Uproar in Australia over plan to block Web sites

SYDNEY, Australia - A proposed Internet filter dubbed the "Great Aussie Firewall" is promising to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.

Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government — mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism.

Hundreds protested in state capitals earlier this month.

Full Article...

"Hundreds" protested? With a country of over 21 million people, I certainly hope that more than "hundreds" are advocating against this. This kind of blanket censorship of the Internet--in a democracy with a Labour-controlled government, no less--would set an extremely bad precedent.

"Child pornography"? "Excessive violence"? Excessive by whose standards?

What constitutes "advocacy of terrorism? Criticizing the government, perhaps? Well why not, since it is apparently the government that gets to decide what constitutes advocating terrorism. Not that this is a conflict of interest or anything.

This whole thing is all a little vague, isn't it?

In doing some research for a client, I stumbled on a map of the world that tells you the domain extensions for each country--.uk for the United Kingdom, .ru for Russia, etc.

The extension for the Bahamas, it turns out, is (I kid you not)--.bs

Yeah, that's really what I want a domain to end in.

Although, I can certainly think of some websites where it would fit. Politics.bs, for example. Perhaps Lawyers.bs?

The New York Times
Monday, November 17, 2008 -- 8:35 PM ET
-----

Jerry Yang, Yahoo Chief, to Step Down

Yahoo said Monday evening that Jerry Yang, who helped build the company from an early directory of Web sites into a sprawling Internet giant, would step down from his role as chief executive after the company finds a replacement.

I suppose it's just as well, since Mr. Yang didn't seem able to produce any progress in turning the company around. A failed sale to Microsoft and a deal with Google that had to be scrapped because of concerns about anti-trust law made Yahoo seem more like a soap opera than an Internet property in recent months. Still, it's sad. Jerry Yang and David Filo were the first to deploy any sort of large-scale tool for trying to organize and search through all of the information on the Internet and it's too bad Mr. Yang seems to have lost his touch in this area. Hopefully his talent will quickly lead him into another opportunity.

Hackers got into at least one of Governor Palin's Yahoo email accounts, which seems to confirm that she's had a practice of using non-governmental accounts to conduct Alaska state business. Hackers have leaked several of the emails over the Internet.

To add another twist to this story, there have been rumors that Governor Palin is a hacker herself.

I don't know about anyone else, but this definitely reassures me about her ability to handle access to sensitive and classified information if she were to become Vice President.


(cross-posted to theleftunited)

You can watch live streaming video of the Democratic National Convention at the official convention website. It will require the installation of two small browser plug-ins; for me, the installations were short and painless. So far, the video seems pretty good quality, although who knows if that will change when they get to the most anticipated speeches, such as Senator Clinton's speech tonight.

Just spent over four hours trying to get things to work with Windows Vista. First, the desktop wouldn't recognize the network hard drive, then the Vista backup program wouldn't work with it. Finally got the thing to see the drive (so it can be used for storage and what not) but it turns out there's no fix for the backup program issue. Guess I'll have to invest in Norton Ghost or something.

And then I couldn't get Apache installed on the laptop. Installing Apache on Windows XP is trivial. Not so with Vista. Turns out that some of the package programs with Apache + MySQL, PHP, and Perl don't even work with Vista at all--specifically Wampserver and Apache2Triad. Finally got XAMPP to work though and it was even fairly painless. Used to use Developerside.net, but they've gone to a paid version only now.

Bah. I'm exhausted. I think its time to call it a night.

Its getting even more worrisome how effective a narrow range of right-wing interest groups has become in bullying companies that provide the tools to transmit Internet content into censoring the content created by users of these sites. As a case in point, I was reading some articles earlier on Yahoo's decision to do away with all of their user-created chat rooms. Although Yahoo won't confirm it, as near as I can tell, this decision was based mainly on one news report from a station in Houston. As if this isn't bad enough, I dug up the original report and it seems to be highly inaccurate, inflammatory, and slanted.

If you read the report and had no other knowledge of the issues involved and were not at all familiar with Yahoo, you would probably think that certain companies were in fact sponsoring a child sex site run by Yahoo. As "evidence" the report cited the existence of a few user created chat rooms, such as "9-17 year old girls seeking sex" and "Younger girls for older men". Admittedly, rooms like this are highly disturbing and I think anyone with a modicum of common sense would agree that rooms like that need to be immediately shut down. The problem is that in every report I read, there were only five cited examples of such rooms. Yahoo in fact had hundreds of user created chat rooms, a fact that is mentioned nowhere in the reports.

Try as I might, I can find absolutely no justification for shutting down an entire service due to the fact that a few people were abusing it when there are numerous less drastic ways of solving the problem. And this is becoming an increasing disturbing pattern; for example, MySpace being bullied into improperly releasing records and Livejournal's recent purge of several hundred communities. Perhaps people who bully companies into pulling advertising to force content providers into such drastic actions believe they are holding corporations responsible, but in reality they are simply giving these corporations ridiculous amounts of power to force websites to censor any content that someone might find offensive.

As near as I can tell, the problem seems to be a version of one that exists in the offline world as well: corporations having too much power and people having far too little. There is a real need here for users of these sites to reassert their authority over how the sites are run. And I'm not even sure it would be that hard to do if the will could be mobilized to do it. For instance, people could stop using services and pull all of their content off of sites the engage in wholesale censorship. If users stop using site features and stop generating content, the issues of advertising becomes moot because there will be far fewer people to read the ads, thus driving down the value of the advertising.

I need to post more about this and better document everything, but I'm short of time at the moment--still have to finish rebuilding the computer that broke since I wasn't able to get everything done yesterday. More on all this later.