One of Australia’s top communications experts says the Government’s internet censorship trials were designed to succeed from the outset, presented no new information and are now being used by the Government to further its political agenda. His comments came after Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday announced he would introduce legislation before next year’s elections forcing ISPs to block a secret blacklist of refused classification
(RC) websites for all Australian internet users. Separately, a report into the scope of content that will be caught up in the net filters concluded that the Government’s policy might lead to a wide range of innocuous material disappearing from Australians’ computer screens. Commentators in Australia and overseas have interpreted Senator Conroy’s policy as pushing the country towards being like repressive regimes such as China and Iran. University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the Government had still failed to address serious issues such as whether the internet filtering scheme would result in any meaningful reduction in harmful content and whether it was worth the effort, given the risk that the scope of blocked content could widen significantly
Australia’s lack of constitutionally guaranteed rights made a much higher level of censorship possible in Australia than in other democracies, constitutional law expert Professor George Williams said today. Australia does not have a Bill of Rights which protects free speech at a federal level,
said Williams, the Anthony Mason Professor of law at the University of New South Wales. We don’t have the protections that they have in every other democratic country. That means Australia might be subject to far more stringent regulations on the internet than would be possible in other democratic countries
Civil rights and online free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today criticised the government’s internet filtering report, claiming civil rights implications should be the focus rather than the technology’s impacts on internet speed and performance
Australia intends to introduce filters which will ban access to web sites containing criminal content. The banned sites will be selected by an independent classification body guided by complaints from the public, said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. A seven month trial in conjunction with ISPs found the technology behind the filter to be 100% effective. However, that claim has been questioned and there has been opposition from some internet users. Twitter users have been voicing their disapproval by adding the search tag nocleanfeed
to their comments about the plans
Microsoft has suspended a new internet messaging service in China, after it emerged that the site was partially based on code stolen from a rival startup. The site, Juku, launched in November is similar in concept to other online messaging systems like Twitter. But earlier this week the team behind Plurk, a young internet company based in Canada and popular with users across Asia, accused Microsoft of directly copying as much as 80% of the code to run the program
The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google’s move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly’s response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web? To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging
It’s still not called the Google Phone
, but the Nexus One — to be made by HTC — is as close as I think we’re going to get. The WSJ cites sources familiar with Google’s plans and says that Google has designed this handset and plans to sell it directly to consumers, unlocked
The Delhi High Court has fined Microsoft for harassing alleged software pirates by taking them to court in the national capitol, instead of the cities where the crimes had supposedly occurred. According to the ruling, using money as a power tool is not condoned without repercussions
Seagate Technology today announced what it’s calling the world’s thinnest laptop and netbook hard drive, the Momentus Thin drive, which at 7mm, is just over a quarter of an inch thick and is 25% slimmer than a traditional 9.5mm, 2.5-in. hard drive. The 5,400 rpm Momentus Thin comes in 250GB and 160GB capacities, features 8MB cache, and uses the SATA 2.0 3Gbit/sec interface. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate’s resellers next month
First of its kind research conducted by Ynet in collaboration with surfers, bloggers suggests two of Israel’s largest internet service providers perform manipulation on file sharing traffic
Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found. With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts
Following an official press release recently that the Pirate Party of Australia is now accepting members, a scathing editorial was written in the Sydney Morning Herald. Such a response was expected, but this tone usually changes when they receive support from thousands of followers
As millions of people wait for the arrival of Christmas in just a couple of weeks time, the festivities have come early for BitTorrent fans. A few hours ago the mighty Demonoid fully returned and the good news is that there appears to be little data loss. Users are feverishly uploading fresh torrents right now
Audio DRM has all but dissapeared from MP3s. Apple said earlier this year that there would be no more DRM on music available via the ITunes music store. However, as prolific writer and blogger Cory Doctorow has found out, they still require DRM on their Audiobooks
IT security firm Sophos has announced its latest probe into how easy it is to steal identities via Facebook and found that user negligence is worst in 2009. We assumed things would be better in 2009 but the situation is worse. This really is a wake-up call,
said Paul Ducklin, head of technology, Sophos Asia-Pacific (Sydney)
On 8 December, Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, was crossing the US/Canadian border at Port Huron, Michigan when he was involved in an altercation with US Border Patrol agents. According to Watts, he was beaten, left half-naked in a cold cell, and finally dumped on the Canadian side of the border with no coat. A legal consultant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was successful in helping a civil rights lawyer in Michigan free Watts. Watts faces US charges of assaulting a federal officer. Based on the accounts, one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer’s hand with his face. If convicted, Watts faces two years in a US Federal prison — via Slashdot
A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind
They’re the scourge of the Internet right now and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation says they’ve also raked in more than US$150 million for scammers. Security experts call them rogue antivirus programs. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre issued a warning over this fake antivirus software Friday, saying that Web surfers should be wary of sudden pop-up windows that report security problems on their computers
A Californian company is aiming to capture sunlight in space to generate a regular supply of electricity on Earth. There are significant obstacles to overcome, like the high cost of launching things into space, but California’s largest utility has already agreed to buy the power. The chief executive officer of Solaren Corporation, Gary Spirnak, says satellites which carry TV signals are already generating small amounts of electricity
Waste plastic from throwaway
carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries. This is called upcycling
— converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling: for instance, bacteria can convert plastic drinks bottles into a more expensive plastic. The carrier-bag-to-nanotube technique was developed by Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and converts high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into valuable multiwalled carbon nanotubes
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