CyberBunk

If you’re an Australian who has been living in a bubble for the past few months, you may not be aware of the Federal Government’s plan to introduce a censorship filter on the country’s internet. Essentially any content deemed “harmful or inappropriate” for children will be blocked, as well as all sites pertaining to “illegal” activities. The proposal is seen opposition from ISP directors, State Governments and Media Censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is insisting on pushing this proposal through.

There are many things wrong with the Minister’s, including technical feasibility, effectiveness and freedom of speech issues. Some of the technical issues include ¹:

• The filtering software will severely decrease the speed of legitimate web traffic, slowing internet access up to 80%
• The filters will create a huge number of false positives, resulting in the mistaken blocking of thousands of legitimate websites
• The filters only apply to illegal or objectional material delivered via web pages, ignoring all banned material that is distributed via other means, such as ftp or bittorrent.
• The filters are easily bypassed using Proxy’s or VPN systems by any determined individual, including children.

There are also freedom of speech concerns, including the definition of “illegal” or “harmful and inappropriate” material. Whilst euthanasia may be illegal in this country, discussing it or searching for information about it should not be illegal. How far will it go ? Whose morality will the filters conform to ? Letting this pass could open the floodgates for all kinds of speech suppression. Today its euthanasia, tomorrow it might be differing religious views, or political ideals.

The filters will be mandatory in every home and school in the country. Users will be able to “opt-out” of the “harmful and inappropriate” filter, but not the “illegal” filter. Nevertheless, the filters will still be in place, and will still negatively affect every single Australian internet user’s bandwidth. Forked out for high speed broadband internet ? Prepare to have up to 80% of your bandwidth taken away.

The protection of our children from “harmful and inappropriate” material should be the domain of the parents, not the government. Parents need to take an active interest in what their children are exposed to on the internet. Monitor their activity. Install a personal software filter on your PC, its cheaper, more reliable, more customisable, and doesn’t have massive repercussions on the rest of the country’s internet usage.

DON’T let the Government waste millions of dollars on ineffective and restrictive filtering systems which will cripple our nation’s internet.

For more information about the Australian Federal Government’s plan for censoring Australia’s Internet, visit nocleanfeed.com.

^{1. http://nocleanfeed.com/learn.html}

There were mumblings around midnight last night that the Firefox 3 final version had been uploaded to the Mozilla public ftp server prior to the official release at 10am San Francisco time. There were also copies flying around the BitTorrent network, often accompanied with cries of “FAKE FAKE!!”. It seems there is some confusion as to whether these early releases are the real deal, or just the Release Candidate 3, based largely on the fact that the RC3 and so called “Final” releases appeared to be identical.

As it turns out the RC3 has been re-released as the final version without modification, a fact supported by the files themselves:

and in the MD5SUMS files on the Mozilla FTP

So if you, like myself, are already running the RC3 version of Firefox3, and don’t feel the need to add to the download count on spreadfirefox.com, save your bandwidth (and the download servers) and don’t bother downloading it again.

I’ve written a small plugin for WordPress to display recent activity on my development projects. The plugin tracks recently modified files contained within project directories and displays files modified within a settable period. New projects can be added and edited through an interface contained in the “Manage” section of the WP backend. The basic backend interface is based on the excellent WP-Quotes plugin by Dustin Barnes.

You can see the plugin in action in the rightmost sidebar. The plugin is set to list all files within my project directories modified in the last 20 minutes.

The plugin is pretty specialised so I doubt many people will find much use for it. I’ll work on refining it some more and adding some additional functionality and then will release it to the public.

Welcome to my new site.

I’ve finally purchased my own domain, and a years worth of webhosting with Unlimited-Space.com. I’m planning to use my domain (timparkinson.net) as a portal for all of my web development projects, as well as a testing area for new projects and ideas. Also appearing here is the blog you are reading, in which I’ll keep track of new developments and keep everyone updated.

To give everyone an idea of what you will see on here, below is a quick summary of my current projects.

JumentoCMS is a web standard compliant, Wiki-style Content Management System, which I have been building from scratch. The project started as a basic content managed website for a LAN group I was affiliated with, and turned into a full blown CMS project. The primary goal of Jumento is to take the hard work out of creating and maintaining a basic website, and to make it simple enough for non-technical users to use, whilst maintaining high evels of web and accessibility compliance.

CerebralStorm grew out of my frustration at the difficulties of coming up with ideas for projects. The concept basically allows users to post their ideas for web, software, or any other projects, and in a form of group brainstorming, the idea is defined and refined to the point where a willing programmer/developer takes the job on, and develops the system. The development process is tracked through the site as well, keeping the original poster and the rest of the community up to date with the projects progress.

The Motivator is a little tool that I am developing to help me manage my time. The system allows users to add lists full of tasks to be completed, with information such as urgency, due dates etc. The users also create lists of rewards, which they will be given once they mark a task as complete. Rewards are chosen randomly, and once redeemed cannot be given again.

SuggestIt Is a simple little tool which allows the general public to submit short ideas for websites. This is basically a highly simplified version of CerebralStorm.