…are not publicly available. You can, however, determine if a site is ON the list.

Vendors of PC based filters that were offered by the Government can be used to determine whether a site is on the ACMA blacklist by the message given when the site is blocked.

I post this mainly to defer questions about whether or not I have a copy of the ACMA blacklist. I don’t, it is not publicly available. The only way I have been able to tell that the above is possible is because I use Integard on my own PC and it blocked a google result whilst searching for the origins of a meme mentioned on Twitter.

Anyone familiar with Memes knows the particular wiki site to which I refer, but I refuse to link it here as I fear it may be illegal to do so despite the site’s frequent mentioning on perfectly legal websites.

When an ACMA blacklisted site is blocked by a Net Alert filter there is no option for a system administrator to unblock the site and the user is informed that the site is permanently blocked.

Given the nature of this site, it is confirmation that the ACMA does not just filter the illicit parts of sites, but the entire site.

My opinion here differs from some in the NoCleanfeed lobby. I don’t think that the blacklist should be available for public scrutiny. It is the unfortunate nature of blacklists to be leaked. It would take mere seconds before internet users outside of the Censorwall will be enabled in accessing this content.

I know this information isn’t new and would be known by anyone using a government filter, but it seems that everybody was surprised when I mentioned it.

Jim Wallace is the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. His recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald drew much criticism from those closely following the ISP filtering debate for, at best using out of date information and at worst using outright lies.

Here I have reproduced his article and provided correction and commentary to his main points.

***

It will be the downfall of the internet, the end of free speech as we know it. It will lull parents into a false sense of security, and it doesn’t even work.

But just as students are taught not to believe everything they read on the internet, so should we not believe everything said about it. Some things are too important to leave to drown in a pool of misinformation, and internet filtering is one of them.

That is true Jim, let’s see why your article does nothing but add lies and misinformation to the debate.

The industry tries to tell us we don’t want this, but a national Newspoll commissioned by the Australia Institute in 2003 showed that 93 per cent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they did. We can assume they would only want it if it worked, and current trials of automatic filtering of pornography are meant to see if it is technically feasible. The results of the two trials to date show that it is increasingly so.

The 2003 poll by the Australia Institute, despite being horribly out of date by any modern market research standards, framed a completely different system to the one currently proposed.

“Would you support a system which automatically filtered out Internet
pornography going into homes unless adult users asked otherwise?”

The 93% support quoted by Jim Wallace was in no way linked to the idea of an ISP level filter and framed a situation where parents could opt out of the filter. Imagine if the question had been worded to accurately reflect the current situation:

“Would you support a mandatory system which automatically filtered out any ‘unwanted content’ such as not yet classified foreign websites and anti-abortion sites such as abortiontv.com?”

I can understand that the government would want empirical evidence before judging the technical effectiveness of the filter, but the conduct of the trials has so far been incompetent and poorly managed by the DBCDE. So poorly managed as to ruin any chance of trustworthy results. Experts in the field would be less inclined to oppose the trials if they were run in accordance with some form of scientific method.

Our dependence on the internet makes us all very sensitive to anything that might degrade its performance, and opponents of filtering have mounted a shamelessly misleading campaign to exploit this fear.

The activist group GetUp!, for example, has raised a petition with the alarmist statement that filtering “will slow the internet by up to 87 per cent”, but the claim is based solely on the worst results of the products trialled.

That ‘worst result’ was in fact two out of the 6 filters that had worse than 75% network degradation and were also the only filters capable of only overblocking 3% of sites that shouldn’t have been blocked.

It conveniently omits to advise would-be signatories that the trial results released in mid-2008 showed another of the filter products tested slowed internet performance by less than 2 per cent, and three products slowed it by less than 30 per cent. As one commentator has noted, GetUp!’s selective use of figures is like reporting on the first trial of refrigeration and writing off the technology because one freezer failed to cool the meat.

The filters with less than 30% degradation were prone to block legitimate websites at a completely unacceptable level. Jim’s analogy of writing off refrigeration is cute, but would be more accurately put as writing off refrigerating your entire house to keep your meat from spoiling because it doesn’t keep it from spoiling, makes life remarkably uncomfortable for everyone in the house and there is this better technology called a refrigerator that is better in every way, shape and form.

Another legitimate test for any filtering system is that it doesn’t block an unacceptable level of legal material.

Internet service providers and the sex industry would want us to believe it would, and have commissioned at least one study full of expressions of woe. But isn’t that why we’re having a trial?

Jim, lumping advocates of free speech in with the sex industry in some vile conspiracy to maintain smut levels in Australian homes just shows that you have little to no respect for the intellect of Australian adults.

We would welcome a trial, if that’s what it was. Senator Conroy and yourself have both erroneously called this latest test of ISP level filtering a ‘live pilot’, when it is niether live nor a pilot. It is, again, a closed system prototype. The only difference between this prototype and the Enex prototype from last year is that this one will be using the equipment used by ISPs. It will not use real world internet traffic, it will not use real world internet conditions and it will not use the actual prohibited list.

The latest Australian Communications and Media Authority trial report, published last year, showed the proportion of illegal and inappropriate content that was successfully blocked averaged above 92 per cent. This was a significant improvement on the 2005 trial, and we would expect more improvements in future.

Just as importantly, the rate of “over-blocking”, or preventing access to acceptable material, was in most cases less than 3 per cent, also a dramatic improvement on the 2005 trial. And again, unless you are a technology sceptic, this is inevitably going to improve.

We can indeed expect improvements in the future, that is the nature of technology. We can expect improvements in the technology used by paedophiles to circumvent the filters as well. We are not chasing a stationary target. What these trials fail to acknowledge is that they are completely reactionary, they can only filter something that the authorities are aware of.

Every time a new technology is released, the government will need to pile money into trying to filter it, and every time they do, they will be starting from square one again. It has taken 10 years for the filtering of simple http traffic to come this far; what about more complex traffic? ISP level filtering is a Band-Aid, it can be as efficient as it likes and still not be nearly effective enough. The only real solution is law enforcement.

Realising that the trials are likely to prove them wrong, opponents of filtering have thrown in something sure to get everyone animated: “censorship”.

The trials could only prove us wrong if they were conducted in a scientifically rigorous manner. Since we have made calls for the trials to be conducted in a more transparent and thorough in their use of scientific method, we are plainly not worried about what the trials could prove. All we ask is that the trials prove something, anything, that can be relied on. So far this has not been the case.

From the outset, it has been clear this system is not going to stop any adult from viewing anything that is legal. They can “opt in” to do so. Child pornography would be blocked to all, but the benefit of the initiative is not just in terms of how well it deals with child pornography, but how well it meets the aspirations of the 93 per cent of parents of 12- to 17-year-olds in protecting their children from both legal and illegal pornography.

Time and time again, the assertion that ‘this system is not going to stop any adult from viewing anything that is legal’ has been debunked by close analysis of the relevant legislation. The ACMA black-list bans content that, while illegal to broadcast, is perfectly legal for an adult to view. For instance, where the ACMA receives a complaint about foreign internet content. The content isn’t even forwarded to the classification board; if the ACMA ‘thinks’ it might be prohibited, it is classified as ‘potentially prohibited’ and thrown on the ACMA black-list. It is not illegal until it has been classified as such. Only Australian hosted content is forwarded to the classification board.

A clear example of this occurred only a few days ago. An anti-abortion web site was added to the ACMA black-list despite two things. Firstly, there was no pornographic or child exploitation material on the website, and secondly, the DBCDE had previously claimed that political content would not be blocked.

Contrary to some of the dubious claims, there is a very real problem with children being exposed to inappropriate material on the internet.

How is a report backed by 49 Attorney’s General in the United Stated a ‘dubious claim’? Even if it was a very real threat, how does abrogating the role of parents solve the issue?

In their 2003 report for the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton and Michael Flood said: “Eighty-four per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls say they have been exposed accidentally to sex sites on the internet and two in five boys deliberately use the internet to see sexually explicit material, with 4 to 5 per cent doing so frequently …

“There are special concerns regarding violent and extreme material on the internet including depictions of non-consenting sexual acts such as rape and bestiality.”

A PC based filter would deal with all of those. There is no need for the filtering to be ISP level.

Concerned parents do not view filtering as interfering with their parental responsibilities; they welcome the help. There is no substitute for parental supervision, but parents cannot be everywhere. They expect governments to help provide a protective environment.

The government was helping until they took away the funding from the Net Alert project. If parents welcomed the help, why is nobody but the free speech lobby upset that PC filters were ditched? One of those filters currently works fine on my computer and circumvention is easily preventable by anyone willing to take half an hour to set it up properly.

The internet is a fabulous resource for everyone, including our young people, but it has the potential to cause great harm if reasonable safeguards are not put in place. The real story here is not the dreadful repercussions of having internet filtering, but the dreadful repercussions of not having it.

The repercussions of not having ISP level filtering include:

• More money for law enforcement
• More money to subsidise optional ISP offered filtering schemes
• More money to subsidise and develop PC based filtering options
• Australia maintains a hope of having a competitive digital economy in the future
• We do not have in place the infrastructure required to instantly quell freedom of speech by future governments
• We do not have an ISP level choke point that can be exploited by internet hack groups.

The ‘dreadful repercussions’ you mention are easily solvable by technologies that do not pose such a threat to freedom of speech. Keep in mind, Jim, some Christian doctrine runs afoul of anti-villifycation laws in many states. The irony is that if a Christian website was blocked for vilifying homosexuals, I would be one of the first people to defend your right to free speech.

…it’s just that the government would like them to feel otherwise.

An argument greatly relied upon by pro-censorship bloggers is that parents are overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of online pornography and the difficult task of ensuring their children aren’t exposed to illicit content.

I’m sure that those same censorship advocates are aware of existing PC based filtering applications that give parents the ability to monitor their children’s Internet access, even when the parents aren’t around (gasp).

I’m sure these same censorship advocates are aware of the numerous anti-malware systems available, often for free, that can combat the pornographic pop-ups that are raised as examples of the unrelenting pornographic assault on our children.

I’m sure these same censorship advocates are aware that the family, and indeed parenting, is supposedly held up as a shining value of our way of life and that parents are at all times concerned with the well-being of their children above all else.

I’m sure these same censorship advocates are capable of understanding the importance of the Internet’s structural integrity in promoting Australia’s tech credentials and therefore establishing more jobs and lifting financial pressure off families; filtering has already and will continue to lower business confidence in the Australian tech industry.

Apart from being rude and entirely patronising, the assertion that parents are desperate for the government to intervene by way of full ISP filtering is an apt example of a philosophical basis of conservatism. Conservatives, or at least the ones that haven’t tried to PR their way out of it, base social policy on the idea that people won’t make the right decisions unless the government/monarchy/aristocracy makes it for them.

Conservatism is an institutionalised lack of faith in the general population.

There’s a few of us that spend quite a bit of time each day researching and collating information about the government’s ISP filter plan. There’s the occasional blogger that supports the filter that needs to be engaged, there’s the worryingly steady stream of civil rights infringements happening around the world in the name of child protection and there’s the increasing need to convince the mainstream of the threat that the ISP filter poses to parents.

Last night’s meeting of the Brisbane Twitter Underground Brigade (#BTUB) made me think. Perhaps Senator Conroy is deliberately stalling this whole filtering process to capitalise on the short attention span of most Internet users.

Take the Net Neutralitydebate in the US. Major Telcos made huge donations to a  number of Congressmen to gain support for a law enabling those telcos to hold back Internet data that hadn’t paid the telco a premium.

In that case, the threat to the Internet was clear. The debate raged for months until the geeks cheered with victory. The problem was, there was no victory. There hasn’t been any solid resolution to the issue and the threat remains.

Likewise here, the threat to the Internet needs to be seen in a long term context. Conroy is a union heavyweight. He is used to dealing with far more determined opponents. If he thinks he can get his way just by waiting till the attention span of your average Facebook user expires, he will.

I spoke about this at the December 13 rally in Brisbane. The tech savvy originators of this movement need to keep in mind that they are playing with the big boys of politics now. They can’t just leave a scathing comment on their blog and watch them shrivel up and log off.

If Conroy thinks that this filter will win him votes, he will stall it till closer to the next election. By then, an unaided blogosphere will be winded and drained.

Fortunately this debate hasn’t really breached the mainstream. It’s not something you hear about on B105 news on the way to dropping off the kids to school.

This being the case, there is still a fair depth of support to plumb and a decent amount of ‘omfgdrama’ for bloggers to focus on. Indeed, this will be the course the whole campaign will take now; there will be a shift towards sending messages to parents.

Conroy has two advantages here, he is practised and he is scary. Scare tactics are regrettably effective when dealing with overworked and overstressed parents.

The advantage of the anti-censorwall lobby is, however, an understanding of the long term stability of the Internet and how important it is to families and industry. Conroy believes that the Internet must be sanitised in order for it to be more appealing to families and business. What he fails to understand, however, is that the Internet has only become the powerful global variable it is today because it has not adhered to traditional business and governmental doctrine.

Business finds the Internet so enticing because of its boundless opportunity and scope for innovation. Business knows better than anyone, however, that the bureaucratic minds of government officials can only do one thing to opportunity and innovation – stifle it.

So whereas Conroy believes that the attention span of the Internet community is relatively short, we know for a fact that Conroy’s attention span is locked into a six-year cycle. The Internet is too important to society to leave it to people locked into such institutionalised myopia. 

In contrast to this, we are now starting to see the rise of the online notion that everything can be kept forever. As storage and bandwidth becomes cheaper and more effective, e-business and online communities are beginning to realise that data can be stockpiled for a much longer period than even governments are used to.

Over the next 50 years, we will see the online repository of collected works and information give rise to changed social method. Our social memory will be longer as digital records are kept ad infinitum. Governments will be less able to hide behind the short memory of human voters. The Internet, the web, the online community will become the ‘fifth estate’.

Already we’ve seen how the government’s determination of what is or isn’t appropriate is unreliable. Only a day after Senator Conroy publicly claimed that the government had no intention of filtering political content, the ACMA began blacklisting abortion-related websites.

In Australia, there is no set right of free speech, it is shakily implied from the constitution in court-made law; these laws are easily overwritten by parliament. Kevin Rudd’s hasn’t constructed his Australian Bill of Rights proposal in a way that will sufficiently prevent future governments from removing our rights. These are rights that people will give up if they are sufficiently scared by the kind of propaganda Conroy is known for.

The online community needs to keep track of Conroy’s political methods. Australians need to stand up for themselves and say no this government plan to abrogate the place of parents in society. We need to ensure that our children can benefit from at least the same opportunities we had. 

If we allow the internet to remain a place for innovation and opportunity, our children might even have better opportunities than we had.

MX Wed 21/01/09

Naomi Bicheno

“A $200 on-the-spot fine [for fare evasion] can easily avoided by paying a few dollars for the correct fare.”

If the correct fare only cost a few dollars, 3,608 people in total would not have had so much trouble paying it last month.

I asked Kieran how much he would expect to pay if I told him something cost a few dollars, and he said $2-3. The dictionary defines “a few” as “being more than one but indefinitely small in number”.

A zone 1 daily return ticket starts from $4.80 minimum (assuming that most people who catch public transport in one direction usually want to get back home later). How is me having to find a $5 note a few dollars?

It becomes even more incorrect because the majority of commuters who use public transport on a daily basis do so because they don’t live in an inner-city suburb. A zone 1-4 return ticket costs $7.60, and now it is definitely becoming inconvenient to pay using “a few dollars” since it would require eight dollar coins which is more than double what most Australians would consider to be a few dollars. And that barely even takes you to the outer suburbs of Brisbane.

A daily ticket can go all the way up to $37.60 for zone 23 (for the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast commuters).

Does this mean that if I’m ever caught without a ticket, I can say “A TransLink spokesman informed me that I can avoid the fine by paying a few dollars,” and then hand the inspector $3 in coins?

This leads me to my second public transport complaint. If a bus turns up significantly late (say, more than 5 minutes), why should I have to pay for my journey at all? At the very least I should get a discount. I see it as a contract, I’m paying them to turn up on time so that I reach my destination on time. If they frequently can’t get me to my destination at the time that they advertised, how can they be so hypocritcal as to crack down on collecting money from me when they fail to hold up their side of the bargain to give me what I thought I was paying for.

Despite numerous claims that the Labor government will not use the filter to hamper political discourse, the ACMA has begun blocking political sites such as the anti-abortion advocacy site abortiontv.com.

In a test of Senator Conroy’s claims that the ACMA blacklist contains only illegal content, whirlpool community user xFoadx sent a random page from abortiontv.com to the ACMA complaints department. This was the response he received:

Subject: Complaint Reference: 2009000009/ ACMA-691604278
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:45:00 +1100
From: online@acma.gov.au
Complaint Reference: 2009000009/ ACMA-691604278
I refer to the complaint that you lodged with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) on 5th January 2009 about certain content made available at:
http://www.abortiontv.com/Pics/AbortionPictures6.htm
Following investigation of your complaint, ACMA is satisfied that the internet content is hosted outside Australia, and that the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content.
The Internet Industry Association (IIA) has a code of practice (http://www.iia.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=415&Itemid=33) for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which, among other things, set out arrangements for dealing with such content. In accordance with the code, ACMA has notified the above content to the makers of IIA approved filters, for their attention and appropriate action. The code requires ISPs to make available to customers an IIA approved filter.
Information about ACMA’s role in regulating online content (including internet and mobile content), including what is prohibited or potentially prohibited content is available at ACMA’s website at www.acma.gov.au/hotline
Thank you for bringing this matter to ACMA’s attention.

Regardless of the graphic nature of some images on the site, there is no doubt that this is a social advocacy site and not pornographic. 

This ACMA ruling means that Australian based PC filtering vendors will have this site added to their list of blocked sites and that, if Conroy’s censorwall is implemented, this site will be blocked within the 1300 site blacklist.

This move has alienated even the conservatives that originally mandated the filter. Discussion amongst the Sydney Anglican community shows concern that religious sites may be blocked due to anti-vilification laws deeming the orthodox anti-homosexual beliefs of the church as illegal or ‘unwanted’. 

Anglican community moderator Luke Stevens writes:

Could Sydneyanglicans.net be blocked as “illegal” if it carries material deemed at some point now or in the future as vilifying other religions?

Senator Minchin, Conroy’s shadow minister, has written an article in the Sydney Morning Herald slamming Conroy’s plan to censor the internet.

I recently posted a list of top 10 people Senator Conroy would hate if he was listening and was amazed by the response it received. Indeed, there were unsung heroes that needed to be announced, nay, trumpeted to the masses. These masses must now be made aware of the encroaching threat to their freedom of speech.

Unlike our parliament, however, our heroes combine style with substance. It is that substance that I aim to collate here and focus, not only for those that wish to know everything about the censorwall, but also for those that want the kernel of truth in the ‘NoCleanFeed’ issue.

5: Websinthe Del.icio.us link list.

This is a growing list of everything ever written about Conroy’s ISP censorship plans and the online #NoCleanFeed movement. Because it is hosted on del.icio.us, it is easily usable, sortable, tagged and you can be automatically alerted about updates. Ideal for social network types and people that frequently use the Internet.

4: OCAU Coverage guide (wiki)

This site has what is currently the most comprehensive list of articles, blog posts, polls, videos and groups regarding the issue. The list is set up as a wiki document and so can be added to and edited by users subject to future editing by other users.

3: Whirlpool community guide to ISP filtering

While perhaps not as comprehensive as the OCAU list, this guide is certainly more action focused and is more likely to lead to results. It still has a very comprehensive list of mainstream media articles but also contains letter templates and various other resources for actual change. It is also slightly more succinct.

2: Libertus

Libertus.net, maintained by veteran free-speech campaigner Irene Graham, is the most mature, well researched and trustworthy source of quotable, academic level discourse on the subject of censorship in Australia. No other source comes close for use by journalists and academics but it remains useful to lay-people due to Irene’s exquisite writing. Her article on Statistics laundering (not nearly as boring as it sounds) is required reading for anyone wishing to take themselves seriously in this issue.

1: Mark Newton’s reply to the governmental form letter.

Since Senator Conroy’s office tried to have Mark Newton silenced for speaking out against the incompetence shown by the DBCDE during the original filter trials, two things have been true: Mark Newton has lead the fight against this idiotic scheme and, importantly, the entire Labor party has been ignoring constituant’s correspondence and, at most, replying with a pro-forma letter that has time and time again been debunked, disproved and found to contain outright lies by Conroy’s office.

In the end, the government has been shown that their policy is a bad idea and will not accomplish anything positive at all.

Mark has written a pro-forma of his own and released it into the public domain. This letter is number one on this list as it contains absolutely everything that is wrong about the government’s stance and gives factual evidence and sound references to support itself.

Special thanks to Jasmine Marosvary in inspiring this article.

The Hotel Grand Chancellor in Adelaide is easy to miss if you’re doing the speed limit. The hotel sits on the corner of one of Adelaide’s main streets and a small back alley and unfortunately, it faces the back alley; only a small sign gives any indication as to the hotel’s location.

I parked my Jeep Patriot out the front of the hotel, in the alley. I looked around and immediately locked the car, it was 11pm on a Thursday and there was a drunkard projecting vomit over the wall 10 meters down from the hotel main entrance. So far so good.

Naomi greeted the lady at the desk as I dragged our large bag into the lobby. The girl took a moment to click out of what she was doing on the computer.

“Yes?” she asked.

The girl served us without a single distraction from her personality or sense of friendliness. We asked where we could park the car and were greeted with a blank stare. Naomi reminded the girl that we had been told there was parking when we had made the booking. The girl snapped to and remembered that they had off-site parking in a back street nearby. I already felt nervous; I would be parking an expensive hire car with a $3000 liability in off-site parking.

We left the luggage in the lobby and took the car to the carpark using the girl’s instructions. We pulled into yet another back alley off Adelaide’s notorious Hindley street. It was narrow enough that the Jeep was a shaky bet in the close confines. Graffiti ran the walls on either side of the alley.

We went back to the hotel, checked in and headed back out again to meet Naomi’s friend. The carpark was stashed neatly behind a raging beer garden and was playing host as the local ‘thursday-piss-up-wall-to-piss-on’ to a handful of young guys that I urged Naomi past quickly.

Naomi spotted a couple of young men coming into the carpark after us, they looked as though they were heading towards a red silvia that was parked slightly down-ramp from where we were walking. Both were white, tall, slim with athletic build, one had spikey blonde hair and the other dark hair. The blonde one was wearing jeans and a red shirt.

My first indication of trouble was when I heard “…f-ck these c-nts up.” I turned to look back, they were following us. I looked at Naomi, she had obviously heard them and had started jogging. I quickened my pace and looked back. They were running after us.

I took off, Naomi had already started sprinting before I’d turned around. There was swearing and threats coming from our pursuers. Naomi got to the car, I yanked her door open and she jumped in. Naomi only just managed to hit the door locks before they started yanking at the door handles. I got into the car just as the two hooligans started attacking the windows.

I give my thanks to Jeep, the force with which those two were hitting our windows was horrifying. One of them split a knuckle on the door-frame; I wiped the blood of the car later.

I sped off, I was ashamed of myself for being so terrified. They chased the car past the security booth and kept pounding the back of the car until I sped out of the back alley.

Naomi and I took a while to calm down.

The reaction of the Hotel? They refunded our $12 parking charge.

Not good enough and I wouldn’t recommend the hotel to anyone. The hotel’s decor is in no way enough to make up for its horrible service and location. My questions are these:

• Where was security? The security guard was not 10 meters away from this whole situation as we had parked close to the exit.
• My fiance was threatened physically in the carpark they provided, how is that acceptable?
• When we reported the incident, all the hotel could offer as alternative parking was an illegal spot in the alley in front of the entrance (tow away zone). Is that the best they could come up with?
• Do they actually think that a $12 refund is enough to say ’sorry your fiance was nearly beaten in our carpark’.

Liability aside, this is an utter failure of customer service. I’m truly sorry that this happened because I was looking forward to staying at this hotel. The Adelaide Hotel Grand Chancellor is in no way deserving of a 4 star rating from our experience. In my opinion I recommend it is avoided.

It’s 2:26Am on a Monday morning and I am just about ready to march down to Canberra and bury Senator Conroy under the 144 seperate articles that have been linked on Twitter regarding his censorwall in the last month alone.

You might notice that I’ve added a del.icio.us button to my sidebar, I’d seriously recommend checking it out for references on the filter issue, there’s already the bespoke 144 articles and that should increase over the next week as I trawl the collective information streams of the various twitterati concerned.

Please make my job easier and if you’ve written an article that didn’t get much coverage, link it here and I’ll add it.

This is all part of a slightly larger project which I’ll announce by Friday. That is assuming it hasn’t killed me first. It’s been a while since I’ve spent this much time doing anything constructive.

I’m actually amazed at the sheer amount that has been written about this issue. I thought I had been keeping relatively good track of what was being published both online and offline. It looks as though I was wrong. There’s a real data mine over in the Whirlpool community that I just hadn’t been keeping a track of.

I must admit that I am impressed with del.icio.us. It has surprised me, I thought I had tried it at one stage and remembered it being remarkably dry and not particularly useful. I was wrong there again. Check it out, it’s worth it if you approach it with a plan or some kind of mission.

Okay, far too many serious posts in a row for somebody who started their blogging career by sending flippant emails to his girlfriend during lunch breaks at work.

I remember a certain style that used to apply to my posts. There was a flow to the words that sat somewhere between Jerry Haulkins and Jerry Springer, all lyrical, all moronic.

I suppose it’s time to do some actual bloggin, not the credibility building pissing contest that my blog has become lately. Yes, I am trying to get work as a freelance writer. Yes, I know that potential clients are reading this site. The truth is, if you look at my writing and decide not to hire me based on some offense or differing of opinion, chances are that you’re not particularly pleasant to work with. Tolerance is a virtue, and I have ways of finding those that have it and those that don’t.

I tolerate just about anyone that isn’t deliberately trying to start a war or make someone else feel bad about their lifestyle. Even then I don’t usually take exception.

Ahh, the wicked tangents of free-flow writing.

I’ve actually been kind of busy lately despite the lack of results. Sure, I have 2 or 3 new websites to my name. Sure, I’m engaged. Sure, I’m not poor or living with my parents. Still, it would be nice to have a few more writing jobs up my sleeve.

I’m completely bailing from the Gaza issue; I’m just not built for it. There’s far too much at stake and far too much lying going on for me to want to spend the required time to wrestle in that ring. People spend their entire lives grappling that issue and still don’t have the whole thing sussed out. I think it would be presumptuous of me to try.

I’ve only locked my jaws on the censorship issue because, well, I’m special okay. That and because it directly affects me and those I love. I’m constantly amazed at the lack of perspective shown by the pro-censorwall lobby. Mike the Observer came first, but at least he was reasonable enough to back down when he realised he was, well, wrong. A new contender has blundered their way into the debate and has made more of a mess of themselves than Mike ever did.

Enter Verity Pravda. The blogger that presumes to cover themselves in the labels of truth seeks to censor it.

Okay, that might be a little unfair. The kid has done well for themselves trying to tackle names like Mark Newton, Stilgherrian and Bob Bain over at Stil’s blog. Still, it comes down to the same old fight, veteran anti-censors versus somebody arguing like they only started thinking about it yesterday. The problem with these guys is that they aren’t sitting around talking about the issue, which is what the anti-censorship lobby does, we talk about it, we talk it through, we take it to inevitable conclusions. It appears that our opposition is somewhat myopic and at the very least, basing future projections on poor assumptions of internet realities.

I’m going to bed now, because, well, even I need sleep, and the ibuprofen will be wearing off soon.

Please note, using my online comments against me in real life is getting old. Try attacking me with substance not with petty attacks on my character.