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Recently Skippy asked, 'why do you blog?' I was commenting on that and it got kind of long, so I thought I'd record it here. The short answer is, I don't know, and I'm not sure I need to know. But since this is all about figuring out the answer, I guess I'll play along.
A good place to start with figuring out why I blog is probably to look at the content and see where that leads me, and the answer is that it's mostly personal - Laura and Aidan, my wife and best friend respectively seem to be ... 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
Internet censorship isn't the solution
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There's been an issue that's near and dear to my heart hanging around like a bad, expensive smell and it just won't die the death it deserves: Government enforced ISP level internet filtering.
Censorship of the internet is a bad idea for very many reasons. While censorship per se is somewhat a question of ideology, I suspect most Australians would feel strongly that Government censorship is, by-and-large, something to be avoided. Regardless of that, there are many non-ideological reasons why centralised internet filtering - specifically - is a bad idea. Here are some to get you started:
Cost - The ... 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.
