Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

The following is a slightly edited letter I sent to Senator Trood. I encourage you (if you are in Australia) to write to your liberal senator with something similar. To stop the clean feed filter nonsense we need to target the liberal senators.

Understand the real issues at stake here, write your senators, get involved. (twitter tags #nocleanfeed #sicbne)

Dear Senator Trood

I would like to ask that you consider carefully the position that the government is taking and intending to introduce legislation on in relation to internet filtering. I believe that they are using the concept of child pornography (an abhorrent thing) as a red herring to pull a much greater invasion of privacy off. Similar to the hidden intent of the thankfully failed Copenhagen accord, this is a way for the government to introduce the potential for censorship in an unprecedented manner for any western nation, and will in fact place Australia in line with countries like Saudi Arabia, China and Iran (see this article) in terms of what it can enable government beaurocrats to do. Most of the content targeted by this so called blacklist filter is not illegal, and would in any other medium require a judge to issue a ruling on restriction of the publication of the content.

Senator there are two issues I would like you to consider and if you agree, to take to the public as the hidden costs to this proposed legislation that Senator Conroy is planning to introduce.

Google Wave

I’ve been Google waving a lot this last week – talking with customers, staff and other friends. Its a pretty cool system.

If you have had an invite and cant figure the thing out these resources may help. If you are on teh wave find me by adding jethroconsultants@gmail.com.

• Complete Guide to Google Wave
• Google Wave Cheat Sheet

Photography How To’s and other tools bookmarked to read this week:

• White Seamless – Studio How To
• 13 High speed Photography images
• Big Huge Labs Mosaic Maker – hers is the mosaic i created from my latest project, 365 days of Bokeh.

David du Chemin has some cheap eBooks for sale including:

I have been having some trouble with comment spam lately. We use Mollom, a great ser vice that works well with Drupal and stops most spam. However some spammers are getting more clever – and at the same time very stupid. They are putting more realistic comments in and getting past the text analysis – but as there are  no links allowed they are kind of stupid. The comment doesn't gain them anything – just fills my comments with rubbish.

So now all anonymous comments require approval – and I can bulk delete the time wasters spam. If you have a legitimate comment to make – and you are encouraged to do so – either log in to make it, or realise that it will go into my approval queue for checking.

So to all my legitimate readers and commenters – thanks for participating. And to all the spammers  go away – there's nothing for you here!

Thanks for reading.

Wow! All I can say is “freaking awesome!”

  Imagine your email, instant messaging, tweeting, blogging, picture sharing and editing all in one place – in your browser, available from anywhere, your mobile, internet cafe, work, friends place, anywhere.

Instantaneous shared editing, wiki like collaboration, history, threaded conversations, and more. This is going to be huge. Chris Saad predicted that 20% of enterprise users will be using wave in the first 12 months for more than 50% of their comms (replacing email and wiki) within 12 months from public release. I concur with his prediction.

Watch the 1 hour 20 video from Google developer conference – I was glued to it.