trollzor’s blog

Damien’s got a good definition of a trackback. I think it’s also interesting that the trackback is on the blog/CMS of the comment author because that does two important things: first, it advertises the other blog and second it creates a different dynamic for censorship - as only the trackback link can be deleted, not the comment.

update
With trackbacks and comments making debate very lively, it is interesting news that the NY Times Op-Ed page will not be available for free any more (with many saying they will not link to it anymore). Looking at the discussion of the Balgaric affair and Hugh Brown’s comments I link to in this entry I would have to say that any media would be foolish to try and make gated enclaves. But perhaps the NYT will become a more common example of the sucessful gated community model as seen in The WELL.

I think I have to reconsider my copious linking to The Age also, as it requires registration. I don’t notice these days because I have the bugmenot firefox extension. Well worth checking out.

I have the my homepage set to a wikipedia random page so I learn something new every time I start firefox (the url is “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage“). And today I got this wikipedia article amounts to not much more than an advert. It demonstrates some of the flaws of not running it through a gatekeeper I think, but given that I have been using wikipedia for ages and haven’t run into many problems like this, maybe their dispute resolution does work well. But I suspect more and more people working in PR/shills will start to manipulate entries.

Here is a video (1mb) of Maddy, the family dog, who now resides in New Zealand. I haven’t embedded the video, as it’s a low res .avi from my brothers still photo camera that records 15fps with no sound; however, I do have a .mov of her that I will add later (7mb on the front page isn’t acceptable).

Possibly the greediest dog in the world.

Here is an example of the DMCA being (ab)used by a voting machine company to silence debate about it´s dodgy practices. And here is a link to the issue of access to the ABC archival footage of politicians and how the copyright and access issues are not only the domain of private corporations but also of the architecture of the law itself is important. This, for me, comes down to the notion of fair use and how much you will allow a given individual to sample work in their own work for the purposes of fair commentary (political or aesthetic). All of the laws surrounding and implementations of Digital Rights Restrictions (Management) do not address the crucial issue of fair use and are therefore not good in any way. This piece by R.M.S shows how bad it could get if DRR are implemented into everything.

This is a very interesting conservative followup to the free speech zone issue. I think it’s good there are people on the republican side speaking out against it too, it is more a libertarian/citizen issue than it is a party political one. I think the management of political speech is becoming a major problem from the ABC archives to people begining to speak about blogs as something that should be regulated. I don’t think they will be able to regulate in any major way, purely because of the logistics, but it’s a matter of putting doubt in people’s minds so they err on the “safe” side.

The resurrection of COINTELPRO type profiling of dissenters is also very worrying because there wasn’t a good justification for those actions back in the cold war, when there was arguably much more danger than there is now from from some tin-pot terrorists. And to say it’s exclusive to America would be misguided, ASIO was doing the same stuff in the 50s and 60s as evidenced by the surveillance of the ABC and the removal of Jack Child (McKnight). The new laws are a disgrace to our civil liberties, which have always been lacking without a proper constitution.

Interesting that the republican spirit of the comment for which Jack Child was fired, “has been overheard to make derogatory remarks about Royalty”, would indeed lead to greater civil liberties if our constitution became more than just an Act of the British parliament (McKnight, 39).

My favourite piece is the reasoning of the ASIO chief, Brigadier Charles Spry:

I do not hold that a person who does not accept the principle of royalty is necessarily a communist, or disloyal to his country for any other reason, but I do feel that when a person has been known to be a Communist or near-Communist in the past, the fact that he holds such views now indicates that he has Communist sympathies still. That is to say, I cannot conceive of him making a definite break with Communism, but still retaining his Communist strong feelings about the Royal family. (McKnight, 39)

McKnight, D., “Broadcasting and the Enemy Within: Political Surveillance and the ABC, 1951-64″ in Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, ed. Gillian Swanson, No. 87, May 1998. link