I have noticed the collective apoplexy being experienced by Australia’s dubiously educated soccer mums and under-employed social academics over Sandilands’ latest trick. I have noticed the vitriolic and panic-stricken cries of the media as they reach for the low hanging fruit of public angst. I have noticed everyone getting off on the chance to once again take a piss into the wind that is Kyle bloody Sandilands.

So while Hetty and friends sharpen their knives and polish their cheque books, Kyle has been apologising and dodging bullets. I’m sure the Labor party is grateful for his ability to distract the ‘feral goldfish’ and take the pressure off them for a few minutes while they sit down with their mates and work out how to deny next month’s installment of Two and a half Factions.

Mother’s Milk

Kyle didn’t pull the plug in time. That is all. He was not trying to verbally molest the poor girl. That was the mother’s job. This woman has to be one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen.

Listen lady, Kyle’s getting a beating over this, so here’s your turn. You are a bad mother. You have failed your daughter. You sold her out for tickets to a concert. You were too fucking stupid to avoid a very obvious and very dangerous subject on national fucking radio. You were asked by the producers if such information existed and you fucking lied.

I’m inclined to believe that you lied deliberately so this situation would arise. That’s abuse on an appalling level.

Kyle’s career as a shock jock is nothing compared to your lack of upbringing. Your daughter was failed by an older man and failed by your lack of maternal ability. Sixty thousand years of evolution has been fucking lost on you.

Moral Decay?

Meanwhile the term ‘moral decay’ has reared it’s ugly head at least once. Moral decay hey? Well, thank God I’m a writer, I’m relevant regardless of how dystopian we get. There’s a word that means, exactly, the application of moral decay to this whole scenario; practice it with me.

Bullshit

It might take you a while to sound it out, especially given contemporary standards of literacy. Moral decay is not the right term here. Let me explain.

Moral decay is a result of moral stagnation. Put simply, morals will only decay if we let them stand still for too long. The world moves and so must our morals. Keeping them set in stone is a wonderful way of sending society backwards. Even Clive Hamilton writes about the need to establish new moral standards. Unfortunately for Clive, his definition of ‘new’ is ‘what he remembers from watching The Brady Bunch‘. Even worse, he’s not alone. Kevin Rudd’s neo-conservative movement has been a rallying cry for the bigots and religious throwbacks of the country.

This leads me to the real point…

This is about stupidity, not manners

Sure manners comes into it, but only on the periphery. Kyle was too stupid to pull the plug on a woman who was too stupid not to sexually abuse her daughter on national radio. The media is too stupid to pick the real culprit and the public is too stupid to realise that the media is shafting them.

Someone shows us a front page and our brains go to shit.

We’re shown to be a nation of dumbasses by the level of entertainment we crave, something goes wrong because of the vapid tits that come up with this shit and then the professional crybabies rush in and, instead of contributing any useful analysis, simply reinforce the notion that we’re collectively brain damaged by being intellectually lazy.

Andrew Bolt, I’m looking squarely at you here. Though I may be hasty, your editor probably dragooned you into that position. It’s not your fault, you were just following orders.

With this in mind, I’ll make my point in simple language so your average mortgage holder can understand.

We’re not getting nastier, we’re getting dumber. This is because you watch shit, read shit, and think shit. The old days were not better. This happened because our moral framework is out of date and nobody puts any thought into it. Kyle Sandilands is not an evil pedo, the girl’s mother is. Stop bitching and send the poor girl some flowers. She’s been hurt, and your focus on Sandilands is just making it worse.

Young lady, I’m so sorry that your mother failed you like this. If you’re one to look for a silver lining, hopefully it will be that your situation makes some parents wake up and do a better job of defending their children instead of hoping somebody else will do it for them.

Update: I just found this article written by the man himself.

An attempted rape in the early hours after ANZAC day ended in a ctizen’s arrest on a middle aged man. At 20 past midnight on the Sunday of the ANZAC day weekend residents living on the corner of Queen and Ann streets heard the terrified screams of a young woman as she was accosted by a white middle aged man wearing a suit.

Within seconds of her screams being heard, several local residents had called the police and no less than 5 people were running to apprehend the man seen grappling with the woman. The man had been grappling the woman in front of the Bus stop outside the abandon building next to the Orient Hotel on Ann Street. He let go when two residents from a nearby balcony roared for him to stop.

The man ran towards the Orient Hotel and clumsily climbed over the chain link fence into the abandoned lot between 540 and 560 Queen Street. Several young men heard the residents’ screams and ran to intercept the man as he came out of the bushes in the lot. The cornered man tried to jump back over the fence but was prevented from doing so by two other men on Ann street.

The man was detained by the youths as police arrived on the scene. He appeared to be heavily intoxicated and his pants were undone at the buckle and fly. His suit jacket was adorned with numerous ANZAC day medals.

The young lady with which he had been grappling walked away from the scene before police could arrive. Several residents witnessed the event and gave statements to the police.

This is not fiction. This actually happened. I was one of the screaming residents and also one of the youths that helped apprehend the man.  My fiance was the one that called the police. This, as far as I know, is an ongoing investigation and this post may be subjected to police censorship. This is not intended to be a critique of ANZAC day but an example of the rampant stupidity caused by excessive alcohol abuse.

Judging by the man’s age it is unlikely that he actually served in ANY war and was more likely representing an unfortunate relative.

So many young men gave their lives for us, ANZAC day should be about honouring their memory. This act is a cruel betrayal of their sacrifice and a fitting parody of war itself.

My ability to communicate has never been in question. I pride myself on writing without needless decoration. I can be civil, friendly and even endearing. I can be trite, crass and sometimes blunt. 

10 years of broad writing experience means sweet bugger all in corporate communications. 

If you’re looking for a writing style that blends all the wonders of passive-aggression, insincerity and hubris without tacky old bugbears like meaning, honesty and relationship building then corporate comms might be your idea of a day well spent. I feel dirty, dirty like the first time you discovered porn dirty, whenever I don my ‘writing for the man’ hat. 

Unfortunately corporate communications has become a stand alone language; linguistics in all its complexity is the only way to approach such a mature monster. It permeates the pores of the entire commercial machine, nobody is safe and no topic is sacred. It must, it must, it must come like a memo. They think in corporate commspeak now – it cannot change.

I don’t wonder why the ages of 22 to 42 are now a catalogue of excess and chemical debauchery for most mainline folk. I pin the blame directly on the workplace personality vacuum and its well honed sense of sameness. 

Don’t be fooled – it’s costing you money

Here’s the picture in my head – you’re a boss in middle to upper management and you’re shaking your head. “We foster creativity and workplace culture here.” That’s great, I know, I worked for you once or twice (or more depending on how well you’ve paid attention to this blog.) Unfortunately you’re kidding yourself and the cardboard flavoured social club you’ve written into workplace procedures has the social creativity of an accountant in a padded cell. 

• When was the last time a team member emailed you to tell you that a client was a sodding moron that couldn’t breathe without tech support?
• When was the last time you read something about your company on an employee’s blog (facebook, twitter) without cringe or suppression?

Teamwork requires honesty and honesty requires open language. Self-censorship amongst employees is costing you money in poor decision making.

Your decisions as a manager need to be based on the most appropriate feedback from front- and mid-line staff. The ethos of corporate communications that has evolved allows for meaning and fact to be obscured in censored language and pre-packaged communication. Corporate language is not required to keep intra-office communications civil – that’s what social norms and values are for. 

Be open and others will equally be open. Don’t let them hide the information you need to know behind procedure and pro-forma. It costs money and slows commercial agility. 

The rules as they stand

It’s not hard to see the rules of corporate comms.

• No negativity – if you have bad news, deal with it, hide it, ignore it but for God’s sake don’t tell anyone about it. don’t tell your immediate supervisor either, he might need to show your latest email to his supervisor who needs to send a folio of recent comms off to head office. 
• Posting an internal email on your website is like lifting your skirt at a bikie bar. Public interest was removed from the syllabus years ago. 
• Proposals don’t mean shit if they’re not pro-forma.
• Nor do ideas, updates, thoughts or warnings.

How to fix this

Keep your client-facing communications controlled – let internal emails go to hell. If the point isn’t getting across, ask if that employee was making any sense before they dropped the commspeak.

Keep your eye on employee’s public writing – let them write it anyway. If your public image spirals downward you didn’t deserve it in the first place. Behave yourself and you have nothing to fear, in fact, your employees will be your greatest PR asset. 

Keep your Jargon – let employees choose not to use it. Shortening a sentence down to a single word is not the same as simplification. 

Keep your reporting procedures – let yourself report the ugly side of the situation. A board of directors wants to hear what’s going on, they can get PR spin from advertising. 

-fin

Yesterday’s cracking of the classification board by XYLITOL is more than a humorous prank born out of a population’s frustration with a belligerent government. 

Pros

• The message was spread to a significant number of people with links to other anti-filter material. This campaign is about exposure and making sure that the general public is aware of this attack on their rights as citizens. 
• The attack highlights that the government is still behind the ball on security issues and probably always will be. If their policies rely on secrecy, they’re bad policies. 
• We all got to have a laugh. 

Cons

• The increase in ‘civil disobedience’ from fringe members of the campaign makes it harder to see us as the good guys (admittedly it’ll be a long time before our side of the campaign resembles the super-conservative and fundamentalist aspects of the pro-filter campaigners).
• They cracked the wrong site. That’s right, they hacked the wrong organisation. The classification board is relatively innocent in all this. They are an open and transparent organisation that merely labels content based on its maturity level. It’s the DBCDE that are threatening to say whether or not we can view that content (in a practical sense) and the ACMA is the group keeping the blacklist from citizen’s eyes.
• We really need to be encouraging the kind of openness and transparency that the classification board, as distinct from ACMA, shows in its dealings.  

I know that the filename of the screenshot I took was purile and a web-forum throwback, but the comments in that article are still valid. This situation also goes to show that a filter is not going to have a significant impact on the ills of the internet compared to the effect of increased police resources.

*Update* I’ve changed the term ‘hacker’ to be ‘cracker’ as this is a more accurate term in this case. A hacker is someone who can create innovative solutions to problems using creativity. A cracker is somebody who deliberately intrudes, harms or defaces in an electronic environment.

At roughly 7pm tonight (Thursday 26th March), news came through the twitter feed that the classification website in Australia had been cracked and the front page altered to better reflect the function they provide here in Australia.

Just in case the nine to fivers whose parents told them to get a stable government job have noticed the changes and broken it again, here’s a screenshot of the hacked site:

And we're supposed to have faith in these guys?

So far nobody has stepped up and claimed responsibility – they don’t need to. They’ve shown that our government is asking us to have faith in an organisation that can’t even keep their front page out of harm’s way, let alone protect children.

I wonder, if the cracker had posted child porn, would ACMA have to send itself a take-down notice? Would it just blacklist itself and then not tell itself?

If the ACMA site can be so easily cracked, then what is preventing it from being hijacked the same way as the poor dentist that found himself on the blacklist.

As public servants, you’re doing a terrible job. Step up and do your job. It’s been nearly an hour now and nothing’s been fixed.

If the price of freedom is eternal vigelence, then I wonder what it is we have given that this bunch is asleep at the wheel?

*Update* I’ve changed the term ‘hacker’ to be ‘cracker’ as this is a more accurate term in this case. A hacker is someone who can create innovative solutions to problems using creativity. A cracker is somebody who deliberately intrudes, harms or defaces in an electronic environment.

ITnews.com.au has posted an article claiming that the Intergard Internet filter has been cracked and the blacklist extracted. I know that a lot of people in the #Nocleanfeed movement cherish this kind of article and hold it up as proof of Conroy’s idiocy, but in this case it’s probably done us more harm than good.

First of all, the article cites no sources, names no names and provides no proof that this actually occured. I could ring them up now and tell them I’ve cracked Conroy’s personal computer and they’d probably publish it given the traffic we generate with news like this. 

Next, there hasn’t been a reciprical posting on any of the mainstream news channels. This tells me that it didn’t pass the most rudimentary of bullshit filters at the Courier Mail. 

I spoke to John Hedges, Technical Director at Race River and, despite ITnews saying they couldn’t get a comment out of him, found that he hadn’t even seen the article, making me wonder how hard the site tried to contact him if at all.

“We are investigating the claims and if there is a security problem with Integard it will be rectified as soon as possible.”

So, why do we NOT want this article to be true? Because the more damage we do to PC based filtering vendors like Race River, the more ammunition Conroy and his cronies have to claim we need ISP based filtering. While there are a whole bunch of forum kiddies out there just hoping for more government ’stuff’ to trash, some of us need to be thinking about how we’re going to get this stopped.

And no, marching on Canberra with 150 /b/tards and kindie-goths with parasols isn’t going to do anything. 

We’ve already seen nearly 3 copies of the blacklist as it is and Conroy has poured water on it to little effect. Throwing articles like this on the fire without any evidence or citation is only going to cause noxious fumes and headaches.

While the debate still rages over Internet censorship at the hands of the DBCDE, it may be ASIC that lands the first punch in censoring forums and blogs.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has released a discussion paper on the need to require Internet Discussion Sites (such as forums and blogs) to hold an Australian Financial Services licence (AFSL) in order to carry posts about financial matters. 

Internet discussion sites (IDSs) are internet websites that provide a place for people who are not financial services professionals to share information, recommendations and opinions about financial products such as shares.

Under the current law, the activities of IDS operators and users may constitute the provision of financial services, for which an Australian Financial Services licence (AFSL) is required. ASIC proposes to update its policy to give specific guidance on which IDSs are likely to need an AFSL. ASIC does not propose to grant IDS operators relief from the financial services licensing and disclosure regimes, meaning operators will need to hold an AFSL unless a pre-existing exemption applies to them.

So far this is just a discussion paper but the language used in the introduction quoted above means that forums, blogs and other social networking sites is that they’re going to may need an AFSL license if it is found that members are discussing financial matters in an ‘advisory manner’.

Information on who needs an AFSL is sketchy even to trained lawyers and this discussion paper makes a significant jump in the concept of who is offering financial services.  It’s beyond the scope of my financial resources to engage a lawyer for advice on this matter and my own legal training is insufficient to cover something this complex – I’ll leave it to my readership to agree or disagree with my reading of the terms above. 

By the term ‘internet discussion sites’ (IDSs), we mean internet websites, such as web-based bulletin boards, ‘blogs’, or chat rooms, that provide a forum for people who are not financial services professionals to display information, recommendations and opinions about financial products.

My interpretation so far is that online communication will now be subject to the same rules that govern commercial communication, even when that conversation is between private citizens. For example, if HotBabe445 posted that she was thinking about buying Telstra shares and BigDaddyXOXO told her not to on the basis that “Telstra sucks”, BigDaddyXOXO may be required to hold an AFSL as, according to the discussion paper,

[...]informal commentary about financial products posted to an IDS may amount to financial product advice.

Slightly more worrying is that the person who runs the forum on which BigDaddyXOXO made his post may need an AFSL as well, regardless of the nature of the forum.

Operators who do not post comments containing financial product advice themselves, but who authorise or arrange for others to post such comments, may also require a licence. This is because authorising or arranging for a thing to be done is generally treated in the same way as actually doing the thing under the Corporations Act.

The exception to this situation would be if the person running the forum had no ability to modify the post or in no way tampered with the post itself.

Of course, confusion sets in with an isolated section that adds an additional restriction on the application of the AFSL.

We think that the current law sets an appropriate line between those who need a licence, and those who don’t, and that there are no policy grounds for ASIC to alter this by granting special relief to IDS operators. Therefore, we consider that if:

(a) a person is providing financial product advice through an IDS (whether as the IDS operator or otherwise); and

(b) the advice forms part of a financial services business,

that person should, like any other provider of financial product advice, hold an AFS licence…

While this puts a dousing on the fire I’ve lit earlier in the article, the bolded requirement is practically meaningless given that the 2001 changes to licensing removed the need for the advice to be part of a business.

The FSR Act replaced the concept of carrying on an ‘investment advice business’ with the concept of carrying on a business of ‘providing financial product advice’…

When taken within the context of the Rudd government’s overall Internet policy base, this is a relatively scary situation. The line between the formal and the informal is being drawn too far into the ‘casual conversation’ zone and risks alienating Australians from the streamlined online participation more modernised countries enjoy. 

Though I may be wrong, comments are appreciated.

It was only a matter of time, but it’s finally happened. The DBCDE has alienated enough of its private sector partners that one of them has leaked the blacklist. 

Asher Moses from the SMH posted an article about the leaking mere hours ago.

The EFA has promptly responded that this is a ‘wake up call’ to anyone concerned with secret government censorship. It’s also a wake up call to child protection agencies now that the ACMA has allowed a list containing links of child abuse to be published to the world. Failure.

It’s unfortunate that not a week after Senator Conroy asked Australians to ‘have faith’ in his department and the ACMA, proof arises that his attempts at child protection are a facade and that a significant proportion of the blacklist are in fact gambling sites or, in some cases, harmless MySpace and YouTube profiles. The site of a Queensland dentist was also put on the blacklist though no reasons for this have been forthcoming.

The ACMA has already come out threatening 10 years jail to any Australian that publishes (snip! -ed) the blacklist in an effort to control the blunder. 

Who leaked the Blacklist?

Until recently there was only a limited number of people with access to the blacklist, including ACMA officials, DBCDE staff and official Internet Filter vendors. Recently, however, the DBCDE opened the gates to the blacklist by accepting small home run businesses into the ISP filter trial. 

The DBCDE failed to heed warnings that this was a serious security risk and proceeded anyway.

So who has the DBCDE specifically alienated? Besides Telstra and all but one of Australia’s largest ISPs, the DBCDE hasn’t made itself popular with many PC based filtering vendors that were either shut out of the process entirely or, in the case of Optenet, booted out of the Net Alert scheme with no public reason given.

Now that the DBCDE has included 6 more companies, including a home-run ‘mum and dad’ operation, it’s anyone’s game, though the security around tech2u.com.au is probably not so crash hot that some bored script-kiddy couldn’t have lifted the list without much problem.

In the meantime, Net Alert Filter vendors are literally preparing for raids by Federal Police after hearing about the Blacklist being leaked.

The question now remains, will the ACMA take legal action against, or attempt to blacklist the twitter profiles of people who have linked the blacklist on twitter?

There’s a long list of political figures and government organisations that claim a mandate to filter the Internet. Senator Conroy, the DBCDE, the ACMA and the Labor party in general all flex and banter about how ‘the people are crying out for ISP filtering’. This was a surprise to me, I’d seldom heard anyone even know what it was let alone crying out for it. 

Still, the ‘mandate’ had to come from somewhere. Apparently it came, amongst other places, from this petition:

The Internet is a great educational tool. However children can too easily access pictures of violent cruelty and extreme pornography on the Internet. Labor wants a “clean feed” technology that can block access to these kinds of sites.

To the Honourable President and members of the Senate in Parliament assembled:

This petition of certain citizens of Australia draws to the attention of the Senate, the danger of children accessing Internet pornography and other Internet pages.

Your petitioners therefore ask the Senate to make laws that:

All Internet service providers be required to offer a “clean feed” Internet service to all households, schools and public libraries that blocks access to websites containing child pornography, acts of extreme violence and x-rated material.

by Senator Conroy (from 20,646 citizens).

Strangely, this petition was delivered at various other points between October 2006 and March 2007 , almost verbatim, by 

• Senator Calvert (3 citizens)
• Senator Ludwig (10,806 citizens)
• Senator McEwin (75 citizens)
• Senator Calvert (again, this time extended to ‘access to websites containing child pornography, acts of extreme violence and x-rated material.’) (18 citizens)
• Senator Calvert (this time as President of the Senate) (22 citizens)
• Senator Calvert (again as President) (16 Citizens)

Also submitted was an interesting little petition from Senator McGuaran, the only one that actually supports mandatory filtering, signed by a grand total of 15 citizens.

So far, it would appear that the number of citizens actually petitioning for mandatory filtering totals 15 people. Compare this to the 98,000 people that have signed the GetUp! petition (though at time of writing, the petition is yet to be submitted – God only knows why not).

For some reason Conroy has decided that there are calls for mandatory filtering that are beyond ignoring. Sure, 32,000 people asking for an offering of filtered content from ISPs is convincing enough, I don’t think anyone opposes an optional filter. 

The problem is that there are only 15 voices recorded officially by parliament as asking for mandatory filtering. Combined with the fact that Labor did not go to the election with mandatory filtering as a policy, I fail to see how there is any mandate for mandatory filtering. 

It would be interesting to see how many of those petitions can be linked back to Jim Wallace himself. I’m also interested to know why so many separate petitions have such incredibly similar scripting wording. 

Although Calvert’s name pops up repeatedly in petition submissions, there’s very little on the Internet about him. He’s a farmer from Tasmania that found himself on numerous top level committees as a Senator and represented Australia on a diplomatic trip to China. Oh, and he’s a Liberal. Not a lot in it and he’s had his day in Parliament – though I’d wager he’s mates with a couple of familiar names.  

If we knew who was behind scripting this petition we’d at least know who it was that framed this as a ‘clean feed’ debate. In the meantime, the writing’s on the wall. There is no mandate for this legislation.