The Western Australian Internet Association has slammed the Internet censorship policy created by the Family First Party in the wake of Australia’s biggest ever child porn bust. The group said it shares the public’s outrage
over the child pornography racket but it is concerned that the actions of a small minority could be used as a justification for unwarranted restrictions on the rights of ordinary Internet users to access material freely online
The Liberal Party today defended its use of pre-recorded phone messages from John Howard, with which it is bombarding households across Australia in the lead-up to polling day. Labor has lodged an official complaint saying the spam contravenes the electoral act
Bruce Sterling is guest-posting on the global-eco-tech blog Worldchanging and thinks we ought to marry the Internet and the United Nations. The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can’t get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism. The UN was invented to unite nations rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it’s politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud. Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations.
It’s obviously part tongue in cheek, but it does make you think
A novel method of optical data storage could soon be used to hold a terabyte of data on a disk the size of a normal DVD, according to an international team of researchers
The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has released its broadband policy paper, encouraging whoever wins government to develop a strategy that will deliver true broadband services
to Australians. The ACS stated that the political parties have compromised strategy for broadband in Australia by diverting the attention towards ADSL, which the ACS believes is nothing more than an interim solution
. ADSL runs at 256 to 1024Kbps; the ACS defines true broadband as greater than 10Mbps
Researchers at UC Berkeley, along with scientists from the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois, say they can slow the speed of light in a way that could help speed the delivery of movies to your PC
The NSW Department of Commerce has released its eagerly anticipated Linux tender, calling for a panel of suppliers to provide enterprise-level software and services for government agencies. The contract, reportedly worth $40 million, is seen as a major step forward for open source lobbyists, as it requests suppliers to provide Linux software for both desktop and server environments
Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed an anti-spyware bill banning unauthorised installation of deceptive software that hides in personal computers and secretly monitors user activity. The bill clears the way for consumers to sue responsible parties for actual damages
Toshiba announced that it’s increasing the song capacity of its Gigabeat line of hard drive-based digital audio players to 60GB. It will be available before the end of the year in Japan, along with 10GB and 20GB versions
Biological heart pacemakers made from human embryo cells have been successfully tested in pigs, raising the possibility that tissue transplants could replace electronic pacemakers. Because they would be natural, the cell implants would need no power source and, over time, would integrate naturally with the heart. They could even be genetically engineered or manipulated to enhance or alter their function
Liberal party stooges and professional religious loons, Family First, want an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level. And I’m sure that their idea of censorship would include a whole raft of things that wouldn’t be offensive to that vast bulk of society
eBay has come under the scrutiny of the Australian Taxation Office as part of its crackdown on evasion in the cash economy. The tax office believes unregistered micro-businesses
are a big source of untapped tax revenue and has made tracking them down one of its highest compliance priorities this year. The ATO has written to eBay asking for details of power sellers — eBay users with sales of at least $2000 a month
The Biomod company in Montreal has released plans for building your own solar scooter for only CA$1600. Hopefully the engineering community will take an interest, and add brakes to the blueprints
Students have developed a tool which could mean broken web links are history. Peridot, developed by UK intern students at IBM, scans company weblinks and replaces outdated information with other relevant documents and links. It works by automatically mapping and storing key features of web pages, so it can detect significant content changes
More than 50% of Australian online shopping sites are selling goods or services with terms and conditions which robbed shoppers of their legal consumer rights. Deputy ACCC chair Louise Sylvan said many of these sites contained clauses which attempted to disclaim consumers’ warranty rights or limit liability
Microsoft affirms its plan to make its Internet Explorer upgrades available only through XP updates, while half the Windows world operates with older operating systems
The chairman of the Motorcycle Council of NSW has expressed his outrage at the Road Traffic Authority’s neglect of motorcycle riders in its planned cashless tollways, saying the RTA has not considered motorcycle riders in their plans
Wholesale network provider Comindico will be sold as soon as possible, the company’s voluntary administrator Ferrier Hodgson has announced. The company, which has spent around AU$445 million establishing its IP-based network and backhaul links to the US, entered voluntary administration Wednesday after critical negotiations with investors to save the business failed
Looks like Elvis Costello doesn’t like the FBI talking about what you can do with his discs once you buy them. Above the obnoxious FBI anti-piracy warnings he has added: The artist does not endorse the following warning. The FBI doesn’t have his home phone number and he hopes that they don’t have yours
— via BoingBoing
Sanjay Kumar, a former chief executive of Computer Associates International, and Stephen Richards, a former vice president for sales, were indicted in what US prosecutors called a massive fraud that inflated the company’s sales by $2.2 billion
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