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Links for 22 December 2008 through 27 December 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 December 2008 through 27 December 2008, gathered despite great personal risk:

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Links for 11 December 2008 through 20 December 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 11 through 20 December 2008, posted not-quite automatically There’s quite a few, but then it is the weekend.

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Links for 30 November 2008 through 10 December 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found through to 10 December 2008, posted automatically.

  • #mumbai: three days as a Twitter journalist | News.com.au: The story of 21yo Aditya Sengupta, a Mumbai student who became part of the Twitter clearing house for news in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks.
  • Adler, The Perverse Law of Child Pornography | The Columbia Law Review: “In our present culture of child abuse, is child pornography law the solution or the problem? My answer is that it is both. This reading pictures law and culture as unwitting partners. Both keep the sexualized child before us. Children and sex become inextricably linked, all while we proclaim the child’s innocence. The sexuality prohibited becomes the sexuality produced.” A challenging read.
  • Prospect reads: first rate, brave Economist article on Thailand at First Drafts | The Prospect magazine blog: This post reveals that The Economist‘s feature article on Thailand was written by Peter Collins, their southeast Asia chief, as his final act before moving back to London.
  • Thailand bans Economist | Straits Times: Needless to say, this week’s edition of The Economist is banned in Thailand, tho not “officially”. “This is one of those ‘cultural harmony’ bans, where the book distributors and stores take it on themselves not to distribute,” says free speech activist C J Hinke.
  • Thailand’s monarchy is part of the problem : The king and them | The Economist: Also from The Economist, a bold editorial calling for Thailand to abolish its “archaic” lèse-majesté law.
  • Thailand, its king and its crisis : A right royal mess | The Economist: The controversial cover story from The Economist this week, breaking the taboo on discussing the role of Thailand’s King in politics. It acknowledges that it’ll make Thais squirm, but it delivers one of the most incisive analyses I have yet seen. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the Kingdom and the choices it faces.
  • Live Filtering Pilot Another Lab Test: DBCDE | How to Be A Systems Engineer: Can this be true? According to the DBCDE officer this guy spoke with, the Phase 2 trials of Australia’s Internet filtering still won’t be real. “This will be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers,” they said.
  • E-mail Etiquette 101 | Michael Hyatt: This is from mid-2007, and the hyphenated “e-mail” is a bit quaint. However these are all still valid points. I continue to be amazed at how poorly most businesses use basic tools like email.
  • Otto the octopus wrecks havoc | Telegraph: Octopuses are smart enough to get bored and start causing trouble.
  • Rolling Your Own Newsroom | O’Reilly Radar: Robert Passarella explains how he wired up a quick custom new page using Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes and some Typepad RSS widgets. The same thing could easily be dong using WordPress plugins or whatever.
  • World's Top Tourist Traps | ForbesTraveler.com: “Not all overcrowded, merchandise-swollen travel hot spots are created equal, and some deserve to be flagged as full-fledged tourist traps.”
  • Breaking news online: A short history and timeline | Teaching Online Journalism: A quick timeline of some major events in online journalism. I think it should include a lot more. Has anyone seen any more comprehensive lists?
  • Inside Story | Politics, Society and Culture: “Launched in October 2008 by Australian Policy Online, Inside Story combines high-quality journalism and analysis to bring readers a distinctive view of Australia and the world. Drawing on a network of writers, researchers and correspondents in Australia and overseas, Inside Story investigates the forces shaping contemporary politics, society and culture. Inside Story is edited at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology.”
  • Net porn: Whose rights matter most? | ABC News: Clive Hamilton has written another piece which tries to equate free speech with pornography, misrepresents the anti-filtering arguments, and deliberate overlooks that filtering won’t work — he even says he’s ignoring that discussion, claiming we should debate the morality of pornography before we look at whether filtering is possible. Full of intellectual dishonesty. Are these really the best arguments there are for comprehensive Internet censorship?
  • The Art of the Title Sequence: What is says: A website dedicated to the opening titles of films and TV programs. I stumbled across it because they’re currently highlighting Soylent Green.
  • A Penny for My Thoughts? | NYTimes.com: A Pasadena, California news site has outsourced all its local journalism to writers in India, who are paid $7.50 per 1000 words.
  • The Musical Compositions of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej: The King of Thailand is, amongst other things, an accomplished jazz musician, playing alto saxophone and writing. This is a selection of his work.
  • A piddling offence and much worse | www.smh.com.au: “Senator Stephen Conroy’s plotting and warring has added to Labor’s decline,” wrote Paul Sheehan in this revealing 2004 article. “His base certainly isn’t the electorate,” he writes. “His power comes from offstage, from the patronage of his mentor, Senator Robert Ray, and his years as a recruiter (his enemies call it branch-stacking), deal-maker and kneecapper for the Victorian Right. His reward was Senate preselection at the age of 31. Once in the Senate, Conroy could start knifing people under the protection of parliamentary privilege. He did not waste any time.”
  • Sharing Around the World | Facebook: This video showcases a Hackathon project that visualizes all the data Facebook receives.
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Links for 28 November 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 28 November 2008, posted automatically with the aid of badgers.

  • Conroy responds to Ludlum. Finally. | Public Polity: A blog post quoting Senator Stephen Conroy’s eventual response to Greens Senator Scott Ludlam’s questions about Internet censorship plans. I haven’t had time to analyse it or link back to the original Hansard.
  • Future of Journalism summit | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook’s live blog of the MEAA’s The Future of Journalism summit, held in Melbourne on Wednesday. Yes, there’s still some value in reading the commentary.
  • History of US Govt Bailouts | ProPublica: A nice chart comparing the size of financial bailouts of commercial operations by the US government since 1970.
  • Statistics Laundering: false and fantastic figures | Libertus.net: “This research paper contains information about various alarming and sensational, but out-of-date, false and/or misleading ‘statistics&’ concerning the prevalence of ‘child pornography’ material on Internet websites, etc., which appeared in Australian media reports and articles in 2008. While sometimes statistical exaggerations are not important, those referred to herein are being used to directly exaggerate the prevalence and hence risk level of certain threats, and to indirectly weaken the position of those attempting to critically assess the nature of the threats, and whether proposed public policy solutions are effective and proportionate.”
  • Save the Net | GetUp! Campaign Actions: “The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist. Testing has already begun on systems that will slow our internet by up to 87%, make it more expensive, miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and accidentally block up to 1 in 12 legitimate sites. Our children deserve better protection – and that won’t be achieved by wasting millions on this deeply flawed system.”
  • Are web filters just a waste of everyone’s time and money? | The Guardian: The interesting thing about this article isn’t so much its clear explanation of the pointlessness of trying to automate an Internet “bad things” filter but the fact that it was written in August 2007. Nothing has changed since.
  • AFACT v iiNet: the case that could shut down the Internet | APC: A legal analysis of the law suit being brought by the movie industry body AFACT against ISP iiNet. This will be an important test of the “safe harbour” provisions of Australian copyright law.
  • Labor's arbitrary internet filter plan misguided and deeply unpopular | Liberal Party of Australia: The Liberal Party’s media release, which includes the full text of Senator Nick Minchin’s statement about Internet censorship.
  • Minchin slams Labor’s NBN backflip | ZDNet Australia: Opposition Senator Nick Minchin has ripped into the Australian government’s Internet censorship plans, calling them “misguided and deeply unpopular”. Without Liberal support, and without the support of The Greens, no new legislation can be passed. (The article’s headline related to the other story covered in this report, the question of whether the tendering process for the National Broadband Network is sufficiently transparent.)
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Links for 23 November 2008 through 24 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 November 2008 through 24 November 2008, gathered with spite and a little too much nasal mucosa:

  • Mapping the World’s Fastest Supercomputers | NYTimes.com: Nice map. Why are there no Australian computers here?
  • Journalists warned of two years of carnage ahead | The Australian: The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) report Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism warns that the Western media industry faces "two years of carnage", squeezed by the global economic meltdown and the unravelling of traditional economic models. I supposedly have an essay in it.
  • Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time and Attention | SlideShare: A fascinating presentation from Merlin Mann of 43folders.com which has been updated with text so it works without the presenter being present. Much food for thought.
  • WordCamp Australia 2008 | WordCamp Association: Apparrently there's a WordCamp on in Sydney this weekend which I only just found out about.
  • Charles Fogden: An entire page about my great great grandfather Charles Fogden who in 1838, with is wife Sophia (nee Slater) their two baby girls, secured selection by Mr H Watson (South Australia’s colonisation commissioners’ agent at Chichester) as suitable assisted immigrants for the new province of South Australia. They left England on 12 September on board the 500-ton barque Prince George. About a thousand miles from Australia Mary Emma was tragically burned to death. She was buried at sea on the 8th December. The Prince George reached Holdfast Bay, Glenelg, at 11pm on 26 December 1838. The story includes bushrangers, fraud and a controversial marriage to a “coloured” man.
  • TheShipsList: Passengers, Ships, Shipwrecks: Ships’ passenger lists from the 1700s through 1900s, plus immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck information, ship pictures, ship descriptions, shipping-line fleet lists and more, as well as hundreds of passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia and even some for South Africa.
  • Rudd will need a stiff upper lip | PerthNow: I never thought I'd agree with Glenn Milne on many things, but apart from any personal or ideological flaws he IS a canny political analyst. This piece on Internet censorship makes some good points. It even portrays EFA, which Senator Conroy and Clive Hamilton would have us believe is an “extreme libertarian” organisation, as “an independent industry watchdog”.
  • Can Labor implement “clean feed” without legislation? | Defending Scoundrels: Dale Clapperton has analysed the Australian government’s plan to censor the Internet from a legislative point of view. Currently to pass new laws the Rudd goverment needs either the support of the Liberal-National Coalition in the Senate, or the support of the Greens plus Family First Senator Steve Fielding plus independent Senator Nick Xenophon. Given The Greens’ opposition, and the Liberals’ stated opposition, Clapperton;s analysis shows that it probably couldn’t be done.
  • Australian Government Mandatory ISP Internet Filtering / Censorship Plan 2008 | Libertus.net: Irene Graham’s updated, concise and clearly-written guide to the Rudd government’s Internet censorship plans which clearly highlight the, erm, ambiguities and inaccuracies in Senator Stephen Conroy’s accounts. She links to references. Conroy just accuse you of supporting child pornography.
  • Seven Revolutions | Global Strategy Institute: “A project led by the Global Strategy Institute at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to identify and analyze the key policy challenges that policymakers, business figures, and other leaders will face out to the year 2025. It is an effort to promote strategic thinking on the long-term trends that too few leaders take the time to consider.”
  • Societies worse off “when they have God on their side” | Times Online: “Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.”
  • South Korea’s Madagascar land lease: it gets worse — much worse | Global Dashboard: South Korean company Daewoo has managed to lease half of Madagascar’s arable land for 99 years, and all Madagascar gets in return is an opportunity to work on the farms.
  • Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns | BLDGBLOG: A delightful riff off one statistic: that there are now more World of Warcraft players in the US than farmers, yet mainstream political coverage insists on making sure we know what farmers think about an issue — but not WoW players. Of course some WoW players are farmers, and all demographics overlap. But what tags are relevant in choosing a political candidate? Are we looking at the right ones?
  • Mandatory ISP filtering mind map | Somebody Think Of The Children: This mind map is actually from Jay’s fingerpuppetmafia.com but the linkage was nicely arranged here. It’s a work in progress, so feel free to offer suggestions.
  • With a public intellectual like this, who needs barbarians? | Somebody Think Of The Children: Jon Seymour’s guest post rips apart Clive Hamilton’s Crikey article in far more detail than anyone else’s so far.
  • Fears over Australia’s £55m plan to censor the internet | The Guardian: A view from the UK: This summary for a British readership points out that Australia’s Internet censorship plan is mandatory and ill-defined. The lead is that it’s the usual “protect the children” appeal to emotion.
  • Live Piracy Map | ICC Computer Crime Services: A map showing all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2008, updated as new reports come in. This is the real kind of piracy, about boarding ships, not copyright infringement.
  • The end of the story – as we know it | The Guardian: Another version of Jeff Jarvis’ notion that in online journalism the “article” is replaced as the unit of reportage by the “topic”.
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Links for 21 November 2008 through 22 November 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 21 November 2008 through 22 November 2008, after being tickled with a feather duster:

  • Danger Room Debrief: How to do Defense, When the Money’s Gone | Danger Room from Wired.com: “The current global economic and financial meltdown may yet become something worse: a protracted global depression. As with the last century’s Depression, which spawned fascism and WWII, it could recast the world at a fundamental level. As such, it may soon represent our biggest security challenge in over 50 years.”
  • The Power of Nightmares | YouTube: The 2.5-minute introduction to The Power of Nightmares, to give you a flavour of the full 3-hour documentary series.
  • The Power Of Nightmares (DVD) | Internet Archive: This film explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today: “Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.” The full DVD image is free to download.
  • Irrelevant Al Qaeda | Jon Taplin’s Blog: Is it time to declare Al Qaeda irrelevant and downgrade the War on Terror a police action that’s just mopping up the stragglers?
  • Mother Earth Mother Board | Wired 4.12: A massive 1993 feature article in which Neal Stephenson toured six countries following the roll-out of fibre optic cables. It introduced me to his writing and it remains an excellent read today.
  • The End | Flickr: A collection of classic “The End” title cards from a wide variety of films.
  • Fiscal Conservative vs. Tax & Spend Liberal | Be the signal: Another variation of an infographic pointing out that the Republicans don’t have the best track record for the US economy.
  • Opinion graph | Junk Charts: On average, the US stock market does much better under Democrat Presidents than Republicans, as this graph shows.
  • How Twittering Critics Brought Down Motrin Mom Campaign | Advertising Age: A groundswell of opinion on Twitter caused Johnson & Johnson to pull an adverting campaign.
  • Thesis Theme for WordPress | DIY Themes: A high-quality but not-free theme framework for WordPress. While I currently use the free Tarski theme for my website maybe this is worth a look at some point.
  • NSW Parliamentary Research: Mandatory ISP filtering is not what it seems | Internet Industry Association: Research by the NSW Parliamentary Library shows that Senator Conroy’s claims about other nations’ compulsory Internet censorship regimes are wrong.
  • Kerr's curse | ABC Unleashed: If nothing else, I love this essay for the phrase “cardboard cutout think tanks”. But there are many other reasons to like it.
  • Internet Censorship and the Irukandji Jellyfish | First Dog on the Moon: Only First Dog on the Moon could successfully combine Senator Conroy’s Internet censorship plan and jellyfish in one cartoon.
  • PG Nation | ABC Unleashed: An interesting essay about the neo-wowserism of the Rudd government.
  • Europa Film Treasures: An archive of European cinematographic treasures. It looks like there’s a lot of material here.
  • The Trojan Horse | Business Spectator: “The current government policy of forcing ISPs to offer their customers a so-called ‘clean feed’ has the overt intention of helping parents to protect their kids while surfing the Internet. It is, we are told, all about child protection. However, the use of content filtering to make the Internet ‘safer’ for kids is already available, to the extent that any statistically significant real demand exists to solve it.”
  • Failing hard drive sounds | Datacent: A collection of the sounds made by dying hard disc drives. Yes, they can be used in music provided you contact these guys first.
  • 19-year-old Commits Suicide on Justin.tv | NewTeeVee: Abraham K Biggs committed suicide on Wednesday while broadcasting himself on video site Justin.tv. Apparently the 19yo Floridian was egged on by commenters on Justin.tv and forum users on bodybuilding.com. The article canvasses some of the legal and ethical issues.