It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to write fiction, but last time I did I had a lot of fun. I collaborated with Aidan and we wrote – difficult as it sounds – a humorous science fiction story called Working Holiday. The result was actually pretty good and was published in an anthology called “Australien Absurdities”. Now it’s seen the light of day again as an audio version over at the Dunesteef Audio Fiction podcast. They did a great job with the voices and effects, and I got a laugh out of it. They then to go on to discuss what commentary we could have been making about the Iraq war, which I thought was even funnier.

Have a listen here.

The pressure is still on Conroy over his plan to censor Australia’s Internet. The public and the opposition are still calling for the plan to be abandoned and the Government to come clean. My own contribution, which takes a Western theme today, is an op-ed in the Australian. Despite all the noise, though, I think Conroy will use the test results to announce that filtering is feasible and going ahead. We’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

Read my piece here.

I’ve spent the last 3 months in China, and haven’t had enough – I plan to go back. It’s an open question whether I’ll find the time, but my Chinese ability is nowhere near where I want it to be. My Chinese adventures are chronicled on my China blog.

My (problably entirely mild and benign) interaction with a cyber-stalker (Hi, Q, if you’re reading) has served as a reminder to be careful of a subject I often am asked to speak about for EFA: online privacy. Occasionally, when Facebook or Myspace change their terms of service, there is a flap in the media about the privacy implications, but in general anecdotal and research data indicates that people don’t think too carefully about the sort of information they put online. People are also not aware of the sorts of information that may litter the web already, or that they may be giving away completely invisibly.

I’ve made a conscious decision to be open about what I put on the public Internet, including most of my contact information. I don’t publicise my address, but I know it’s out there to be found – old WHOIS records, the phone book, etc. I’ve been careful on Facebook, keep information within my circle; but still have hundreds of friends, even though I try and limit the circle to people I wouldn’t mind knowing what I’m up to on a given day. (Also people I don’t worry about boring with the minutiae of my life.) I know that through LinkedIn and my company and other bios on the web, my employment history and academic histories could be determined. Through Flickr, my travels around the world and photos of me and my family can be had in abundance. Twitter will give an insight into my thoughts and activities on a variety of subjects, and a diligent investigator could pretty easily determine my political affiliations and religious views without too much work. For a few bucks, all the details about the company of which I am a director can be easily had, online, instantly.

Overall, that’s actually a pretty complete picture of my life that could be built up on a quiet Friday afternoon in the office. It’s probably not enough to become completely obsessed with me, but there’s enough there to give me pause if I know a stranger is compiling it all. For instance, I haven’t completely edited out my ex-girlfriends from all my Flickr photos and potentially old tweets or notes left somewhere. If at various times you’d signed up to dating sites and searched for lonely men using my public information, you probably could have had a dating profile as well – pretty scary, really, given how embarassing those things can be. While my hypothetical persecutor was having a chuckle at that, they could, with Google Street View, be having a look at a photo of my house. (Street View itself has caused many privacy concerns, from drunks to dead people to the entire nation of Japan.)

This is despite the fact that for some years now I have been very conscious of what I let out online. Although I am more active online than most people, think about how much information I might be able to find out about you with your name and email address. Of course, you’ve read and been told many times to be careful with this stuff, and no doubt you are. Consider, for example, that by reading this blog post you have left your IP address in my webserver logs, from which I can probably roughly find out your physical location, perhaps even the name of your employer. Sure, you have nothing to hide now, but what happens when you make an enemy? Even the nicest of us can have psycho ex-partners.

Of course I’m not saying anyone should panic, as I often point out to the media the advantages to our lives of these technologies are still there even if we have new challenges to face on the privacy frontier.  What gives me slight pause is imagining the next generation of politicians now working their way (scheming and stabbing their way) through the ranks. In 10 or 15 years time there won’t be many politicians who haven’t left a racy, rude or ill-thought-out forum post or tweet lying around (not to mention embarassing photos that can be dug up in the Wayback machine), and would we want a leader who didn’t have strong opinions on various topics from time to time in their youth? Former friends will have drunken emails in their archives, Facebook messages will linger. All of these will become fodder for electoral battles, and it’s already happening. Will we get used to this and forgive our politicians for unguarded remarks, or will only the electronically meek inherit the earth?

The Chinese Government’s sudden announcement that all PCs sold in China after July 1st would have to include its “Green Dam Youth Escort” software came as a surprise to many. With the rationale of protecting the impressionable minds of the kiddies – of course – the software would filter all web access in real time, blocking suspect images, blacklisted web pages, and anything with forbidden keywords. The software is frightening in the extreme – it takes all the worst aspects of voluntary home filtering software such as overblocking, underblocking, security flaws and performance degradation, and combines it with the political paranoia of the CCP. The result is government spyware that not only blocks web pages, but actually terminates the processes of running apps into which the user types banned keywords. And that’s version 1.0!

Chinese internet users seem pretty resigned to the Golden Shield, but this might be a step too far. Let’s see what happens. I am not optimistic of a backdown.

I wrote up a summary of the initiate which appeared in Crikey today (shouldn’t be behind the pay wall too long).

On a personal note, I’ve managed to settle down in Shanghai a bit (more here, so updates and media/writing work should be more regular now.

A piece in the SMH today by Asher Moses looking at the upcoming end to the filtering pilot (with a quote by yours truly).

Via http://ladyburp.blogspot.com/

I was a guest blogger on New Matilda’sPollieGraph blog, discussing the revelations by the Minister on SBS’s Insight show.

Read and comment on the post here.