Stilgherrian

Silk Road battleground: individualism v authority

The takedown of Silk Road is about much, much more than the allegations of billion-dollar drug dealing. It's about the power struggle between the forces of individualism and authority, writes Stilgherrian. The FBI's takedown of notorious online…

'Literally' purists literally belong in the stone age

Some basic research into the history of "literally" and the basic role of dictionaries could have saved the feverish googlers among us a lot of angst, writes Stilgherrian. "We did it guys! We killed English!", or so ran literally billions of tweets…

Like it or not, Turnbull's NBN vision strikes a chord

The Coalition's alternative NBN won't deliver the same capability, but that's the whole point. Geeks won't like it, but for most people, Malcolm Turnbull's plan will seem good enough, writes Stilgherrian. Malcolm Turnbull pwned Stephen Conroy with…

Blockbuster trial for a movie and TV industry in decline

The movie and TV industries just spent nearly four years and millions of dollars in legal fees chasing internet service provider iiNet all the way to the High Court and accomplished... nothing. Meanwhile their key strategic question remains…

Collateral damage in the copyright wars

Last week's takedown of Megaupload and the counterattack by Anonymous demonstrate the stupidity and hypocrisy of the zealots on both sides of the internet's copyright war. In the blue corner we have the US criminal justice system. On Thursday,…

Anonymous imposters: hiding behind the AntiSec identity

Anyone can say they're part of Anonymous. It's the perfect cover for hackers with motives more sinister than fun and propaganda. The Operation AntiSec collaborators Anonymous and LulzSec dominated media coverage of online security through 2011,…

When is a journalist not a journalist?

Crystal Cox, "investigative blogger" of Eureka, Montana, committed acts of media, and it cost her $2.5 million. Her case is being reported as a slap down; the wrong-headed ol' bloggers aren't journalists. But it's not that simple. Cox's problem…

Google+: What's in a name?

Google demands "real names" on their new Google+ social network. Pseudonyms are banned. What surprises me most about what has now been dubbed the "nymwars", though, is not Google's stubbornness, incompetence, inconsistency and hypocrisy, but the…

Turnbull's curious high-bandwidth blind spot

"It's certainly very difficult to think of many applications that are of interest to residential users that would not be perfectly well serviced by the speeds I've described," Malcolm Turnbull told me, referring to the 12 and 25 megabit per second…

The real cyber criminals are no lolling matter

If your understanding of cybercrime comes from mainstream media reports, your head is full of rubbish. Cheap comic-book yarns bearing little resemblance to the real threats. Indeed, the stories that get reported are chosen precisely because they can…

Poll-driven knee-jerk reactions: the latest political craze

"It seems every time Attorneys-General appear in the news it's because they did something embarrassingly stupid," tweeted filmmaker Rohan Harris on Friday. "Do they ever do anything non-stupid?" They do, Rohan. But it usually doesn't get…

Why rush? Let others find the Google+ privacy landmines

Ten million people have already joined Google+, the search and advertising giant's new social networking service (SNS) currently in "field trials". It'll be 20 million by the weekend. Why this seemingly unseemly rush? It isn't surprising that Google…

Facebook regulation

Sigh. Here we go again. Facebook has deleted a photo of two fully-clothed men kissing. It’s “graphic”. Or “sexually suggestive”, or somesuch bullshit. In February they deleted an image of a painting even though the original is on public display.…

Digital fingerprints the next privacy invasion?

Every day we leave our digital fingerprints all over the online world. How much of it should be available to police and intelligence services without a warrant? If Australia accedes to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime as the Government…

It's the NBN Corporate Plan, not a crystal ball

The NBN Co Limited Corporate Plan 2011 - 2013 didn’t go down well with the critics. Even at 160-odd pages, it still doesn’t provide the certainty they demand. It’s incomplete. It’s based on unproven assumptions. “Three parts puff and two parts smoke…

NBN: too bold for timid Australia?

"Australia would have had an easier time getting this done in 1880 when, well, a man could dream," The Drum editor Jonathan Green said of the National Broadband Network (NBN). I reckon he's right. Where has our confidence gone? In the late…

Myths of the NBN myths

If the National Broadband Network (NBN) is indeed Australia's biggest-ever infrastructure project, then it deserves better critiques than those coming from economists such as Peter J Cox. There have been similar pieces from other economists lately,…

ACMA and Nine demonstrate Australia's institutionalised racism

Need proof of Australia's institutionalised racism? Look no further than the limp-lettuce lashing handed out to Channel Nine over Sam Newman's continued low-brow bigotry on The AFL Footy Show.Earlier this week the Australian Communications and Media…

Gay marriage an irrelevant sideshow

"Leave Penny alone!" On Q&A last week, Senator Penny Wong re-stated her party's policy. Labor doesn't support gay marriage. As The Australian reported, she was immediately branded a sell-out by "the gay and lesbian community". Spineless. A…

Let's blame Facebook again, shall we?

On Monday evening in Minto, a working-class dormitory suburb in Sydney's outer south-west, a 24-year-old woman received a visitor. The visitor, it is alleged, was a man she'd become briefly acquainted with, though she wasn't interested in continuing…