A cleaner, slower internet for all
It’s Friday, time for a Mat Rant.
For some time now the Australian Government has been talking about filtering the internet at ISP level here in Australia with a supposed ‘black list’ of websites with what is termed ‘illegal content’, I’ve even discussed it on this website before here and here.
Well there has been some amendments made to the original proposal and now the Australian Government has decided that there is no ‘opt out’ of the filter, all ISPs will be forced to comply with this legislation.
The filter will be a two-tiered system, the top tier will be always on whilst the second-tier will be opt-out. At this stage there is no full confirmation on what the top-tier filter will actually stop, or what websites will be on the blacklist, however one thing is for sure that it will restrict what we are allowed to see online and it is going to slow down our already crap-tacular internet speeds in Australia, not to mention the $44.2 million dollars that will come out of tax payers pockets to fund this.
I’m all for protecting children from pornography, violent videos, and all of the other crap that can be found on the internet however I really don’t think this is the best way to approach this, oh and by the way this filtering system wont be applied to email, peer to peer networks, or even bit-torrents, coz you know kids don’t use those technologies at all.
If this system is to work and not negatively effect how many of us work on the internet, bloggers, freelance website designers, etc. then it needs to be an opt-in service. How hard would it be to ask people when they sign up for a plan “Would you like your internet access filtered to stop certain types of ‘offensive’ materials being available on your computer?”. It’s really not that hard, shoot even Foxtel allows me to put a ‘parent barring code’ on certain channels.
C’mon Senator Conroy, wake up to yourself. This legislation will hurt Australians, it will hurt businesses, it will make us look like a pack of idiots who need protection from the ‘big bad internets’. Ohs nos!
Andrew Beeston says it best here.
Reverb Issue #22
Another big issue of Newcastle’s one and only Reverb. This month we’ve got plenty of interviews with people like COG, Kate Miller-Heidke, The Sterephonics, and Sebastien Bach. Check out reviews of a massive amount of CDs, games, DVDs and gigs gigs gigs.
Click on the cover below to download it now! (6.5mb)
I’m With The Band - header
A week or so ago I mentioned that I was working on the logo / header for the new I’m With The Band website, well it’s finally completed (till I decide to tweak it again) and the only thing left to do now is to actually sort out the colour scheme.
The other thing I managed to finalise is the ability to subscribe to Reverb Street Press via email. Basically we setup a category on the IWTB website where each month we publish a downloadable PDF of that month’s Reverb and just by clicking on the cover you can download it. To make things even easier we published that particular category as an RSS feed and through the help of Feedburner we’ve now added a form on the front page of the IWTB website where all you need to do is enter your email address and voila, you get an email each month as soon as the new Reverb is published with a prompt to download it. It was tempting to setup an ‘auto-send’ email subscription however seeing as Reverb is around about 15mb it would break most people’s mail servers.
For now here’s what I came up with, along with the help of one of Reverb’s designer’s mates, for the header of the website.
I’m also finishing up a disco version, a dance club version, and more of a rock music version so that we can change them around every couple of months or so.
Time to finish up the rest of the colour scheme, I think I might also make the text larger and also customise each category header as well, oh and the Reverb signup form needs to look a bit different to the standard IWTB one so that people understand what they’re doing. Oh and I’ve also gotta lock in the advertising spaces so we can sell them off each month.
So yeh, almost complete!
And for those music fans out there, this month there’s interviews from Pete Townshend (The Who), Ian Brown (The Stone Roses), Coheed and Cambria, and not to mention Gnarls Barkley. Pretty damn tasty considering we’re a locally owned and produced press, and we’re not even based in Sydney!
Find me here