Rubénerd!

Following Dave's instructions as per his interesting new site:

If you agree with these principles, please say so in a place where your expression can be seen and counted. If you mostly agree, or would say it differently, just copy and modify the text, and point back to the original. That's why it has a CC license. Discuss on the tech-without-borders mail list.

The points, and Dave has them

1. We are people of tech.
2. We live and work everywhere.
3. We value our own freedom, the freedom of people who use our technology and freedom in general.
4. We think there is no meaningful distinction between WikiLeaks and the news organizations covering the stories in cooperation with WikiLeaks.
5. We urge all governments to respect freedom of the press, whether the news originates online or offline.
6. We apply these principles in our work and they are embodied in our technology.

My thoughts, and Ruben has them

On the whole I agree with all of his points, save for #4. I think there is a difference between Wikileaks and news organisations covering the stories with their cooperation, but that's not my primary concern. If we want to make this an all inclusive and time tested list people will be able to reference, we'd be doing ourselves a huge favour by not discussing the flavour site of the month and keeping things more general. Perhaps a more perititent point would be "We are journalists, because we're engaged in debate and discussion". Finally,

Point #2 really spoke to me, as I've essentially used it to attack the Australian governments plan for a compulsory internet filter on several occasions. Forgive the self-quoting:

Welcome to the 21st century Steven Conroy [the senator proposing the mandatory filter]. If you piss off well educated people who have the means to travel, they will simply wave, move away, apply themselves passionately to their jobs in a society that values their contributions [..] and pay their taxes to them instead. It’s your call.

Random footnotes

• I'm glad I can agree with Dave on something again after this confusing piece.

• Because this is TechWithoutBorders, I suppressed my weblog theme's automatic image border on the logo. Having a sense of humour and using common sense, there's another point he should include!

• Part of the reason why some things don't make sense, such as this point, is because they're entirely meaningless. This means people attempt to find meaning where there is none, like in this point. This point was entirely meaningless.

• In line with Dave's original piece, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, not Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution ShareAlike which the rest of my stuff here is.

  

People have already discussed this issue to death already, but Gillard's comments have been festering in my brain like a... thing that festers.

Julia Gillard is Uncle Fester?

I'm going to take a controversial stance here. When Julia Gillard billed the proposed compulsory internet filter in Australia as a "moral issue", she was right. The problem is, despite numerous campaigns by organisations like the EFA, the misinformed still believe that this filter will not only be effective, but is necessary to maintain moral hygiene.

I've always asserted that the latter is irrelevant because the former simply isn't true. Even if it were this deeply important issue and we were all in favour of curbing our civil liberties, technologically it wouldn't be effective. Anyone who's used the internet for more than five minutes knows this.

Right right right... the right is the bight. Bird bird bird... the bird is the word.

Now Conroy claims they don't intend to filter P2P or channels other than the regular tubes. Right there, he's not only admitting the shortcomings of his policies and that ultimately its going to be useless, but he exposes it for what it is: a token effort to appease the religious right.

Its a morale issue too... it makes me depressed

It is a moral issue Ms Gillard, its about treating the Australian public like adults, not sacrificing their rights, and not putting the country at a further disadvantage to the rest of the world technologically.

Political history has taught us that sacrificing rights is easy, winning them back is like trying to make diamonds by putting quartz under your bed. I did this for many years, and all I ended up with were a couple of heavy shoeboxes.

I suppose nothing has changed since August after all. Which is a right royal bummer.

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.

It's all them portal things

For those not in Australia, the illustrious Stephen Conroy is the senator who wants to implement a nationwide, mandatory internet filter based on a super secret blacklist, regardless of the technological infeasibility, negative social implications and other such quibbling factors of which I've discussed at great length. If he wasn't taught at the Ted Stevens school of understanding the intertubes, he at least received some free coaching one afternoon from the man over some cheap alcoholic beverages.

"There's a staggering number of Australians being in having their computers infected at the moment, up to 20,000, uh, can regularly be getting infected by these spams, or scams, that come through, the portal (sic)."

Unlike other esteemed survey organisations such as Newspoll, Zoo Weekly is uniquely positioned to gauge the sentiment of the Australian public on the societal impact of technology. Their exposes on how much photoshopping one poor model in a bikini can endure are featured on the front covers of their magazines each week.

Runners up

As a runner up, I thought Richard Dawkins' description of the Orwellian-ly titled Family First party leader Steven Fielding was particularly apt:

Runner up in the Zoo survey was Family First Senator Steve Fielding, who has been described as having the intellect of an earthworm by eminent scientist Richard Dawkins, after saying he thought the earth was less than 10,000 years old.

I dunno, earthworms can navigate with their eyes closed. Still, I do follow him on Twitter.

A case of another leader who started with a lot of promise but failed to deliver like so many other politicians, so they were replaced. Which of course is the politically correct way to say said person didn't fulfill the desires of some faction. So who do we have now?

Late last night a cabinet reshuffle ousting thingy (they're valid political terms, look them up) former Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been replaced with Julia Gillard. No, that's me in front of Parliament House, not Julia Gillard, sheesh get your glasses checked.

Position on internet filtering?

Because this is a tech blog (or at least it's supposed to be) I'm more interested to hear what happens to Mr If You Are Against The Mandatory Filter You're A Pedophile Senator Conroy's position. My very good friend and all around awesome guy talkingduck informs me that he could be replaced by Kate Lundly, patron senator of IT and open source. Sounds great, almost too great, so I'm hedging my bets that it won't happen. I hope I'm wrong.

What I'd love to see is a person put in charge who not only recognises the need for open standards, but a transparent bidding process for government IT contracts and who understands that a mandatory internet filter is a futile exercise that will hurt Australia's standing in the world. Oh and it'd be great if she took the NBN seriously, and if she pledged to make all government documents open and available in standard formats, or if not her then someone she puts in charge. We'll have to wait and see.

Positions on other whatnot?

As for other issues, Kevin Rudd talked the talk when it came to asylum seekers, emissions trading and the environment, but failed to follow up on any of them. Preliminary chatter on Twitter by my Aussie friends suggests she won't be changing much of the party's policies, bummer. Ah democracy, its such a productive exercise.

One bit of good news is she's an atheist, like me. I have no problem with people of any faith being the leaders of countries provided they don't let their influence their policy decisions, and Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd unabashedly proved they couldn't in that recent embarrassing debate. If anything only addressing Christian voters was an insult to people of all other faiths and not just heathens like me.

Not sure when the Governor General will be swearing her in on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all that. I suppose in these circumstances I can see where having a separate head of state and head of government is a good thing, sort of, kinda, maybe.

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.

It seems we split as species around 600,000 years ago, but that this interbreeding was occurring as late as 30,000 years ago, as evidenced by the partially sequenced genomes of several fossilised bones.

I didn't do biology in high school, but could this explain such anomalies as Stephen Conroy and Sarah Palin? I suppose it would be too convenient an excuse, and even if it were true we'd be opening ourselves up to The Neanderthal Defence.

Barrister: "Your Honour, when my client was informed that his internet filter would not work, his Neanderthal genes protected him from this grim reality and offered him a respite by ignoring the facts and continuing to press for said filter to be implemented. Yes, it's natural for someone with his genes to be affected in this way, as detailed in Exhibit D. "

Judge: "Mr Smith, there IS no Exhibit D."

Barrister: "Oh, yeah about that. You must forgive me Your Honour, for I have this gene that..."

I should be a writer for Law and Order.

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.

Given the veracity and frequency of my posts on the proposed mandatory internet filter in Australia I'm surprised it took me so long to sign their online petition. The record of online petitions doesn't suggest this one will do anything towards changing attitudes, but it's still critically important we all show our support.

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.

The whole post is worth reading, but for those in a hurry:

After all, while children may be vulnerable to certain elements of the internet, they are typically more digitally savvy than the rest of us, precisely because they have grown up with the World Wide Web.

But conservative moralisers rarely acknowledge this. Instead they tend to hinge their arguments on the patronising, victimised view of children as inherently vulnerable and corruptible. Even worse, by using the figure of the innocent child as a political pawn to advance their own agenda, conservatives are guilty of exploiting children.

Whether or not Senator Conroy cynically is aware of this and is exploiting it or he's genuinely ignorant, the result is the same: some of the internets most savvy users are being ignored and will be opressed by a system being designed and proposed by people who probably don't even know how to program their microwaves to reheat the meals their poor wives and husbands may have made for them while they were debating this nonsense in Parliament.

It's easy to blame the voting public for not being aware of these issues, but who can blame them when their primary sources of information are the Government who have a vested interest in keeping them in the dark, and when [most] of their media on television and newspapers believe the issue is worthy of debate despite all the technological flaws guaranteeing such a scheme wouldn't work even if the dubious ethical grounds it stood on were more solid.

Forgive the huge long sentences, I haven't been able to blog for a few days and I have a lot of pent up language in my brain stack. Whenever I talk about stacks I think of pancakes. If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, then the way to mine would be epic pancakes. And a wicked sense of humour. And striped socks. Wait, what does this have to do with the filter? Nothing? Or everything?

Can you imagine if Conroy got his cronies to write a filter to heuristically block illogical nonsense? Not only would most of my site here be blocked, but he probably wouldn't even be able to access his own. That'd be kinda funny.

In an article ripe with brash generalisations and blatant misinformation, Senator Conroy has directly attacked the critics of the proposed mandatory Great Internet Filter of Australia in a posting to The Punch.

The heading of his piece states:

Conroy: Don’t believe the myths on the ISP filter

You mean the myths that it won't be an electronic Edsel and not a Titanic waste of taxpayers money? And what about this gem right in the second paragraph:

The Government has always maintained there is no silver bullet when it comes to cyber safety and we have never said ISP-level filtering alone would help fight child pornography or keep children safe online.

Then, prey tell, what is the point senator?

The irony that someone would defend their moves to push Australia's online civil liberties and free speech towards PRC and North Korean territory by publishing an article online is breathtaking. I have an idea sir, I find you ramblings offensive, can I have them filtered?