"A protest has been created by the Creative Freedom website against the Section 92A law that instructs internet service providers to cut a user's connection if a music company accuses them of copyright infringement, that is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the National Party."

And I thought the NZ had the more sensible government in this part of the world. Soon they'll be exchanging ideas, and we'll get it as well, while they can get the awful firewall. Yuck.

"The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) plans to limit internet access on the laptops given to NSW's senior students under the 'digital education revolution' to a pre-approved list of websites... "Our internet filtering is unbreakable. We have a huge proxy array that does all the filtering..." said Wilson."

Unbreakable eh? Not sure you really want to be making that claim so soon. It's sad that the so-called 'digital education revolution' seems to be limited to what the government wants. Not that this hasn't been going on for a while already...

"After a year in the making, the ABC tonight unveiled iView in Sydney. The internet site has six channels which allow people to watch a variety of ABC TV programs on demand. Among the channels are a children's channel, documentary, ABC shop, a news channel, arts and Catch-up where people can view popular shows from the last few weeks. The children's channel includes unique content not available on TV."

This is cool - could make PVRs useless if more other channels do it too (and if our internet quotas are fairer). Sucks that you can only download shows within a certain period though... and the fact that the shows on ABC that are worth watching are already available for download anyway :)

"On Thursday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to allow — in addition to more traditional top-level domains (TLDs), such as .com and .org — theoretically any TLD at all, as long as it is no longer than 64 characters long... "This has the potential for utter chaos," said John Mackenzie, of the law firm Pinsent Masons, on Friday... "All of a sudden, every brand will be forced to register their name at .shop, .buy and .london to stop anyone else getting it.""

Hmm... this could get messy. It effectively removes the guessability of domain names as well, on top of increased forgery attempts. We need new TLDs, but this may be going too far...

"Mozilla’s Head of User Experience Aza Raskin has just posted a video preview and extensive post covering the concept behind of one of Mozilla’s latest endeavors, Firefox Mobile... The GUI looks very cool, though raw... Firefox Mobile will be usable on touchscreen devices, keypad-operated devices and everything in between."

Cool little video. Although I'm convinced it'll work very well on mobile-sized devices. Mini-tablet-sized devices would work well though.

"Not content with simply limiting itself to blocking despicable child sex abuse, a move three major ISPs in the US also agreed to today, the French government instead has decided for its citizens whether or not they can view content it considers inappropriately racist and or linked to terrorism. Sarkozy’s government is inviting people to send in huge long lists of sites which offend their delicate sensibilities."

Looks like the French are doing what our government wants to. Luckily, our government is a tad incompetent... so far anyway.

"A few people at work have been chatting about David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous. I first heard of this book from Weinberger’s Google TechTalk so I thought I’d share... Simply put, the concept of the book is that ordering things in the digital world is different to physical world. So in the real world we’re bound by the concept of one thing in one place – ie one physical object cannot occupy multiple places. However, in the digital world... Stuff can be placed anywhere or nowhere."

Nothing new, but a good overview of an important concept, especially given it's something I'm planning for in my current project :)

"The next version of Internet Explorer, IE8, has passed the Acid2 test, which has historically been one of the toughest Web standards and compliance tests to pass... No version of IE has been able to pass the test, while mainstream competing browsers like Opera, and Apple's Safari have managed to be compliant for the last few years. Mozilla's upcoming version 3 of Firefox is also set to pass the Acid 2 test, although the current shipping version of Firefox (version 2) will not."

Good milestone, and about time. But I'll hold the praise until they release (when?), and when they can finally force IE6 users off that horrible version!

"The world of standards-based web design and development has been undergoing something of a shake-up these past few days; Andy Clarke’s “CSS Unworking Group” seems to have opened the floodgates to expressions of dissatisfaction with the current method of progress (or lack thereof) in developing and standardizing new features for web developers and designers... how to produce a process whereby standards bodies can respond quickly to innovative ideas, and wherein innovators will encourage standardized, interoperable implementations of their ideas. "

Why can't the world be a straight-forward, non-political, friendly place? Damn politics. :)