AUSTRALIA - THE NEW CHINA
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Fucking hell. I HATE that Australia’s becoming a whole new police state now - seriously, for non observers - don’t be surprised if in 10 years we end up looking like China - the poster child for big brother-like policing and communism. My gawd there’s been so much shitty laws happening in the past few months I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of it!!
One of the most significant one is the fact that Australia may well be getting a mandatory internet filter probably sometime soon:
AUSTRALIA’S mandatory internet filter is being primed to block 10,000 websites as part of a blacklist of unspecified “unwanted content”, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy revealed in Federal Parliament.The 10,000 blocked websites would include 1300 websites already blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Senator Conroy revealed details of the Rudd Government’s proposed web filter as he called for expressions of interest from internet service providers for a live trial of the technology.
As part of the trial, ISPs will test different methods of filtering the web with subscribers who volunteer. The trial is expected to last six weeks and will start before Christmas.
“The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA blacklist of prohibited content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content,” Senator Conroy told Parliament.
Yes. This is happening in AUSTRALIA - a place which is fast turning into some kind of big brother nanny state. Okay so its targeted at porn - more specifically child porn (why people would willingly volunteer to be part of the study mentioned above which looks at how effective the filter is with child porn… is completely beyond me). And its targeted at ‘illegal content’ The problem is - what exactly is defined as ‘illegal’? Digital music? Movies? BOOKS!!??!?! They haven’t really made themselves clear. And that’s the no. 1 problem right there.
This filter is mandatory too, so there really isn’t much choice for aussies at all:
Australians may not be able to opt out of the government’s Internet filtering initiative like they were originally led to believe. Details have begun to come out about Australia’s Cyber-Safety Plan, which aims to block “illegal” content from being accessed within the country, as well as pornographic material inappropriate for children. Right now, the system is in the testing stages, but network engineers are now saying that there’s no way to opt out entirely from content filtering.
I am not in any way supporting porn - but seriously does this not sound alarm bells for anyone else that the government can now legislate entire control over what sites are filtered and what aren’t? Could it not set a precedent in the future for the government to just keep adding to the blacklist - in effect turning Australia into a country like China which filters just about every single goddamned internet site?
And just today, my ISP - iiNet got sued by for apparently allowing ‘illegal downloading’. WTF!?!??! So ISP’s are now supposed to filter content to its customers???? What a load of bull. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t go after Bigpond - a far larger ISP in Australia which serves a LOT more people. Is it because Bigpond sells music and movies legally? There is NO EFFIN WAY you can stamp out file sharing unless you get rid of the internet altogether. From the actions of these frickin useless corporations, I’ll bet taking down the entire internet is EXACTLY what they plan to do. Yeah. Let’s just all partay like its 1900 when there was no such thing as computers!!!!
Australia is also kinda lacking when it comes to the internet too. Americans? They have their uber 60mb connections of whatever the hell they have over there. Over here the max you can get is basically around ~1.5 MB(apparently you can get up to 20MB but thats if youve got money to burn) which is frickin nothing compared to other countries. The Rudd government made some sort of election promise last year to improve broadband in Australia. Has it happened?? Not that I know of. iiNet provides some of the fastest internet speeds in the country - which is maybe why they’ve been targeted by AFACT. I mean let’s face it now. Apple makes 120 GB ipods. It doesnt take a moron to figure out why anyone would need that much space - unless they were downloading shit off the internet. And ISP’s provide tens of gigabytes of bandwidth a month - why?? Is that considered ‘encouraging’ piracy? If making ipods 120GB in capacity isn’t encouraging file sharing I don’t know what is.
Back on topic though, iiNet HAS been outspoken against the mandatory internet filter I was talking about earlier - its no wonder they are the ones being targeted in all this!
Mr Malone said that the $44 million the Government is purporting to spend on ISP filtering would not be nearly enough to cover Australia’s more than 700 ISPs.
“I can tell you that if all the ISPs were to be involved it will cost a lot more than that.” he said.According to Mr Malone, the only way to effectively filter the Internet is in the home.
“What’s good for a six year old boy is not going to work for a 15 year old girl who needs to do research for high school assignments. A one-size fits all approach to filtering will never work,” Mr Malone said.
Mr Malone said that Senator Conroy should listen to SAGE-AU (the System Administrators Guild of Australia) which has stated that the proposed filtering system is not technicallly sound.
“Senator Conroy knows all this. His own figures show that the proposed system will slow the Internet down between 2% and 86%. Yet he won’t listen to anyone. He’s the worst Minister in the Rudd Government.”
To date no major ISP other than iiNet has committed to participating in the trial.[Read More]
Fuck Conroy. Fuck the Rudd Government. Im actually regretting voting for them now - though I dont know if Howard wouldve been a better government. Australia really is stuck for choice here.
Far out. Reading these stories make me really mad >_> Its not just all tech though. There’s now calls to ban energy drinks to teenagers and kids because apparently they have too much caffeine and red bull in them. Just ask Tracey Robertson - a mum whos found out her son has been drinking up to 13 a day -_- Are people really this stupid or do they just have a death wish? OBVIOUSLY drinking that many energy drinks in a week is unhealthy - any sane person would realize this - even a 14 year old. How dumb do they think the general public is - to have to impose restrictions on an ENERGY DRINK when you could just educate kids and teenagers how unhealthy it is!?? Its like those people who are addicted to coke or mcdonalds - they blame EVERYONE but themselves.
But I digress. These articles just further proves how much Australia is becoming a police state - controlling every little thing we do. Yeah, the UK has their CCTV. America has their body scanners and fingerprint catalogue of every person in the country. Australia? Well we have LAWS.
Schmapple
Thursday, August 21st, 2008Helping you buy stuff you never thought you’d need.
HILARIOUS!! I’ll be browsing this entire site tomorrow:P I gotta sleep now…ugh didnt realize it was so late XD
Is Cover Art dead?
Thursday, August 21st, 2008In today’s Independent on Sunday legendary album cover designer Peter Saville has pronounced that album art “is dead.”
Saville is famous for the iconic artwork of New Order and Joy Division who he worked with extensively, he has also designed album covers for Pulp, Suede and Roxy Music.
“We have a social disaster on our hands,” he said, speaking from his studio this weekend, “The things that pop music was there to do for us have all been done… there’s nothing to rail against now.
“When I was 15, in the North-west of England … the record cover was like a picture window to another world. Seeing an Andy Warhol illustration on a Velvet Underground album was a revelation … It was the art of our generation … true pop art.”
But is Saville really only speaking for his generation? After all most 15 year olds in the North-west of England today won’t be aware that they’re missing out on Andy Warhol’s artwork, as it’s available to view in the mass media and on t-shirts in Afflecks Palace. The rate at which most 15 year olds in 2008 are consuming images in the media is beyond anything Saville would have dreamed of as a teenager in Manchester.
Is the artwork of bands to be consumed elsewhere, rather than packaged around a 12 inch disc of black plastic? Will classic album artwork of the future be all the surrounding marketing of an LP, its TV advert, its website, its promo videos?
Or will the 5cm squared artwork included on your iPod when you view the album details of your favourite tune be all there is left, a postage stamp size footnote of music history?
[See More]
Hmm. Well I guess I can kinda see Peter’s point. I seriously doubt album art will ‘die’ anytime soon. I know some people who organize their music with coverflow. For me though, I find it way too slow … but its nice for reference. Album Art doesn’t necessarily have to be pointless either…I mean if its something for a Britney Spears album I might understand if no one really cared about the art, but I honestly got the Tool 10,000 Days album because the album art is awesome. Plus the lens just trips you OUT. So I guess if album art is to be in the future, artists need to get innovative. And creative. No more slapdash photoshop shite like this:
A Profile Pic Guide
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
The Procrastination Flow Chart
Thursday, August 21st, 2008If in doubt, refer to this chart for some handy advice on managing your schedule!
P.S. I do this ALL THE TIME. Sue me.
[Source]
Death of the author
Thursday, August 21st, 2008So we’re doing all this ‘death of the author’ stuff in my communications course, and lo and behold I stumble onto this site:
I am a newspaperman.
For some unexplainable reason, I am compelled to say that tonight.
Something is coming, some turn in the media universe, a turn in the future of my newspaper. A turn that will mean the end of me, of us. There will be reporters. Editors. Something called online producers and multi-media coordinators. Mojos. Slojos and Nojos. Bloggers, froggers and twitters.
But there won’t be newspapermen. At 58, I am among the last of a dying race.
And what a race it was. An American archetype.
A newspaperman was a writer. An author. The true, first voice of history. A newspaperman chronicled the life of his times on old Remingtons with faded ribbons. A newspaperman wrote on copy paper, one story in one take. If he wanted a copy, he used carbon paper. If it didn’t sing, it was spiked….
So has the ‘author’ really died or will it continue through digital media?? I suppose its an interesting problem to comprehend, because ‘journalism’ is clearly being taken over by citizen journalism today. The internet just makes things so much easier to find and getting news from different sources makes so much more difference than watching half an hour of fluff and puff pieces!!
And I gotta say, if the old media corporations want to get with the times, they should probably make things more interactive with their blogs….eg. New York Times. Plus their blogroll could also go to small timer, regular people’s blogs - not just journalists in high places. I mean just read this article and tell me what you think of the writing -_- Seriously the author, Elizabeth Farrelly even says: “The blogosphere is often offered as evidence of the mass amateurisation of publishing. And not in a good way.” The hell??? I’m sorry to say but I think 90% of bloggers out there agree this piece of writing is pretty amateurish in itself! I didn’t even know what her point is until I read the last paragraph on the second page. You know, if I wanted an article of how bad the Olympic coverage is over here, I could just surf over to Yahoo forums. They seem to be having a ball bashing Channel 7!! (me included xD)
Anywho I’d love to hear some other people’s thoughts on the ‘death of the author’…just leave a comment!
You wouldn’t steal a….oh &%*! it
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
CAPTCHA helps research!!
Monday, August 18th, 2008Yep - not only is it annoying, it is also a technology being used by scientists to figure out what some ancient manuscripts say. What are CAPTCHAS you ask??
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In practical terms, a CAPTCHA takes the form of a string of characters subjected to distortions that make it difficult for computerized character recognition to identify them.
That has made the CAPTCHA a useful tool (although the bad guys are catching up) for keeping spam bots from harvesting e-mail addresses or posting spam-filled messages to public forums.
Scientists are apparently currently using reCAPTCHA to determine what chunks of text actually say - using majority people brain power and votes to decipher these manuscripts:
According to the authors, humans handle over 100 million CAPTCHAs every day. “This mental effort is precious,” they write, “since deciphering CAPTCHAs requires people to perform a task that computers cannot.” Their automated system attempts to harvest this precious effort. Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two optical character recognition programs; in cases where the programs disagree, the questionable word is converted into a CAPTCHA. It, along with a control word of known identity (used for cases where a bot is trying to crack the CAPTCHA) are then distributed to participating websites. Currently, over 40,000 sites are using reCAPTCHA.
Inneresting.
Net Neutrality
Thursday, August 14th, 2008Okay so this debate has been going on for a while, and I’m pretty sure everyone on the Earth would be all for net Neutrality. Apparently there is the REAL possibility of internet providers taking over though, so I thought it was interesting to see what was being done about this threat:
A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality:
The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.
In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
Eric Schmidt
Well that’s all well and good what what exactly is Google doing about it I wonder?? They’ve already allowed China and Cuba to restrict users from accessing sensitive data…
Anyway there’s a site dedicated to ’saving the internet’ over here, which explains what the term actually means and the threat facing freedom of access on the internet. I’m assuming this is only happening in the USA for now based on its blog and the companies involved…:
Comcast was caught red-handed secretly discriminating against innovative technologies used for high-definition online TV, using the same censorship technology the Chinese government uses to block free speech. This discriminatory behavior represents the most blatant and outrageous violation of consumer choice in the history of the Internet.
Based on this clear-cut case against Comcast, a bipartisan majority of the FCC issued a guilty verdict. Commissioner McDowell, however, dissented, using almost every inaccurate argument made by Comcast to defend his decision.
…but seriousl,y how soon will it be before providers decide to block access to sensitive data?? Do you think it will happen at all?? I think it is definitely a real threat to think about…the internet is an extremely powerful medium that helps us go about our daily lives but at what cost will providers forgo for the sake of freedom of speech?
The ultimate iPhone app?
Thursday, August 14th, 2008So id you’re rich and have money to blow…an application called ‘I Am Rich’ featured in the store for a couple of days:
Its function is exactly what the name implies: to alert people that you have money in the bank. I Am Rich was available for purchase from the phone’s App Store for, get this, $999.99 — the highest amount a developer can charge through the digital retailer, said Armin Heinrich, the program’s developer. Once downloaded, it doesn’t do much — a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext “I Am Rich.” Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That’s about it. For a thousand dollars.
Mmm. yeah. What a great way to waste 1000 bucks!! Well the applications now been taken off the Apple store, but not before 8 people BOUGHT IT. Yes, BOUGHT IT. Well to be fair, some guy mistakenly bought it thinking it was fake XD
Geez. I seriously wish I had a grand to waste of useless applications saying you’re rich!!! Anyway apparently the creator doesn’t know why its been taken off the store so he’s looking into it…but apparently he’s getting emails from people saying they want to buy the application ._. Seriously. What is this world coming to??