log

Hilar­i­ous arti­cle by Cather­ine Deve­ny on the ‘debate’ between Fam­i­ly First’s Wendy Fran­cis and the Aus­tralian Sex Par­ty’s Fiona Pat­ten on morn­ing television:

Look out, up next, the inter­net fil­ter. Fran­cis played the ‘You’re either with us or with the child rapists card.” Pat­ten was forced to explain to Fran­cis that child sex abuse is ille­gal, the Inter­net will not stop it and that any­one involved in child sex abuse should be pros­e­cut­ed and sent to jail. Not allowed to continue.

See also this fine arti­cle writ­ten by Fiona Pat­ten on net cen­sor­ship and hypocrisy.

Please stop vot­ing the two prac­ti­cal­ly iden­ti­cal polit­i­cal par­ties into pow­er. Make a big, unavoid­ably notice­able dent in their vote tal­lies and give sen­si­ble, adult-fac­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy a chance.

My God, the com­ments here are full of win:

DG says:

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

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:

• Language:
  • Nat­ur­al evolution
  • Con­struct­ed or planned (Esperan­to, Glosa)
  • Proxy and auxiliary
  • Alter­nate forms, expres­sions and encoding: 
    • Region­al and spo­ken variants
    • Accent­ing and inher­it­ed shaping
    • Pid­gin and vari­ants
    • Sem­a­phore and oth­er phys­i­cal-form expression
    • Smoke sig­nals
    • Polyrhyth­mics
• Encryption
  • ROT-13 and sub­sti­tu­tion­al and rota­tion­al algorithms
  • Pub­lic key encryption
  • Code books and one-time cyphers
  • Steganog­ra­phy
• File formats
  • Com­mon (web)
    • HTML and variants
    • CSS and vari­ants (includ­ing XSL and XSL:FO)
    • JPEG, PNG, GIF (+ com­pres­sion variants)
    • XML
  • Com­mon (non-web) (see also Wot­sit)
    • Image: bmp, eps, exif, odg, pdf, ppm, pgm, pbm, pnm, psd, swf, tga, tiff, wmf & emf, xps
    • Sound: wav, ogg, mpc, flac, aiff, au, gsm, dct, vox, aac, mp4/m4a, mmf, mp3, wma, ra, m4p
    • Doc­u­ment: txt, doc (all 13 ver­sions), wps, rtf, pdf, xps, ppt, pub (arguably hun­dreds more)
  • Com­pres­sion and text encoding
    • Uni­code: UTF‑8, UTF-16 and to a less­er extent UTF-32
    • Char­ac­ter encod­ings and HTML vari­ants
    • ZIP (+ vari­ants), RAR, 7zip, and oth­ers (+ encryption/password sys­tem for each format)
    • Imagery and doc­u­ment for­mats with cus­tom compression/encryption routines

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.

Lost Plan­et 2’s trail­er: maybe the most impres­sive piece of Flash work I’ve ever seen. Watch it from the start with­out skip­ping through. Exe­cut­ed mar­vel­lous­ly, tak­ing me com­plete­ly by sur­prise. If only Fire­bug could look inside the Flash applet so I could see how it worked!

Tool or A Per­fect Cir­cle fan? You should watch Adam Mon­roe’s live cov­er of Lat­er­alus. Apart from the Fibonac­ci sequence near the begin­ning, his play­ing of two dif­fer­ent time sig­na­tures start­ing at 4:15 is amazing.

I’ve been debat­ing this for a few weeks now, and Faruk, I’m giv­ing up on your blog.

Tak­ing a step back to look at the com­put­er indus­try as it was, pri­or to the iPad launch, we see three real plat­forms of significance: […]

I can’t read this over-eager fan­boy drib­ble any more.