Alfreido's Blog

The OPEL has been given the government ‘fling out the back door‘, finally. So instead of the Australian public throwing nearly $1 billion at a company which kicks our collective asses with high broadband prices, instead we are now dedicated to throwing $4.7 billion of our hard-earned cash to a national broadband solution that is still full of conjecture and political promises. It could be a public FTTN (fibre to the node) network that invites competition and low prices, or it could be a national smoke-signal network since Telstra won’t sell us back the network the government decided, in its infinite wisdom, to flog off.

Now I’m not backing up OPEL (the Optus-Elders consortium) on this, since they received an extra $940-something million dollars from ‘crazy lady’ ex-Minister Helen Coonan, only a couple of months before the Liberals got given the public ‘fuck off’ call, and have given hardly any evidence that they deserve it. One of the stipulations of the grant was that the Optus-Elders consortium provide 90% coverage to highly-unserviced areas (a la, everywhere located outside an Australian capital city) and our new Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, has claimed that OPEL could only cough up around 78% coverage. I don’t know what school of business management the CEOs of those 2 companies went to, but shit, if someone threw nearly $1 billion of the taxpayers dosh at me and told me what needed to be done, I’d bloody well do it to the letter. Not for fear of what the government would do, but fear of what the public would do. To stuff up an endevour like this is like having a medicine ball thrown at your nuts. Your ego would be bruised forever.

So, our only alternative now is to wait and see what happens with the Labor Government’s $4.7 billion pledge to faster and more available broadband. Optus has a second chance, aligning with other Internet Service Providers like Internode and iiNet, arguably two very big players in the ISP community, but obviously, the main player hasn’t played ball with the rest of them, and that is Telstra. Saying ‘no’ to Optus for the first pledge is almost a tentative ‘yes’ to Telstra, but these next few months will be very interesting to say the least. If it’s Telstra selected, may God have mercy on us all.

Something that has crept up on the Australian Internet community lately which is probably the most controversial thing that has happened in the history of Australia’s internet usage is the announcement by our new Labor Government and their intention to introduce a mandatory filter to every ISP currently operating in Australia. It’s sparked many disapproving thoughts throughout the Australian Internet community and I thought I would weigh in on the issue and give my opinion (even though I’m sure no more than 2 people really give a shit). I’m not going to launch into a whinge about how we are becoming alarmingly similar to China’s current state of Internet (ableit with less bandwidth available to us) where the government can instigate a ban on a website without the public being able to scrutinize the decision, but instead, I wish to analyze just how far this sort of mandatory blocking of questionable websites could go, and what it could do to Australian Internet.

For those not in the know, basically, the mandatory filter is going to be activated on every ISP on an opt-out basis (ie. you have to go out of your way and opt-out of the filter to be allowed to use your Internet fully again). It will then mean that every site you visit on the Internet will be checked against a blacklist of sites with questionable content (ie. pornography, violent content, messages to Allah/God/Santa) and if you have yet to opt-out, you will not receive the site, and will more than likely receive a message along the lines of “You dirty perv, the Australian government believes you should not be allowed to view this site, so ner-ner.” What possible explanation could be given to institute such a ridiculous system? Well, let’s queue Reverend Lovejoy’s wife for a second… “OH PLEEEASE, WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?”. Basically the new Labor Government (ie. Kevin Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy) believe that something has to be done to protect the children from viewing inappropriate material whilst surfing the web, at the expense of everyone else’s viewing experience.

How is this going to inconvenience Australia? Well, let’s have a quick think:

• If the blacklist is quite big (which it will mostly be, considering the amount of filth on the Internet), every time you visit a website it will have to check against EVERY site on the blacklist before it will let you continue. This could slow down the Internet immensly. This would then directly contradict another promise delivered by the Labor Government, the promise of fast broadband widely accessible in Australia.
• The blacklist is rumored to have two levels, an R-rated level and an X-rated level. R-rated level, which is softcore porn, questionable but not offensive material, etc. will be viewable once you opt-out of the filtering. However, X-rated sites will continue to be blocked even after being opted-out, hence the Australian government is directly interfering in the content that you can view.
• With a population of around 20 million in Australia, it can be safe to assume that around 50% of Australia will want to opt-out of the filtering program. So that is going to be at least 10 million calls to customer service divisions all around Australia. We could easily see a massive increase in wait times for customer service, at least while that 10 million or so people get sorted out.

There’s are just some of the side effects of this filtering system, but what is even worse is how far this sort of system could go, if the Government was to avoid a backlash from the churchies or whingers who asked for this system in the first place (sorry, but I have to be blunt and take a leaf from Chopper Reid: “Harden the fuck up”).

Think a Big Brother scenario, where if you opt-out of the filtering, your actions on the Internet will be monitored. It’s already been hinted by the government, it may not be official policy yet but it’s definitely a possibility that it will be implemented. The government could implement ‘flagging’, where if you view any page which has the certain words (like say, ‘doggy-style’, ‘anal’ etc.) would be flagged and could be blacklisted very shortly. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook etc, they could easily be flagged and blacklisted as there is questionable material on there. Search engines like Google (which already automatically redirect to the Australian version of the site) could also be forced to have search results filtered, just like in China. The outcry which happened in China when this happened would happen all over again, and would undermine Google’s aim of being a search engine which delivers true search results. The search results would be only the ones that got through the filter.

This is a VERY slippery slope that the Government is taking, and I think it could destroy the crucial young vote that Labor relied on to actually get here in the first place, because I’m sure there’s a lot of teenagers who would be very disappointed that they can no longer bat off on a Friday night over those porn sites. It’s a major fuck-up in my opinion, and I really hope that the legislation is kicked out or the public outcry so large that the Government would be forced to back down, because once they implement it, it can only get worse, never better.

Gotta love the hoops you have to jump through when you work in government schemes. For those of you not in the know, I work as an office clerk in Perth at a respectable health company (website design is my hobby for the moment). I was signed up under CDEP, a government scheme to basically ‘work for the dole’. I didn’t care much about the money at the time, I just needed a cash flow to keep up with all my spending on various things (mostly booze :P). Now it appears that I have to sign up to a Job Seeker Network. Basically, they want me to look for a job while I am currently in one. I tell you… if the Australian government had a brain, Australia’s economy might actually go up.

I’ve been driving heaps as of late. 29th September is the day of reckoning. My driving exam. I’ll be doing it in my car, looking forward to it but at the same time, worried because the test will more than likely take place in the city, where everything is so hectic. Well, I guess if I pass, I’ve passed under the worst conditions and should be proud…

Gamestah.com is down. Has been for nearly 2 days. We may be contracted to Ausgamers, but I’m sure there is something in there about Ausgamers having to provide a decent service.