Tag: censorship

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Talking Facebook regulation on Syn Radio

There was a bit of media interest in my opinion piece for ABC Drum Opinion on Facebook regulation, including an interview for Panorama on Melbourne’s SYN Radio.

While they do eventually put some items on their own website, it doesn’t seem to have appeared yet. So here it is for your listening pleasure.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:18 — 4.6MB)

[The Conversations category is where I post the unedited versions of interviews I do, or the various media spots I do which aren’t podcast elsewhere. If you’d like to grab all of them in the future, subscribe to the RSS feed.]

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Weekly Wrap 39

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets. With three full working days occupied by conferences, I still managed to get a few things done. And not all of it was drinking.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 78, “Bionic eyes, gigabit Wi-Fi and the NBN”. This is my wrap-up of the NICTA Techfest, including an interview with Dr Terry Percival, one of the inventors of Wi-Fi, about potential future uses of the National Broadband Network. He reckons video will be the killer technology, with the world returning to non-written communication as the norm.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • This week’s edition of the Business 21C Weekly podcast from Sydney community radio station 2SER was all about the Australian government’s plans for internet censorship, and I was one of the guests. The program also features web developer Scott David from Flock and the president of the Internet Society of Australia, Tony Hill.

Corporate Largesse

  • The Kickstart Forum on the Gold Coast continued on Monday and Tuesday. My airfares and accommodation were paid for by the organisers, Media Connect. Monday’s lunch was sponsored by Samsung. There was also plenty of freebies from the vendors, though notably less than last year. And substantially fewer USB memory sticks. Should I bother reporting all this stuff? If nothing else, it’s interesting to document for posterity.
  • On Thursday I attended the Digital Directions 2011 conference as their guest. They provided food and drink. Stories relates to the event will appear next week.
  • The lovely folks at Saasu — well, their CEO Marc Lehmann — decided to give me a three-month extension on my subscription, just as a gift. I’d still say it’s a delightful online accounting system even without that.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: The view this morning from the front door of Tea Tree Cottage, one of the Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, where I’m living this week. I’ll write more about this experience very soon.]

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Weekly Wrap 17

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

Geekery

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been doing next week.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Making TV at Aria: Lisa Creffield of Sky News Business interviews Peter Baxter from AVG at Aria Restaurant, Circular Quay, Sydney, following a lunchtime media briefing.]

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ICT Election Forum: what questions?

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) is once more holding a Federal Election Forum on ICT issues, with the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Senator Stephen Conroy, his Coalition counterpart Tony Smith MP, and The Greens’ spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam.

As you can see from the photos, Australia’s political diversity is once more represented by a bunch of middle-aged men in dark suits.

When I wrote about the equivalent event in 2007, I noted that the Minster at the time, Liberal Senator Helen Coonan, looked rattled and scored a few own goals. Conroy, by comparison, was alert and scored some sharp political points. And Democrat leader Senator Lyn Allison — remember the Democrats? — was quietly confident.

Labor’s broadband promise was a Fibre to the Node network with a “guaranteed” minimum speed of 12Mb/sec to 98% of Australians, costing $4.7 billion. The Liberals were promising WiMaX through the OPEL consortium. From memory, mandatory internet censorship didn’t even get a mention, as both parties only added that little gem to their agendas after the official campaign period had started.

How times have changed…

This year’s moderator is Sky News political editor, David Speers. An odd choice, I must say. Sure, he has the profile and Sky News Business is the host broadcaster. But wouldn’t it have been better to have someone with a better technical knowledge of the portfolio, rather than a general political news reporter? My worry is that it’ll degenerate into political point-scoring rather than analysing competing policies.

So let’s help out Mr Speers. What are the issues this year, do you think? What questions should he ask?

I think we can take a question or two about internet censorship for granted. Please try to think beyond the obvious indignation du jour.

The Federal Election Forum is next Tuesday 10 August 2010 at the National Press Club in Canberra. The debate starts at 1pm Canberra time and will be broadcast on Sky News Business and possibly ABC News 24. [Update 3pm: The Forum will also be streamed live at YouTube’s Australia Votes channel.]

[Photo credits: Stephen Conroy via Wikimedia Commons. Tony Smith via Office of Tony Smith MP. Scott Ludlam via The Greens. This composite image is licensed for re-use under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.]

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Attorneys-General, are you really up for reform?

[Update 22 July 2010: I failed to update my brain. The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General postponed their meeting thanks to the federal election. If only I’d re-read their website. Still, this means there’s now plenty of time to make the point.]

The other day, communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy called for a review of Refused Classification material online, something I called his “filter masterstroke”. With the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General due to meet in Perth tomorrow and Friday on 4 and 5 November 2010, I’m calling for them to review the whole classification system — not just online and not just RC.

Here’s what I just sent the NSW Attorney General, John Hatzistergos MLC (pictured):

The Hon John Hatzistergos MLC
Attorney-General of New South Wales
GPO Box 5341
Sydney NSW 2001

Fax +61 2 9228 3600

Review of Refused Classification

Dear Minister,

As you will be aware, Senator Stephen Conroy, Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, has recommended that the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General review that category of online content called Refused Classification.

I urge you and your fellow Attorneys-General to extend that into a full review of the classification system, not just for the internet but for all media.

In brief, Australia’s classification system is currently an inconsistent mess. I doubt that it accurately reflects the mature, tolerant and robust Australian community standards of the 21st Century. Simply put, such a review is long overdue.

Irene Graham has documented in detail the state of Refused Classification in Australia at http://libertus.net/censor/isp-blocking/au-govplan-refusedclassif.html and it is clear that over the years the RC category has been extended in an ad hoc manner to include material well beyond the governments’ original intentions — in many cases without reference to parliaments, let alone to the people.

Looking through the rest of Ms Graham’s site, it is clear that for the last decade, and perhaps longer, more attention has been given to the views of vocal minority groups rather than to the peer-reviewed social research that is available. This must change.

It is also clear that many decisions have been made on the basis of content being perceived as “offensive” to people’s tastes, rather than any demonstrable risk of harm. It simply is not the government’s place to legislate on matters of taste.

Finally, this is the age of media convergence. It is ridiculous to have different classification standards for the same video material, for example, depending on whether it is delivered via broadcast television, a DVD in a shop or via the internet.

In no way should any of this be seen as wishing to relax the laws relating to criminal material such as child abuse material. But that is a matter for criminal law, not classification.

If you require any further details, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Stilgherrian

cc: The Hon Carmel Tebbutt MP, Member for Marrickville

It’s all very last-minute, but I reckon a lot of phone calls, faxes and emails to your state Attorney-General wouldn’t go astray.

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Weekly Wrap 6

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 48 in which I chat about “Conroy’s filter masterstroke”. With an election due to be announced today, Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, has I think succeeded in taking the toxic topic of ISP-level internet filtering off the table by announcing a comprehensive review of the Refused Classification category. I chat through the implications with Peter Black, who teaches internet law at the Queensland University of Technology.
  • The interview I recorded last week for A Series of Tubes will be scrapped, as events have moved on. There will be an episode next week, ‘cos we’ve booked a recording session for Tuesday morning.

[Photo: “Blurry at Museum station“, Sydney, taken on 14 July 2010.]