I really don’t understand the Opposition. This is a political group which will rail against the Government at every opportunity — on asylum seekers, on the National Broadband Network, on the carbon tax — the negative vitriol is incredible. And yet, when given a concrete chance to hold the Government of the day accountable on an issue of high public interest such as Internet piracy, the Opposition doesn’t take it.

Allow me to explain.  Source: Australian Electoral Commission’s annual periodic disclosure of political party donations for the lead organisation behind the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT);

The total value of donations from just the one organisation that is the main antagonist in AFACT, for just 2010/11 is $869,224.00

Understanding the sum of copyright lobbyist contributions to both major political parties takes more time and research, and what it actually buys them remains to be seen, but one thing is clear; it at least buys you a meeting with policy makers out of the meddlesome sight of the public and even out of sight of some senators.

AUSTRALIAN consumers will be forced to pay substantially more for their favourite fashion brands as a growing number of local importers reach agreements with international brands to stop selling their clothes to Australians on overseas websites or to lift their web prices.

The article goes on to describe in detail how Australian retail importers, acting together in a group, have reached the agreement including how many fashion brand websites will now not sell to Australians, and how others will do so but sharply raise the their prices such that they are not competing with local Australian retailers.

I’ve sent the following complaint to the ACCC this morning.

I refer to the newspaper article http://gguy.me/7l which describes agreements between importers and international brands to stop selling clothes to Australians via websites. I am unaware of how it can not be worth the ACCC’s time to investigate an apparent circumstance where Australian businesses such as the International Fashion Group are entering into practices designed specifically to cease other businesses trading with Australian consumers. In particular, I am curious if the ACCC intends to investigate what leverage the group used to bring this agreement, if not by not threatening refusal to stock the same brands in retail outlets in retaliation for the continued competition.

The article describes that the ACCC are expressing concern about similar practices, but in some circumstances government bodies can’t or don’t act unless there are specific complaints.  In still other circumstances senior figures speak to the media about generic phenomena without specific cases being on the radar of investigators.  I’ll keep folks updated with any outcome.

Amongst other things, it will form a major backbone of the health service, revolutionizing healthcare for all Australians – especially the elderly and those in rural areas – while at the same time saving the $100bn annual health budget so much money that these benefits alone will pay for the entire rollout.

I’ve gone into this before in various ways on various forums.  High speed broadband isn’t the only, or even main reason healthcare is a policy problem.  If we magically had 20Tbps broadband into every room of Australia right now we’d still have doctors with very poor technology literacy, a host of privacy and security problems around eHealth, policy and legal problems around liability for remotely conducted diagnosis and drug prescription, data mining concerns, standardisation problems, etc.

The NBN will also provide Australia with a “smart grid” which allows for wildly superior and more-efficient energy distribution around the country.

No, the NBN will provide Australia with high speed broadband infrastructure via FTTH and wireless, which is not the same thing as a smart grid which is telemetry-enabled and flexibly controllable electricity infrastructure.  A smart grid consists of many things, one of which is good broadband and the rest of which are almost as numerous and problematic from a policy perspective as health technology.  You think people get upset about the potential privacy problems of eHealth?  Ask a privacy advocate what they think of smart meters which are an underlying technology for smart grids, and are able to reveal details of how and why families use electricity for what.

The NBN will also revolutionise education – especially for those in rural areas – with kids being able to access the best lessons in the world and interact with teachers who could be thousands of kilometres away.

Because of all of those high definition video conferencing setups that are designed with high speed broadband-empowered distance education right? And the smart whiteboards…   Oh wait those don’t exist.  Sure this is a chicken and egg thing, the availability of broadband is one of the issues that stops those types of technology solutions being commercially available (and supportable, and at the right price point, and there being qualified and educated people about who can operate and maintain them, etc.), but again it’s not the only one and it’s not even the main one.  The lack of IT skills in remote communities, it’s difficult to get electricity to buildings in remote communities sufficient to support the new requirements for broadband-utilising equipment, the list goes on…

If built out to the entire country, the NBN has the potential to be an important piece of a lot of really interesting and positive pies, but it is not a discrete solution to any one Australian public policy problem.  Characterisations to the contrary aren’t helpful, are demonstrably false, and unnecessarily colour the debate that is already thin on facts.

Today the High Court dismissed an appeal by a number of film and television companies from a decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia.

So begins the summary judgement which details that the unanimous decision of the high court; iiNet had no power to prevent its customers from infringing copyright using Bittorrent. It’s great news, despite how many millions must have been spent on Roadshow Films and Ors. v iiNet as it wound its way through Australian courts all the way to the top.

Unfortunately from here we can expect AFACT to shift its focus to government (or rather it already has), and we can shortly expect draft legislation to codify AFAC’s opinions on how the Internet should work.  The courts after all, tell it how it is.  The government tells us how it will be.  The copyright lobby tells the goverment how it should be.

The full decision is here.

Subclause (4) provides that person must not upload, or cause, permit or authorise the uploading of, material on the internet that constitutes or contains an unhealthy food advertisement that is directed to children.

The Greens have a history of being advocates of free speech, particularly on the Internet and particularly via senator Scott Ludlam, but it appears the history is just that.  Between the inquiry into how hurtful the media can be in Australia and bills such as this, I think it’s a good idea to contact Greens senators and explain your concerns that free speech should extend to deep fried things as well as non GMO tuna, and even media that is critical of you.

What is the “post-PC era”?

Put simply it’s the meme that traditional computers which sit on or under a desk connected to a keyboard, mouse and screen are old news.  Laptops which are a folding device which sit on your lap or in a dock are old news.  This is the era of devices which break new ground in portability, weight, comfort of use and abandon long-ago won battles like processing power and flexibility which don’t really enable the majority of consumers anyway.  Post-PC-ites say we’ve long had the grunt to do what we need, because generally we don’t need very much grunt, because what we need to do is fairly circumspect.  Specifically, we browse the web, we talk to friends, we shop, we consume media, or at least these things are what normal people do.

Here is where the religious wars start.  ”Normal people” is an amorphous concept that overextends more tangible (and well, sane) measurements like “the majority of consumer electronics purchasers” or “16 – 24 year-olds who use Facebook”.  By a process of elimination it also establishes a concept of “abnormal people” who don’t necessarily celebrate (or even care that much about) the rise in popularity of technology solutions that enable specific use cases that were historically done on computers, to be done on mobile or ambient devices.  These people are geeks – the word is used here in a pejorative sense – and column inches have been used to describe how they dislike the “revolution” of the post-PC era and how it goes against their belief that everyone should use obscure operating systems on desktop PCs that are awkward and require a specific field of expertise to master, when “normal people” just want to “get on with it”.

Of course very little is further from the truth.  There’s no cabal of neck beards sullenly resisting the relentless charge of the Retina display.  There simply is, and always has been, people who genuinely enjoy developing and maintaining the skills like those required to use and master a computer as a platform or a suite of tools rather than just an end client to an app store.  There are folks who like to maintain a computer they built themselves and no amount of popular ascendancy of a computer whose instructions consist entirely of “touch the front” is going to threaten that.

There aren’t normal and abnormal people, there are just preferences around complexity and control.  The technology landscape is changing and better reflecting the proportion of people who want and need that control in comparison to the people who previously had to put up with learning how to use technology in order to get the benefits it provided.  Those people can now choose not to learn how to use a computer, rather they learn what the computer lets them do.  No more learning about carpentry, just making wardrobes.

People who prefer manual cars aren’t “defending the empire of complexity that maintains the mechanics and driving instructors as gatekeepers”, they just derive recreational enjoyment out of the control provided by manual transmission.   Drive your automatic and enjoy it.

People who knit aren’t some sort of tiresome affront to clothing labels.

People who cook aren’t geeks who are petulantly resisting the obvious superiority of the rise of McDonalds.

There are those who like to learn how it works, and those just want to work it.  Let’s stop the triumphant anger directed at curiosity.

After a UK judge gave the green light to extradite the student two months ago, Home Secretary Theresa May officially approved the request from US authorities today.

Julia O’Dwyer, Richard’s mother, is severely disappointed with the decision and says that her son has been “sold” to the US. The extradition may disrupt his life for years.

 

According to Rape Crisis UK, 21% of girls and 11% of boys experience some form of sexual abuse.  23% of women and 3% of men experience rape.  40% of adults who are raped do not report it, of the 15% that report it to the police, 6% result in a conviction.

But if you infringe copyright you can now be sure you’ll be extradited to a country you’ve never set foot in to face charges.

Stop the planet I want to get off.

What’s a supergram?

The term Telstra actually use is the same one that I’ve had a problem with since the censorship plan’s inception, it’s “redirection trigger”.  Redirection triggers aren’t an industry metric that anybody actually uses to measure Internet activity, they’re essentially a made up word. We don’t know (and IT News have asked) if this refers to user attempts to access a website on Interpol’s “worst of” list, or whether it refers to one of a handful of related requests that might be generated on a system when a user does that.  We don’t know if they are even deliberate attempts to break the law.  We don’t know if they’re even accidental attempts, or if it’s possible for a redirection trigger to occur naturally through network maintenance activities such as automated software programs which check to see if web pages have changed.  Basically even though the term “redirection trigger”, like my made-up word “supergram”, looks like it should mean something, it doesn’t actually convey any information at all and has no relationship to the terms that people use day-to-day.  It bares a superficial resemblance to words you do understand but if you stare at in long enough you realise you haven’t actually been told anything that makes sense in any normal context.

So why hasn’t the voluntary filter program used terms people understand and can discuss in existing contexts?

If you use terms that people understand, it provides perspective which is not something that is likely to be helpful to the filter program’s success (and it’s subsequent use as an “out” for DBCDE in the face of it’s failed mandatory censorship plan).  If I tell you I have 80,000 supergrams of gold, I sound really quite rich provided you don’t spend too much time thinking about the relevance of the metric.  Similarly if Telstra and the AFP say that 80,000 redirection triggers happened before but now there’s fewer, it looks like the program has been a success provided you move on to the next news story pretty quickly without too much time to digest what you’ve just read.

The IT News attempt to determine what a redirection trigger was in real world terms was stonewalled.  I’m fairly sure this, and the fact that there were 20x more redirection triggers in a few months than there are referrals to the AFP about anything (child abuse or otherwise) in the 2010-11 annual report can be taken to mean that this particular supergram is probably closer to a picogram than a kilo.

Since the 1970s, the Australian classification system has largely operated around a principle of classification, with censorship or the banning of content occurring only in exceptional circumstances.

Since 2000 alone, the following computer games have been banned in Australia (let alone from the 1970s through 90s, and let alone other media).