Russell Coker: Precision vs Accuracy in Identifying People
Andrew Dowdell and Michael McGuire have an interesting article in the Adelaide Now about censorship in the South Australian election [1]. The South Australian government wants to force everyone who comments on the upcoming SA election to provide their name and postcode. Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law was all about honesty . However a law that forces someone to not comment as Anonymous and instead forces them to use a name that sounds like something that might appear on a birth certificate and a postcode is not going to increase honesty at all.
I think it s much better to honestly say I m not telling you my name than to lie and claim to be revealing your name. When the government forces people to give precise but totally inaccurate information it seems that it s going to be bad for everyone. It s even bad for the people who want to be identified, if most people who comment on a blog post are anonymous then I d like to be distinguished as the person who uses their real name!
In the vast majority of cases the effort of determining who is using their real name will not be worth the effort. If someone comments on my blog under the name John Howard from Bennelong I will be very suspicious that they are using a fake name. But probably the vast majority of the English speaking population of the world wouldn t immediately identify such a name as fake. If someone wants to comment on my blog and they don t have a published phone number then I won t have any good way of identifying their address. If their name and postcode match an entry in a phone book then they still might be faking it they could take a random name from a phone book. If I was to demand that people who enter blog comments provide their phone numbers then I would have to pay the expense of phoning them as well as dealing with cases of people who are away from home, should I delay a blog comment for a month until the author returns from their European vacation?
I have had a moderate amount of experience in writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and I have only once had an editor phone me to verify my details. In all other cases I guess I could have fooled them if I wished.
I believe that there are already precedents regarding libel, if I approve a blog comment (or fail to unapprove it in a reasonable amount of time if it meats the automatic approval criteria) then I could be sued for libel if the contents of the comment are deemed to be suitably damaging. So if I was to try to get the real names of people who make comments on my blog then it wouldn t make it any easier for an idiot who wants to sue also anyone who wants to sue regarding an Australian political issue will probably find me a better target than most people who comment on my blog (a significant portion of whom are from the US and have much greater legal protections of their freedom of speech).
Extending such a law to US based services such as Twitter is just silly. The stockholders and employees of a US based corporation can freely laugh at Australian censorship laws. Also it s pretty stupid to have a global scope on such laws, as a Victorian why should I care about the South Australian state laws? Implementing laws that can be easily broken inadvertently and can never be enforced against anyone who cares is just pitiful and will result in the MPs who vote for such laws being the object of derision.
Vote for the small parties and independent candidates. Both Labour and Liberal want to censor us, put them in the second last two spots on your vote card!
Now this law doesn t take affect until the writs for the March 20 election are issued. I encourage Australian bloggers to write bad things about the Liberal and Labour parties after the writs are released which are not libelous and which don t include your postcode. If they try to apply the new law then your blog post gets wide attention. If you plan to be a professional blogger then you could consider the $5,000 fine to be an advertising fee. If you don t want to be known then you can use a US based blogging service.
I m going to continue to write political blog posts whenever I feel like it and I won t be telling anyone where I live. I will rely on the Streisand effect to save me.
Update:
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.
Yesterday, and about nine days after
Well, I'd not call it a Mashup - it's actually backed by a custom database,
a Xapian index for full text search and so on. To me, a true mashup would
work without own server side code.Anyway, what it does is this:
On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening 
Today, I was glad to attend the biggest demonstration ever in favour of the
Cabanyal neighbourhood of Val ncia, a traditional district populated by the
sea people of the city. After decades of oblivion, the Valencian right-wing
government is trying to execute an old plan to open Valencia to the sea ,
which means demolishing around 450 traditional houses, many of them under
protection for their cultural and architectural value, to extend a big avenue
until the beach. Patrimonial loss aside, neighbours would be forced to
other areas in the city (sadly, this has been happening for a decade already),
making Cabanyal-Canyamelar the new posh neighbourhood for the richer class,
destroying its identity and replacing it with a new set of skyscrapers.
The local government of PP, led by the infamous Rita Barber , knows that
getting the anti-riot police in the neighbourhood and forcing very old men
and women out of the houses where they were born isn't what many people like to
see in the evening news. They also know time is their ally; this plan is
many decades old, and there's no need to hurry now, so it's better to apply
silent mafia tactics on the problem. It's very easy.
First, stop investing a single euro in the area and monitor the slow but
effective results of the degradation. Have a bit of patience, and after
quite a few years, start promoting the illegal occupation of the increasing
number of empty houses by marginal collectives which will bring the associated
introduction of drug dealing in the area. This will surely make even more
people leave or accelerate their decease. Keep repeating this process, until
the Cabanyal is really fucked up. Now, start promoting the rehabilitation
plan , which unavoidably includes splitting the neighbourhood in two
pieces, and destroying a substantial part of it. Hopefully, many of the
neighbours not directly affected by the demolitions will back the plan, they
can't be blamed for being really fed up after all. Do all you can to confront
those in favour to those against. In the meanwhile, start harrassing owners,
make them end up selling their property at ridiculous prices and as soon as
this happens, demolish it very quickly. Don't even bother with cleaning up the
rubble: an increasing number of sites like this all over the place may be
what makes a few more families give up and leave.
In the end, you either have an empty neighbourhood, or you've managed to
demolish all the annoying houses that block your shiny avenue. However, if a
Supreme Court argues that the remaining houses still have some
cultural value, you might want to consider changing your local law to
unprotect those architectural elements.
Today, many thousands of Valencians marched around Cabanyal to say
enough! . From the street, I saw several old women out on the balconies
of their beautiful houses, their eyes wet with tears, while they observed in
silence all that many people who were fighting for them. There's still a long
way to go in the courts until this is all over, but at least these people
have a little more hope today than those in el Carme or La Punta, who ended
up losing similar battles, years ago.
It still doesn t seem to be getting the coverage, but this is the sixth year that I ve written about the World Economic Forum, which is basically where large corporations try to tell governments how to rule their populations, as described in 
How a window manager with tiling layouts makes a 1024x600 resolution livable.
I spend a lot of time in front of a screen, and for the past year I have
used only my netbook. No desktops, no laptops. Just a cheap $200 computer
that is nearly a kid's toy. The most challenging thing about this is
dealing with the 1024x600 screen resolution. When I moved to this screen
from something with many more pixels, it at first seemed very cramped.
After a year, I think that the most important part of coping with the small
screen is the flexability and customizability of layouts provided by the
Xmonad window manager. In this post I will explain a few layouts I have
developed for fitting specific tasks onto the netbook screen.
(I assume that you know maybe 0.1% of Haskell (about what I do),
and can read Haskell code without having a brain aneurysm.)
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