Readers of the Libraries Interact blog will know that we’ve written before about the plans that the Australian Government has for filtering the Internet. Some of us have written about it on our personal blogs, and I’ve collected some news stories and put them up on Delicious.
Today I came across this post by David Weinberger, [...]

The Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has launched a blog to gather Australians’ thoughts and ideas about the digital economy.  The blog will apparently only be ‘open’ for two weeks, so get over there now if you want to share your ideas in this type of forum, and subscribe. There should be [...]

Yesterday the article “ISP filtering gains momentum” was published in the Online edition of The Australian IT section of The Australian newspaper. We’ve posted about this initiative before.
From the article:
“As part of the federal budget, the Government allocated $125.8 million for a range of internet security initiatives, including the filtering program, over four years.
About $49 [...]

In time for Library Week, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has launched a new information pack for public library staff, aimed at assisting them to promote safe internet use in-house, with a particular focus on children.
Created with consultation from ALIA and staff from public libraries, the pack includes:

Cybersmart Guide for Library staff
Cybersmart Guide [...]

Recently I stumbled across this post on the ABC Unleashed website by Lucy Saunders. It presents an interesting way at looking at issues that we’ve posted about before [1] [2] [3] [4]. From the post:
Enjoy your unfiltered internet access while it lasts. As we speak, the government is hard at work building a device to [...]

A new article, Online Predators and their victims in the journal of the American Psychological Association, examined fears of internet predators and concluded that they are myths. Based on three US surveys conducted by the authors, from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, they found that internet-related sex [...]

Late last month tango posted about a report on Australia’s Internet filter. It sparked some discussion and one of the main points was that we, those in the discussion, believe that user education is more important than filtering.
With this in mind it was interesting to read on The Australian IT website an article entitled “E-security [...]

A report in The Age newspaper earlier this month indicated that the new Federal Government has announced that the Software filter produced for Australian families and able to be downloaded for free has failed to reach expectations and is therefore under review.
$85 million was spent on the filter, which was hacked by a 16 year [...]

Sue Hutley updates us on what ALIA is doing about the proposed Internet filtering in Australia:
“Roxanne Missingham and I are meeting with Senator Conroy’s advisor this Thursday.  Derek Whitehead as Chair of the Online Content Advisory Committee and Vice-president is also very involved in this issue.
There will also be more information on our advocacy webpages during [...]

Senator Stephen Conroy - Telecommunications Minister in the new Labour Government, announced that “it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material”.
Announced on 31st December and reported on ABC News, the implications for libraries are not [...]