Unless you have been living under a rock, or have no internet connection, you will know that the Australian government is proposing to censor the internet in Austrlia.
The recent events in Iran, and people’s use of twitter, show how effective censoring the Internet in a country can be. Not very. Not without inadvertently affecting numerous other things that depend on the network infrastructure.
No other option then, just make accessing sites on the Office of Film and Literature Classification banned list a criminal offence.
Mr Smith goes to answer a knock at the door. Standing there are 3 burly AFP agents holding an arrest warrant.
“Good evening Mr Smith. You are under arrest for accessing sites on the OFLC banned list.”
“What?…I haven’t accessed anything illegal!… What is this about?”
“You have been accessing the web site of dentist in Queensland. Don’t attempt to deny it Mr Smith. We have logs from your ISP.
“And hand over that smart phone too. The community do not need to see any more tweets about your visits to the tuckshop.”
Putting asside the feasibility aspect for a moment. Do we really want Australia grouped with countries with such poor human rights records as Iran and China? Do we want a central regime that controlls all access to information?
A recent SMH article[1] says that Australia is the 3rd most mono lingual country in the world. According to a report[4] by Griffith Asia Institute we come almost last on the list of the language proficient. With over three quarters, or 78.4% of the population only speaking English.
And, although we only got the bronze medal for this contest, it would be worse to have gotten gold.
So, who actual came last?
Do we dare to guess that is is the USA? But don’t they have a large Spanish speaking population? Maybe it is New Zealand? Do many people speak Māori? Or is it somewhere else in the world that only speaks their own language?
Well the list of the language deficient was a little hard to find. The web version of the Griffith Asia Institute report[4] is a little short on for details in this area. It outlines Australia’s shortfalls, what steps should be taken to address the problem, and how much it will cost. But no indication of how they determined we were 3rd worst.
Any idea of who is more limited in their language than Australia?
SBS reports that Melbourne has been declared ‘swine flu capital of the world‘. With 874 reported cases of H1N1, Melbourne has twice the prevelance of Mexico.
That is a swine flue cases at 1 to 9,139 in Victoria, and at 1 to 21,860 in Mexico.
Of course, there are 109,955,400 people in Mexico and only 5,205,200 people in Victoria. And Australia only has 4.5% of the cases in the world.
Do you catch the train at peek hour in Sydney and feel a little squashed? An article in the SMH on Monday stated that 73.6 percent of trains were overloaded, some with up to 145% capacity usage!
Of course 100% capacity only means that everyone gets a seat. So the extra 45% are left standing.
Now, if you’ve ever been to Tokyo train station at peak hour you will know that they must measure capacity reached when you can’t squash any more people on to the train.
All the Tokyo trains have seats along the walls, not in rows like Sydney. So there is much more standing room. Allowing people to be packed in more densly.
And while the morning peak hour is quite crowded, at night between 11pm and 12am is much worse. As trains stop running shortly after 12am, everyone makes a mad dash to get home, and the people are often squashed into trains like sardines.
And is not just trains that are packed. The station platforms are wall to wall people too.
Though all the people are quite orderly about it all, lining up in nice queues to get on the train. Of course, there are 4 (or 6) sets of doors on each side of the carraige. And the trains actually stop so doors line up to where they are marked on the platform.
A SWEEPING, multibillion-dollar transport plan, to be unveiled next week in a discussion paper from a leading transport researcher, Garry Glazebrook, of the University of Technology, Sydney, proposes linking almost every home, office and university in Sydney to upgraded train, tram and bus services within 30 years.
Apple Australia is being sued for allegedly controlling a failed reseller, trading while insolvent for months. This reseller (and by inference, its managers) was so grossly incompetent that Apple did not trust its management’s ability to manage and account for its own business!
IBM decided not to buy them, though Oracle seems to think it is a good idea. It will be interesting to see how the acquisition of Sun fits into Oracle’s host.
One question that comes out of the acquisition is: what will happen to MySQL? Oracle being the premier product, will it try to push the lesser aside in the business market? And will all the business and open source projects that use it suffer?
There are a couple of articles where people think there is nothing to worry about. Over at Forbes, Victoria Barret thinks it MySQL will fit a missing niche for Oracle, and will help it combat Microsoft.
And Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame thinks it is the open source nature of MySQL that will save it. Seeing that it is the community that push most of its development at the moment, and its licensing. There shouldn’t be a worry about Oracle axeing it.
Doing an Oracle subject at the moment I can see some of the advantages. But I don’t really want to have to spend large sun on Oracle just to run my blog.
The Pirate Bay court case if over, and the owners of the service have been marched down the plank. The four were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement (2, 3).
Now, are the users of Pirate Bay to be deprived of their bits of torrent?
Well apparently not. The owners foresaw this as a potential ending, and distributed the servers far and wide. So, despite the verdict, all the users can still sail the high seas, and go where their bandwidth will carry them.
Today the Australian government announced its decision on submission to build the new National Broadband Network. Telstra put itself out of the bid last year by putting in an incomplete submission. So who of the remaining tenders were to take the cake?
None of them it seems. The government decided that none of the bids were up to scratch. So awarded the contract to itself.
The government announced its intention to establish a new public company to build the network. Spending $43 billion on the new entity to create a new fibre network. And interestingly, they now intend to do fibre to the home, rather than fibre to the node. Which seems like a much better proposal.
A question remains though, which a friend put forward: If the government is building the network, is this so it can bypass all the ISPs, and more easily implement its own filtering/censorship policy?
It has been interesting, though getting boring, to watch the banter about the latest book by Bettina Arndt, The Sex Diaries. It seems to have split people into two camps.
All men are Liars has a post about The Sexless Marriage, which pays lip service to both views, but seems to sit more on the ‘women need to put out more‘ side.
Where as Wendy Frewplants her foot in the opposite camp. Rejecting the ‘Just do it’ mantra, she blames the problem on ugly men. With the view that men put off women by not taking care of their appearance.
Even Miranda Devine has set pen to paper about this book. And tries to take a moderate view. Although it looks like someone forgot to edit the piece as it is not quite as sharp as usual.
Are women wowsers? Are men too eager?
It looks to me like a failure of project management. Not enough communication; a slip in project scope; and not a unity of vision.
Of course, all this made me think of the Protestants skit from Part I of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
