Playing Games

This Friday is shaping up to be D-Day for Australia's gamers.

The attorney-generals of the six states will meet to decide whether adults will be finally allowed to play videogames considered unsuitable for younger teenagers.

The current problem is that Australia doesn't have an R18+ rating for video games. This means that any game ruled not suitable for fifteen-year-olds or under is banned from sale. Unlike films, magazines, books and other types of media: video games have never had an adult rating available.

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The Filter: the Future

So we know that the internet filter is a wrong and terrible idea, but the government is going to do it anyway. What might happen once the Great Firewall of Australia goes up?

1. Daily leakage of the blacklist

Even before the filter arrived, ACMA's secret blacklist was leaked - multiple times - to Wikileaks. Expect it to go up on a daily basis. The people with access to it will also be those most likely to (a) oppose censorship (b) be able to get and leak the list and (c) know how to cover their tracks securely when doing so.

2. The Big Ban campaign

Anti-censorship groups are already lining up a lig list of technically "prohibited" sites to bombard ACMA with. The idea is that the more numerous and mainstream the sites that get banned (for example the Amazon listing to euthanasia book The Peaceful Pill), the more public opposition to the filter will grow, and the more workable it will become.

Find out more likely reactions here

Bebo: Bye bye or buyer?

News that AOL plans to shut or sell struggling social network Bebo will surprise no one. It's more of a surprise that so many social networks still strive on in the face of huge market dominance by a few players. Even once-dominant MySpace is undergoing yet another revamp to try and close the widening gap with front-runner Facebook.

But without the huge resources that News Corp-owned MySpace enjoys, the only option for many smaller networks will be to find a specific niche, to evolve into a specialised service, or to merge.

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The curse of late adopters

Some years ago there was a UK comedy sketch featuring a middle-aged father who enters the room as his children are watching Top of the Pops. "Hey what's this? It's got a good beat!" he says, and begins a dancing display akin to a moonwalking walrus.

And this is exactly what we see with the Internet. With every single advance, every single innovation, every single new trend. While most people quietly start using these services: communicating with friends, sharing videos, starting interest groups, there is a whole host of antiquated walruses who fling themselves loudly and obnoxiously at every new technology in some misguided attempt to be "down with the kidz".


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iPhone, iHype

Amongst all the frenzied speculation and rumour-mongering over Apple's predicted new tablet computer, there's been little comment on one key issue. Will the device function as a standalone computer or will it remain essentially a semi-parasitic pod?

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Six problem the Internet filter will create

The government has announced it will bring in its controversial internet filter. It's been reviled from everyone from IT industry groups to children's charities, with many parties pointing out why it won't even work.

But here are six reasons why it will actually make Australia's internet situation worse.

Read them here

Internet Pigeon Protocol

One of the quirkiest stories in Tech Report this week was a pigeon that flew faster than the internet.

An experiment was carried out in rural New South Wales where a car, a pigeon, and a Telstra ADSL 2 connection all raced to deliver a 700mb file. The pigeon won. The internet connection dropped out twice, and eventually failed to send it.

This kind of non-electronic data transfer is known as a "sneakernet". They're actually widely used today. Online DVD-rental services send digital media by post. Oil companies generate vast data files from seismic surveys, and have to take them back manually. If you've ever carried work files home on a USB because they were too big to email, you've used a sneakernet.

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