Tech Stream

More technology news from the week

12 February 2010

There was plenty of technology news this week which we ran out of time to cover in the radio program.  There was the story about the Queensland gamer who will have to pay Nintendo AU$1.5million in damages (negotiated in an out of court settlement) after illegally copying one of its games and uploading it to the internet.  More in this article from ABC News and this story from ABC Radio’s PM program: Nintendo fan pays dearly for illegal sharing.  It got plenty of coverage outside Australia too with some people wondering whether the punishment fitted the crime.

You may have heard us chatting on RA Today this morning about the latest social networking tool from Google which they are incorporating into their Gmail system.  It’s called Buzz and it’s created some quite negative buzz online, with concerns that it violates user’s privacy.  More details on the service in plenty of articles online, like this one from CNET.  ZDNET Asia reports that Google announced some changes to it on Thursday which will make it easier to hide their details from public view.

And government websites in Australia came under attack this week from internet protest group Anonymous.  Their assault, dubbed comically “Operation Titstorm”,  featured a co-ordinated DDoS attack on the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s homepage.  The parliamentary website was also crippled for over an hour.  Anonymous are angry at the federal government’s plan to introduce a mandatory internet filter this year which would block access to sites, like those containing certain types of pornography or illegal activities, that are deemed to have been “refused-classification” in Australia.  Hungry Beast covered this in a program segment on ABC TV this week: How To Wage Titstorm and more details on this story are here on ABC News Online.

At almost the same time Stephen Conroy, the minister responsible for implementing the ISP level filter, was having meetings with Google to ask them to censor content on You Tube.  The SMH reported that Google said that it “had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did” and that “YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can’t give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube”. Senator Conroy defended making the request, saying “in Australia, these are our laws and we’d like you to apply our laws”. Needless to say this story made headlines across the world.

For more technology news remember to follow our Tech Stream twitter feed.  And let us know about any stories you find that might be of interest to cover here or in the radio program. You can email me at techstream (at) radioaustralia.net.au