Slashdot | Intel Adds DRM to New Chips

History teaches that during the 1800′s there were many people who believed that the entire meaning and purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically just the opposite was true;the industrial revolution demanded a mobile and skilled workforce.

First, they responded by making slavery last forever, and making laws so harsh you couldn’t even teach a person of color how to read. Then they responded by trying to micro-regulate the northern states, then they responded by trying to break off from the Union and fence themselves off from the rest of the world causing all hell to break loose.

Today many in media circles believe that the entire meaning and purpose of the information age is to use inventions like the Internet to leverage their copyright holdings to the far reaches of the Earth for unlimited growth and profit. Ironically, just the opposite is true; the information age demands the unrestricted flow of information.

First, they responded my making copyrights last effectively forever, then they responded by making it so that illegal copying could be punished worse than rape, then they tried to micro-regulate the technology industries with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and now they are trying to fence the information they control off from the rest of the world with Digital Rights Management (DRM). We are now at the point where society must tell them to go to hell.

Ever wondered what $87 Billion would look like?

It’s hard to visualise, but someones down all the work for you.

Check out this web site to see how physically large that quantity of money is.

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/index.htm

Oh, and he does weird stuff on Japanese television too.

Why the Army shouldn’t be so surprised by Saddam’s moves.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, March 28, 2003, at 1:55 PM PT

Much has been made of Thursday’s remark by Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of U.S. Army forces in the Persian Gulf. Talking about the fierce and guerrilla-style resistance of Iraqi militia groups, Wallace said, “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against.”

In fact, however, militia fighters did play a crucial role in a major war game designed to simulate combat in Iraq but the Pentagon officials who managed the game simply disregarded or overruled the militias’ most devastating moves.

The war game, which was called Millennium Challenge 02, took place over three weeks last July and August. Planned over a two-year period, at a cost of $250 million, the game involved 13,500 personnel from all four services – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines – who waged mock war in 17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites. The scenario envisioned a war in a fictitiously named Persian Gulf country that resembled Iraq.

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip “had shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

Link: UPI

This is from – THE ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION. I could not get the link, but confirmed the index of this column

Subject: Making Sense of the Official Story on Iraq

Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal Constitution

By JAY BOOKMAN
The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. The pieces just didn’t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions. This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists” that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled? Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran. In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations’ territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.

And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we. Among the architects of this would-be American Empire are a group of brilliant and powerful people who now hold key positions in the Bush administration: They envision the creation and enforcement of what they call a worldwide “Pax Americana,” or American peace. But so far, the American people have not appreciated the true extent of that ambition.

Part of it’s laid out in the National Security Strategy, a document in which each administration outlines its approach to defending the country. The Bush administration plan, released Sept. 20, marks a significant departure from previous approaches, a change that it attributes largely to the attacks of Sept. 11. To address the terrorism threat, the president’s report lays out a newly aggressive military and foreign policy, embracing pre-emptive attack against perceived enemies. It speaks in blunt terms of what it calls “American internationalism,” of ignoring international opinion if that suits U.S. interests. “The best defense is a good offense,” the document asserts. It dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.”

In essence, it lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence. “The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”

The report’s repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire.

“At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals,” the report said. stated two years ago. “The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this ‘American peace.’ ”

Familiar themes

Overall, that 2000 report reads like a blueprint for current Bush defense policy. Most of what it advocates, the Bush administration has tried to accomplish. For example, the project report urged the repudiation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and a commitment to a global missile defense system. The administration has taken that course. It recommended that to project sufficient power worldwide to enforce Pax Americana, the United States would have to increase defense spending from 3 percent of gross domestic product to as much as 3.8 percent. For next year, the Bush administration has requested a defense budget of $379 billion, almost exactly 3..8 percent of GDP. It advocates the “transformation” of the U.S. military to meet its expanded obligations, including the cancellation of such outmoded defense programs as the Crusader artillery system. That’s exactly the message being preached by Rumsfeld and others. It urges the development of small nuclear warheads “required in targeting the very deep, underground hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries.” This year the GOP-led U.S. House gave the Pentagon the green light to develop such a weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, while the Senate has so far balked. That close tracking of recommendation with current policy is hardly surprising, given the current positions of the people who contributed to the 2000 report.

Paul Wolfowitz is now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton is undersecretary of state. Stephen Cambone is head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross are members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

‘Constabulary duties’

Because they were still just private citizens in 2000, the authors of the project report could be more frank and less diplomatic than they were in drafting the National Security Strategy. Back in 2000, they clearly identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as primary short-term targets, well before President Bush tagged them as the Axis of Evil. In their report, they criticize the fact that in war planning against North Korea and Iraq, “past Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power.”

To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform “constabulary duties” — the United States acting as policeman of the world — and says that such actions “demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations.” To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed. More specifically, they argue that we need permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, where no such bases now exist. That helps to explain another of the mysteries of our post-Sept. 11 reaction, in which the Bush administration rushed to install U.S. troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil war in Colombia.

The 2000 report directly acknowledges its debt to a still earlier document, drafted in 1992 by the Defense Department. That document had also envisioned the United States as a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush.

Effect on allies

The defense secretary in 1992 was Richard Cheney; the document was drafted by Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy. The potential implications of a Pax Americana are immense. One is the effect on our allies. Once we assert the unilateral right to act as the world’s policeman, our allies will quickly recede into the background. Eventually, we will be forced to spend American wealth and American blood protecting the peace while other nations redirect their wealth to such things as health care for their citizenry.

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy — he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project — acknowledges that likelihood. “If [our allies] want a free ride, and they probably will, we can’t stop that,” he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway. “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’? he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.” Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena. Candidate Bush certainly did not campaign on such a change.. It is not something that he or others have dared to discuss honestly with the American people. To the contrary, in his foreign policy debate with Al Gore, Bush pointedly advocated a more humble foreign policy, a position calculated to appeal to voters leery of military intervention.

For the same reason, Kagan and others shy away from terms such as empire, understanding its connotations. But they also argue that it would be naive and dangerous to reject the role that history has thrust upon us. Kagan, for example, willingly embraces the idea that the United States would establish permanent military bases in a post-war Iraq. “I think that’s highly possible,” he says. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. That will come at a price, but think of the price of not having it. When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

Costly global commitment

Rumsfeld and Kagan believe that a successful war against Iraq will produce other benefits, such as serving an object lesson for nations such as Iran and Syria. Rumsfeld, as befits his sensitive position, puts it rather gently. If a regime change were to take place in Iraq, other nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction “would get the message that having them . . . is attracting attention that is not favorable and is not helpful,” he says. Kagan is more blunt. “People worry a lot about how the Arab street is going to react,” he notes.. “Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since
we started blowing things up.”

The cost of such a global commitment would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military, which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our expenditures will have risen to $378 billion. In other words, the increase in our defense budget from 1999-2003 will be more than the total amount spent annually by China, our next largest competitor. The lure of empire is ancient and powerful, and over the millennia it has driven men to commit terrible crimes on its behalf. But with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, a global empire was essentially laid at the feet of the United States. To the chagrin of some, we did not seize it at the time, in large part because the American people have never been comfortable with themselves as a New Rome.

Now, more than a decade later, the events of Sept. 11 have given those advocates of empire a new opportunity to press their case with a new president. So in debating whether to invade Iraq, we are really debating the role that the United States will play in the years and decades to come. Are peace and security best achieved by seeking strong alliances and international consensus, led by the United States? Or is it necessary to take a more unilateral approach, accepting and enhancing the global dominance that, according to some, history has thrust upon us?

If we do decide to seize empire, we should make that decision knowingly, as a democracy. The price of maintaining an empire is always high. Kagan and others argue that the price of rejecting it would be higher still.

That’s what this is about.

Noah Shachtman writes in Defense Tech:

Anti-war movements usually attract quite a number of, shall we say, eccentric ideas. But this has to be one of the strangest pleas for peace ever: activists are begging the Pope to go to Baghdad and become “the ultimate human shield.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, a former Harvard professor, is urging people from around the globe to e-mail, fax, call, and snail mail the Vatican, and ask the Pope to “travel to Baghdad and to remain there until a peaceful solution to this crisis has been implemented.”

The idea, Caldicott writes, is that the Bush Administration wouldn’t risk a bombing campaign in Iraq if the Pope’s life were in danger. There’s been no official word from Rome in reaction to Caldicott’s entreaty.

But new-age guru Deepak Chopra said late last month that he’d join John Paul II and the Dalai Lama in Baghdad, if the two spiritual leaders were willing to place themselves in harm’s way.

You can ignore this entry. I was just thinking about the difference between Managers and Leaders… and I wanted to record it for myself.

I know many good Managers. People who can “execute” – those who can manage complexity and get tasks completed on time and within budget. I also know some excellent Leaders… those who “influence”. People with passion, drive and charisma. People whom others want to follow…

I just don’t know anyone who is both.

It’s funny really, Managers are often the senior people in the formal organisation… but the Leaders are the senior people in the Shadow Organisation… and frankly – that’s where the real work gets done.

I see it every day. It doesn’t really matter who the boss is according to the org chart. The real bosses are those whom the team want to follow.

So my commitment is to learn more about how I can behave/perform to both manage and lead people – in both the formal and shadow organisations!

I never thought I’d be linking to Alternet – always saw them as a little extreme. But then I came across this article written by a 92 yr old Granny – Doris Haddock.

Doris walked across the U.S. in 1999-2000 for campaign finance reform. She made this speech to Citizens for Participation in Political Action in Boston, on Sept. 27, 2002.

…Some of you may be old enough to remember the Reagan Administration. Mr. Reagan and those around him believed in a very new kind of American hero. This new hero was a business hero ? not the fellow who built up a family furniture store on Main Street and supported the Little League and the Scouts; this new hero was not the woman who worked late hours to create a successful travel agency, nor was this new business hero anything like any of the hard-working Americans who built-up our middle class, advanced our standard of living and gave us the resources and leisure for the proper civic life of a democracy, with its leagues and Rotaries and Lions and Elks and VFWs and party conventions and all that glory.

No, the Reagan business hero was the corporate takeover artist.

Any regulations that might get in the way of these ruthless new capitalists were removed ? removed so that reptiles of uncommon greed and brutality might rule the earth, which they now nearly do.

What soon happened was that ALL corporations of medium size or larger had to look over their shoulders. How did a corporation protect itself in this environment from a hostile takeover? It had to close down any factories that were not earning obscene profits. Never mind that a factory had served a town well for a century, or that it provided a healthy and regular profit for its stockholders. If it seemed to be underperfoming by the new hypergreed standards, or if it could be closed in favor of opening a foreign plant that provided a slightly higher rate of return, then, in this new atmosphere, the company was derelict in its duty to its stockholders if it did not ruthlessly act….

Go read the article: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14506

A fascinating take on American Imperialism from the “other-side”. It’s a thought that has been mulling around in the festering ooze of my brane for some time. Just who do the Yanks think they are anyway? And where do they get off calling the shots on sovereign countries?

NEW YORK–Making the case for United Nations intervention against the United States, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told the organization yesterday that military action will be “unavoidable” unless the U.S. agrees to destroy its weapons of mass destruction.

In a much-anticipated speech to a special session of the U.N. General Assembly held in Brussels, Khatami launched a blistering attack against American leader George W. Bush, accusing him of defying U.N. resolutions and using his country’s wealth to line the pockets of wealthy cronies at a time when the people of his country make do without such basic social programs as national health insurance.

“Nearly two years ago, the civilized world watched as this evil and corrupt dictator subverted the world’s oldest representative democracy in an illegal coup d’?tat,” said Khatami. “Since then the Bush regime has continued America’s systematic repression of ethnic and religious minorities and threatened international peace and security throughout the world. Thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Basic civil rights have been violated. This rogue state has flouted the international community on legal, economic and environmental issues. It has even ignored the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war by denying that its illegal invasion of Afghanistan–which has had a destabilizing influence throughout Central Asia–was a war at all.”

Story at Yahoo

If I mention the “bookkeeping problem” that’s threatening Wall Street right now and asked you how many companies were being investigated for or had announced “overstated earnings,” how many would you say? Six? Eight? Try 17. Seven of them are energy companies.

Dow below 6000?

From the Guerilla News Network

“Microsoft will continue to find ways to gain more control of computers, and eventually will try to directly attack other operating systems and make them illegal.”

Well it’s certainly not “eventually”. This campaign against other operating systems, as well as other technologies that threaten MS’s dominance. What do you think the SSSCA/CBDTPA/S. 2048 bill is all about? Why do you think that Intel, IBM, and just about every other major tech company is screaming that they’re scared shitless about this bill? Right now, Microsoft is going for checkmate in the technology game and this bill is their first move in their campaign. Should Microsoft even partially succeed in this campaign to bring every other tech company to its knees and force them to pay tribute (both financially and in policy matters) to Redmond, Microsoft will become the most powerful modern corporation in history.

Although this legislation has the proverbial snowball’s chance of passing this time around, I feel that its main provisions will be enacted by the end of the decade unless Congress and Microsoft both get bludgeoned severely. These provisions may get enacted in a piecemeal fashion, but the two factors that will cause S. 2048 to become law are (a) Microsoft’s huge war chest from which it can make “campaign contributions” and (b) Congress’s tendancy to accept these “contributions” in exchange for favorable legislation for the contributor. The most obnoxious part of this legislation is the fact that it requires all hardware made in or imported to the United States to implement one DRM scheme dictated either by industry consensus or by the Commerce Department in 12 to 18 months if the industry can’t reach a consensus. In addition, antitrust concerns will not be applicable to the process of reaching this DRM standard.

Here’s the killer for all the other players in the tech industry: Microsoft holds most of the important patents for implementing DRM in software as well as major portions of implementing it in hardware. Unless another company’s DRM research pans out no later than a year after this provision were to become law, there would be no alternative to whatever scheme Microsoft comes out with. Then, the Commerce Department would then impose the Microsoft standard on the nation’s technology industry, extending Microsoft’s grasp from the PC world to a significant portion of the U.S. GNP. Sun and IBM would be at the mercy of Microsoft, and since these companies are enemies of Gates & Co., it is likely that Microsoft would be able to use its control over these DRM patents to marginalize or even destroy these companies by making it impossible for these competitors to release new, innovative products that would, by law, include these DRM technologies.

Intel, AMD, Cisco, and other companies that primarily make hardware and most importantly don’t produce software products that compete head-on with Microsoft’s will also have a harder time profiting. Though it wouldn’t be in MS’s interest to destroy them, the folks in Redmond would be interested in taxing these companies based on a portion of their revenues for access to DRM technologies that they would need to sell new products. And MS would probably also wield enough muscle to force AMD and Intel to design future processors to run only future versions of Windows. If the Pentium 7 proved capable of running Linux, BeOS, or even Windows 2000, Microsoft could flush Intel down the drain faster than you can say “Enron.”

Intel and IBM have advocated that the market determine the fate of DRM schemes. This will allow American businesses and consumers to determine which ones get adopted and which ones fall away. It should not be the government’s right to state that Americans have the choice of buying a PC with Palladium installed or not buying a PC at all. It especially is not the government’s prerogative to grant a company what is effectively an unregulated monopoly to a major portion of the U.S. economy, as every software and computer hardware company would be under the foot of Microsoft in a post SSSCA world.

We Americans like to boast about the fact that we reap the benefits of participating in a “capitalist” economy. Capitalism, in the ideal sense of the word, has never been practiced in history, just as communism has never been truly enacted in a country. If you define capitalism as the “Golden Rule” of “he who has the gold rules”, then perhaps by vision of capitalism should really be called “laissez-faire socialism” or something. In my book, as soon as a movie studio buys the DMCA, or Microsoft buys the CBDTPA, or any other company purchases legislation that treats itself or its industry differently than the rest of the economy, it’s proof that the U.S., like the rest of the world, is really a plutocracy. I think that the Microsoft situation is really just a symptom of a much larger illness of the American economy.

The next several years will determine the fate of the American economy and as well as the U.S. role in world affairs for the next several generations. This claim covers a lot more than Microsoft. It covers the tendancy of the U.S. government allowing Big Business to take on a bigger and bigger role in dictating legislation and policy matters. It may be that the Enron and WorldCom fiascos, the mega-mergers of the 1990s, the artificial “oil crisis” that caused the price of gasoline to exceed $2.50/gallon in some parts of the U.S., and the tens of billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that major employers across the country have been able to extort from cities and states have pissed Americans to the point where they feel the pendulum has to start moving the other way. I really hope we’ve reached that point, because if we’re not there now, things may never change. If we were to continue on the present course, I think in the next 30 years, we’re going to see the game of capitalism end once and for all, and the handful of winners of that game forming an oligarchy that will control the U.S. and its sphere of influence for the forseeable future. We would get to the point where each major sector of the economy is subject to the stranglehold one company which carries enough power to destroy any challenger to its market share before it can gain a foothold. There would be one dominant software company (in this post I have discussed my fear that this would be Microsoft), one dominant electronics company, one dominant energy company, one dominant bank, one dominant food supplier. The U.S. was actually pretty close to this point shortly after 1900, with Standard Oil, Ma Bell, the bank trusts and the like, and it took a remarkable shift in government policy (antitrust laws, worker safety laws, etc.) to change the American economy into a more truly competitive game. The U.S. is nearing the high-water mark of industry consolidation reached at the beginning of the 20th century. The industry consolidation scenario has repeated itself; I really hope that the popular uprisings that occured as a result of that are about to repeat themselves too.

Please tell me that the scenarios I’ve described are unrealistic. I really hope I’m being paranoid and that Microsoft will become merely a player and not The Player of the 2010′s technology industry. IBM was stopped in the 1970′s and 1980′s in the courts (ironically enough it was never even convicted of antitrust violations), hopefully Microsoft will be next.

[lifted from kadehje]

Another interesting political quiz. I once again show up as a “Libertarian”.

NW-You would feel most at home in the Northwest region. You advocate a large degree of economic and personal freedom. Your neighbors include folks like Ayn Rand, Jesse Ventura, Milton Friedman, and Drew Carey, and may refer to themselves as “classical liberals,” “libertarians,” “market liberals,” “old whigs,” “objectivists,” “propertarians,” “agorists,” or “anarcho- capitalist.”

Some very loaded questions in there, some which are impossible to choose an answer for as sometimes more than one fits.

Where are you on the political spectrum? Go here: http://www.politopia.com

It seems Mark Latham knows how to get re-elected.

While the Australian Media whips itself into a onanistic froth, no one has yet pointed out that Mark Lathams comments do nothing but endear him to the people he represents.

Sure, it’s a carefree use of colourful colloquial vernacular, but his point is that our PM, John Howard, the arse-licker, did not fight as diligently as he should have on behalf of Australia and our Farmers during his recent arse-licking jaunt to our Protectionist & Hypocritical Pals in the United States of America.

Mark Latham is a member of the Labor Party. A Centrist-Left Political Party. Traditionally, this party represents the blue collar worker. The lower socio-economic strata of our population. The people who call a spade a spade and don’t care for (or can’t afford) frills and posing.

The Media can stop feigning disgust right about now. It’s silly.

Latham will go places.

Link: Sydney Morning Herald

I’ve always struggled with the whole left-wing / right-wing thing. In fact, over the last few years I’ve recognised that there really is very little difference between the “conservatives” and “republicans”.

There’s a cute little quiz at self-gov.org that makes things a little clearer. Whilst it’s not exact by any means (just 8 questions), it does demonstrate that there’s more to ideology than the 2 dimensional whimocracies we have today.

[Copy of email sent to ISOC-AU members list by Jeremy Malcolm]

The Broadcasting Services Act is the Commonwealth statute that regulates the content that Australians may host on the Internet.

Since the passage of amendments to that Act on 28 June 1999, which commenced in January of the following year, Australian Internet users have been subject to restrictions on the Australian Internet content that they may access, that are equivalent to the restrictions in place on films.

Leaving aside broader questions of the suitability of the film classification regime, ISOC-AU does not believe that Internet content should be classified or regulated in the same way as films. If you agree that it is time for a review of the Broadcasting Services Act to re-assess the suitability of the regulation of Internet content (including textual content) by reference to standards developed for motion pictures, we ask that you consider protesting on 28 June 2002.

The protest is suitable for participation by anyone who maintains a Web site, and does not require that you have administrative access to the server on which the Web site is hosted, nor the ability to run CGI scripts. All that is required is that you add the following to the HTML code of the front page of your Web site on 28 June 2002:

popup.txt

The inclusion of this code will cause visitors to your Web page to be redirected to ISOC-AU’s call for a review of the Broadcasting Services Act. At the bottom of that page is a link to close the ISOC-AU window and to return the user to your Web site, being the page that they were originally expecting to see.

If you have any difficulties you may contact me for a fuller explanation. We hope that as many people as possible will join in and modify their Web sites in the manner suggested on 28 June 2002, in order to demonstrate to the Government the depth of concern in the Internet community about shortcomings in Australia’s Internet content regulation regime.