” is capitalised.

The Twitter hashtag is #media140, and I daresay I’ll be posting snippets as it all unfolds. Stay, as they say, tuned.

The reprobates in the photo are me and my fellow panellists at forthcoming the Media140 Sydney conference, where we’ve been given the topic “Do Journos Do it Better? Journalists in SocMedia Communities.” Look out, folks!

From left to right, that’s freelance journalist, columnist and blogger Mia Freedman; new media consultant and recovering journalist Bronwen Clune; Valerio Veo, who heads up online news and current affairs at SBS; social media consultant Laurel Papworth; and me.

Now I’m hoping the discussion doesn’t degenerate back into those tedious bloggers versus journalists arguments from last year. Certainly by year’s end they seemed to have faded. And we do seem to have a more switched-on panel. But we’ll see.

Actually the full conference program looks good, with everyone from ABC managing director Mark Scott and Crikey editor Jonathan Green to… oh, look for yourself.

Media140 Sydney is on 5 and 6 November 2009 at the ABC’s Eugene Goossens’ Hall in Ultimo. Early-bird bookings at $145 close today have been extended to 5 October.

Increasingly, I’m getting annoyed with otherwise-intelligent people who simply don’t “get” what is happening as our world becomes hyperconnected and rail against it. The man in the photo is Henry Porter. He doesn’t get it. But a pseudonymous commenter at The Poll Bludger this morning does. And he explains it better than I ever have.

Ah, the contrast!

In a piece for The Observer, Porter’s headline warns that Google is just an amoral menace. The ever-growing empire produces nothing but seems determined to control everything, we’re told.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the Internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs — worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past…

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive. Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

It’s worth reading the full rant — because it completely misses the point: I only found Porter’s piece because Google had told me about it.

Google didn’t “steal” his content. It produced a new audience member. And that’s what all media outlets produce: an audience for their advertisers — or, in the case of the ABC and SBS, an audience sufficiently large to justify their existence.

Ever though I think this one piece by Porter is full of shit, I clicked through, read about him, and discovered much better pieces about his concerns for our declining civil liberties and how the decline of one-way TV sets the scene for increased public debate. Porter now has a new reader because of Google.

However that commenter over at The Poll Bludger, yes, he got it right…

Responding to another commenter’s suggestion that Google should set up its own news operations, dolphin-avatar’d The Finnigans said:

Google doesn’t need to. News service is also an old hat. Citizen journalism via blogs, video posting à la YouTube, social networking sites and the latest Twitter-type news sharing. News service will also heading the oblivion path that is the print and classified media are heading.

As someone who was there from the beginning, Mosiac Browser V0.1, Web Server v0,1 and HTML V0.1 on Windows NT for the main streamers. Yes, I know the Unix guys have been hacking away for years, but it did take Mosaic browser to take it to the masses on Windows.

We knew from the beginning that aggregation will be the king. We actually built the first web crawler in Australia that aggregate contents across websites. But we didn’t have the resources to build a proper search engine. So good on Google for making billions because they do build the best search engine there is.

We also knew the Web/Internet will smash the monopoly and democratise the content creation, publishing and distribution. Especially distribution, the print media was supreme because it controls its own distribution channel via the newsagency channel. Any business that has control and monopoly over the distribution network, it’s a very good and profitable business, just ask Telstra.

But now, the distribution networks or channels are commodity, especially with the arrival of the wireless. The mobiles will be king in the next few years. In Japan, Korea, USA and some European countries, 50% of the internet traffic now are coming through the mobiles. It’s still early days for the mobiles, that is why I suggested to William that he should talk to his master at Crikey about putting together a mobile version of PB.

Rupert said people should pay for the contents. I am not prepare to pay for data, information, knowledge any more, they are commodity, they are available everywhere. I will pay for wisdom. Sorry Rupert, your publications do not have any wisdom and you have missed the bus many times and still missing. Adios Amigo.

BTW: I notice Microsoft has stopped selling its encyclopedia Encarta, obviously it has been killed by Wiki, just as it killed Britannica.

Pre-fucking-cisely! I explained this in my piece Journalism in a hyperconnected world, when I discovered I could track the Bangkok riots of 7 October 2008 through Twitter far better than through any “mainstream” news outlet.

Campbell Reid, the Group Managing Director at News Limited, got it right when he told the ABC’s “Quality Journalism” forum that “me-too journalism” is the cancer because it wastes resources.

Why do news editors send someone to cover a media conference which is already being streamed live?

Take a look at the photos of this week’s G20 demonstrations in London. Why is there a pack of photographers at every little violent incident, producing hundreds if not thousands of almost-identical images?

Some news sites have already given up.

Fairfax, for instance, produced Heatwave gets them all aTwitter simply by copying and pasting tweets — spelling mistakes and all — with the journalist doing nothing more than adding some weather data cribbed from AAP and elsewhere.

As Newsphobia points out, Twitter is not a Lazy Journalist’s Replacement for Vox Pop.

Fairfax gets away with this because Twitter users are still a minority. For now. But for those who do use Twitter, who do see the trending topics display and, since the Internet is so handy, to the Bureau of Meteorology‘s weather observations, Fairfax added nothing of value.

Who were these people? Where were they? What were they doing?

Where was the engagement with the community which demonstrated that the Fairfax was producing, as The Finnigans puts it, Wisdom?

Of all the moments of frustration in last night’s SBS program Insight — and there were many — the most revealing was from host Jenny Brockie. After almost an hour debating Internet “filtering”, Brockie said, “I’m still unclear about whether it works or whether it doesn’t work, as a system.”

Thus begins my article in Crikey today — though it’s behind the paywall. If you’re not yet a subscriber (and why not?) you can get yourself a 21-day free trial. [Update: Things are only behind the Crikey paywall for 14 days, Click away!]

My key theme is that the reason no-one can agree on whether “the filter” will “work” is that no-one has defined exactly what it’s supposed to do — least of all the Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy.

“I have only ever identified [the material to be blocked as] Refused Classification in terms of child porn, bestiality, rape, incest sites, those sorts of things,” Conroy said last night. “For adults who want to be able to watch the other sort of material, we’re not proposing to do that. We’ve never proposed to do that.”

Except that, as the article details, the story has changed over time.

OK, this morning’s post about Senator Conroy being sacked was a little April Fools’ Day jokette. But with the continuing controversy over Internet censorship, the delayed National Broadband Network (though that finally gets an announcement of something or other this week), and yesterday’s gaffe about iiNet spying on its customers, could it soon be true?

The problem was that Exchange’s POP3 connector was saying it had retrieved a user’s email and delivered it into their mailbox. However when we looked in the mailbox, the email wasn’t there. Nor was it in any of the “undeliverable” queues. Nor were there any error messages. I think I’ve solved it — or at least figured out a workaround — but I’d like to understand Exchange’s behaviour here. So here goes…

This is a relatively-new server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, fully patched, with (of course) Exchange 2003. It does not accept email directly via SMTP, except on the local LAN; all email from external addresses is brought in using the POP3 Connector from mailboxes in a shared hosting account on a Linux server which is under my control.

The primary email domain is maindomain.com.au. Each user has a base email address of the form jsmith@maindomain.com.au, and some users have john@maindomain.com.au added and marke as their primary address. Some users also have addresses in other domains, such as jsmith@additionaldomain.com.au or john@additionaldomain.com.au, which I’d added using the “Manage Users” tool in SBS’s GUI.

All this was working OK, and still is.

However on the weekend I added another additional domain, let’s call it problematic.com.au, and two more users. For these users, I wanted jbrown@problematic.com.au to be their primary address in Outlook, so I added the SMTP addresses to their account in the usual way, set them as primary addresses, and then added the relevant POP3 Connectors. POP3 connector downloads the email OK, and the logs would show that it was successfully delivered into the mailbox jbrown@problematic.com.au. However it wasn’t. Email to jbrown@maindomain.com.au failed silently in the same way.

Here’s the weirdness…

If I set the user’s primary email address to jbrown@maindomain.com.au, then both jbrown@maindomain.com.au and jbrown@problematic.com.au start working. Change it back and they fail again.

Also, the second user, “Sue Smith”, was sue@problematic.com.au and the primary address and ssmith@maindomain.com.au as the add-on. Both failed. If I flip them so ssmith@maindomain.com.au is the primary email, then ssmith@maindomain.com.au starts working but sue@problematic.com.au still fails.

This is presumably because the underlying Windows login is ssmith and not sue. But why should this matter if the email address is listed in the user’s account as an SMTP address?

It looks like email is only accepted if the primary email address is within the server’s primary domain, but not if an address in another domain is set as the primary — even though both addresses are attached to the user. And, as it happens, even when problematic.com.au is added to the server’s default recipient policy.

Am I understanding this correctly?

And, the final scary question… Since there’s nothing in the delivery or undeliverable queues, has the inbound email which didn’t arrive been lost forever?

Only hours to go! Eurovision at the Pub is tonight at our local “Irish” pub, Kelly’s On King, 258 King Street, Newtown. The SBS broadcast starts at 7.30pm, but we’ll be there from 5pm or so to, um, ensure sufficient fuel for a long evening of big hair, tacky costumes and dodgy choreography.

There’s a Facebook event page, but even if you don’t use Facebook please RSVP here or to my Twitter stream or somehow. The more confirmed guests, the more free stuff the pub gives us.

I’ll be Twittering the event, as will many others, with the tag #eurovision. If I have enough bandwidth, I’ll also provide an audio commentary via Ustream.

But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?

Tomorrow night at 8.30pm The Cutting Edge, which usually runs imported current affairs material, tackles the same issue. While the title “The Meth Epidemic” pre-supposes it is an epidemic — what is the medical definition anyway? — the review in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald gives hope.

The review doesn’t seem to be available online, so here’s some choice quotes:

A disturbing, captivating examination of the “meth rampage” in North America, where the impact of methamphetamine — also known as crystal meth, glass or ice — has been devastating. This is a powerful piece of television…

The program provides little in the way of a solution, though a legislative push for controls on the supply of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, both essential ingredients in the making of the drug, signal a promising upturn in the crisis. Unspun, and without the kind of melodrama that dampens the impact of most community-service material, this is unmissable.

Probably perfect viewing in the lead-up to Australia vs Italy in The World Cup! Sorry, wrong date. I mean for the comedown afterwards.