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.
Links for 11 March 2009 through 18 March 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 11 March 2009 through 18 March 2009, posted after considerable delay in some cases:
- Conroy’s clean feed | Background Briefing: ABC Radio’s 45-minute exploration. “In the name of protecting children, the government will decree we’ll be forbidden to see ‘unwanted’ and ‘inappropriate’ things on the web. But exactly what that means is a secret, and the thin end of the censorship wedge. Reporter, Wendy Carlisle.”
- The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time | What’s My Pass?: Humans are remarkably predictable. Even when they think they’re being obscure.
- One Laptop per Child trial | Centre for Learning Innovation: ’Pong’s video about the first Australian trial of the OLPC, showing kids using the XOs in a primary school in rural New South Wales. Interviews with Pia Waugh and the educators involved. For soem reason, DET have cut the credits off the end, which seems a bit rude.
- The real facts about Telstra and the Fake Stephen Conroy | nowwearetalking: Telstra’s first official response comes via their blog.
- Telstra man behind Fake Stephen Conroy | smh.com.au: Leslia Nassar has revealed himself as the man behind Fake Stephen Conroy. And now the shitfight begins…
- Social networking & social norms | Aide-Memoire: My friend Kate Carruthers links to some interesting discussions about how we’re creating and negotiating new social norms for online social networks. A good a starting point as any.
- File Sharing Has Become the “New Normal” for Most Online Canadians | Daily Exchange: New Canadian research on attitudes to “file sharing”. 45% say people who use peer-to-peer file sharing services to download music and movies are regular Internet users doing what people should be able to do on the Internet. Only 3% believe file-sharers are criminals who should be punished by law.
- Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day | smh.com.au: Websites linking to Wikipedia and an anti-abortion website have been threatened with fines.
- ABC Mobile Web Site Failed Accessibility Test | Link: “Currently I am teaching mobile and accessible web design to second year and postgraduate students at The Australian National University in the course ‘Networked Information Systems’ (COMP2410). The ABC
[Mobile] home page would not be of an acceptable standard for student work on this course.” - You can’t spell Lowest Common Denominator without “ABC Mobile” | Department of Internets: A less-than-complimentary review of the ABC Mobile website.
- ABC Mobile: The new supposedly-mobile-friendly website from Australia’s ABC. But…
- We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!: Just like “Sexy People” but… with lasers! Lasers improve everything, right?
- Sexy People: Billed as “a celebration of the perfect portrait”, this collection of over-produced and overly-sentimental portrait photography reminds us just how bad the 1970s and 1980s really were.
- A gentle introduction to video encoding | dive into mark: A set of six articles providing an orientation to to issues involved in video encoding, written with a suitably cynical tone given the dog’s breakfast of formats available.
- Happy 20th Birthday WWW | Link: 13 March 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the CERN paper outlining what would become the World Wide Web.
- Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Amendment (Search Powers) Bill 2009 | NSW Parliament: This Bill proposes giving far more extensive search powers to NSW Police, including the ability to secretly enter premises next to the suspect without notifying the owner or tenant, and to secretly install monitoring software on third-party computers.
- Unicorns and Cupcakes: Two of the worst styles of kitsch collide in an explosion of… kitsch.
- An interview with an anonymous blog commenter | Joanna Geary: A regular commenter on the Birmingham Post‘s website, “Clifford” chats about his experience.
- australian screen: Australia’s audiovisual heritage online. “Explore over 1,000 Australian film and television titles produced over the last 100 years, with clips, curator notes and other information.”
- Gary Hayes Emerging Media Diagrams | Flickr: “A range of charts created by Gary Hayes across games, social networks, cross-media, broadband services, virtual worlds. Used in various presentations already and all marked as creative commons – attribution, non-derivative, non-commercial.”
So Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall is dead… or is it?
[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?”
Links for 03 March 2009 through 07 March 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 03 March 2009 through 07 March 2009, containing traces of nuts:
- J-Startup News: Billing itself as the latest on journalism startups and new business models for news
- Twitter Nudes: “This art project is designed to reflect the diversity of Twitter through nude photos of users from around the world and is completely anonymous: even we won’t see who sent the picture.”
- The Week that Twitter Tipped | Fast Company: If 2009 is the year that Twitter becomes “mainstream”, then perhaps this is the week of that year.
- Pauline Hanson Today Tonight 01Mar09 | YouTube: From Monday night, the Today Tonight interview where independent political candidate Pauline Hanson, formerly of One Nation, spits the dummy when asked where her election funding went, exactly.
- Skittle Fisting: Memes spread in strange ways. This tasteless “Taste the Failbow” site appeared during the #skittlefisting event last weekend.
- Tell Me More About This Australian Thing Called Rooting | PodBlack Cat: Following the Twitter #fisting incident last weekend, someone ran it past a Doctor of Linguistics who specialises in taboo language.
- Infringement and Terrorism: Pfft! | Brendan Scott’s Weblog: Arguing against the logic in that RAND report about increasing penalties for copyright infringement. “Does anyone honestly believe that people who are actively planning to commit mass murder are going to be deterred by a jail sentence for copyright infringement?”
- Twitter Begins Rolling Out Search and Trends | ReadWriteWeb: The news story itself isn’t that exciting. It’s just that the random Twitter screenshot they used to illustrate the story contains a mention of me via @NickHodge. Yes, this is really low-grade ego surfing. Cope.
- Sky News appoints Twitter correspondent… | guardian.co.uk: Jemima Kiss' post makes a few excellent points about using Twitter in journalism, including the observation that a dedicated Twitter correspondent “rather misses the point, which is that Twitter should be a tool that any forward-thinking journalist tries out, learns and then incorporates into their news gathering.” Precisely.
- Robots | The Big Picture: 32 fine images of robots, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance.
- Taking out the trash | ZDNet Australia: Fake Stephen Conroy pays tribute to Clive Hamilton, amongst other things.
- What Are You Doing? (#Skittles) | WSJ.com: The Wall Street Journal‘s rather staid blog post about the #skittlefisting phenomenon.
- Video: Jon Stewart explains Twitter (or tries to) | VentureBeat: Some Twitter users have criticised this as a lame attack, and it is. It confused some tweets being inane with all tweets being inane. But there’s a bittersweet moment towards the end where the “reporter” reminds Jon Stewart he’s not immune.
- Address to CeBIT Broadband Infrastructure Forum | Senator Stephen Conroy: The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is loose in Hannover.
- Social Marketing Bullshit Bingo | raena.net: Need buzzword bingo cards for the next Web 2.0 wankfest? Here you go…
- Organized Crime Is Increasingly Active in Film Piracy; Three Cases Link Terrorists to Piracy Profits | RAND: What the headline doesn’t say is that two of the three cases are well and truly in the past, and that the report was “supported by a grant from the Motion Picture Association” with the express aim of investigating the link. Naturally enough, they found one, and the media release provides the spin.
- Lily Allen talks Twitter on ROVE (Australia) | YouTube: Rove’s interview with Lily Allen which led to around 1600 Australians joining Twitter in a couple hours.
Thank you, First Donor!
I’d just like to say a great big “Thank you” to the chap from Adelaide who was the first person to use the “donate” button on my website. After giving me $50, he said: “The live blogging is good (although I read the last one a day late), but in general I like your Crikey commentary and your investigations into the Labor Great Firewall of Australia. Keep up the good work.” Thanks. You can donate too, if you like.