Great Walls of Fire

From Boing Boing:

Australia's Great Firewall: Just Like China, Syria and Other "Free" Countries

In a move that seems to be happening without comment from the Australian media, the Australian government is introducing a censorship regime ostensibly targeted at stopping teenagers accessing online porn.

But rather than being an opt-in system, it's "opt-out." I use the scare quotes because, and this is the most insidious part, you can't actually opt out - you can merely be placed on an alternative blacklist which, instead of blocking "content inappropriate for children," block any material deemed to be illegal.

The fact that it will likely reduce everyone's internet performance is secondary; It will most likely incorrectly block 1% of sites, and now what you are allowed to view online is determined and controlled by the state (although most likely quite inaccurately).

The rationale is that since they're setting it up anyway, they're morally obliged to block traffic deemed illegal:

"Illegal is illegal and if there is infrastructure in place to block it, then it will be required to be blocked — end of story."

I don't think I need to go into too much detail about the potential threat to our civil liberties.

People of Australia, please write to your MPs to voice your opposition to this.

More here.

Slow

PJ received a call about the caterers.

He is giving a paper next week at an international poetics conference at the State Library. The event is fully catered and on the forms he had to fill out, he was asked if he had any dietary requirements.

He wrote Slow Food - a term the organiser had never heard, and which had completely baffled the caterers. The caterers!

Think Fast Food, he told them, and it's the opposite.

Today's blog post was going to end here, with a nice wrap up about the fast food approach to everything that once was nourishing. I even thought about composing a victual verse.

But. My laptop died this morning (for the third time in its two year life). Lucky for me PJ is not working from home today and I am able to get a few things done on his computer. Though I am unable to get my work done as the software I need has gone too.

And so. I am forced to revert to the analogue. To take deep breaths and go about my offline business. To. Slow. Right. Down. And notice all the things that I haven't been noticing.