*Season's Greetings for 2009 from the* *******North Coast Voices crew*******

Best wishes for the festive season from all at North Coast Voices

Clarencegirl, Clarrie Rivers, Petering Time, WaterDragon, K. Roo and others

North Coast Voices will be on holiday until New Year's Eve

Animation from Google Images

Mandatory National ISP-Level Internet Filtering: Mark Newton sends a letter

Mark Newton has published yet another letter to his Federal Labor MP Kate Ellis and it is well worth reading.

Excerpt from PDF copy of the letter dated 20 December 2009:

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY FORMULATION

For the year that it has taken to conduct his six-week trial, the Minister has claimed that evidence gained from the trial will inform the policy.

The Minister also relied on evidence supplied by Mr. Tom Woods in 2007 as a justification for moving from user-based filtering (under the Coalition's policy) to ISP-based censorship due to Mr. Woods' ease of bypassing the Coalition's NetAlert filters.

So it's curious that the evidence5 delivered by Enex Testlab in the trial results released on 15 December weren't similarly persuasive.

Enex found that all of the solutions they tested could be trivially bypassed when blocking defined blacklist

(with success rates for circumvention blocking ranging from 16.2% down to a lousy 8.1%).

The success rates were higher when additional censorship methods were employed, but even then none of the products successfully prevented circumvention and all of them experienced reduced reliability.

Specially notable is that WebShield, the ISP in Australia with the most experience at running censorship systems, was included in the testing and was circumvented.

Even the experts can't prevent bypass, leaving the efficacy of these systems worse than the PC-based filtering systems employed by the previous Government.

At least a PC system can intercept your Google search to block knowledge of bypass methods.

ISP systems have no such defensive capability.

Other results of the trial include further confirmation that increases in accuracy lead to decreases in performance (You can have it fast or good - Pick one) and a moderate increase in underblocking errors as measured against the 2007 lab trial previously carried out by Enex Testlab for ACMA.

5 http://www.dbcde.gov.au/online_safety_and_security/cybersafety_plan/
internet_service_provider_isp_filtering/isp_filtering_live_pilot"

Report into the conduct of the trial. Recommendation is to ignore the Minister's press release and examine the raw data in the Enex report.

The real Rudd Family 2009 Chrissie card pic

I believe the inscription inside the Chrissie card might have read:

Will do better try to do better continue our triumphant progress on behalf of the Australian people next year.
Merry Christmas. KRudd

Moggy Musings [Archived material from Boy the Wonder Cat]

At last a tweet I understand! musing:

stilgherrian Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Miaow. Yes I know.

A Get well soon, Apollo musing: Apollo (a very intelligent cat who cunningly found himself a very comfy berth in the stilgherrian household) has just had a big op. A big get well soon wish from one moggie to another!

A Smartypantz Cats musing: Rod3000 has the best tweets. He found a Wikipedia entry which shows that cats, George, Oliver, Oreo & Henrietta all received degreees or diplomas after handing over hard cash - which was some feat for H'etta as she had been deddy for some time past.

A media says it's true musing: A Bolivian man's cat saves him from being deported from the U.K. About time that having a moggy in the family was judged to be part of a hoomanz human rights!

A cat in the dog house musing: I'm not coming out from under the bed until Clarencegirl apologises for wagging her finger at me because I went into the herb patch and mowed down the lemon grass before moving on to trim those young tomato plants - can I help it if I like my greens?!

A Just like our house musing: An amusing tweet - stilgherrian I am home and arguing with the cats about the logistics of the fishing industry.

A By George! musing: George the Pillar Valley staffie saved his owner on 25 September 2009, when he raced to her rescue and killed a highly venomous brown snake slithering near her feet. Although not normally condoning snake killing, George is being feted by his family for this daring deed.

A gaming cat musing: I had to snicker behind a paw as I watched Clarencegirl try to Circle the Cat in this itty bitty online game.

Next year's must see movie!

Click on poster to enlarge

Kevin Rudd gets anti-censorship mail from Paris

From Reporters Without Borders:

The Hon Kevin Michael Rudd

Prime Minister

Parliament House

Canberra ACT 2600 Australia

Paris, 18 December 2009

Dear Prime Minister,

Reporters Without Borders, an organisation that defends free expression worldwide, would like to share with you its concern about your government's plan to introduce a mandatory Internet filtering system. While it is essential to combat child sex abuse, pursuing this draconian filtering project is not the solution. If Australia were to introduce systematic online content filtering, with a relatively broad definition of the content targeted, it would be joining an Internet censors club that includes such countries as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced on 15 December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers (ISPs), your government intended to introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, paedophile or particularly violent content.

Reporters Without Borders would like to draw your attention to the risks that this plan entails for freedom of expression.

Firstly, the decision to block access to an "inappropriate" website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.

Secondly, the criteria that the proposed law would use are too vague. Filtering would be applied to all content considered "inappropriate," a very slippery term that could be interpreted very differently by different people. In all probability, filtering would target "refused classification" (RC) sites, a category that is extremely controversial as it is being applied to content that is completely unrelated to efforts to combat child sex abuse and sexual violence, representing a dangerous censorship option. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects.

The choice of filtering techniques has not been clearly defined. Would it be filtering by key-words, URL text or something else? And what about the ISPs that are supposed to carry out the filtering at the government's request? Will they be blamed, will they be accused of complicity in child sex abuse if the filtering proves to be ineffective, as it almost certainly will?

Your government claims that the filtering will be 100 per cent effective but this is clearly impossible. Experts all over the world agree that no filtering system is effective at combating this kind of content. On the one hand, such a system filters sites that should not be affected (such as sites about the psychology of child sexuality or paedophile crime news). And on the other, it fails to filter targeted sites because their URLs contain key-words that are completely unrelated to their content, or because their content (photo and text) is registered under completely neutral terms. Furthermore, people who are determined to visit such sites will know how to avoid the filtering by, for example, using proxy servers or censorship circumvention software or both.

The Wikileaks website highlighted the limitations of such as system when it revealed that the ACMA blacklist of already banned websites contained many with nothing reprehensible in their content. According to Wikileaks, the blacklist included the Abortion TV website, some of the pages of Wikileaks itself, online poker sites, gay networks, sites dealing with euthanasia, Christian sites, a tour operator's site and even a Queensland dentist's site.

The US company Google has also voiced strong reservations. Google Australia's head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said yesterday: "Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."

As regards paedophilia, the most dangerous places on the Internet are websites offering chat and email services. So if this project were taken to its logical conclusion, access to sites such as Gmail, Yahoo and Skype would also have to be blocked, which would of course be impossible.

There are more effective ways to combat child pornography, including tracking cyber-criminals online (by means of cookies, IP address comparison, and so on), combined with police investigation into suspects and their online habits. Why did your government end the programme launched by the previous government, which made free filtering systems available to Australian families? This procedure had the merit of being adapted to individual needs and gave each home the possibility of shielding its children from porn.

A real national debate is needed on this subject but your communications minister, Stephen Conroy, made such a debate very difficult by branding his critics as supporters of child pornography. An opportunity was lost for stimulating a constructive exchange of ideas.

We also regret the lack of transparency displayed by your government as regards the tests carried out in recent months using procedures that have been kept secret. Your government paid some 300,000 Australian dollars to ISPs to finance the tests. Australian taxpayers have a right to be given detailed information about the results.

Finally, you must be aware that this initiative is a source of a concern for your compatriots. In a recent Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 people, 96 per cent were strongly opposed to such a mandatory Internet filtering system, while around 120,000 Australians have signed a petition against Internet censorship launched by the online activist group GetUp. The withdrawal of this proposal would therefore satisfy public opinion as well as prevent a democratic country from introducing a system that threatens freedom of expression.

I thank you in advance for the consideration you give to our recommendations.

Sincerely,

Jean-François Julliard
Secretary-General

Stranger than fiction.......

Stumbled across this as I tiptoed through the tulips in Yahoo! ANSWERS.
Seems someone's done a variation on an Einfield recently:

"I've just received a speeding infringement notice form Victoria Police, Australia - although I have never been to Australia! They have my correct name, correct street name (not number) and a postcode from a few streets away. I believe I know who has given these details, and old acquaintance who moved to Australia a year or so ago - they lived in the street which the postcode on the notice had. So my question is, what should I do with this? Go to the police in the UK? Ignore it? Or will they chase it up? Also, what is likely to happen to the person who gave the false details?"

Mr. Disspain sinks his fangs in....

I think the creator of www.stephenconroy.com.au (later http://stephen-conroy.com) might think himself lucky that Chris Disspain CEO of .au Domain Administration Ltd at least endeavoured to be a little polite in correspondence, as he summarily booted the spoof site off the Australian Internet with only glancing reference to any AuDA dispute resolution policy.

Mr. 'I'm endorsed by the Federal Government' Disspain is not always polite.

Here is a sentence found in one his own company emails sent during a dispute with Larry Bloch's Netregistry: Rebelling against an 'over-zealous' regulator or just plain media whoring?

Now that's very proper executive officer language that is!
This is the man who has day-to-day control over domain registration of at least 6 million Australian websites?