Rubénerd :)

Time to celebrate this evening? Some on Twitter seem to be already.

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has suggested changes could be made to the Federal Government’s proposed internet filter. “Stephen Conroy… has announced some changes to the filter – he’s talking to industry about those now,” he said.

I won’t be. I’m with Greens Senator Ludlam on this, Labor hasn’t said they’re scrapping it, they’ve just made vague references to "changing" it, whatever that means. We don’t want a reworking, we want a thorough repudiation. Keep the corks in the bottles, folks. :(

We all suspected as much, but now it’s official: the readers of (uh, Zoo Weekly) have dubbed Stephen Conroy the dumbest politician in Australia.

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Some civil liberty groups are championing the news that Senator Conroy’s plan to filter Australian internet has been put "on hold", but personally I’m still just as jaded and pessimistic as I was before. Conroy and his cronies haven’t said they’re scrapping it which is the only sensible thing to do, they’ve simply pushed it to a time after the federal elections to spare themselves some embarrassment.

While we’re also talking about this, David Ramli of ARNNET is reporting that it seems Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has also put his support behind the mandatory filter which leads us to one very important question: can we all stop calling Barnaby Joyce a maverick, rouge, super elite senator please? Yes he’s taken issue with a few things the coalition have proposed in the past, but reading these descriptions at the start of every single story about him starting to get a little long in the tooth.

The science and history-obsessed parts of The Internets have been all abuzz over the evidence showing Neanderthals and Humans interbred. I know the heading picture makes no sense now, but bear with me.

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Communications Minister Stephen Conroy yesterday confirmed his department was hosting a private online forum to discuss controversial issues about the filter with internet service providers (ISPs) — including the possibility of making it an offence to promote methods of circumventing the filter.

Did I miss something, or did Conroy just admit that a mandatory internet filter could be circumvented and therefore laws need to be introduced to make up for its failure? No, surely it can’t be that simple.

Reading the excellent Open Internet blog by Electronic Frontiers Australia, I came across this excellent piece about the proposed mandatory filter that puts it into some badly needed perspective. It doesn’t protect children, it patronises them.

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It seems as though Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama finally have something they disagree on: the US government has expressed concern over Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan for a mandatory internet filter. Guess that old headline above somehow isn’t as true anymore :P.

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Can someone like, go punch Conroy in the face? and by punch, I mean not, because that gets you in trouble. But maybe just grunt at him? ~ Monnie

Yo, Conroy! Mandatory-internet-filter this! *sock!*

Remember when I said (and Craig said) Australia was starting to lose global respect because of Conroy’s internet filter scheme? It’s started.

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You know when Australia has really started losing respect in the eyes of the world when people discuss the country on their sites or publications where they’ve never really mentioned it before. For example, take this Japanation blog post:

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