Users, or Lusers as they are known, learn early not to piss off the sysadmin, who is God. Federal minister Stephen Conroy's ham-fisted attempt to gag critics of his stupid paternalistic and ultimately failure-ridden net filter scheme has managed to piss off the whole lot of them. This could be fun. Anyone got the popcorn? I have the beer...
This, by the way, puts Australia in the company of such civil liberties havens as China, North Korea, and Burma. Yay us.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Don't forget, once again the time is fast approaching.
Soon yet another installment of the Skeptics' Circle will be upon us. In fact, it's less than a week away and due to land at the quackometer blog on Thursday, October 25. Our host this time has achieved a fair amount of notoriety by being the…
I guess I suspected that Golden Compass might not be good, but I went to see it last night if for no other reason than to see why thousands of people would attempt to boycott it on Facebook. The Catholic League is also organizing a boycott. I haven't read the books that this movie was based on,…
George Bush this week declared war on sea mammals, officially adding whales to the dreaded Axis of Evil. The Bush administration stated whales are a threat to the American way of life, democracy, and of course freedom. Joking aside, Bush this week gave the official go ahead for the Navy to…
News@Nature has the best summary of what is known about North Korea's missile test that I have read thus far.
How big was the blast?
Estimates for the bomb's yield (the amount of energy discharged when the weapon is detonated, in the equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene, or TNT) differ widely, from…
Lovely. I know some people from SAGE-AU and I hope they put up a hell of a fight. In addition to keeping everything running, sysadmins have a professional and ethical responsibility to ensure that technology is used in a responsible manner. That a member of a government would try to stifle a knowledgable professional from commenting on proposed policy implies that the policy is all about paternalistic authoritarian censorship and government overreach rather than serving Australia's internet users.
I give SAGE-AU credit for being able to get its name and views publicized and for taking a principled stance against what appears to be another bluenosed censor that can bear neither scrutiny nor criticism.
Hmm. "Mark Newton" is this admin's name. That's an anagram of "Network Man". I wonder if this Mr Newton actually exists, or is a made up fiction by a group of admins who wish to vent complaints about being pressured to implement the filter, but not be named publicly?
Yes, anagram or not, I actually exist.
The nature of my name was discovered back in the early '90s when a FidoNet guy called Andrew Clayton ran my name through an anagram generator that had won one of the International Obfuscated C Code Contests.
I nearly fell off my chair laughing.
So the remaining question is, are you God?
Do you think we'd be arguing about internet censorship if I was? :-)
It's not that sysadmins are God, it's more that God sometimes likes to play at being a sysadmin.