log

June 28, 2010

Julia’s ‘reshuffle’

My God, the com­ments here are full of win:

DG says:

Con­roy stays on as com­mu­ni­ca­tions min­is­ter? Labor has lost my vote.

posted by Andrew

June 20, 2010

Filtering

Are you a pub­lic ser­vice fig­ure advo­cat­ing Inter­net Fil­ter­ing? Hold your hors­es! Before you rush off on a nev­er-end­ing quest to save the chil­dren from stuff they’re not look­ing at we require you first study in the fol­low­ing fields:

Fail­ing that, maybe you should, you know, ask some peo­ple who have stud­ied in those fields for some input. They may give you a hint on whether your grand plan is achiev­able. A tip for the wise: try gath­er­ing this before spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars on devel­op­ment. Addi­tion­al tip: try lis­ten­ing to feedback.

With pro­fes­sion­al feed­back in hand you may unintentionally/unfortunately dis­cov­er that many tech­ni­cal and/or log­i­cal prob­lems have sur­faced, includ­ing the issue that the pro­to­col you’re fil­ter­ing (the web) does­n’t actu­al­ly con­tain much of what it is you’re intend­ing to fil­ter out (child pornog­ra­phy). While this may present a chal­lenge tech­ni­cal­ly, it won’t real­ly make a dif­fer­ence! The chil­dren will still be saved from some­thing, so don’t let it affect your qual­i­ty mar­ket­ing message.

Now that you’ve got an idea of the almost-per­pen­dic­u­lar uphill tech­ni­cal bat­tle you face you may like to soft­ly lay your pre­vi­ous plans down and back away slow­ly. If you fail to make the clever choice that would result in not imple­ment­ing a sys­tem with a one-thou­sandth per­cent suc­cess rate at actu­al­ly pro­tect­ing a child from some­thing they’re not doing, at least you’ll know what you’re talk­ing about instead of blow­ing large gaseous clouds of moral fibre where pre­cise tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion is required.

posted by Andrew