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.

The game, which will be released on April 19 here in North America, contains the usual level of Mortal Kombat violence, judging by the videos I’ve seen online. You’d think we’d be past the thinking that “violent video games” turns everyone in maniacs, but apparently not. Never mind that the average age of a gamer, according to the Entertainment Software Association, is 34-years old.

Australia has a long and storied history of refusing to rate games games, the biggest recent example being Left4Dead 2. Valve was forced to submit a heavily modified version of the game to the classification board, which then approved this version. Valve tried to get the uncensored version approved, but the classification board again refused.

It’s pretty great: think of the thousands and thousands of hours sunk into Left4Dead 2 by gamers all over the world, and I can’t remember one story where someone picked up an axe then started swinging wildly in a circus.

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.

The SBS warned, in speaking about Australia’s plan for a national broadband network, that broadband will encourage different ethnic groups to “retreat inward,” rather than embrace different peoples and ideas.

Such a phenomenon could also be described as narrowcasting. Rather than create programming that attracts a wide audience, you instead create programming that appeals only to a small niche. There are networks that only show sports, networks that only show movies, networks that only show reality TV, networks that only show the news. The same principle applies online: Web sites that only cover sports, Web sites that only cover tech, etc. Sirius XM has discrete channels that appeal only to a certain audience: I doubt very much that fans of The Boneyard listen to BPM all that often. (I listen Sirius XM, but I primarily only listen to The Virus. I have no idea what happens on the several hundred other channels on the platform.)

The danger, of course, is if this separateness moves beyond simple pastimes and becomes part of a community’s larger identity. Group A only visits Web site A for news, while Group B only visits Web site B. What happens if these sites have different editorial slants? Group A and B may see the very same story in two totally different lights, which could lead to problems down the line.

The point, I suppose, is that increased broadband availability won’t automatically solve the world’s problems. Just because you give people access to greater communication doesn’t mean they’re not going to use it as an extension of their already present communication channels or biases. And if people only see their opinion online, and see it constantly reinforced and validated, well, that could be problematic.

I understand this all sounds somewhat backwards—give people greater access to communication and they’ll merely turn inward—but let’s not pretend we can’t already see that happening.

Here’s a fascinating privacy debate for y’all to chew on this (big) 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?

The public official was a 25-year veteran; he wasn’t some kid just out of school with minimal training. He argued in court that what happened to him amounted to a “gross” breach of privacy after having trying to argue that he was merely conducting research. Hmm.

Against this we have the government’s case that the computer patently didn’t belong to him, and that it had asked him, and all its employees, not to use it to view pornography. A simple enough request, right?

Now the big question: who’s right here? Is the public official right to accuse the government of a “gross” breach of privacy, or did the government overreact by sacking him? There wasn’t any lighter reprimand the government could have doled out?

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.

From Jay Fulcher, President and CEO of Ooyala:

“We see tremendous opportunity in the Asia Pacific region, we’ve had some early success with local customers and count some of the biggest companies in the region as partners or customers. With our expansion to Australia, we plan to not only grow in the local market, but to use this as a springboard into Southeast Asia.”

As Education Director, Asia Pacific at Adobe, Treloar oversaw the business development of the education vertical before accepting the Managing Director position at Ooyala.

The most recent Australia/New Zealand expansion jives well with the company’s continued thrust into the Asia Pacific region, having recently partnered with NTT Smartconnect in Japan. Otherwise, Ooyala was most recently in the news for being the first video platform to offer a system of content monetization for the iPad.

And in case anyone in the Asia/Pacific region is interested in working out of the newly minted Sydney office, they’re hiring.

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.

The man had sued Sony for the price of his PS3, arguing that Sony had disabled the very feature he had bought the console for in the first place.

And then the judge said, in effect, “Sorry, gotta side with Sony here.”

The good news: while the man won’t get his money back, he won’t have to foot Sony’s legal bills.

Let’s see if Sony is this lucky in a few days when it comes time for that other big Australian case!

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. So says the mighty Kotaku, at least. 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.

What does this mean? Eh, in the grand scheme of things not too much. The temporary ban on the sale and importation of that PS3 jailbreak dongle has been extended to Friday. That’s when Sony and its army of lawyers will try to convince the courts down there that these jailbreak devices have been created for the express purposes of piracy (don’t expect Sony to mention homebrew at all) and should thus be banned forever.

Funny how a multi-billion dollar company like Sony can be shaken in its boots over a tiny piece of plastic. What a wacky world.

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.

Ubisoft did offer this bit of helpful advice:

Apparently this problem is especially common in Australia – we will try to get to the bottom of this

That message went up on Thursday of last week, and Aussie gamers are still having issues.

Plainly, this is what happens with this kind of DRM regime. You cannot expect a system to work if it requires the Internet’s terrible infrastructure to always work all the time.

I don’t know, there has to be some sort of compromise between this Ubisoft DRM regime (INSANITY) versus no rules whatsoever (ANARCHY), something us PC gamers could at least live with.

Something Steam-like, if you will.

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?

So the deal is that, thanks to the resignation of a well-known stick-in-the-mud attorney general down there, Australia could be on its way to finally introducing the much-needed R18+ video game rating. It’d be analogous to the ESRB’s M rating in that games carrying said rating can only be sold to people 17 and older. (Kids younger than 17 know to get their older brother, or the friend’s older brother, or their parents for that matter to buy said games for them.)

Society has deemed that you need to be 17 years old to play Grand Theft Auto and God of War just like you have to be 18 to buy cigarettes and 21 to buy alcohol. Granted, at 18 you can sign up for the military, but you’re not allowed to walk into a 7 Eleven and buy a can of beer. But that’s a hack argument for some local talk radio show.

Anyhow, in Australia the age is 18. Well, would be 18, provided all the Ts are crossed and Is are dotted.

Someday soon our Australian brothers will be able to walk into Big Store and walk out with an uncensored copy of Left 4 Dead II. That’s the dream, at least.

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.

First, a little background information. There appears to be an effort going down in Australia to, I don’t know, rid the country of vice and sin. Games, movies, magazines, and whatnot are under attack by certain groups there looking to make life safe and pure for children, despite the fact that life itself is not safe or pure to begin with. Still, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with wanting to prevent small children from being exposed to hardcore pornography and graphic violence. (Note: Do whatever you want, kids, just don’t bother me in the process.) But rather than teaching kids what’s right and wrong, or parents actually doing a little parenting every now and then, groups there have started to pressure the country’s politicians to start banning all Refused Classification media from being accessed via the Internet. Anything that’s Refused Classification down there is already banned—you’ll recall that Left 4 Dead 2 was banned—so going above and beyond the call of duty by extending this ban to Internet-accessed material…

That could be the worst paragraph I’ve ever written here, but I hope the main point got across: people in Australia want all Classification Refused media banned from being accessed via the Internet.

This, I think you’ll agree, is crazy. The government’s plan is to filter whole genres of material from ever reaching the country in the first place. It’s sorta like, you know how you can’t search for Tieneman Square from inside China, you wouldn’t be able to search for, I don’t know, “ladies dressed provocatively” from within Australia.

The issue becomes that these filters are rubbish. Here’s a crude example: you’re reaching breast cancer, but the filter only sees “breast,” so it prevents you from your research.

And if the government is truly interested in blocking “bad” material, it does realize that this material is pretty much impossible to trace, right? Lord knows what’s being traded in obscure IRC rooms all over the world—you can’t patrol that.

This filter sounds like a giant waste of time, and it’s so weird to hear a Western country dabble with outright censorship.

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.

The system is designed to protect ports from all sorts of chicanery. You load up the port with 40 to 60 16-megapixel cameras, which then send the 3D data to computers that are manned by, you, trained professionals.

Rather than send a bunch of armed agents into the nooks and crannies of a port, you have a technician in front of a computer monitor who spends all day scrolling around a 3D representation of the port. It’s cheaper and more effective. Win~!

via Slashdot

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.

The game was refused classification because “there is insufficient delineation between the ‘fictional drugs’ available in game and real-world proscribed drugs.”

In other words, the in-game drugs aren’t “fake enough” for the Australian Classification Board.

CrimeCraft is sort of an FPS MMO.

You’ll recall that this same board refused classification for several other games, including Left 4 Dead 2 and Risen.

No, I’ve never heard of Risen.

I wonder, what is it about this board that makes it so ornery? You never hear about the ESRB refusing to rate a game here in the U.S.

I could go on, but Australia is so far from me, you know.

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.

Of course, since Valve is, you know, interested in making money, it really can’t have a game out there that’s only playable by the over-18 crowd. To that effect Valve has re-submitted the game with some tweaks here and there in an effort to get passed the censor.

But there’s more! It seems that Valve anticipated this scenario, and has developed a special, Australia-only version of the game. You have to imagine that this version is way toned down, and may not be an accurate representation of the “real” game. So if Valve can’t get the censor to approve the slightly tweaked version of the game, then it’ll activate Plan B: selling the Australian version.

My guess is that, should the Australian version end up being released, then you’ll see plenty of Australians buy that version (in order to support Valve), but then download the cracked American version. That’s probably what I would do, to be honest.

The problem lies in the rating system. Australia doesn’t have a “mature audience only” classification, so if a game is considered too violent or graphic for the average 15 year old, it’s banned. Seems like something that’d be easy to fix, but apparently their attorney general doesn’t see the need for people to prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse.

Don’t worry Australia. You can still play Peggle.

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.

The police computer that the hacker broke into was supposed to be a honeypot, something put there so police could “trick” the hackers into exposing themselves. Unfortunately for the police, the PC ran Windows, and the hacker was able to rock a SQL injection. The police “left the MYSQL password blank.” Smart.

Of course, the police say that no “real” data was compromised in the hack.

The lesson is, of course, not to mess with script kiddies and their message boards. Or, maybe, to at least set a password every once in a while.

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.

Organizers hope to send some 400,000 computers to the whole of Australia, all of which would go to Aboriginal schoolchildren. So far, about 2,000 have been sent.

A main goal of the program is to help improve children’s literacy. Apparently, in Aboriginal communities, illiteracy in English is a chronic problem. Unless something is done to change this, these communities will continue to suffer, if that’s even the right word. I guess the overriding idea here is that a proficiency in English would do wonders to improve these people’s situation there. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

What does this mean? Well, the Age believes kids are addicted to cellphones they way they are addicted to their rock and roll and fancy dancing which could mean the end of society as we know it once those kids stop listening to intelligent older men and start going off driving their cars at all hours of the afternoon and spending time in my yard throwing stones at the sparrows in the feeder and then going off to school to learn about rap music and all that evolverution stuff or whatever they teach these kids these days. It could also mean that parents now have a line to their kids no matter where they are, something that I, as a parent and older man am glad of. When did you guys give your kids cellphones?

via Giz

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?

Yeah, so Foreign Policy compiled a list of little known Internet censors. The list includes, as mentioned, Indian and Argentina, but also France (see its draconian file-sharing laws), South Korea (it regularly blocks North Korean propaganda) and Australia (ostensibly it blocks child pornography and terror-related content, but it could well broaden). The point of the brief little round-up, I guess, was to show that Internet censorship isn’t merely something that happens Over There; nope, it happens to more familiar countries, too.

Never mind the nonsense that Americans have to put up with in the name of “protecting” this or that group or entity or institution.

Also, embedded for the hell of it, the Hand of God goal. Fact: Maradona > Pelé.

As for the huge black rectangle—get it, black, censorship, etc. We’re so deep and meaningful!

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.)

The scheme is made of two filters: a giant blacklist, maintained by the government, that ISPs would have to block access to; and an optional filter that would be used to weed out unseemly content from being accessible to children. Quite the nanny state you’ve got there.

Of course, there’s plenty of people who don’t like the idea. Type in “australia censorship” on Facebook and you find dozens of groups populated with thousands of people who aren’t too keen on the idea of mandatory Internet filtering. Oh, and these filtering schemes, in tests, have slowed Internet speeds by as much as 87 percent. So there’s that.

Again, as with the Great Usenet Purge of 2008, it’s hard to defend against censorship when officials hide behind things like child pornography and terrorism. No one wants to be seen as being “soft” on such topics, and the nuance required to successfully argue against this type of censorship is often difficult to articulate in a media environment of 60-second sound bites and screaming Drudge sirens.

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.”

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?