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The Federal Government continues to pursue unworkable, expensive and above all, ineffective plans to mandatorily censor every Australian internet connection. The reasons the proposed legislation is a bad idea are innumerable, but here are three key points:
It won't protect the children
We will all pay for this ineffective solution
It sets a dangerous precedent.
To find out more about the proposed legislation visit one of the following sites where the issues are articulated much more eloquently than I could do so:
Electronic Frontiers Australia
No Clean Feed
Libertus.net
Department of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy
This site will ... more
Amazon.com.au - Ahh, now I understand
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After recently arriving back home from a year in the UK, I've been increasingly frustrated with the lack of availability and high price of books here in Australia. More than that, I didn't understand why there are no good online book retailers in Australia, even the good physical retailers don't have good online stores - none of them1. That was, until I read an article today by Chris Berg which flicked the light switch for me - even if it didn't solve the problem.
It had bewildered me before I left that there were no good online book sellers in ... more
Greens: Taking the Government to task
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Andrew Bartlett posts today at Crikey on the political prospects of The Greens as a third party in our 'two party' system. In his (always insightful) analysis he makes mention of the inevitable internal tensions about direction within the Greens over whether their effort to grow the party's support base should focus on trying to consolidate "the more doctrinaire left wing vote" or "broaden their appeal to capture some of the 'small l' liberal1 vote that the Democrats2 used to get."
The Australian Democrats are in a hard place right now, but I for one, hope we haven't seen the ... more
More About Internet Filtering
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So you're probably getting the picture that I think this is a serious problem. Today there's been an interesting podcast interview of Internode's Mark Newton by Ben Grubb at Tech Wired Australia (via STOTC). It touches on all the pertinent points about why the Government's proposal is simply unworkable.
After the Rudd-Labor victory at the 2007 federal election I had high hopes that the days of Government ignorance around internet policy which we had seen under the Howard Government, and especially with Sentator Helen Coonan as Minister, were behind us. However, as Labor continues to pursue the deeply flawed policy ... more
Internet Censorship: It is a big deal!
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A quick search on Google News seems to indicate that this issue still doesn't seem to be getting the main stream media coverage it deserves. In fact, it seems to be getting more coverage overseas than it is in Australia's media - including from Chinese news outlets. As you would expect, it's getting some good coverage by bloggers:
Gizmodo - Australia To Build Great Firewall Down Under [Censorship]
Amnesia Blog - Australia’s Great Firewall without an opt-out
Boing Boing - Australia's Great Firewall: just like China, Syria and other "free" countries
The Technology Liberation Front - Australian ISP-Level Content Filtering ... more
This is sw'as, the digital home of Simon Elvery - a 26 year old Web Developer with too many extra curricular interests. Usually written from Brisbane, Australia, sw'as has entries dating back to 2004 on subjects including politics, photography, books, music, and many other flights of fancy.
