Warning, Warning! The Great Firewall of Australia is being live trialled from 24 December 2008

Because the Australian Government's live trial of its mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme is fully functional from tomorrow, North Coast Voices apologises in advance to its readers for the incredible stupidity of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy which may cause our blog to disappear from view over the life of the trial.

International visitors to our blog will still be able to read all posts and we will endeavour to keep publishing.

Update:

Senator Conroy has announced that the live trial will not be starting now until mid-January 2009.
Presumably both the minister and department have run into a few obstacles on the way to the Great Firewall of Australia, given the less than enthusiastic response from Australian ISPs.


Graphic from Google Images

Christmas madness and sleepless nights

Cartoon from XKCD

Yes we have all experienced 'the madness'.

Have you finished shopping for presents yet - only 1 more day until Santa arrives.

Flying Santas at 12 o'clock high

Skydivers over Sydney NSW

From Times Online picture gallery

One final word before Senator Conroy [insert crow calls] the Internet

I went onto the Australian Communications and Media Authority website th' other day and happened on an 8th December media release.

Did you know that at June 2008:

• There were 1,009,347 registered .com.au domain names


• There were 7.23m Internet subscribers - 5.66m being broadband and 1.57m dialup


• There were 22.12 million mobile services in total, and quite a few able to access the Internet on the move

Now I might be a bit of a dunce, but that seems like an awful lot of voters to p*ss orf if Senator Conroy and his Prime Minister still want to keep the ship steady until 2010.

The website also threw up another little morsel - want to know just how much personal information sharing telecommunications companies are doing?

See ACMA's 2007-08 report chapter National interest matters

For those too lazy to have a shufti, here's a bit of a graph (includes 000 calls):

Buying political influence: getting in on the ground floor?

US ABC News has highlighted an interesting aspect of American political life - how Obama is finessing political donors' expectations of influence.

He's banned lobbyists from the transition team and stopped companies from giving money to the effort – some of the boldest limitations on money in a presidential transition

But big donors -- particularly bundlers -- still play a key role in his transition efforts. And good government groups say the real test for whether President-elect Barack Obama will change the culture of lobbying depends on whether he can address the broader question of special interests funding campaign donations.

"They are important for sending a signal but let's not confuse the low hanging fruit with the real hard fruit," said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center..........

Despite the ban on lobbyists, not all big money people have been banned from the effort. Bundlers, many of whom raised hundreds of thousands for Obama, are still allowed to play a role.

Public Citizen has identified at least five members of the transition team so far who raised upwards of $50,000 for the Obama campaign, including Valerie Jarrett, a transition co-chair; Susan Rice, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute; Julius Genachowski, managing director of Rock Creek Ventures; Donald Gips, a vice president of Level 3 Communications; and Michael Froman, a Citigroup managing director.

Meanwhile, the Presidential Inaugural Committee lists those privately contributing to his inauguration splurge; including shareholders/employees of a numbers of companies such as Agvar Chemicals, Innova Aviation Consulting LLC, Kpmg LLP, Verizon Telecommunications, Google Inc, Cheyenne Exploration Inc, Tyco International.

It looks as though companies might get to pay and play after all.

Full list of Obama bundlers at White House For Sale