A few links for today following up on various stories we’ve written about.

Googlekiwi

PC World New Zealand has reported that NZ’s controversial “Section 92a” – which would cut people off from the Internet after three accusations of copyright infringement just got a submission from Google, which explains that “more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act 1998 were sent by businesses targeting competitors and over 1/3^rd (37%) were not valid copyright claims.”

As such, Google says "Section 92A puts users’ procedural and fundamental rights at risk, by threatening to terminate users’ internet access based on mere allegations and reverse the burden of proof onto a user to establish there was no infringement."
It goes on to say, "Section 92A undermines the incredible social and economic benefits of the open and universally accessible internet, by providing for a remedy of account termination or disconnection that is disproportionate to the harm of copyright infringement online."

Now, I’ve met with a number of people, including Deputy Prime Minister Bill English, in New Zealand politics. Suffice to say, I think that NZ’s government can do dumb things but rapidly course corrects when they find out new information. Google’s statistics not only illustrate that not only will 92a result in false accusations, but that false accusations are actually the majority.

Which gives me a bit of a pause – if Google has the kind of data that would be useful to determining proper Internet governmental policies… maybe those statistics should be shared with the world. Problem is, Google’s a for-profit business, and that releasing that information would put Google at a competitive disadvantage. Hmm… something to think about.

Kinky Brisbane Dentistry

Australia’s Internet Filtering plans are back in the news after the secret list of websites to be “banned” under a proposed mandatory Internet filtering scheme surfaced on Wikileaks.

The Age, one of Melbourne’s largest papers, wrote about some of the sites on the list. This was the lede:

The Australian communications regulator's top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia's forthcoming internet censorship regime.

Journalists, especially major metro newspaper journalists, are often loathe to use strong adjectives or make value judgments in non-editorial stories. That Asher Moses used the description “harrowing,” says quite a lot.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

I had no idea that Brisbane dentistry was so kinky.

Also on the list – and this isn’t a joke – 4chan.

Compounding bad judgment with great stubbornness, the Australian Communications and Media Authority actually went so far as to threaten a $11,000 (AUD) fine per day to Australian Broadband News Site Whirlpool for linking to one of the anti-abortion sites listed in the blacklist, demanding that the link be taken down. Think that’s bad? It gets worse.

On January 5, an internet user in Melbourne, known online as Foad, lodged a complaint with ACMA about "offensive content" on an anti-abortion web page, not the entire website.
The man did not want his real name published for fear of reprisals. He said his motive was to test the system and show that web pages not showing material connected with sexual abuse of children could end up on the blacklist.
The web page concerned is the same as the link stated in ACMA's notice to Bulletproof.
Around two weeks after the complainant contacted the regulator, he received a reply from ACMA informing him it was "satisfied that the internet content is hosted outside Australia, and the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content''.

So, a protestor added an innocuous site to ACMA to see if the system could be abused. Not only could it be abused but that same innocuous site, used as an example of an innocuous site unfairly marked “illegal” by ACMA was then threatening a site linking to the site as an example of a site unfairly marked…

…oh dear, I seem to have gone all cross-eyed.

Cisco officially goes Flip over Pure Digital

The rumored purchase of Pure Digital by Cisco went through today for $590 million in stock. While Ashlee Vance of the New York Times couldn’t make sense of the deal, we listed some reasons Cisco was willing to pay for the Flip Mino maker in a blog post last week.

And finally, some shoutouts

Anue Systems has been recently linking to different monitoring resources in their blog, “The Network View” – and mentioned us in one of their posts. We wanted to give them a shout-out back in response. Our customers have told us that Anue Systems’ port aggregation products have transformed what was previously a tedious and painful command line process into a streamlined and simple experience.

We also wanted to say hello to the NCIX.com forums, who have been jamming out on the Network Rockstar Challenge game. Hey guys!