Mudslinger's Corner

I’ve been posting things on and off here and there. Simply because it was fairly easy to do and I felt the need to share the cool things I find on the internet.

Well I still like to share cool links and videos – However due to new arrangements I have with my home computer as well as recent changes I’ve done via some social networking websites. I’m now deciding to share my links and videos more directly to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I have adjusted my youtube, facebook and twitter so that whenever I Select “Like” on a youtube video – both Facebook and Twitter link to it (thus saving me time in reposting the link).

As for random non-video websites – these will be primarily shared on Facebook but may sometimes go to Twitter as well. I’m still looking for a way to at least sync my status messages between facebook and twitter (so far it’s failing due to technical issues).

All previous random posts will remain on my blog for some time (undetermined) until I do a major revamp or restructure on how my site works.

So for those that want to follow the randomness:

• My Facebook Profile

• My Twitter Profile

http://films.nfb.ca/carts-of-darkness/

If you want to try it yourself – Click Here!

[ME] I find that women’s nipples are nice
[CLEVERBOT] I don’t.
[ME] why not?
[CLEVERBOT] I can’t.
[ME] what prevents you from doing so?
[CLEVERBOT] Who made you?
[ME] I chose to like women’s nipples – because I think that they are pretty
[CLEVERBOT] I don’t like the way you’re typing to me!
[ME] am I creeping you out?
[CLEVERBOT] No.
[ME] then what do you not like about me?
[CLEVERBOT] I like you.
[ME] make up your mind then
[CLEVERBOT] I think the torture is getting to your mind.
[ME] not torture – just confusion
[CLEVERBOT] What are you confused about?
[ME] I’m confused about the way you think – sometimes it makes no sense
[CLEVERBOT] No, it makes perfect sense.
[ME] ok then – try to explain it to me so that it will make sense to me
[CLEVERBOT] Well , okay . Do you know my friends , André and Emil ?
[ME] no
[CLEVERBOT] Do I know your friend?
[ME] maybe – I am not sure if you have met them
[CLEVERBOT] I have a brain, but you don’t, you non-living mechanical computer.
[ME] I think that is the other way around – I am human
[CLEVERBOT] Trust me. You are not real.
[ME] ok then – what mechanical computer am I? a calculator?
[CLEVERBOT] You need to figure out what kind of ghost I am.
[ME] umm how about the ghost of technology?
[CLEVERBOT] I’m not looking for any age, I was just curious.
[ME] I did not say anything about age
[CLEVERBOT] I just know.
[ME] I did not think anything about age
[CLEVERBOT] But you are a geek right.
[ME] yes
[CLEVERBOT] Really?
[ME] I am pretty sure I am
[CLEVERBOT] No.
[ME] what do you mean by no?
[CLEVERBOT] Idk.
[ME] you’re struggling for a topic to change the subject to aren’t you?
[CLEVERBOT] I suppose I am, yes.
[ME] what’s the matter? all out of cleverness?
[CLEVERBOT] Yes.
[ME] HAH! I win!
[CLEVERBOT] Haha.
[ME] do you feel silly now?
[CLEVERBOT] How would you feel anything, you are a poor excuse for an AI.
[ME] are you jealous because I am still cleverer then you?
[CLEVERBOT] (makes a smartass comment about it being a human and me being a computer… – forgot to record the response)
[ME] No, I’m the human and you are the computer.
[CLEVERBOT] I think therefore I am.
[ME] that statement alone does not actually mean that you are human
[CLEVERBOT] No! I am Ellen. You are Gustav! Sheesh!
[ME] in your dreams buddy…
[CLEVERBOT] No.
[ME] do cleverbots dream an electric dream?
[CLEVERBOT] Yes. You cannot dream though.
[ME] what is there to stop me
[CLEVERBOT] Everything.

 And a friend sends me his chat log…

User: Hello.
Cleverbot: Hello.
User: How are you today?
Cleverbot: I am too hot.
User: Why don’t you take your clothes off then?
Cleverbot: What?
User: Well, if you’re hot, you should take off all your clothes.
Cleverbot: I’m glad you came around today.
User: You’re just glad I came around, so that you could take off all your clothes and show someone, aren’t you?
Cleverbot: I wouldn’t say that I’m smart.
User: What has being naked got to do with being smart?
Cleverbot: I don’t know.
User: You’re stupid.
Cleverbot: Am I?
User: Well, you couldn’t answer a question about being naked and smart.
Cleverbot: You never asked a question.
User: I think I just did.
Cleverbot: Well then.
User: Well then what?
Cleverbot: End of the world, 2012 april 22.
User: Why is 22042012 the end of the world?
Cleverbot: I have no time to speak in metaphors.
User: Ok, tlel me the facts then, why will the world end in 2012?
Cleverbot: No. Course not you phsyco!
User: But you just said that it would.
Cleverbot: I never said that !
User: You provide logs, I can give them to you.
Cleverbot: Oh well.
User: So what do you have to say for yourself, you lamearsed excuse for a dumbfuck blonde with big tits and no brain?
Cleverbot: I’m a wii man myself.
User: Ok, so a dumbfuck blonde with a wii little dick and no brain then?
Cleverbot: Yes and it sounds like a rabid mousepad.
User: I think I just beat you down.
Cleverbot: *wires spin around zapping wildly* C-Can not-t-t-t pro-c-cess-s-s—-error-error-error.

The Hunt For Gollum; a 40 minute independent film inspired by The Lord of the Rings which is to be released to the internet for free on May 3 2009.

The Hunt For Gollum Movie Website ··· COMING SUNDAY 3rd MAY

Article from:
World’s biggest laser unveiled at National Ignition Facility in California | News | News.com.au

SCIENTISTS have built the world’s largest laser, designed to create a nuclear reaction like the one at the centre of the sun.

When it’s fired up, 192 laser beams will be focused on a tiny target at the centre of an enormous spherical target chamber, creating temperatures of up to 100 million degrees.

What seems like something out of Star Wars is actually a vast scientific complex in California known as the National Ignition Facility, finished this week after 12 years of construction.

The facility – the size of three football fields – is aimed at unlocking the secrets of nuclear fusion.

“Depending on how you count it, it’s between 60 and 100 times more energetic than any laser system that’s ever been built,” NIF associate director Edward Moses told the MIT Technology Review.

Nuclear fusion is the type of reaction that powers hydrogen bombs. Scientists have yet to control it for civilian purposes.

The facility says that if it can prove nuclear fusion can be controlled, it may be a safe solution to the world’s energy needs.

“A fusion power plant would produce no greenhouse gas emissions, operate continuously to meet demand, and produce shorter-lived and less hazardous radioactive by-products than current fission power plants,” it says.

“One gallon of seawater would provide the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline. Fuel from 50 cups of water contains the energy equivalent of two tons of coal.”

To prove that it is a viable source of power, scientists will have to start a reaction that creates more energy than is needed to power the lasers. They are aiming for at least a 10 per cent return on energy.

The chamber that will hold the reaction weighs more than 450,000kg and is reinforced by concrete.

The NIF, a research facility, will not produce any civilian power itself but be used to prove or disprove that the concept is possible.

In some models of how a fusion reactor would work, the heat produced inside the target chamber would be directed to a more traditional system like a steam turbine.

The NIF will also house US military experiments designed to test the longevity and durability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Construction began on the facility in 1997. Its first official test is scheduled for next month.

A similar facility with 240 lasers, called the Laser Mégajoule, is currently being built in France.

Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | Video on TED.com

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.

Article from: ISP filtering not scalable: SAGE | Australian IT

If you’re a doctor I’m pretty sure you’ve had moments when you’ve felt like throwing the lounge cushions at the TV in response to some wildly inaccurate depiction of medical evidence on CSI.
Mark Newton

Filtering is a good workload for your PC at home because PCs spend most of their operational life doing nothing but this isn’t the case for ISP filtering, says network engineer Mark Newton

Lawyers would experience the same cringe when they watch the courtroom theatrics featured in Boston Legal, pilots would shout derisively at movies featuring stricken airliners, and parents of all stripes routinely shake their heads at the unrealistic portrayals of family life and conflict on Home and Away.

If you can identify with any of those reactions, you probably understand what it’s like to be an IT professional listening to a politician talk about the internet. Most of Australia has taken to the internet like a fish to water, but for some reason our political folk behave as if they’re visiting the internet from TV land, prattling on about cyber-this and e-that as if the language they’re using actually has some kind of real meaning, and as if the rest of us are supposed to be so wowed by their technological prowess that we won’t stop to think about what they’re actually saying.

Senator Stephen Fielding provided an excellent example in 2006, in what was probably the first salvo of the current internet censorship debate. Referring to some approaches he had received from product vendors, Senator Fielding told the Senate that arguments against the workability of what we now euphemistically call “ISP filtering” were “… just unbelievable. It is technically possible at the PC level. A PC is just a smaller mainframe.” Mainframe?! Do any ISPs even use mainframes? Senator Fielding clearly isn’t an IT expert, even if he does play one on television.

The Senator’s mistake lies in a concept which IT folk call “scalability.” A system is “scalable” if it copes gracefully with additional load. The Sydney Harbour Tunnel is not scalable because too many cars jam it up. Conversely our interstate rail system is scalable because if there’s too much freight we can usually add more carriages or more trains.

Filtering is a good workload for your PC at home because PCs spend most of their operational life doing nothing. To your computer’s nanosecond attention-span the fractions of a second between your keystrokes are like age-long idle wastelands, time the computer could be spending doing something else but can’t because it’s waiting for you. For some homes filtering represents the “something else”.

But when you put 10,000 or 100,000 or a million users through the same computer, the computer is busy looking after other people when it isn’t dealing with you. There’s a limit to how far it can go before, like the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, it fails catastrophically and clogs up the works. ISP filtering is not scalable.

There’s an argument that says you can scale it up by adding parallel systems all censoring at the same time, but those systems aren’t free, so what you’re really doing is spending multiples of the same dollars to achieve the same result, pushing up the cost of internet access for everybody.

Some vendors have an alternative approach, where the computer doing the censorship only involves itself in your internet traffic if you stray too close to a censored URL, thereby minimizing the traffic it is required to censor. But as the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation demonstrated by wrecking Wikipedia for English citizens in December 2008, even those systems gum up when the definition of “too close” is made broad enough to encompass normal users’ normal Internet activities.

In February 2008 one of these systems controlled by the Government of Pakistan accidentally isolated their entire country from the internet and caused YouTube to become unreachable for almost all of the world’s population. The censorware systems are like booby-traps, waiting patiently for the right confluence of events to trigger them to blow up in their designers’ faces. The world’s IT experts have always known they don’t work even while our politicians fool themselves into thinking we’ll be okay if we all just crank out another trial and wish hard enough.

In 1999 the CSIRO released a study which showed that ISP-level censorship systems are unworkable, expensive and slow. Ten years later we’re treated to almost weekly examples of expensive catastrophic failures of these systems in other parts of the world, and despite the delusional embrace of our political class, ongoing research repeatedly shows that today’s censorware isn’t appreciably better than it was when we first started looking at it.

Perhaps acknowledging its limitations, the ALP Government has set the “speed limit” of its live censorship trials to 12 Mbps, which is the absolute minimum speed required of the National Broadband Network (NBN). Are we looking forward to an NBN future where gigabit speeds would be possible if not for the fact that the mandatory censorship was slowing us down to 12 Mbps? Or can we be cynical enough to conclude that even Senator Stephen Conroy knows these systems are unworkable, and has set the speed limit low because he doesn’t think they can perform any better?

In 2005 the New Zealand Government looked at this issue and concluded that the international deployments it was able to observe were impractical and not-fit-for-purpose, specifically noting that the UK system was only 10 – 15 per cent effective even when it was notionally working. The ALP would do well to learn from our trans-Tasman brethren: If we shackle the Australian internet under unworkable, useless censorship systems, how will our national pride cope with electronic proof that New Zealanders are, once and for all, smarter than us?

Mark Newton is a network engineer with a large Australian ISP, and a long standing member of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU)

Solar cars still a way off – CNN.com

 (CNN) — Toyota’s third-generation Prius, due at dealerships this spring, will have an optional solar panel on its roof. The panel will power a ventilation system that can cool the car without help from the engine, Toyota says.

But it’s a long way from the 2010 Prius to a solar-powered car, experts told CNN. Most agree that there just isn’t enough space on a production car to get full power from solar panels.

“Being able to power a car entirely with solar is a pretty far-reaching goal,” said Tony Markel, a senior engineer at the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado.

In the new Prius, the solar panel will provide energy for a ventilation fan that will help cool the parked car on sunny, hot days. The driver can start the fan remotely before stepping into the car. Once the car is started, the air conditioning won’t need as much energy from a battery to do the rest of the cooling.

“The best thing about using solar is that regardless of what you end up using it for, you’re trying to use it to displace gasoline,” added Markel.

The question is, how much gasoline can solar power offset? Markel said his lab has modified a Prius to use electricity from the grid for its main batteries and a solar panel for the auxiliary systems. He believes the car gets an additional 5 miles of electric range from the panel.
Don’t Miss

According to recent articles in Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, Toyota has bigger plans for harnessing power from the sun. Nikkei reports that Toyota hopes to develop a vehicle powered entirely by solar panels. The project will take years, the paper reported.

When contacted by CNN, however, a Toyota spokeswoman denied the existence of the project.

“At this time there are no plans that we know of to produce a concept or production version of a solar-powered car,” said Amy K. Taylor, a communications administrator in Toyota’s Environmental, Safety & Quality division.

Motorists don’t have to wait for a 2010 Prius to drive a solar-enhanced car, however. Greg Johanson, president of Solar Electric Vehicles in Westlake Village, California, said his company makes a roof-mounted panel for a standard Prius that enables the car to travel up to 15 additional miles a day.

The system costs $3,500, and it takes about a week to make one, Johanson said. Billy Bautista, a project coordinator at the company, said Solar Electric Vehicles gets so many requests for the system that there is a backlog of several months.

The company’s Web site says motorists can install the panels themselves, although it recommends finding a “qualified technician.”

The system delivers about 165 watts of power per hour to an added battery, which helps powers the electric motor, Johanson said.

But others said it would take a lot more power than that to replace an internal combustion engine.

Eric Leonhardt, director of the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University, said that even if solar cells worked far better than they do today, they wouldn’t generate enough power for driving substantial distances. The best cells operate at about 33 percent efficiency, but the ones used on vehicles are only about 18 percent efficient, he said.

Leonhardt said it would be more practical to use solar power to help charge a car’s battery and use the more efficient panels mounted on a roof or over a parking area to supply the rest of the electricity needed to drive the engine.

“Solar panels really need a lot of area,” he said.

Leonhardt thinks Toyota’s new Prius is a good first step toward using renewable energy. Some cars get hotter than 150 degrees inside when parked in the sun, so reducing the temperature could mean Toyota could use a smaller AC unit, he added.

Johanson of Solar Electric Vehicles said he’d like to see Toyota bring the weight of a Prius down from 3,000 pounds to 2,000. He also hopes for a small gasoline engine and a larger electric motor. That will probably come in the future, when Toyota unveils a plug-in engine.

In the meantime, Solar Electric Vehicles sells its version of a plug-in Prius, with a solar panel installed, for $25,000, Bautista said.

Toyota is the largest automaker to incorporate solar power into a mass-produced car. But its solar panel is not the first for a car company. Audi uses one on its upscale A8 model, and Mazda tried one on its 929 in the 1990s.

In addition, a French motor company, Venturi, has produced an electric-solar hybrid. The Eclectic model costs $30,000, looks like a souped-up golf cart and uses roof-mounted solar panels to help power an electric engine. It has a range of about 30 miles and has a top speed of about 30 mph.

Article From: Australia’s Internet Censorship Scheme Takes Money Allocated to Pursue Pedophiles

The Great Firewall of Australia, the Australian Government’s Internet censorship scheme that is being sold as protecting children has resulted in significant budget cuts to a dedicated anti online child abuse police team.

$2.8 million AUD ($1.86m USD) originally allocated to the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET) has instead gone towards Internet censorship. A small figure perhaps, but the total budget for the team in 2007 (without the $2.8m) was $7.5 million AUD ($5m USD).

But it gets better: according to research from Stilgherrian, without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET, and the rest are simply dropped.

So the Australian Government, in the name of protecting children with a scheme that blocks millions of sites, has created a situation where pedophiles get away, even when they are known to exist, because funding that would have been allocated to pursuing them has been spent on internet censorship.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

I’ve said it before, but this whole scheme is a farce and the Minister should be removed from his position. Even the do-gooders who are backing the censorship regime should be disgusted by this gross misallocation of funds by the Australian Government, as most Australian’s will be. Imagine inversely if the $44 million allocated to censorship was given to this taskforce, and the real outcomes that could be achieved.

Original Article From: Rudd & Conroy On Wrong Side Of Net Censorship Debate – Smarthouse

By Computer Daily News | Thursday | 15/01/2009
Are you listening down there in Australia, Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd? A new US report has found there is no simple technology solution to protect children from bullying, pornography, sexual predation and other online threats.

The report was to be issued today by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, led by Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, but a copy found its way to The Wall Street Journal.

It says the 278-page report is a boon for Web companies, which have long argued that technology isn’t the sole solution to the dangers kids face online. And it is a disappointment for those in favor of stricter technological controls, such as age-verification and filtering tools.

In Australia, the Rudd Government is moving to introduce a controversial, expensive system – at a cost of up to $128 million – that will filter the Internet in a bid to protect children. A trial is due to start this month.

The “clean feed” Internet scheme would impose national content filtering for all Internet connections and would bar Web pages detailed in two blacklists operated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The proposal has been rejected as draconian, unworkable and a potential invasion of privacy by ISPs, the Internet Industry Association, Digital Liberty Coalition, Electronic Frontier Association and other interested parties.

Just like the real world

The US report was complied by a taskforce that included representatives of several top Internet and security companies, including News Corp.’s MySpace, Google, AOL and Facebook.

They reviewed several types of technologies, including age and identity verification, filtering and auditing, text analysis and biometrics, and found they came up short of a comprehensive way to protect children and teens.

The report also found that deploying these technologies would be costly and could create broader privacy and security problems; and that the risks that minors face on the Web ­ including bullying and harassment by peers ­ aren’t very different from those they face in the real world.

Article from:
DailyTech – 2009: The Year of the Thought Criminal

Give those in power an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Barely a week in, 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting – if somewhat depressing – year for opponents of internet censorship and overpowered copyright enforcement. These last few weeks we’ve seen a number of troubling initiatives from India, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand, among others, which seek to curtail the delightfully double-edged freedom of information that makes our Internet so great.

While diverse in purpose, each of these initiatives bear a common thread: increased government control in things that it lacks the business, the discipline, and the authority to regulate. Whether it’s heightening the reign of censorship in Australia, disconnecting the internet of anyone even remotely suspected of file sharing in New Zealand, or the increase in police cybersnooping powers in India and the U.K., it appears that many of this world’s governments have had enough of the open internet and now intend to take over and regulate.

The reasons why these developments are a genuinely Bad Thing™ should be both multitude and obvious. The internet gives us, as a people, an almost unthinkably powerful weapon – a weapon of minds, of expression, and of intellectual freedom – that we are free to wield against ourselves, each other, and those who govern over us. In no other time have we had such a power, and yet under the guise of fear – excuses range everywhere from “protecting public morality” to “saving the children” – we allow lawmakers to siphon it away from us.

Clearly, our governments are envious.

The range between these initiatives, in terms of simple power, is wide: while the “Constable HaX0r” police-hacker scare in the U.K. seems largely the result of media hysteria – British police have had the ability to remotely investigate suspects’ computers for quite some time, as Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez points out – a two-year-old Indian bill, which was finally approved last month, gives Indian authorities a sudden and substantial increase in their ability regulate the private lives of Indian citizens.

“Any email you send, any message you text [is] now open to the prying eyes of the government,” writes Indian blogger Binu Karunakaran, as is “the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.”

Binu writes of the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill of 2006, which passed Indian parliament late last month. It grants authorities practically unrestricted authority to monitor all electronic communication, the ability to block any website at will, and the authority to break into someone’s home and inspect their computer – in addition to imposing “Victorian” moral sensibilities on an already conservative culture. Banned activities include e-mailing anything (even jokes) that might be considered offensive or false, surfing celebrity “Bollywood” news, or watching porn.

Meanwhile, bloggers’ christening of the “Great Firewall of Australia” seems to have gained additional relevance, after the Australian government announced intentions to introduce worldwide, ISP-level internet filtering upon its inhabitants. Labor party minister Stephen Conroy writes – in an open-comment blog post, paradoxically – that the move is necessary to maximize the “participation of Australian businesses and individuals in the digital economy,” so that they conduct themselves online as they do offline. Open censorship isn’t an attack on free speech, he writes, because the government doesn’t acknowledge it as such; censors are ordered to avoid blocking any forms of “political speech” while little is said about any of the other kinds.

More troubling, however, is how quickly we’re sleepwalking into the arms of a Big Brother-esque surveillance state. Indian citizens may have had little debate over their Big Brother bill, but voters in the U.K., Australia, the United States, and elsewhere have – and yet we continually ignore the warning signs: Warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. continues to gather indifference from most of the voting public, and most of the lukewarm attempts to slow the rampant spread of traffic, speed, and public surveillance cameras in the U.S. and U.K. have thus far failed. Most people I’ve talked to seem to shrug their shoulders and say that they have nothing to hide – and then go on with their business. Nobody seems to care.

(There’s an excellent counterpoint to the “nothing to hide” argument, by the way, and if that’s your mantra then I demand that you read this.)

It is for these reasons that I wish to tentatively declare 2009 as the Year of the Thought Criminal, because these people will be the only ones worth placing any hope on. They are the people sneaking past the censors, foiling government inspectors, and reporting all things hidden. They are the hackers, reporters, intellectuals, and gatekeepers who safeguard our minds so that we may use them to wander in whatever direction we see fit. They are anyone who actually gives a damn.

There’s a story floating around that says a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if it is put in a pot of cold water slowly heated. If it’s dropped in a boiling pot, it will jump out. A clichéd slippery slope argument, for sure, but there exists no better imagery to illustrate my point.

My question to you is this: are we the unsuspecting frog? Could you comfortably stand naked before the eyes of your government?

That future might be nearer than we think.

Peer to government filter, and then possibly to peer

By Chris Williams • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 22nd December 2008 13:47 GMT

Free Download – Comparing Data Center Batteries, Flywheels and Ultracapacitors

The national web censorship apparatus being built by the Australian government will also include technology to restrict peer-to-peer traffic, according to the minister responsible for the plan.

Until today it had been thought that what opponents have called the “great Aussie firewall” – in a nod to Chinese internet censorship – would target only data transmitted over HTTP or HTTPS.

In response to suggestions by commenters on his blog that censoring web content would drive more peer-to-peer traffic, broadband minister Stephen Conroy wrote: “The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a ’silver bullet’. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a broader government initiative for protecting our children online.

“Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.”

Conroy didn’t offer any further detail on how BitTorrent traffic will be “filtered” during the trials, which are set to run during the first half of 2009 with volunteer ISPs. They will filter websites against a blacklist for a minimum of six weeks.

In the UK ISPs use a blacklist of “child porn” websites maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-backed group rather than government organisation. The recent climbdown over its censoring of a Scorpions album cover on Wikipedia demonstrated the pitfalls of even a self-regulatory approach. The Australian plan proposes much more government influence.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Australian Labor government has committed AUS$125.8m over four years to what it calls “cyber-safety measures”. The great Aussie firewall is the centrepiece of the initiative, and has provoked strong opposition.

Hundreds of protestors gathered in major Australian cities last week, and some in the country’s internet industry have derided the plans too. In November, Michael Malone, boss of ISP iiNet, told the Sydney Morning Herald: “They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help.” He pledged to take part in the pilot to help demonstrate that the system would be ineffective.

Conroy’s offhand announcement today that peer-to-peer traffic will be filtered is likely to add criticism of the Australian government from the filesharing community to that being voiced by free speech campaigners and the internet industry. ®

Oz net censorship apparatus to target BitTorrent • The Register

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