Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet December 31, 2007
The Australian Government has announced that they will be joining China as one of the few countries globally that broadly censor the internet.
The Labor Party’s policy was announced prior to the Australian Election in November (release here) and was justified on the basis that the previous Government’s policy of providing free copies of NetNanny to all Australian households who wanted it didn’t adequately protect children.
As recently as the week prior to the election, Labor Party candidates were telling those concerned about the proposed law that the censorship wouldn’t be compulsory, and that the “clean feed” would be opt-in, not opt-out. Today’s announcement by Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy states that the censorship regime will be mandatory, although people will be able to opt-out of it. The problem of course then becomes if you opt-out questions will be asked as to why you want out, which in itself may lead to Government monitoring.
To be censored by the Australian Government is “pornography and inappropriate material.” X rated pornography is illegal online in Australia, as are casino style internet gambling, certain forms of “hate” speech and R rated computer games. BitTorrent would be a possibility, even if certain downloads for personal use may be legal under Australian law, sharing those downloads would not be. How far “inappropriate material” may extend was not made clear, for example questioning Government policy where it comes to Aboriginal people could be deemed to be discrimination under Australian law and hence blocked by the censorship regime. Worst still, bloggers or those (such as forum owners) who allow users to comment or post could find themselves blocked under this proposal should someone say or post the wrong thing. If there is one certainty in any country that implements broadscale censorship, once they start blocking content it doesn’t stop, and certainly every do-gooder group and special interest lobbyist will be wanting the Government to add to the list.
There is also a potential cost involved to Australian Internet users. The previous Government regularly cited feedback from ISP’s stating that the cost of implementing a “clean feed” would be passed onto internet users, who already pay some of the highest internet access costs in the Western world for on average slow services.
Notably Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a former Australian Diplomat in China, and speaks fluent Mandarin; given Australia’s boom is fueled by mineral exports to China, it would seem that Australian Government policies are now by China in return. This video from before the election may have foretold some of the future.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Web Zen: time zen December 30, 2007
wooden gear clocks (* image shown here)
Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
Sacha Baron Cohen to play Abbie Hoffman in Spielberg’s Trial of the Chicago 7
Woah — Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat) will play Abbie Hoffman in an upcoming Spielberg adaptation of the Trial of the Chicago 7. I’m a huge Hoffman fan — his (somewhat fictionalized) autobiography is one of my favorite books — and Cohen’s the kind of merry anarchist who strikes me as the perfect and unlikely casting choice.
Hoffman went on to become an irascible celebrity who, later diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, killed himself with pills in 1989.Baron Cohen will not have to undergo a big transformation to play the part. Hoffman, who was Jewish, attended Berkeley University in California, while Baron Cohen, an urbane Orthodox Jew more than 6ft tall, cut his teeth entertaining friends at Christ’s College Cambridge with subversive wit and surreal pranks.
(via Digg)
Nintendo Wii hacked — homebrew games ahoy!
During yesterday’s Why Silicon-Based Security is still that hard: Deconstructing Xbox 360 Security presentation at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, hackers Michael Steil and Felix Domke demonstrated a blown-wide-open hack for the Nintendo Wii. They’ve extracted the keys for signing Wii code, and now you can run anyone’s code on your Wii, not just programs that Nintendo has sanctioned. Incredible as it may seem, there are still companies that think that they should have the right to tell you what you can and can’t do with your hardware after you pay for it.
(Thanks, waltbosz!)
Foxtrot takes a swipe at the DMCA
Today, Foxtrot (easily the geekiest of the mainstream comic strips) took a great little swipe at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the notorious 1998 US Copyright law that makes it illegal to break DRM.
(Thanks, Kim!)
Mike Brady’s angry Shakespearean critique of the Brady Bunch scripts
Robert Reed, who played Mike “Dad” Brady on The Brady Bunch was a frustrated, classically trained Shakespearean actor who sent stroppy memos the show’s writers explaining How Drama Works to them in minute, enraged detail. They are a treasure. Here is one of them:
Once again, we are infused with the slapstick. The oldest boy’s hair turns bright orange in a twinkling of the writer’s eye, having been doused with a non-FDA-approved hair tonic. (Why any boy of Bobby’s age, or any age, would be investing in something as outmoded and unidentifiable as “hair tonic” remains to be explained. As any kid on the show could tell the writer, the old hair-tonic routine is right out of “Our Gang.” Let’s face it, we’re long since past the “little dab’ll do ya” era.)
Without belaboring the inequities of the script, which are varied and numerous, the major point to all this is: Once an actor has geared himself to play a given style with its prescribed level of belief, he cannot react to or accept within the same confines of the piece, a different style.
When the kid’s hair turns red, it is Batman in the operating room.
I can’t play it.
(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)
Circuit City’s suicide: firing the people who know stuff
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel spots a bit of astute analysis explaining what happened to drive Circuit City into disrepute, and how the idiot execs responsible were rewarded with a cool million each:
The basic story is that last March, the wise men who run Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea of laying off their more senior salespeople, who get $14-$15 an hour, and replacing them with new hires who get around $9 an hour. It turns out that this move was not very good for business. One of the reasons that people go to a store like Circuit City, rather than buying things on the Internet, is that they want to be able to talk to a knowledgeable salesperson. Since Circuit City had laid off their knowledgeable salespeople, there was little reason to shop there. … The Post reports that Circuit City’s executive vice-presidents will get retention awards of $1 million each.
Link,
Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets
Steal This Film, Part II: the Internet makes us into copiers
The folks behind Steal This Film, an amazing, funny, enraging and inspiring documentary series about copyright and the Internet have just released part II of the series. I taught part one (about the PirateBay crackdown in Sweden and the founding of The Pirate Party) in my class last year, and it was one of the liveliest classes we had.
Part II is even better than part one — it covers the technological and enforcement end of the copyright wars, and on the way that using the internet makes you a copier, and how copying puts you in legal jeopardy. Starting with Mark Getty’s (Chairman of Getty Images) infamous statement that “Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century,” the filmmakers note that oil always leads to oil-wars, and that these are vicious, ill-conceived and never end well. This leads them to explore the war on copying — which ultimately becomes a war on the Internet and those of us who use it.
This installment includes punchy interviews with a lot of the US’s leading copyfighters — EFFers like Seth Schoen and Fred von Lohmann, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eben Moglen, Aaron Swartz, Yochai Benkler, Rick Prelinger, as well as folks in the UK, Sweden and Bangalore. Interspersed with this is are smart historical perspectives, and a brief interview with MPAA chief Dan Glickman, who all but twirls his mustache in glee at the thought of punishing copiers. There’s also some interesting material here from new artists who embrace copying, but I’m guessing that that’s going to be the main theme of a future installment.
Steal This Film II is available as a P2P download (natch) in several formats, including HD, and opens with a stern warning encouraging you to share it as widely as possible.
(Thanks, Robbo and everyone else who suggested this!)
See also: Steal This Movie: documentary on Swedish piracy movement
Pilot to TSA: Let my people go!
Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who co-writes the NY Times’s Jetlagged Blog has written a corker of an editorial railing against the bullshit “security” procedures that the TSA has put into place. Smith is hopping mad and stops just short of calling for a revolution. Man, I’d be with him at the barricades.
No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.
The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”
(Thanks to HeavyD and everyone else who suggested this one!)
Hybrid carp with “human faces” December 29, 2007
A Korean newscast reports on a hybrid breed of carp with “human faces.” Not exactly human, but helllp-meeee freaky Fly enough to give me the willies.
(via Neatorama)