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!
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.
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.
[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday 2 March. Nothing’s changed since then.]
The villain gets thrown off the cliff. He bounces off the rocks into the river and his limp, bleeding form is flushed downstream. Hurrah! But just as our heroes down their first celebratory drinks, the door bursts open and the villain is back — soaking wet and angrier than ever…
“The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled,” wrote Asher Moses last Thursday when independent Senator Nick Xenophon withdrew support for the Rudd government’s internet “filtering” plans. Opponents of Senator Conroy’s scheme popped open the virtual champagne and started sending congratulatory messages to anti-censorship lobbyists.
But as blogger Kieran Salsone’s headline put it, “Twitterati blow load over Xenophon: Lobbyists still without cigarette”. Despite Senator Xenophon’s announcement, nothing has actually changed and Senator Conroy has yet to comment.
True, any legislation would need support in the Senate from the Coalition or all seven minor party and independent senators. With the Coalition expressing grave reservations and calling the proposal insulting, and with the Greens and now Xenophon opposed too, any legislation would be blocked.
Blocked, that is, unless someone changes their mind.
Continue reading “So Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall is dead… or is it?”
Yesterday’s Stilgherrian Live Road Trip was more a video thing that a liveblog, and if you really want to see all the fragments they’re online in unedited form over at Ustream. Today, however, I will be liveblogging properly — like, with actual content — from the Politics & Technology Forum, starting just before 9am Canberra time.
I forgot to mention that you can get a taste of what to expect at this year’s Politics & Technology Forum by watching the videos of last year’s.
Thanks to Microsoft’s Nick Hodge, you can view videos of Matt Bai’s keynote address, Panel 1 on Blogging, social networks, political movements and the media with Annabel Crabb, Peter Black and Mark Textor, and Panel 2 on Politics 2.0: information technology and the future of political campaigning with Joe Hockey, Senator Andrew Bartlett, Senator Kate Lundy and Antony Green.
This Thursday 26 February I’m liveblogging from Microsoft’s second Politics and Technology Forum in Canberra. This year’s theme is “Campaigning Online”.
Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi (pictured), heralded as the man who reinvented political campaigning thanks to his work on many US campaigns for the Democrats, and author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything. He’s also a political analyst with MSNBC and much more, as his Wikipedia entry or Twitter stream reveal.
The political panellists are federal Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull (who tweets as @TurnbullMalcolm) and Labor’s Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, who’s been pushing for better government use of technology for some time.
Our MC is Mark Pesce, who himself has covered similar topics in presentations like Hyperpolitics, American Style.
Bookmark this page, ‘cos the liveblog will start here at around 8.45am Canberra time on 26 February.
Continue reading “Live Blog: Politics & Technology Forum 2009”