Tech

It’s a very first-world picture of human misery: a packed airport terminal filled with thousands of delayed travellers.

There are frazzled parents at the limits of their patience, looking after bored kids giddy at being on their school holidays but frustrated at having nothing to do. Passengers milling around, trying to nap on a hard floor, anxious that the next announcement on the public address system will be the one that cancels their flight.

And all because of a computer problem.

Continue reading "Virgin blip gives a glimpse of total digital chaos" »

In recent months, and especially the last week, there has been a noticeable shift in public sentiment against Facebook.

The controversy surrounding the company’s decision to change its privacy settings have been further amplified by the murder of 18-year-old Nona Belomesoff. As I write a Pakistani court has banned Facebook in the entire country over a page encouraging users to post caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

But since when did all this become Facebook’s fault? Why do we put such an onus on a corporation to act so responsibly with our details rather than questioning our acquiescence to handing over that information in the first place? Why is it we seem to be laying a portion of blame on Facebook for awful human behaviour rather than questioning where it grew from in the first place?

Continue reading "How it became Facebook’s fault" »

The internet offers a world of opportunities. But it also brings some new threats a lot of parents and young people don’t adequately understand.

The tragic murder or 15 year old South Australian girl Carly Ryan by a 50 year old Victorian man who travelled to Adelaide after grooming her on a social networking site brought home to many of us how badly our outdated laws deal with the new threats posed by the internet.

The fifty year old killer had pretended to be a 20 year old youth online in order to win over Carly’s confidence. With the support of Carly’s mother Sonya I introduced into the Senate a Private Senator’s Bill which would make it illegal for an adult to misrepresent their age while communicating with a minor online.

Continue reading "We need to be able to act when online alarm bells ring" »

I’ve got two words for those working themselves into supernovas of incandescent cyber rage over Conroy’s internet filtering scheme: The Matrix.

Or how about: The Terminator. Or, to be more scientifically respectable: the Singularity. Let’s all unhook ourselves from our computers, iPhones and PlayStations for a few moments and consider the possibility that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is not a reactionary Papist set on turning this free-speech-loving nation into – take your pick from the blogosphere pundits – Torquemada’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or Hu Jintao’s China.

Is it possible that in the not too distant future, the man voted 2009’s Internet Villain of the Year will come to be venerated as a John Connor-esque hero, a 21st century neo-Luddite resistance fighter, a man who tugged on the handbrake a little while the rest of humanity was intent on driving itself off a cliff?

Continue reading "Conroy’s filter has nothing on the next technology scare" »

The federal government has been told the National Broadband Network can be rolled out for at least $5 billion less than the original $43 billion earmarked. News.com.au has the story here, but a quick back-of-a-napkin calculation on what it means:

This just landed in The Punch’s inbox. Can anyone explain what it means?

To meet a growing demand from companies of all sizes for software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) tools that are easy to use, SAP Australia New Zealand today announced the local launch of the SAP® BusinessObjects™ BI OnDemand solution.

Targeted at casual BI users currently under-served by products on the market, the solution will deliver a complete BI toolset in one flexible offering. Leading local on-demand services and solutions provider Sqware Peg is the first local partner to offer customers the new solution, which will provide analytics capabilities for customers using core on-demand solutions. 

Continue reading "Translator required, going forward" »

Spend a little time reading the rabid, sometimes psychotic, responses to Stephen Conroy’s piece yesterday about the proposed internet filter and you’d be forgiven for thinking the Rudd Government is about to become a one-term wonder or Australia is about to turn into a society about as free as the Third Reich.

The hundreds of comments on the minister’s piece contain a mass of vitriolic, hysterical rage and delusional warnings that the plan could cost Labor power. There were personal attacks on the minister and even a hint at a death threat. “I feel like I’m living in Germany circa 1936,” wrote one contributor. “OK, Conroy, as a Catholic, it is you who believes in myths. You have a rubbish Economics degree and you weren’t born here. Go away,” said another, constructively.

What the debate almost entirely failed to reflect was the overwhelming popularity of Conroy’s plan with the general public. A recent poll put support for mandatory government filtering of child abuse material at 80 per cent. That’s a staggeringly high approval rating for any policy that does not involve handing out wads of free money.

Continue reading "Why Conroy’s critics should censor themselves" »

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about the Government’s ISP-level filtering proposal and Eliza Cussen was right to warn people they shouldn’t believe everything they hear or read (Top Ten Internet Filter Lies, 25 March 2010).

Unfortunately her article repeated some of the misinformation and I’d like to outline the facts.

The Government has always maintained there is no silver bullet when it comes to cyber safety and we have never said ISP-level filtering alone would help fight child pornography or keep children safe online.

Continue reading "Conroy: Don’t believe the myths on the ISP filter" »

The Obama administration has questioned the Rudd Government’s plan to introduce an internet filter on the grounds that it runs contrary to stated US foreign policy of using an open internet to spread economic growth and global security.

The US State Department has told The Punch its officials have raised concerns about the filter with Australian counterparts, as America mounts a new diplomatic assault on internet censorship by governments worldwide.

Asked about the US view on the filter plan US State Department spokesman Noel Clay said: “The US and Australia are close partners on issues related to cyber matters generally, including national security and economic issues.

Continue reading "US reveals concerns over Conroy’s net filter plan" »

If we were cavemen and we came across a sabre tooth tiger, what would we do? Let’s hope we’d run.

We’d know to run if we possessed important information - big cats have big teeth. Cavemen who didn’t have that information wouldn’t have run and wouldn’t have propagated. Information is fundamental to survival and well-being.

Today we live in an incredible era of information. A quarter of the world is online. This number is growing quickly and the amount of information we consume is ballooning. The openness of the Internet gives extraordinary access to information and this is a powerful force for good.

Continue reading "Google: An open web helps keep the bastards honest" »

Walking into Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco you’re acutely aware of your existence in the present.

At Twitter, here and now, you are in the heart of a company that is hottest on the internet (and possibly off it) and right now millions of Tweeters are their sending their thoughts via this office. 

This would make Twitter co-founder Biz Stone the man of the moment.

Continue reading "The Punch meets Twitter founder Biz Stone" »

Online memorials have been getting a bad rap lately, and in many ways, rightly so. The cruel comments posted on the Facebook memorial page for murdered Brisbane 12-year-old Elliott Fletcher are nothing short of repulsive.

Even after the furore over the posting of pornographic images on Fletcher’ s site, insensitive and offensive comments persist. Amid good wishes to Elliott and his family, Matt Jackson has written on one Fletcher tribute page, “im famous, im on the world famous post hahahahaha hi mum im on tv lol.”

Scroll down. One of three “fan photos” at that page’s left shows Fletcher in life, grinning under tousled hair, with the words “Woot I’m [sic] dead” written over him in thick red marker.

Continue reading "Don’t kill off online tributes because of bad press" »

Public outrage over the shocking vandalism of internet tribute sites for two young Queenslanders who died in terrible circumstances has again raised questions over freedom online.

The worldwide web next month celebrates its 21st anniversary. It has grown from a single web page to more than a trillion unique pages and is expanding rapidly every day.

Social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube transformed the web from largely static pages under a website owner’s control into something more fluid, with people interacting on the websites to create content.

Continue reading "What next for Facebook after its nightmare week?" »

The Punch has just left Facebook’s headquarters in San Francisco where the company sought to address the fallout from the controversy of tribute pages to dead minors being defaced with obscene content.

Following questions earlier this week from The Punch, Facebook’s global communications and policy director, Debbie Frost, told us the company was sending a letter to Queensland Premier Anna Bligh apologising for the incident and addressing the Premier’s letter of concern sent to the social networking giant this week.

Frost said the incident was unprecedented in her time at Facebook, adding it was difficult to fathom how people would decide to attack memorial pages in this way.

Continue reading "Facebook responds: Shock at obscenities, no policy change" »

As a new recruit to Facebook, I admit I was not exactly on the first-wave of the online social networking phenomena. It’s not that I’m a techo-phobe by any measure (my blackberry is a constant companion).

It’s just that I am not entirely convinced that the addition of a Facebook page will enhance either my work or personal lives.  And the thing is, in this job, the two are often inextricably linked. MPs are public figures - albeit very minor ones. And - after sharing weekends, evenings and most waking hours with either my local constituents, my parliamentary colleagues,  Industry groups and stakeholders within my shadow portfolio responsibilities -  I’d kinda like to keep a little bit of me just for my nearest and dearest.

Call me old fashioned (and I’m sure many of you will) but I prefer to share my personal trials, triumphs and trivia with those I am closest to, rather than the-acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance who I met once at a function and who has now requested to be my “friend”.

Continue reading "Online tributes a hollow imitation of genuine grief" »

Update 7am: Despite the company’s statement yesterday, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy say Facebook needs to explain itself. The Punch is still awaiting a response to its questions put to Facebook’s press office.

Update 4.45pm Wednesday: Today there are at least two groups live on Facebook - one of which has over 3400 members - calling for the death of the man accused of Trinity Bates’s murder. If this happened in a newspaper or on a major news website the editor would be at risk of going to jail.

Update Wednesday 2.45pm : Facebook has published a statement about obscene content on the tribute pages to Elliott Fletcher and Trinity Bates on its website. It is printed in full below. We’re yet to hear from them.

Facebook’s statement:

Continue reading "Obscenity on tribute walls: Five questions to Facebook" »

Another week, another internet service that needs joining to see what the hype’s about. The web was supposed to make life easier, but all it seems to be doing lately is inventing more ways to bombard people with babble.

Google Buzz‘s launch last week was wrapped in an increasingly familiar aura. As with the iPad launch, there was huge excitement from some nerdy types but a resounding verdict from much of the public has been a sigh and a shrug.

Instead of capitalising on excitement, new products have to overcome fatigue. There’s the effort setting up yet another profile, then somehow remembering to check back on it in between reading the news, monitoring tweets, Facebook status updates, doing the footy tipping, watching that Hitler video everyone’s talking about and getting to your reading recommendations all while trying to manage your phone and email inbox.

Continue reading "I’m sorry but the internet is starting to suck" »

The first thing that came to mind on seeing pictures of Apple boss Steve Jobs with his new iPad device this morning was Trigger Happy TV, the British skit show whose signature sketch involved the star taking hysterically loud phone calls at inappropriate times on a three-foot telephone.

“Hello?” he’d suddenly shout in a full cinema, brandishing the prop. “No, I’m at a movie. It’s rubbish.”

Let’s not kid ourselves. The iPad is a laptop computer that doesn’t fold. But its appeal – or potential – lies in the content you’ll be able to access from it at a touch, once you hand over your $560 for the basic model when it ships worldwide two months from now.

Continue reading "The future of media is a comically oversized iPhone?" »

For someone who now works almost solely on the internet I have very little love for the web.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate its applications and implications, I just don’t care about, for lack of a better word, the internet as a culture. My feelings towards the internet are similar to those I have toward my gas stovetop: as long as I have it I don’t really care about what gas stovetop I have and I don’t think about what the gas stove does when I’m not cooking.

Yet when I received the ten year anniversary letter from Hotmail I was filled with an unexpected kind of nostalgia for the free email service.

Continue reading "Oh Hotmail, you are truly the fairest of them all" »

Ten days before Christmas a toddler drowned in a backyard pool somewhere in the US. It was tragic yet unremarkable among other all-too-familiar stories except for one detail: his mother tweeted his death.

You can read the story and other opinions about the tragic drowning here and here.

This week Twitter was once more buzzing as the bizarre death of Johnson & Johnson heiress, Casey Johnson, was announced via the tweets of her fiancée, television personality Tila Tequila.

Continue reading "Tweet and be damned" »

On a rainy Autumn afternoon in April 2006, while sitting in the front room of my home, I launched Digital Photography School - a blog about photography to record and share the lessons I was learning in photography.

The first post was on shooting action shots in low light conditions - it wasn’t that great and I’m not sure that anyone ever read it - but it was a start.

Today, 3 and a half years later, that blog is read by over 3 million readers a month and is quickly paying my mortgage - in fact in November it generated more than $100,000, most of that in a week after launching a Portrait Photography Tips E-book.

Continue reading "Seven rules of blogging from a legend of the craft" »

I once stumbled into a child porn chatroom. I was working at a magazine and having one of those “Hey, does anyone know if…?” conversations beloved of journos where we meander into oddball topics, debate them vigorously and call it work.

On this day, we were trying to remember whether Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of The Boy Scouts, was a confirmed paedo or whether it’s just that the organisation itself has the sour whiff of the kiddy-fiddler about it and we were wrongly maligning him. I Googled (or possibly Yahooed – this was a good seven years ago) something along the lines of ‘scouts, paedophilia, Baden-Powell”.

And before I knew it I’d clicked though to a site flooded with hundreds, possibly thousands of posts and replies from men defending – and describing - their lust (both imagined and enacted) for pre-pubescent children.

Continue reading "Child welfare is more important than net freedom" »

Computer nerds hate Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan to filter the Internet so that material which is refused classification (RC) becomes harder to access. But instead of moaning about how it might slow the Net or limit freedom of speech, they should just build a better filter that actually works.

Don’t doubt that geeks can do it. Napster, the late-90s phenomenon that shocked the music industry by enabling music piracy on a vast scale was written by a lone teenager. BitTorrent, the protocol currently used by millions of people around the world to share illegal copies of films and TV shows, was also created by a lone geek. Twitter was whipped up in few days of frenzied programming.

Sadly, some of the tools that geeks have created are now favourites of the perverts, criminals and hatemongers who want to access the vile material that Senator Conroy wants Internet Service Providers to block. Perverts uses these tools because they are far harder to detect than other methods of finding Internet nasties, leading to entirely justified criticism that the filter is a largely futile exercise that will drive creeps underground.

Continue reading "Hey geeks, stop the whining and build a better filter" »

Australia has an international reputation as visionary for the way we managed the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. While countries like the US were being sidetracked by extremists claiming the virus was a sign God was venting his wrath on homosexuals, Australians acted rationally.

Our governments, our health experts and our media got the message out: HIV was primarily spread through blood and semen. Safer sex and injecting practices could stem the tide.

If you go online today you’ll find countless websites devoted to that message. Many of them are hosted overseas. Many of them give detailed instructions on drug injection and describe, in necessarily explicit language, sexual activity that would be deemed illegal to show in a film made for entertainment purposes under Australian law.

Continue reading "Sex, drugs, and other things you can’t read about" »

Much like handing out condoms with the tip cut off won’t help fight STDs, the Rudd Government’s plan to filter the internet of Refused Classification material won’t make the internet safe for children.

Before the 2007 election Labor promised they would “ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material” by introducing mandatory content filtering of all websites at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level.

One might have thought that they were promising to make the internet safe for children.  It certainly sounded like it.  With the great firewall of Australia in place parents would be able leave their children in the capable hands of Uncle Kevin, net nanny extraordinaire.

Continue reading "Call it an ISP filter Kevin but your logic leaks like a sieve" »

Twitter just announced “Lists” as its latest feature. Utilising a Steve Jobs tactic, Twitter Lists are not yet available, nor are they being resold on ebay as Google Wave invites are, but they are “Soon to Launch”, says Project Lead Nick Kallen, on the company blog.

When available, Twitter Lists will enable “people to curate lists of Twitter accounts”. What does it mean? Unlike Facebook, whose raison d’etre has evolved from connecting Harvard study buddies to the “people in your life” and ultimately making the “world more open” - Twitter wants you not only to connect with your In Real Life friends - but also to topics of interest - via Lists of People.

Continue reading "Suggestion to Twitter: think Australian, start here" »

This simple graphic illustrates one way the internet can be used to get an insight into a person, by analysing publicly available information associated with a name. I’ve chosen, for no particular reason, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull. Through the rest of this post are similar profiles of a range of Australian public identities.

You can enter your own details into the Personas tool here. If you feel uncomfortable watching the process of this tool scouring the web for information about you, that’s the idea. It was designed to show you have a publicly available profile which you cannot control.

Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s intended to highlight not just how you are seen on the web, but “for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories.”

Continue reading "What does the web think of you?" »

For the sake of marking a slightly unusual date in the calendar tomorrow, 09/09/09, there’s a campaign underway to rid the internet of cats for 24 hours.

If that doesn’t strike you as a perfectly sensible idea, you’re probably reading this on a dial-up connection. Cats are to the web what tomatoes are to Italian cooking. One online magazine said earlier this year declared the internet was made of kittens.

To a classically Catholic reaction of horror and amusement, I discovered this week there’s even a project underway to rewrite the Bible in kitteh, the imaginary moggie tongue which has some rigid conventions – “can I have” becomes “I can haz” and omnipotence comes in the form of “Ceiling Cat”, a meme stemming from photos of cats looking out of holes in the roof.

Continue reading "List: Things to ban from the web, just for a day" »

I am a social media whore. That’s the point of it all right? There’s a lot you can know about me from what music I listen to, what concerts I’ve been to and yes, even occasionally what I just ate.

There’s even a 12 second video somewhere of me dancing in a tutu to What a Feeling by Irene Cara.  All of which I chose to share across a number of social networks I belong to that include Blip.fm, Twitter and 12seconds.tv and I’m comfortable with that.

And then there’s Facebook.

Continue reading "Six million Australians are selling their lives to Facebook" »

Over to you.

This is on news.com.au today:

If you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years.

This is based on information from Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. It adds that to actually read the entire internet, you would need six hundred thousand decades - six million years - of nonstop reading to read through the information. I guess that’s before you start watching stuff like this or this.

So, Punchers, let’s help each other out. In the comments below post links to the pages you think are the absolute must-sees of the web. I’ll kick it off with this, just because it’s top-of-mind: Joe Hildebrand’s review of Tango & Cash.

Continue reading "If you could share one page on web, what would it be?" »

I can’t remember a time when the decimal point was more popular.  Apart from the usual uses in maths, finance and software, we’ve now got things like Web 2.0, PR 2.0 and even Participation 2.0.

I clearly remember the first time I heard the term Web 2.0. I was shocked and confused. “But I’m just doing Web.  What the hell is Web 2.0 and how did I miss Web 1.0?” I thought.  Likewise when I heard that PR 2.0 was the real deal when I was still fumbling around with plain old PR.

Sometimes I wonder when the 3.0s will arrive and who will decide when they do?  And in 10 years, will I be doing PR 8.0?

Continue reading "Life 2.0: Finding the point in a world full of decimals" »