Author: Stilgherrian

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The lies of the internet censors: Your. Filter. Won’t. Work.

Crikey logo

I’ve just written a piece for Crikey today about the hypocrisy of those folks in favour of Internet censorship. It begins:

Gloves-off time. The purveyors of pervasive internet censorship — handful that they are — have burned their goodwill. It’s time to call them out on their lies and demand to know why they’re not advocating the real solutions to child sexual abuse.

Bernadette McMenamin of ChildWise, you’ve crossed the line, defaming everyone who’s protested the government’s plans. “Most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child pornography,” you said. How dare you!

Ms McMenamin, to really stop child abuse we need to spend our resources efficiently. Let’s run through it one more time. And let’s skip those hysterical, made-up “statistics” you still peddle. Child abuse is bad enough without heading into your paranoid fantasyland.

It continues in that vein. It’s not behind Crikey‘s paywall so it’s free to read.

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Telstra, you goddam bloody idiots!

Telstra logo

Once more, Telstra demonstrates its appalling arrogance. They’ve just been excluded from bidding for Australia’s National Broadband Network for submitting a non-compliant bid, and now try to deny it despite their own clear evidence.

The Australian IT reports today:

In a statement to the stock exchange, Telstra said it had been excluded from the bidding process because its proposal submitted on November 26 did not include a plan on how to involve small and medium-sized enterprises in the building of the network.

26 November was the closing date for submissions, published well in advance. And yet:

Telstra chairman Donald McGauchie said the reason for its exclusion was “trivial”…

“Telstra provided its SME plan to the Government in early December and, in Telstra’s view, in accordance with the RFP (request for proposals),” said Mr McGauchie.

No, you fuckwit. The closing date was 26 November. Supplying information in “early December” means your submission was missing key elements. Morons.

Did you ask the teacher for an extension? Did you have a note from your mother? FFS! I stand by what I wrote in October: Get over yourself, Telstra!

If you can’t even provide your goddam submission on time, why the hell would we be stupid enough to give you $4.7B of our money?

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WordPress 2.7 broke something

I just upgraded this website to WordPress 2.7 and something has gone wrong with the tagging. I couldn’t be bothered figuring it out just now, so tags will have to be broken for a little while. You’ll live. [Update: OK, so it fixed itself. Mysteries abound.]

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Kruddiversary: The internet thanks you for 12 months of achieving nothing

Crikey logo

[This article was first published in Crikey on 27 November, but I forgot that I hadn’t re-posted here.]

Evidence-based policy! National Broadband Network! Australia 2020 Summit! After 11 years of Howard’s opportunism and fear-mongering, Ruddish mantras sounded like… well, like “Fresh Thinking”.

But one year on, precisely none of the NBN has been built. The Summit produced nothing. The Cyber-Safety Plan is trialling (again) unworkable internet filters while Senator Conroy accuses everyone of being a pervert.

Tenders for the NBN only closed yesterday, and Telstra’s off-grid bid means we’re probably in for months of legal battles. Although the network is intended to cover 98% of households, David Kennedy from Ovum Research reckons it’ll take three years to reach the first 50% — that’s 2012.

Continue reading “Kruddiversary: The internet thanks you for 12 months of achieving nothing”

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A post for Human Rights Day

Sixty years ago today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the newly-formed United Nations. After the bloodshed of the WWII, virtually every nation on the planet understood that these values were What It Was All About — and yet Australia is alone amongst Western democracies in not having enshrined them into Law. What’s wrong with us?

I’m still too ill to write an original essay today. However I’ve already written what I think about this in “Let’s just write that down…”. You may also like to read my review of Julian Burnside’s book Watching Brief.

Under the Rudd government, we seem to be closer to rectifying this gap in our laws — though I find it odd that a Bill of Rights sceptic is chairing the panel. Still, anything would be better than the comprehensive erosion of human rights under the Howard government.