Archive for November, 2008
Live blog coverage of UNSW Filtering Forum – Thursday 27
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Tomorrow I (and many others) converge on Sydney for the the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre's Internet Filtering Forum. The good news for those unable to attend is that Stilgherrian will be blogging the event live (he's also kindly invited myself and Peter Black to join in and offer ...
Statistics Laundering: Report on false and misleading online child pornography statistics
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Irene Graham has published a comprehensive research paper about the false and misleading statistics associated with the prevalence of child pornography on the Internet which appeared in Australian media reports and articles during 2008. That includes Bernadette McMenamin's comments in The Australian back in January: 'Child pornography is one of the ...
GetUp! launches Save The Net campaign
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008GetUp! has launched their anti-filter campaign, Save The Net. The Federal Government is planning to force all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block any material the Government deems ‘inappropriate’. Under the plan, the Government can add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist. Testing has already begun on systems that ...
DBCDE answers ISP questions about live filtering trial
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008The DBCDE has published answers to 23 questions submitted by ISP's about their live filtering pilot. Considering the size of the task proposed and the impact it would have on ISPs, DBCDE's response is rather barebones. Here's a selection: 1. If this Pilot is run as a voluntary opt in ...
Libs shoot down filtering plan: ‘Misguided and deeply unpopular’
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008The Greens announced their opposition to filtering (or close to it) this morning and now the Liberals Shadow Comms Minister Nick Minchin has issued a press release labeling the Government's plan as misguided and deeply unpopular. It reads: Senator Minchin said nobody of decency disagreed about the importance of working to ...
Greens won’t support filtering plan
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008The Greens will not support the Government's net censorship proposal according to News.com.au. Bob Brown told ABC TV "We're very, very concerned that there's going to be a unnecessary clamp down on the internet and it has to be watched." He said Ludlam is working very hard with community groups ...
Australian Sex Party answers censorship questions
Monday, November 24th, 2008I raised concerns last week about whether the Australian Sex Party (ASP) would fight for an R18+ game classification, given Eros had been opposed to one (a bad move in my opinion). However, party convenor Fiona Patten promptly responded to my queries over the weekend and informed me that ASP does ...
Sunday wrap up: Image filter mistakes Conroy for porn
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008[caption id="attachment_1659" align="alignright" width="99" caption="LogiPik evaluated this photograph as 'erotic'"][/caption] LogiPik, a PHP image filter for websites which supposedly uses a number of advanced detection layers to accurately classify a pictures level of appropriateness, thinks this picture of Stephen Conroy is porn. Actually, of the five photographs of Conroy I tried, ...
7:30 Report tackles filtering again this week
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008I'm told by some of my readers that the 7:30 Report is taking a look at the filtering debacle once again this week. (First thought to be Monday 24 November 2008 on ABC1, but new info suggests it might be the Thursday night show). Let's hope it's a better report ...
