Group items tagged

The transition from traditional structures of storytelling in games to a more television-based episodic one is brought up in this article. It makes us think whether we should start thinking about games as an art form, and whether we should be classifying them the same as films and introducing an R18+ rating.

For many Koreans, long proud of its status as one of the world's most wired countries, it is such an unpleasant turn of events that their country is suddenly being compared with less democratic countries such as China as one of the worst countries in terms of the Internet censorship.

This article looks at the notion that the internet was supposed to spark the decline of autocrats. It then argues that authoritarian regimes, such as China and Vietnam, have actually undermined the potential power of the Web in the way that it controls content. However, this idea of a filtered internet for users should not be restricted to countries such as China and Vietnam. Australia is quickly becoming one of the most censored countries in the Western world and in many instances has been compared to that of China.

This is a blog that deals with everything to do with games. This post talks about Australian classification laws applying to international games companies when they choose to allow Refused Classification games into Australia. The question of borders comes to mind when reading this somewhat long and unedited post, but it certainly gets us thinking about the scope of Australia's antiquated classification laws...

My blog post on the outcomes of the recent conference which saw educators, politicians and lawyers discuss the problem Australia has with cyberbullying.

If you are going to look at copyright on the internet, you really can't go past this settlement. This is Google's next step at world domination: control of our intellectual property. No one likes it, but everyone is going ahead with it because Google has them over a barrel ... The basic deal is that Google wants to digitise every book ever written and make them all searchable online by google customer. On the surface this is all shiny; it seems commonsense that all material should be digitised - we have to keep up with technology. The problem arises when you get to the sticky situation of copyright - generally with books, owners get royalties every time someone buys a copy. With the digitisation, Google wasn't too keen on the idea of pay-per-view. Ideally, they would have loved to present all that information free and just reap the benefit ... well, however Google reaps benefits. There was litigation all round - publishers were against it, yahoo and other internet giants were against it (because it wasn't their idea) and it went to the doors of the US Supreme Court, but not quite to trial. Google's rivals were not too sure that they wanted to go to trial, because the outcome was a little on the uncertain side. So the Google book settlement was drawn up, objected to, fought, signed up to, taken to the US Supreme Court for approval, rejected, modified, fought over a bit more, and sent back to the judge. The last move was in Feb 2010; we're still waiting for Critics argue that the deal gives Google too much power over digital books and will not benefit customers in terms of cost, possible censorship issues, privacy. Copyright owners will also lose out, as Google's royalty policy cuts them out of the system and reduces their royalty - and they are automatically included in the agreement unless they 'opt out' (even if they have not 'opted in'). Really, Google is the only party that seems to benefit, and yet for all of the fighting, the settlement seems

China is looking to strengthen already tough laws on telco and internet companies, forcing them to inform the Government about customers who discuss state secrets. A pertinent article for those who believe that mandatory internet filtering in Australia will only ever be just that. This shows how the reins can so easily get tighter and tighter...

Washington state government supports a library in its decision to fully filter the internet content available within the library. Concern has been raised as the article reports that 75 million people in the US rely on their internet access from libraries, and if this stringent filtering becomes standard amongst libraries, this is a very large number of people being censored.

Facebook alters functionality and gets more personal, raising increasing concerns about user privacy.

A mapping data base of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed around the world. This initiative gives names, location, actual status and draw attention to the campaigns to free them. Until now it reports 230 cases of threatened or arrested bloggers.

A document that explores the difficulties of Iranian Cyber Activist to fight against the regime. Explain how Web Pages, Blogs and other internet initiatives like Radio Zamaneh, Jaras and Kalameh have been victims of persecution, filtering, and jail.

google revealed information about government agencies' requests for removing searched contents from google, Australia is the ninth.

American officials are going to encounter their Chinese counterparts for a scheduled human-rights meeting in Washington next month. They are likely to broach the subject of Internet freedom when they join . This will be the first round of bilateral dialogue between the United States and China since May 2008.

The Rudd government's proposal will be completely ineffective as far as keeping children safe goes, it will capture much more material than the government implies - including sites such as this one, euthanasia, abortion, safe drug use and porn sites - and the cost will be borne entirely by the ISP's, who will inevitably pass their costs on to their users.

For anyone interested.... Tues 11 May @ 6:45-8:30pm The City Recital Hall Angel Place (2 Angel Place, Sydney)

Letter to Google from the Canadian government regarding their concerns about Google's disregard for privacy standards when joining GMail to the social network - Google Buzz.

The Dutch consumers'association is trying to take some responsibility for privacy online away from the consumer and shift it to the owners of social networking websites. The association believes it is too difficult and time consuming for consumers to set the privacy settings themselves.

When the world was talking about Chavez intentions to control the internet, he decides to use twitter to spread his ideas.

It seems that New York Police Department has somehow linked the failed terrorist attack in Times Square to all this fuss around the 'drawing Mohammed' thing. There is a Facebook group and some Youtube videos have been taken down. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=113257775375783#!