February 2010 archive

Optical Media – Next Stop, Obsolescence

Today was a bit of a slow news day (in my opinion anyway) apart from ongoing analysis over the AFACT vs iiNet case and something over the weekend about the Australian Democrats attempting to become relevant again with a call for copyright legislation on the Internet. So I thought I’d dig up something not in …

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Piracy Code of Practice – Practical or Pathetic?

Earlier this week, I touched on the court case between AFACT and iiNet and the precedent it sets for copyright law in Australia (subject to the appeals process which is yet to be formally invoked). Several days after the verdict, Senator Stephen Conroy (Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) has made a public …

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Declination in Teenage Blog and Twitter Usage

Over the last few days, I’ve come across a number of articles reporting  that teens are now blogging and tweeting less than young adults. Now, being a person who does a little bit of statistical analysis for a crust I found it somewhat annoying that the majority of articles seemed to regurgitate numbers without so …

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Australian Video Game Classifications – Out of Touch

In an earlier blog post (An Attack on Online Anonymity), I mentioned that the highest tolerated classification for video game publication in Australia is MA15+. This is as a direct result of South Australian Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson being the sole opposing censorship minister at state and territory level. In a development covered today by News, …

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Aye Aye – A Win for Common Sense for Copyright Law

Another saga that has been closely watched by the technology community for the last fourteen months has been the case between AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) and iiNet (a national ISP based in Perth). In a nutshell, AFACT (comprising of the big six members of the MPAA in the US plus Village Roadshow, Seven …

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Console Trek – The Next Generation

I’ve been a bit of a gamer for a while and when I say a while, I mean from about 1985 from the age of four. I started with a “Dick Smith Wizzard” which was a rebadged  VTech CreatiVision which was a second generation video game console. The games were very simple to say the …

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Political Backflip with a Twist

In my previous blog post I reviewed the dismal legislation passed in South Australian parliament. It seems today that Attorney General Michael Atkinson copped some flack when attempting to defend the new law on Adelaide radio station 5AA. As a result, Atkinson has indicated that he will motion to repeal the law after the election. …

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An Attack on Online Anonymity

Today, I was wondering what I could blog about and the Government of South Australia handed it to me on a platter via the News and Electronic Frontiers Australia websites. In a nutshell, the Government in this state has amended the South Australian Electoral Act 1985 to require that people publishing election-related content (both print …

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Twitter (huh, yeah) – What is it good for?

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the relevance of Twitter at least within the context of my use of social networking. I use a range of social networking services, including: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer, … plus a range of instant messenger applications (of which I use a couple most frequently). Now, just because I find it …

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