(Above: click through to get the full picture).
A friend dropped this in my in tray, and as it's off the beaten track of the election campaign - why, there's not a word about Kevin Rudd or Gillard's hair, or Abbott promising more middle class welfare by the day - I thought I'd give it a plug.
The solutions are a little optimistic but hey what do you expect in two minutes.
I've always been a fan, for example, of the waybackmachine - it's very handy if you know what you're looking for, but it doesn't cover everything, and it's always way behind, and prone to error, and the task of cataloguing the web is sisyphean. In that sense, the clip is misleading, but the other tricks will amuse or console ...
As a little ginger in the election porridge, it stirs the pot nicely - sheesh, mix those metaphors dude - and is the work of Electronic Frontiers Australia.
As usual, we're in a damned if we do and if we don't scenario in relation to the full to overflowing intertubes. While Joe Hockey has announced the coalition will oppose any move to legislate mandatory internet censorship (is that a core or a non-core promise?), at the same time the Liberals are planning to throw broadband back a decade.
If we leave building a national network up to Telstra or the other players, the agrarian socialists better start weeping into their porridge bowls ...
Meanwhile, it's pleasing to see that the Herald's technology pages are keeping the heat on the Government, with Government backs away from web snooping plans.
The story's well worth a read - onya Ben Grubb - not least because it provides a link to a pdf of the secret document obtained under FoI laws, which was prepared in relation to Attorney-General Robert McClelland and the Attorney-General's Department plans regarding mandatory data retention of users' web browsing histories. There's also a link to a pdf of the decision letter explaining why the Department designed to arm a crazed monkey with a black texta and allow it to mark up the secret document to help with the read.
It's probably the most crazed exercise in paranoid censorship I've seen outside China, or war correspondence, and in my time I've seen some doozies. They even black out some of the definitions, designed to clarify any key or ambiguous terms used in the document. Not that the definitions would be of any use in a document where anything remotely hinting at useful information is given the black spot.
So that's what Freedom From Information means.
I'll treasure these documents for years to come.
It was former Chairman Rudd's idea to let Stephen Conroy off the leash, and then McClelland compounded the folly, and now no one in the Labor party seems to know what to do about it all.
The fact that Conroy's conceit is a folly, as explained in the two minute clip above, will make it either funny or sad, depending whether you enjoy manic depression along with your paranoia ...
The Herald provides a sample page, and here's mine.
Click on it if you want to see how in larger format how expertly a paranoid monkey can wield a texta:
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