Politics – Page 6 – Stilgherrian

04 April 2009

Links for 30 March 2009 through 04 April 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 30 March 2009 through 04 April 2009, gathered with the assistance of pumpkins and bees:

The Australian Sex Party: “The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.”
Measuring the Information Society: The ICT Development Index 2009: Australia is ranked #14 based on figures from 2007. In 2003 it was at #13.
Ho Hum, Sweden Passes new anti File Sharing Legislation | Perceptric Forum: Tom Koltai’s analysis of that new Swedish law: It’ll make no difference long term.
As Sweden’s Internet anonymity fades, traffic plunges | Ars Technica: A new Swedish law that went into effect 1 April makes it possible for copyright holders to go to court and unmask a user based on an IP address. Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped 40% overnight.
Study: online sexual predators not like popular perception | Ars Technica: This survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting — and both differ markedly from the popular conception.
What Is Fail Whale?: The complete history of the Twitter’s error-bringing Fail Whale, along with all the art and craft it’s inspired to date.
Voda/Hutch merger rattles ACCC | ZDNet Australia: Australia’s competition watchdog tonight issued a strongly worded statement of concern that the proposed merger of mobile carriers Hutchison and Vodafone could lead to increased retail prices on mobile telephony and broadband services.
All the news that’s fit to tweet | guardian.co.uk: The Guardian has also announced a new 140-character commenting system. “You’ll never again need to wade through paragraphs of extended argument, looking for the point, or suffer the unbearable tedium of having to read multiple protracted, well-grounded perspectives on the blogs you love.”
Share This Lecture! | Viddler.com: Mark Pesce’s annual lecture for “Cyberworlds” class, Sydney University, 31 March 2009. About the significance of sharing across three domains: sharing media, sharing knowledge, and how these two inevitably lead to the sharing of power.
Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | The Guardian: One of the better April Fools’ Day pieces. I particularly like the extracts from the Twitterised news archive. 1927: “OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*”
Flappers, wine, cocaine and revels (Pt II) | The Vapour Trail: A few hours after five Melbourne girls were arrested for vagrancy in late March 1928, the headline of Melbourne’s Truth broadcast their misdeeds: “White Girls with Negro Lovers. Flappers, Wine, Cocaine and Revels. Raid Discloses Wild Scene of Abandon”.
A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia | TIME: Time‘s take on the leak of the Australian Internet censorship blacklist portrays it as a joke and a scandal. There are some factual errors in the story, but this looks like how it’ll end up being perceived internationally.

18 March 2009

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.”

07 March 2009

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.

01 March 200905 March 2010

Links for 25 February 2009 through 01 March 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 25 February 2009 through 02 March 2009, gathered with gin and joy.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture | Times Online: Laws that allow officials to monitor the behaviour of millions of Britons risk “hardwiring surveillance” into the British way of life, the country’s privacy watchdog has warned.
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers | New Scientist: “Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” says researcher Benjamin Edelman.
Chatham House Rule | Wikipedia: A rule for running a meeting where people can speak freely but their confidentiality is respected. The rule itself is: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” The Wikipedia article gives the background.
Australian Internet Filtering Debate at Kickstart 2009 | Midnight Update: A video of the Internet Filtering debate at Kickstart 09 from the weekend, including Bernadette McMenamin from Child Wise, Anthony Pillion from Webshield, Geordie Guy from EFA, and Mark Newton. I’ll write more upon this later, maybe.
Internet Study 2007 | ipoque: A report on the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, Voice over IP, Skype, Joost, instant messaging, media streaming such as YouTube, from a traffic point of view.

24 February 2009

Links for 23 February 2009

Here are the web links I’ve found for 23 February 2009, posted with a headache and gin.

Winners gallery 2009 | World Press Photo: What it says. As always, some very fine photojournalism.
Twitter is the new cat poo | First Blog on the Moon: Crikey cartoonist First Dog on the Moon has written a brilliant piece about Twitter and what might be called Twitterwhoring. Something he’s rather good at himself.
Victorian Bushfire Events | Premier of Victoria, Australia: A map of local fundraising events for the Victorian bushfires, the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history, put together with help from a little firm called Google.
Crisis of Credit : clusterflock: A nice animated film by Jonathan Jarvis showing how we got into the Global Financial Crisis. Some people have called is a “visualisation”. It’s not, as the imagery isn’t a proper mapping of the data, but it does help explain.
Where Clive Hamilton accuses me of trying to silence him | Websinthe: A bizarre story, this. Clive Hamilton confuses a call for better accountability with an attempt to silence him. It’d be funny, except that Hamilton gets unfettered access to major media in Australia, wrapping himself in a university’s cloak of respectability as he makes his pronouncements, and then proceeds to ignore the valid criticisms put to him.
‘Sexting’, teen culture, technology, scandal | Salon Life: “What’s more disturbing — that teens are texting each other naked pictures of themselves, or that it could get them branded as sex offenders for life?” Apart from portraying sexually healthy youths as “hormonally haywire teenagers” and a few other tabloid clichÃ©s, this article clearly outlines the problem of current child pornography laws in the context of pervasive digital media.

22 February 2009

Links for 17 February 2009 through 21 February 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 17 February 2009 through 21 February 2009, massaged and relaxed:

BLOG CASUALTY: Bernardi sacked for revealing on his blog that Pyne is not a conviction politician | VEXNEWS: South Australian conservative Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi was sacked from the Coalition front bench after refusing to withdraw comments he made in a bog post. This’ll be interesting: leader Malcolm Turnbull will be at the Politics and Technology Forum in Canberra next Thursday, from which I’m liveblogging.
Filtering “dangerous”, says Obama strategist | MIS: Ben Self, who ran Obama’s online campaign for the US presidency, makes his position clear.
Content Filtering | Primus Telecom: iPrimus, the largest of the ISPs to have been accepted into the government’s Internet filtering trials so far, explains how and when they’ll be involving their customers.