Steven Conroy fielding questions about The Great Firewall Of Australia (internet filter) on ABC1 Thur 26 9:30pm AEDT

GetUp! are taking questions to be posted to Steven Conroy when he appears on ABC1 for a Q&A session about his proposed Australian internet filter at http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=580.The form only appears to allow you submit one question though, so here's a few more that I'd like to hear his answers for:

"Please explain how the internet filter is more effective at addressing issues in society than educating parents and children to raise public awareness about the internet and how to use it responsibly?"

"Please explain how limiting access to information about issues in society does anything to address the actual problems that cause them? "

"How will making it more difficult to access inappropriate content online in any way prevent people from engaging in inappropriate behaviour - will they not simply find other communication channels?"

"What specific research can you refer to that clearly shows a correlation between an increase in inappropriate behaviour and an increase in internet usage?"

"Quoting specific research sources, what are your predictions for the decrease in inappropriate behaviour that will result as a direct result of the internet filter?"

"Please give a specific example of a well case of inappropriate behaviour that could not have been perpetrated without access to information on the internet."

"As the vast majority of inappropriate behaviour is conducted offline, would it not be more effective to address the societal problems causing it directly and in so doing affect both offline and internet behaviour?"

"Please quote specific research which shows the percentage of inappropriate content found both online and offline and explain why it is more important to target the internet."

"Why do you feel your role as Communications Minister includes deciding what comprises "inappropriate" content and what gives you the right to impose your moral compass over others?"

Cultured Code support broken?

Please, Cultured Code, maybe it's just me but I'm having major issues with Things Mac/Touch:

• Syncing between Mac/iPhone is sloooow.... Once it's finished sending data, Things Mac saturates the CPU for at least a minute while "Processing"...


• Moving items is also slow. Just dragging a single item out of the inbox into an area invokes the spinning beach ball of death for several seconds.


• Seems to affect anything related to moving/re-positioning items

Your support system seems to be broken, I submit bug reports, get an automated response, and that is the last I ever hear of it. So I tried using the forums, but after creating 2 accounts with different email addresses I am unable to log in and post questions. I can search and browse though and see that I'm not the only customer experiencing similar issues.

Please help! I love things, I written before about why I prefer Things' tags/areas to OmniFocus' more rigid GTD contexts/projects. I'm begging...

Only humans dream?

Web censorship plan in it's final death throes

From http://www.smh.com.au

Senator Nick Xenophon's stocks just went up in my book:

Xenophon said instead of implementing a blanket mandatory censorship regime the Government should instead put the money towards educating parents on how to supervise their kids online and tackling "pedophiles through cracking open those peer-to-peer groups"

So glad to know that I'm not alone in opposing the internet filter:

The policy has attracted opposition from online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television.

Thank you to GetUp for their efforts, glad to have given my support. Their telephone poll found miniscule numbers of people backing the filter:

This week, a national telephone poll of 1100 people, conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by online activist group GetUp, found that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.

Looks like Netspace found most of their customers strongly opposed, 6% strongly for, and the rest presumably not giving a shit:

A recent survey by Netspace of 10,000 of the ISP's customers found 61 per cent strongly opposed mandatory internet filtering with only 6.3 per cent strongly agreeing with the policy.