At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Online civil liberties organisation Electronic Frontiers Australia
(EFA) has hit out at what it believes what it believes is a creeping
censorship of the Internet by the Australian Government.
The latest cause for concern at the EFA is the
news that the Government's "Clean Feed" Internet censorship plan will
not allow Australian adults to opt-out.
The filter, which will be mandatory for all Australians, was initially
touted as a "cyber-safety" measure for homes with children. However,
according to EFA, recent comments by experts have revealed the
existence of a second, secret black list, that would apply even to
homes that managed to opt out of the child-safe filtering scheme.
"The news for Australian Internet users just keeps getting worse," said
EFA Board member Colin Jacobs. "We have legitimate concerns with the
creeping scope of this unprecedented interference in our communications
infrastructure. It's starting to look like nothing less than a
comprehensive program of real-time Internet censorship."
According to the EFA, the filtering scheme seems at odds with the
Government's campaign promise to improve the speed and availability of
Australian Broadband.
The Government's own research has showed that filtering lowers speeds
by 30% or more even under ideal testing conditions. The same data
raises serious questions about the accuracy of filters, with even the
best performers over-blocking hundreds of thousands of innocuous web
sites, the EFA stated.
Most worrying of all to the EFA is the ever-increasing scope of the filtering scheme.
"The definition of inappropriate material has never been well defined,"
said Jacobs. "With Government-mandated software monitoring each
Internet connection, we expect the scope to expand further as time goes
by. How will the Government resist pressure by Family First or
other special interest groups to permanently block material considered by some to be harmful?"
Michelle Thomas
| Smelly Black Dog Internet is proud to announce that the company has signed up for Simtronic Technologies new wholesale broadband service as an…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
