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 wrote about the Anonymous attacks on the Parliament House website for Crikey as well as covering it in this week’s Patch Monday podcast.
In How I brought down the Parliament House website there’s a few quotes from c0ld blood, who was one of the attack’s organisers, as well as some of the other podcast participants.
The new angle is a few comments from the Secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services, Alan Thompson, who runs Parliament House. He is not amused, and rightly so.
It’s almost old news now, but last Thursday the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers (ISPs) are not responsible for the copyright infringements done by their customers.
The full decision by Justice Dennis Cowdroy is almost 200 pages long, yet I found it relatively easy to read and learned a lot.
I’ve written three stories for Crikey so far:
I daresay I’ll be writing more soon. Meanwhile, if you have any questions…
Not posting here for a week makes it look like I’ve vanished. But increasingly, more of my work is elsewhere. Like my Crikey piece It’s called iPad, and the Kindle is rooted. Like the 2000-word feature I’m slaving to finish today for ZDNet.com.au. Look in the sidebar under “More Stilgherrian”. My online presence is now scattered amongst so many streams of data!
There’s an essay here about the meaning of all this fragmentation. But if I write that essay, I’ll end up having to admit this is precisely why Facebook has been so successful. So much of your life can happen through Facebook and its myriad third-party data-sucking privacy-perverting applications, from organising a BBQ to marketing a business.
The ease with which Facebook can become your all-encompassing social portal means Facebook will win.
That means I’ll probably never write that essay. I don’t want to admit Facebook will win. Because it’s ugly. And because they’re cunts.
Despite all the news about Google being, it is alleged, hacked by attackers in China, from an Australian perspective China probably isn’t our main problem.
I made this point in Crikey‘s lead story yesterday, quoting a security consultant at a leading outsourcing firm.
Australian attacks targeting the private sector have come from other so-called ‘friendly countries’. Which country is a problem closely correlates with business competition in the particular sector…
You could pick any one of our major trading partners and I could tell you a story about a sophisticated and well-executed attack sourced from that country. Examples at the top of my mind include Japan, Canada, US, India and France.
The story is free to read. Do click through.
I’ve been very busy this week following Tuesday’s announcement that mandatory ISP-level Internet “filtering” will go ahead, writing stories for Crikey and ABC Online.
Two stories for Crikey:
And my first outing for ABC’s The Drum — well, for Unleashed, there’s still some unresolved branding issues — is Evidence-based policy? Not on this filter! I argue that the mandatory filtering program isn’t about “protecting the children” at all.
A sample:
If the plan were really about protecting the children, and if it were really evidence-based, the government would have first have figured out what risks children actually face — online and everywhere else. They’d then figure out the best methods of countering those risks. Then they’d figure out the most cost-effective ways of implementing those solutions.
If we did that, we’d probably find that the risks are the very same ones that child protection experts keep banging on about. Bullying by their peers. Abuse from within their own homes and families. Poverty and its associated health risks. Obesity.
But this is politics, not child protection.
This policy is probably about a Senate preferences deal between Labor and Family First. It’s certainly about the political demands of a small but vocal and well-connected minority of conservative Christian voters and the devilishly evil internet.
The political solution has already been chosen: compulsory censorship by an automatic filter. The political goal is to sell that policy to the voters.
The comments threads on all articles is revealing fascinating stuff. Please read. And comment.
That’s all link to my recent stuff. In part 2 I’ll link to some of the other clever writing on this issue.
Yesterday I wrote an article for Crikey plus a post here based on Google Trends data which, it now appears, is dodgy.
Google Trends shows a steady decline in traffic to various websites since about September 2008, based on the metric “unique daily browsers”. But I was howled down. Everyone else’s metrics were not showing such a decline.
Indeed many, such as this chart of Nielsen NetRatings’ unique dailies, provided by Andrew Hunter (@Huntzie), Head of News, Sport and Finance at ninemsn, showed the exact opposite.
For example, news.com.au grew from 250,829 average daily unique browsers (UBs) in July 2008 to 346,367 in October 2009, a 38% increase. Not the roughly 50% drop shown by Google Trends.
Google says:
Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms…
In other words, it’s some Google Secret Sauce. But has the sauce gone off?
The Google Trends forum is rather quiet. There were only three questions or comments posted for the whole of September, none of which received a reply, and nothing since. I can’t see that anyone from Google has responded to anything for months and months — I gave up looking back any further. Others have noted that Google Trends data differs wildly from Google’s own Analytics product — usually complaining that it shows significantly less traffic.
Google Trends is a Google Labs product, i.e. an experiment, I’m starting to think that it’s been abandoned and we’re just seeing a slow degradation due to lack of maintenance.
Meanwhile, I have changed my Twitter avatar to a goose for the rest of today.