Australia’s Classification Review Board has refused to rate the upcoming Mortal Kombat re-boot. Without a rating, the game cannot be sold there, ie, the game is effectively banned down under. → Read More
Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form tight-knit “communities” online—ghettos, in other words. Instead of broadband, and more generally the Internet, bringing people together, it threatens to further separate different groups of people from each other. → Read More
Here’s a fascinating privacy debate for y’all to chew on this Friday afternoon. A public official in Australia was sacked after it was discovered that he had searched for “knockers” on his work-provided computer. The computer had been running monitoring software, Spector360, that took screenshots every 30 seconds, so it found him looking for “knockers” even though he had deleted his browser history. Here’s where it gets complicated. The public official was browsing from his home and was not browsing during work hours. “Me time,” in other words. The question is: should employees be fired for what they do with work-provided equipment if they’re not doing so on company time, let alone at the company’s offices? → Read More
Premium streaming video service Ooyala, serving such influential media properties as Fremantle Media, Vice Magazine, Glam Media, Electronic Arts as well as yours truly, today announces its plan to expand its operations to Australia. To helm this initiative, the company has appointed former Adobe executive John Treloar as Managing Director for the Australia and New Zealand region.
Founded by former Googlers, Ooyala’s “killer app” is the simplicity of its “Backlot” video platform as well as its souped up analytics for content managers and advertisers. → Read More
Sony 1, Linux users 0. A court in Australia has ruled against a man who had brought suit against Sony for removing the Other OS feature from the PS3. (That was done ostensibly to prevent piracy. Hmm.) The court ruled that Sony was acting within its rights to remove the feature. → Read More
Not the biggest story in the world today—it is transfer deadline day, after all—but it looks like the big Sony PS3 modchip courtroom smackdown has been delayed by a few days. The judge who was supposed to preside over the case didn’t show up today (it’ 9pm in Sydney as of this writing), thus the hearing has been moved back to Friday, September 3. → Read More
I’ll keep this short and to the point, if only because I’m sensing the “outrage” surrounding DRM has sorta died down. The movement ran out of fuel, I mean. Anyway, gamers in Australia have been unable to play Settlers 7, which uses that silly DRM nonsense that requires you be to constantly connected to the Internet, because Ubisoft‘s servers have been unreachable. Who saw this coming? Oh, right: everyone but the Ubisoft executives in Paris. /Le sigh. → Read More
What do I know about Australia? Not much—I know Jim Jeffries is from there. In recent years, Australia to me has always been associated with weird censorship and video games being banned left and right. Those days may soon be behind us, as Australia seems to be inching closer toward an R18+ rating for video games. That would mean that, instead of outright banning violent games, they could only be sold to adults. Pretty shocking that it has taken until 2010 for that to be the case, but what are you gonna do? → Read More
Man, what’s up with Australia? I think we’ve touched on the country’s plan to block all sorts of unwanted content from reaching the country’s computers, but now Google and Yahoo have officially come out against it. Surely Google knows a thing or two about battling state-sponsored Internet censorship. → Read More
Pretty fascinating story coming out of Australia this fine day. (Well yesterday. Or time zones. I don’t know.) A research outfit there has won a AUS$1.01 million grant from the government to develop a 3D surveillance system that has been described as “Doom-like.” Someone call Anthony Cumia, he could use something like that. → Read More
There’s almost a comedy about this next story: Australia has banned another video game because it’s too violent. (What is it with Australia and banning violent video games?) The game is CrimeCraft, and it has been refused classification by the ratings board down there. → Read More
Australia’s crazy anti-violent video game restrictions strike again! Valve submitted Left 4 Dead 2 (aren’t we boycotting that game?) to whatever board is in charge of rating video games down there, and the board replied with this: yeah, this game is too violent for anyone under the age of 18. → Read More
Sorry Australia, apparently you can’t handle the zombie killing action and gore of Left 4 Dead 2. Nope, the government has decided that the graphic violence and gore, is just a little too much for the delicate sensibilities of the people of the land down under. Well, you won’t be able to buy it at a retail outlet at least. → Read More
Here’s a fun story. Police in Australia thought they were being mighty clever when they took over an “underground hacking forum.” (The forum is r00t-y0u.org, though it seems to be down right now.) One of the hackers on the forum then retaliated by breaking into police computers using a simple SQL injection. Security fail. → Read More
Talk about perspective. On this day when Manchester United announced that it had accepted Real Madrid’s £80m bid for Cristiano Ronaldo (who will make something like €211,000 per week in Spain), we here at CG now turn our attention to the efforts being made to improve literacy. One Laptop Per Child—remember them?—has been handing out free laptops to children on Elcho Island, an Aboriginal island some 1,200 miles northwest of Sydney. (It’s part of Australia.) The idea is to help the island’s children with their schoolwork, get a decent education, and improve their lot in life. It’s certainly a more altruistic use of technology than salivating over a digital compass, or complaining, somewhat pointlessly, about a certain Android phone’s keyboard. → Read More
A recent poll by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found that 90% of Australian children aged 15 and older own a mobile phone. This number could be higher or lower in other countries, but I suspect it’s on par with what you’d expect in the U.S. as well. → Read More
Yesterday’s revelation that China blocks access to YouTube should not have come as any surprise, but did you know that other countries censor the Internet in their own special ways? (Happy families are all alike!) For example, did you know that India’s Computer Emergency Response Team’s has the power to block Web sites wily nilly? Ostensibly it was set up to help eliminate terrorist-realted sites, but it has also blocked “Hindu nationalists and other radical groups on social networking sites such as Orkut.” Or, that in Argentina a search for “diego maradona” will be tampered with because of a terrible court ruling → Read More
Australia looks to be moving ahead with its plan to censor Internet content on a country-wide level, and will test its array of filters later this month. To refresh your memory, the Australian government wants to block access to illegal material on the Internet, be it genuinely awful material like child pornography or something more controversial like terrorist Web sites. (Who’s a terrorist?, when is a site advocating terrorism?, etc.) → Read More
Australia, land of kangaroos and terrible actors, must be beaming today, what with the news that someone there was able to overclock an Intel Atom processor to 2.38GHz. That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen an Atom run, as a matter of fact. Of course, getting the processor, found in an MSI Wind, to run that was quite the challenge, as it should be. Not since Frankenstein pieced together his monster did someone go to such lengths to accomplish anything. What does running an Atom at 2.38GHz gain you, aside from bragging rights? Nothing, I would guess, which is about par for the course when it comes to overclocking. It’s the old Slashdot axiom, “Because you can.” → Read More
Australia looks set to join China as a state-mandated Internet censor. The measure is primarily aimed at combating online child pornography, but an open-ended statement from the government’s communications minister sounds ominous: …we are talking about mandatory blocking, where possible, of illegal material. “Where possible”? That seems pretty capricious. The government must have recognized the nature of the proposal, as early drafts included ISP-level opt-out clauses. Say you wanted unrestricted access to the Internet. You’d contact your ISP and they’d put you on a “don’t censor this connection” list. That scenario is no longer possible; the whole country will be subject to the “virtual curtain.” The thing about this, which is similar to the war on Usenet here in the U.S., is that it’s damn near impossible to come out against measures that, to the letter, have anything to do with eliminating child pornography. Nothing like appearing to be soft on child porn to completely ruin your reputation, right? → Read More
