Thursday, February 26, 2009
Senator Nick Xenophon may save the day:
Senator Nick Xenophon may save the day by siding against the government on the issue of ISP filtering. He may have wanted to avoid being labelled the politician who single handedly introduced ISP filtering in the same way that Meg Lees was hung out to dry over GST.
Spoof!
This video was made as a comment on attempts by some German polititians to ban violent games. The makers are trying paint a portrait of what critics believe teenagers do whilst gaiming online.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Australian Institute's research on the effect of porn on kids.
The Australian Institute's .pdfs on Regulating Youth Access to Pornography and Youth and Pornography in Australia: Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Clive Hamilton has seen this video
Clive Hamilton's description of what 15 year olds all over Australia do as soon as our backs are turned is very reminescent of Randy in this South Park episode. Just give it a couple of minutes.
"A boy comes home from school and logs on to the computer. He types in a search for, say, 'sex pictures'. Thousands of sites appear and he starts exploring. He sees pictures of naked women in all sorts of positions, some using dildos and various devices. He surfs to sites showing men and women having sex. Some are straight sex; others show women being penetrated by two men at the same time. Still others show women engaged in oral sex.
The images are confusing but exciting. The boy clicks on "cum shots". A number of men stand over a woman and ejaculate onto her face. Her smile looks strained. He moves to sites called "Teen facials", "Teen blowjobs" and "Teen hard-core". It says they’re 18 but some look younger.
A pop-up appears which takes him to a site listing dozens of "fetishes" with phrases like "bondage", "fisting", "black bitches", "upskirts", "SM", "incest", "golden showers", "gang bangs", "fat", "amputees", "scat" and many more.
He doesn't have any idea what most of them are, but he is drawn to find out. He sees pictures of women with weird-looking vaginas, men with huge penises and videos of drunken girls having sex. One site shows pictures of pregnant women being penetrated; another specialises in stick-thin anorexics.
The boy senses that some of this is wrong. He feels guilty but it's hard to stop. With a few more clicks of the mouse he sees a picture of a woman defecating into another’s mouth and others showing a woman and a horse. He is disgusted and disturbed. The images stay with him for a long time after.
Enough. You get the point. We are not talking about Playboy."
GetUp's Save the Internet campaign is still going.
GetUp's Save the Internet campaign is still going. It must have prickled Clive Hamilton by the look of his attack on GetUp in this AustralianIT article.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
A response to Clive Hamilton's opinion piece
A response to Clive Hamilton's opinion piece: The Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians.
Some real research
The Effectiveness of Internet Content Filters, Philip B. Stark, Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley.
Some real research has been done on what a filter will do and how it will work.
Some real research has been done on what a filter will do and how it will work.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Ben Self
Ben Self, Obama's web guru, says internet filtering is a bad idea. The article goes on to site the Thai experience where the banned list was leaked. Some 20% of the banned sites were anti-government. I'm not saying that this is why the Rudd government wants this but once it is in place, why wouldn't they? Or the next government. Look at the power grab that the US government went through in the aftermath of 911.
Large ISPs aren't invited now.
The government is going to run their trial with half a dozen small ISPs. Surely the deployment would be easier for a small ISP.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Set the controls to 'porn mode'
IE8 will have a private mode. Private mode means the computer does not store any data on where it has been so no-one can find out what you've been looking at.
SMH Article >
SMH Article >
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Actual Online Risk
There is much talk of online risk. How much risk is really out there? Harvard University has had a look at it and released a report. It includes such shoking revelations as 17 year old boys are interested in porn! No, I kid you not! 17 year old boys are sexually curious.
MsNaughty looks at underage curiosity about pornography.
MsNaughty looks at underage curiosity about pornography.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
The Chinese ISP filtering model
Does this sound familiar? The government asserts that it has the right to stop citizens from looking at sites or talking to each other to preserve social order. What a crock of shit. The government is preserving its power. This is what the Rudd government wants to do, preserve its power and the churches authority over moral issues pertaining to sexuality. They don't want to protect kids, only the status quo.
Cyberbullying
SMH article discussing cyberbullying.
There is an implication here that teachers don't fully understand social sites like MySpace and thus cannot control cyberbullying. Tell me, were teachers ever able to control bullying? I was bullied in high school. This happened right under the teacher's noses. They weren't able to stop it or help. How the hell are they supposed to stop it online? How did this get dumped into teacher's laps? This is a parenting issue. If your kid is a bully you have to take your kid to councilling to get them out of the habit.
That said, if the kid is a bully the parent is probably a bully too. Thus the parent wont believe reports of the kid's bullying so they probably wont seek councilling.
I just have to assume that this article is designed to generate more i-fear (fear of the internet) to support the proposed ISP filtering scheme. Filtering wont stop bullying. It wont keep kids out of social web sites. If you ban MySpace a dozen social networking sites will pop up in its place. The dozen probably already exist and are waiting for something like this to give them an opening on MySpace's market share.
Kids all have to have a mobile so that they can ring if the swarms of pedophiles leap out at them. Are you going to take their mobiles off them so that the bullies can't text them?
Bullying has been going on forever. Kids just have to grow out of it. Bullied kids cop it. Come up with a solution instead of blaming the easy targets.
There is an implication here that teachers don't fully understand social sites like MySpace and thus cannot control cyberbullying. Tell me, were teachers ever able to control bullying? I was bullied in high school. This happened right under the teacher's noses. They weren't able to stop it or help. How the hell are they supposed to stop it online? How did this get dumped into teacher's laps? This is a parenting issue. If your kid is a bully you have to take your kid to councilling to get them out of the habit.
That said, if the kid is a bully the parent is probably a bully too. Thus the parent wont believe reports of the kid's bullying so they probably wont seek councilling.
I just have to assume that this article is designed to generate more i-fear (fear of the internet) to support the proposed ISP filtering scheme. Filtering wont stop bullying. It wont keep kids out of social web sites. If you ban MySpace a dozen social networking sites will pop up in its place. The dozen probably already exist and are waiting for something like this to give them an opening on MySpace's market share.
Kids all have to have a mobile so that they can ring if the swarms of pedophiles leap out at them. Are you going to take their mobiles off them so that the bullies can't text them?
Bullying has been going on forever. Kids just have to grow out of it. Bullied kids cop it. Come up with a solution instead of blaming the easy targets.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
Friday, January 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
ZNet Poll
ZNet ran a poll on Net Filtering. Now Mr Wallace loves his polls but this one seems to be saying the opposite of the polls he was making his decisions on.
Many of the concerns outlined in the comments in favour of the filter can be addressed by people installing their own filter software. One comment indicates that the PC based filter didn't work as well as the writer had hoped. So, does he expect that the technology will work better deployed on an ISP server? Wouldn't it yeild similar results.
Many of the concerns outlined in the comments in favour of the filter can be addressed by people installing their own filter software. One comment indicates that the PC based filter didn't work as well as the writer had hoped. So, does he expect that the technology will work better deployed on an ISP server? Wouldn't it yeild similar results.
ZNet - Conroy tries to gag oposition (Oct 08)
This is an old article.
The article states that Conroy tried to silence vocal opponents of his plan to completely stuff the internet.
Comments:
In the comments one person indicates that the current 128 bit encryption may be dropped down to 48 bit encryption. This would mean that banking would cease to be secure. If the government wants to look at encrypted data do they imagine that there would be anything to stop criminals from looking too.
Gamers:
A group that I never considered was the online gamers. Slower internet speeds will introduce lag. So, essentially, when you are playing a game against other users slow internet will mean that you will have been shot and not know it or you'll be shooting at someone but they wont be there anymore. People like these games. They are legal to own and play. Many have spent substantial money on XBox or Play Station units. Much of the functionality will be gone.
The article states that Conroy tried to silence vocal opponents of his plan to completely stuff the internet.
Comments:
In the comments one person indicates that the current 128 bit encryption may be dropped down to 48 bit encryption. This would mean that banking would cease to be secure. If the government wants to look at encrypted data do they imagine that there would be anything to stop criminals from looking too.
Gamers:
A group that I never considered was the online gamers. Slower internet speeds will introduce lag. So, essentially, when you are playing a game against other users slow internet will mean that you will have been shot and not know it or you'll be shooting at someone but they wont be there anymore. People like these games. They are legal to own and play. Many have spent substantial money on XBox or Play Station units. Much of the functionality will be gone.
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