Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
In stark contrast to John Howard’s closure of johnhowardpm.org and Melbourne IT’s subsequent silence, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Lalla Freivalds has resigned over allegations that she pressured a private Internet hosting company to close a website — something which is illegal in Sweden.
She becomes the fourth government minister around the world to lose a job over the anti-Muslin cartoons which originated in Denmark.
After unilaterally taking satirical website johnhowardpm.org offline, Melbourne IT is, predictably, staying quiet.
In another triumph of tolerance and freedom of expression, the Prime Minister’s office ordered the shutdown of a spoof John Howard website which featured an “apology” speech for the Iraq war.
Australian futurist and social commentator Richard Neville created johnhowardpm.org on Monday and received 10,500 visits within 24 hours. It was closed down by domain registrar Melbourne IT on Tuesday, but Neville was only told yesterday that this was “on the advice from the Australian Government”.
Mr Neville says the parody was an act of satire, and now has a PDF copy of the speech on his website.
Information security expert Bruce Schneier looks at the Future of Privacy in this article from his Crypto-Gram Newsletter.
Two snippets:
The pervasiveness of computers has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with profound implications for our society and our freedoms. Corporations and the police are both using this new trove of surveillance data. We as a society need to understand the technological trends and discuss their implications. If we ignore the problem and leave it to the “market,” we’ll all find that we have almost no privacy left…
Most of us are happy to give out personal information in exchange for specific services. What we object to is the surreptitious collection of personal information, and the secondary use of information once it’s collected: the buying and selling of our information behind our back.
Bruce writes coherently — and presumably knows more than we know he knows. His books are well worth a read too.
I’ve never been a fan of the Australia Post website, and not just because it’s pig ugly. In any website design, attention to detail is important — and every time I’ve used this site I’ve run into attention-to-detail problems.
Continue reading “Australia Post’s lousy website”
Rantings of an Insane Platypus blogs about women’s basketball in Australia and the US. Written by a good friend, it pulls 3300 human visitors a month — plus an indeterminate number of monotremes.
I mention this because we finished the redesign yesterday — thanks to Andreas Viklund for the original layout — and because it’s an excellent example of what I’ve been calling “micromedia”.