"Clean Feed" Censorship, Gaming Updates (and theory), Other News

[tcpip]

Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, is embarking on a mad venture to spend tens of millions of dollars to cripple Australian Internet speed and increase consumer costs through conducting deep packet inspection to filter out "objectionable material" from Australian homes. The filter will be mandatory; there is no opt-out; in other words, the State will determine what adults are allowed to see or read - I'm sure we feel a lot safer now. Electronic Frontiers Australia have put together an informative website and action plan. Parody and ridicule is a fair option in these circumstances. I have written a fairly blunt (and open) letter on the subject to the Senator.

Michael ran another excellent session of Middle Earth Role Playing on Friday night. On Sunday after I followed up with the final session of Dyksund Caverns for RuneQuest's Shadows on the Borderland (I must write a more comprehensive review), which involved negotiations with mad ghosts (with one possessing a PC), discovering that they trapped in the caverns and their supply team had been eaten by ogres, finding a magic crystal that was powering a dormant demigod, launching an attack on a homestead inhabited by said ogres and ogre children (nasty little buggers; rather like the Children of the Corn) and giving chase to a number who escaped into the wilderness (for future plot developments - bwahahaha!). A good roleplaying session involves all the players throughout the session, provides both motivations and conflict (internal and external) for all the characters and occurs within a plausible (albeit often exotic) setting with a consistent sense of narrative flow. Most of my gaming sessions manage to do this reasonable well; this one however worked extremely well. I have also been working an article "Improving Mongoose's RuneQuest" for The Grimoire, which is initially inspired by a thread I started on rpg.net with the title Armour in Mongoose RuneQuest Considered Harmful.

The new rodents have settled in and are proving themselves to be a source of great amusement with 'Trouble' proving to be most social. Most things workwise are just fine, although I'm having a small war getting the Shibboleth module for Drupal to play nice, and ditto for the source version of SciLab. On a health-related issue, I seem to have acquired (goodness knows how) a minor case of pyelonephritis, which I do not recommend to anyone; antibiotics have been prescribed and blood tests are pending.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I share your sentiments. Like yourself any interest on material that is probably going to be blacklisted is purely academic. My political concern is that the blacklist will be expanded and as such our democratic rights are reduced.

After all, the State hardly has a good reputation on such matters, as recent (and local) reports make clear. Basically, I don't really trust this government and I certainly don't trust future governments not to misuse the technology.

As for performance metrics, there have been some recent "improvements" but despite the glowing PR-like responses, it still deserves a fail.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

And there are other really pressing concerns about this too: filtering HTTPS traffic is one I hadn't thought about. So we're passing all of our encrypted banking and financial data via a government body that wont tell us what it does with this information?

I'm sorry, that dog won't hunt.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Maybe we can blacklist some banks? :)

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

You've hit what I believe is the most important economic point to this whole stupid idea. Therefore, it may be our best hope for this getting stopped.

Around 1% of families opt to use the government's existing free filter package or an ISP-provided solution and the other 99% don't. Rudd and Conroy clearly don't care what we think. However, filters which intercept https traffic are a signficant issue for our financial institutions. I'm sure our banks will be able to extrapolate a worst-case scenario regarding ISP employees stealing banking data and selling it and, when they do, maybe they'll make it clear to Conroy that he's being a dickhead.

Also note that none of the government tested filters filters any IM or p2p protocols whatsoever, so the majority of the internet's traffic (and the vast majority of its porn) would be totally unaffected by the filters, except for being slowed down.

[zey.livejournal.com]

You've hit what I believe is the most important economic point to this whole stupid idea. Therefore, it may be our best hope for this getting stopped.

I think you're right, but, what a sad and sorry state of affairs to be saying this about the Labor Party; once the voice for workers and disadvantaged, now just another group of right-wing neo-conservative technocrats :-(.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

what a sad and sorry state of affairs to be saying this about the Labor Party

Yeah, but it's entirely been like that post-Whitlam. Also, the right within the Labor Party are split; one one hand there's the technocrats (whom one can actually work with) - on the other hand there's the wowser faction.

Now they've been in the Party for a very long time because such radical Catholicism is part of the working class (the Tories have their evangelical Protestants).

Conroy, as the Right's main factional leader is particularly interesting because he combines both points of view.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

For "particularly interesting", I would substitute "particularly scary".