How to recognize a moral panic,, won't someone think of the children.

With all the Henson controversy lately, and the subsequent fakefurore, one thing struck me. The so called 'victims' were exceptionally articulate young ladies, who appeared, despite their tender age, to have a full understanding of what they were doing and the political context in which it took place.

There is so much fear and panic being generated, that the police have to take action.

Today was another dark day for those who like to think rationally, and without fear. And it wasnt just one attack on the freedoms we should all fight for, it was two.

Ever heard of Rule 34.? Perhaps not. But im sure you know about The Simpsons. You know the yellow, four fingered cartoon characters.

Well a supreme court judge has ruled that an image of Bart and Lisa going at it, is child porn.

Ok...

Wat?

Yep.. Child Porn!! Like the exploting children kind, because.. as the judge pointed out. Bart and Lisa are people.

Lets just deconstruct this. Download a rule 34 image from the internet by browsing a web page.

For your troubles you get:

1 x $3000 fine
2 x 2 year good behaviour bond.
3000+ x google results with your name and child porn.

How fucking ridiculous! Its a cartoon. If it was a person, it would be 28 years ald. Its NOT a person. It has four fingers, and its a joke.

I feel so sorry for this guy, particularly because I accidentally downloaded a number of those very same simpsons pictures when researching this topic. Are we going to arrest google for hosting the thumbnails?

Umm.. perhaps not.

So I though this was a bad day for Australian rationality. It couldnt possibly get worse.

Uhh.. nope, it could.

A Queensland man has been charged with reposting a video clip of a man swinging a baby around. Thats right RE-POSTING. He didnt:

• Touch the baby
• See the baby
• know the baby
• take the video, or
• post the original video

he simply

• reposted something he saw on the internet.

For this the police raided his house and treated him like a pedophile, and now he has been charged with child abuse related charges.

Some of the most cherished photo's I have are (and I suspect many people) of me and my best friends naked in a bath when I was literally knee high. If I upload that to my Flickr account, does that make me a child pornographer?

After today, I'm really not sure.

reflection on the lunacy of the lockout

I went out to the cross last night, and I have seen so much aggression.

Was it because of the lockout? perhaps. Perhaps it was just a coincidence?


So we got to the cross a little late. I was drinking with a few bar staff at the local and we all decided to head into the cross. Our first port of call was YU. Its a good club, and it wasn't on any list I had seen.

Oh well, we pondered, just move on and go somewhere not on the list. A quick yell to the security at Dragonfly and it was another lockout standoff.

Screw that, Candy's will be open.

So we make the short walk across the lights and up bayswater road, only to see a guy get completely laid out just outside mansions. I know this is probably not totally unusual for the cross, but the randomness of the hit was a little odd.

So we walk into candies, and holy shit did that place get some sausage up there. It wasnt just a sausage fest, it was a whole full blown sausage festival. With so many guys there was bound to be some trouble with the rather hot girls that were with us. And yeah.. there was the one dickhead, who really wasn't taking no for an answer, like some kind of hovering weird crazy guy.

I have been to the cross many, many times. And I have never before had a guy try to start me at Candys. Its the kind of thing you would expect from Mansions, Empire or Scruffy Murphys. The dingy alcohol barns with cheesy music and a sleaze factor that's through the roof.

All this stupid lockout has created was a whole bunch of frustrated drunk people on the street in the wee hours of the morning. And its also moving all those undesirable people into the other bars, which were previously relatively free of this kind of neanderthal behaviour.

Melbourne dumped their lockout as there was an actual rise in alcohol related violence on the streets.

Police need to get off their fat asses, stop busting people for smoking weed and taking pingers and start looking at the violence. If you hit someone, you should go down.

The person who gave the random smack down last night clearly got away with no effect. Where are the police then. They want a lockout because they are lazy and dont want to actually have to do their jobs properly.

Police are supposed to be there to protect our rights, not lobby for them to be taken away.

The NSW police motto is Culpam Poena Premit Comes, or punishment follows closely upon crime. I guess in this case, they are trying to see if punishing everyone first might be a better way of going about it.....

Has it finally come? The phone I have been waiting for!

Its been a long time.

I remember the day clearly, after getting a crappy Nokia 6280 as part of a 'take it or leave it' insurance deal from the lovely Vodafone, I decided that 2 months of series 40 crapness was enough and I needed a damn smartphone again. Luckily the n95 had just been launched, and I was more than prepared to go into the 'I know I could get this a lot cheaper in 2 months' crippling contract.

I never looked back. It was the best phone of my life. But, like anything, the love affair waned. The little annoyances stopped me playing with the deeper recesses, loading a multitude of new software till I had to wipe it all and start again.

It became the workhorse, the little phone that could. It was my little digital everything, but its looking old.

So I began the slow process of getting a better phone. But that was the problem. It had to be better than what I had.

I want a big screen. The browsing on my n95 is a bit too small to be fun.

Sweet, i'll get an iphone. That interface looks awesome and... oh.. wait.. shit..

• Uhh what do you mean I HAVE to install iTunes.
• Uhh.. no.. video
• what's with the crappy camera, mine is so much better
• you lock what down with the what now? OK.. fuck you.
  

So no iPhone then.

Ohh.. that Samsung Omnia looks cool. Can I have a play with it... oh.. yeah. Thats not really what I am looking for at all. I want a true smartphone.. something to play with.

The G1? Uhh.. its a bit.. yeah. Not really hey. I mean i really like what they are doing, but its still so limited. Wheres my n95 worthy kickass camera

And then I hear about this n95 doozy. Sure its a crappy CG promo, but fuck me. With these specs I am actually thing I have found the replacement.





All the reports have been awesome but I'm still a teeny bit skeptical about the browser. But perhaps thats because it isnt quite there yet. But in 6 months, my contract will be out, and it will be time to buy a ridiculously priced N95 widescreen qwerty monster on steroids.

Net filtering in all it's glory

There is something so strange about a government that goes ahead with policy despite certain failure and idiocy.

But thats what apparently is happening here.

Thankfully getup have gone about raising a nice $30,000 already to advertise against the insane filtering policy. Nice work guys!

A great point is that the reason the free sofware NetFilter was so low in popularity, was because there really isn't that big a demand for filtering. In fact.. i might go so far as to say that people really don't give a shit at all.


The media (which the government listens to intensely) may bluster and fuster about the threats to our children. But the people who we need to "protect" obviously dont really care.

But with the Greens, the opposition and pretty much any expert you talk to calling bullshit, I actually have faith that it wont get through.

Hooray for the senate!

I miss John Howard

I was so excited to see him get voted out, the old guy who had no idea about what it was to be a young person in Australia today. I spent years hating theguy. He stood for everything that I didn’t, I couldn’t wait top help vote the little fucker out of office.

What an idiot I was.

I want him back.

You can take away my services – That’s bad policy

You can prop up private sector with government subsidies – that’s bad policy

You can hold out on saying sorry – that’s just plain mean.

You CAN’T start censoring the internet – that’s not acceptable; we are supposed to be a democracy!

Australia has had a long history of conservative censorship laws. Hell, we don’t even have a R18+ rating for our video games. Sure I can understand making it easy for parents to protect their kids. Perhaps a question when signing up to get a clean feed. But mandatory filtering of the internet is what happens when there is no freedom.

The problem is not exactly the sites they are going to block. Its having the system in place, with a list controlled by the government that is the problem.

Soon it will be like the experience you get from workplace internet access. Its like having a meal with the internets retarded cousin. He keeps on starting sentences and then just stops, sticks his hand down his pants and throws shit all over your shirt.

Despite this, its not going to be very effective anyway. You cant block all the proxy servers in the world, so the heinous child porn sites will still be available if you really wanted to spend a nominal amount of time finding a good proxy. This might even make it harder to catch the pedo-predators anyway. To be effective you would have to block all the proxy servers too, and all email (you can get child porn as an email attachment too), oh and the file sharing networks (which have no specific IP address) oh.. and the list goes on.

It’s another example of the bullshit, Neanderthal, backwards policies to “protect the children” that actually make me ashamed to be an Australian. I did NOT vote for this shit.

I want little Johnny back.

I didn’t think I would ever say that.