From the category archives:

Politics

How Much Bang Can Optical Fibre Cable Deliver?

14 December 2010

Amid the bluster about whether the NBN warrants the investment, it hasn’t always been made clear exactly what the proposed network will do.

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Add ?NoCleanFeed or &NoCleanFeed to Blacklisted URLs to Bypass Mandatory Australian Internet Censorship

20 December 2009

Depending on the technology, you can bypass the proposed Australian mandatory filter by changing your DNS servers, using an encrypted VPN service, or installing Tor. But these workarounds can take up to 60 seconds to set up, and can slow your access somewhat. Instead, you can bypass the filter by simply adding ?NoCleanFeed or &NoCleanFeed to the end of the blacklisted URL.

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ACMA Blacklists Iran Protest Video & Boing Boing

28 August 2009

Neda Agha-Soltan was shot and killed during the Iranian election protests. Her death was captured on video, and spread virally on the Internet, becoming a rallying cry for the Iranian protests. Now, ACMA has blacklisted the video, and a Boing Boing post commenting on it.

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Resolving the Abortion Debate in South Australia

28 August 2009

The Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA) s 82A allows medical termination of pregnancy, so long as the termination poses less risk to the life of the woman than the pregnancy does (not only if the pregnancy carries abnormally high risk). And it appears that abortion in the first 16 weeks is safer than live birth.

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Googling Sex in Two Countries

24 August 2009

When people flocked to reproduce Abigail Bray’s experiment of searching Google for ‘sex’, what surprised me was that the results varied significantly. So, I tried myself, and I found that the results were very different when searching Google than they were when searching Google Australia.

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Classification Board Classifies AbortionTV R 18+

5 May 2009

Today, ACMA issued EFA with a final link-deletion notice for linking to the blacklisted AbortionTV page. From the notice, it appears that the Classification Board has now actually classified the content, and that the classification it arrived at was R 18+. The AbortionTV page is now ‘prohibited content’ as opposed to ‘potential prohibited content’.

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Exetel Trials Filtering with No Ability to Opt-Out

28 April 2009

Around noon yesterday, Steve Waddington of Exetel announced that Exetel would run its own filtering trial, independently of the Government-run trial. The kicker? There is no ability to opt-out of the trial.

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Australians Scared of the Internet, Need Protection

28 February 2009

Senator Stephen Conroy recently confirmed that a bureaucrat will decide what online material offends you and it will be blocked. When only 2% of Labour voters support its filtering policy and 90% of Internet users indicate they would opt out of filtering of adult material, why is the Government pushing forward with this plan?

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