The political battle of censorship in Australia has been relatively futile so far for those of us against it. By its proponents, issues have been muddled together, sensationalist terms like “child porn” have been bandied about and claims have been made that it’s safer for Australian children using the Internet. That last part is supposed [...]
We have a tricky problem to solve as we begin to use the Internet on more and more devices: making our data available on all of them. These devices include desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, consoles which play movies and music, cars with telnet ignition interfaces, etc. I believe that the only tenable long-term solution [...]
Tonight I appeared briefly on ABC’s programme Q&A which was this week about Internet filtering. I asked of the panellists a question which read: (John Gilmore famously once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” However,) “The Net” is not some robot but the result of how everyone uses it. Since [...]
February 22, 2010 – 21:21
Today I was lucky enough to attend a forum in Hobart run by the Australian Computing Society with the leaders of the three state parties as the panelists. The theme of the forum was the National Broadband Network (NBN), which is a rollout of fibre-to-the-node for most of Tasmania and good wireless access in other [...]
December 23, 2009 – 22:20
Currently the protest against Senator Conroy’s Internet filter is happening in a vacuum. This vacuum is occupied by thousands upon thousands of outraged Internet-savvy computer users. Unfortunately these people constitute only a small percentage of the overall voting population of Australia, and not all of them are prepared to vote based only on an Internet [...]