Two published stories from me yesterday. In New Matilda, Well That’s Awkward covers the outing of Telstra employee Leslie Nassar as Fake Stephen Conroy. And in Crikey, ACMA issues threats, meets the Streisand Effect covers the government’s threat of $11,000-per-day fines to people even linking to links to “prohibited” material. The latter is behind Crikey‘s paywall for the moment.
Kids know better than the censors
I haven’t visited Indexed in ages, but this image from last month says it all, eh?
The censors would treat us all like children. They imagine we’re unable to make our own decisions That unless “They” make the decisions for us — secretly and unaccountably — then we will succumb to the danger.
Is the Victorian Government running without data backups?
In Crikey yesterday, I wrote that we’d received information that all is not well at CenITex, the Victorian Government agency which provides IT services to six out of 10 state departments. Our tipster’s more serious allegation is that there hasn’t been a full data backup in more than a year, and that “everyone in CenITex is aware of this”.
“Some time ago, what was the Shared Services Centre realised they were unable to back up all the data they manage for the participating departments in the overnight time window,” they told Crikey.
“For over 12 months they have been taking only incremental backups… There is no disaster recovery in place. Everyone in CenITex is aware of this and are told to ‘shut up’.”
The article isn’t behind the paywall, so read it in full.
More Twitter on the Tubes
On this week’s A Series of Tubes podcast with Richard Chirgwin, you can hear me talking about Telstra’s HFC upgrades, copyright, and (yeah, I know) still more Twitter.
Episode 39 is online, with a gnome
Episode 39 of Stilgherrian Live is now online for your post-facto viewing pleasure.
After so many fine nominations for “Cnut of the Week” it was difficult to pick a shortlist, but I applied my arbitrary judgement and narrowed it down to: Peter Costello (final score 8%) for refusing to understand that he is yesterday’s man; rugby player Brett Stewart (11%), recently accused of sexual assault; rugby players in general (36%); and our winner, Anna Bligh (44%), whose political campaign website for the Premiership of Queensland doesn’t list an email address or even a contact form, and who uses Twitter but doesn’t respond in any way.
You’d think that after the success of Barack Obama’s online campaigning, they’d get themselves some sort of clue — especially given the string of Obama advisers giving speeches here recently like Ben Self and Joe Trippi. But no.
Episode 39 is tonight!
After a bit of a break, Stilgherrian Live returns to the Internet at 9.30pm tonight Sydney time — so nominations are now open for “Cnut of the Week”.
Who do you think is futilely resisting the tide of change? Nominations are open to people, organisations, nations and even abstract forces of nature — but your nomination has to reflect the news of the last week, and you have to give reasons. As usual, I’ll select the shortlist at 8.30pm Sydney time, and you can vote during tonight’s program.
Who do you nominate, and why?