Filed under: Political
Thanks to Stuart and Alan for alerting me to this.
The Government is planning to create two blacklists: one for children, similar to the one already operating in DECS schools, and one for everyone. The idea is to blacklist child pornography and terrorism sites, which is a noble idea in theory, but as any kind of computer person could tell you, impossible practically without dramatically reducing internet speed (which, in Australia, is already amongst the worse in the developed world), increase internet costs (amongst the most expensive in the world, too) and blocking at least 3% legitimate websites. Oh, and they want to block bittorrent websites too.
This is wrong on a couple of levels. One, superficially, if you’ve ever tried to use a computer in a public (or private) school, you understand how damned irritating these kind of Net Nanny programs are – this blog, for example, would be blocked automatically, because blogs are banned altogether (not sure why? – especially since many people use WordPress to publish actual websites). This has been a huge hindrance to my teaching, let me tell you.
On a more sincere level, this threatens civil liberties. If anyone needs an education on where things like this can lead, talk to my mate Meg, who’s teaching in Japan at the moment. WordPress? no. You Tube? no. Facebook? no. Myspace? no. All because of the ‘national interest’. Scary stuff. There is a reason why lefties and civil libertarians are always harping on about freedom of speech and other similar old fashioned concepts: there is still danger even in a little bit of limitation, such as this.
For more info:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7968823265
Filed under: Uncategorized
My friend Caroline found this vid and posted it on her blog: she often keeps track of international affairs and the bizarre political termoil that goes on in her home country Belgium.
It explains how the World Financial Crisis is now happening (but still doesn’t explain why, when its everyone else’s banks that are failing, is it the Aussie dollar that goes down – come on, there isn’t a Euro bank out there that isn’t suffering! Fall already, damn it!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Ns4ltUvfw
Okay, now I’m off to watch Heroes – yay yay yay – but I did go somewhere interesting over the weekend, so I’m going to post tomorrow with another mini-vid.
