Surfing Australia Way

Placing several Wikileaks pages on the Australian government Internet censorship list may have woken the slumbering monster. The Age reports that Wikileaks will be publishing the complete list shortly (I just searched for it but obviously it's not up). I for one will be very curious to see what is on the list. Or rather, what beyond their initial sales pitch (to ban all child porn sites) has crept onto the list. The message here? Don't fuck with Wikileaks because they will fuck you back.

I should be upfront about this. I've been banging this drum for almost six months now to anyone that will listen. Tiresome though my friends may find it, it's certainly important. At least to me. The current administration in Australia plan to censor the Internet. Ostensibly this is to prevent people from looking at child porn and thereby save the children who are being abused. Huh? What's that? Preventing people from looking at child porn on the Internet will not save one single child and the money would be better spent on tracking down the people that upload/share/distribute this vile material? Seriously? Wow, never would have thought that.

The Australian government's model of censorship involves keeping a confidential list of the websites that are deemed "inappropriate". The minute you have confidential lists without independent arbitrators is the same time that suddenly any website condemning the government or disagreeing with their policies starts disappearing. The beauty of all this? We would never know! It smacks of Orwellian contempt for the people and in a country which has a fairly free media, it's also a bit disturbing to suddenly start pulling the strings on one form of media. What next? A Ministry of Truth to ensure that all of our media is "factually correct"?

More interesting to note is that the only countries currently censoring any individual pages from Wikileaks are China and the united Arab Emirates. Wow, we really are at the forefront of human rights violations now.

I like new years

I have nothing of special interest to say about the end of one year and the start of another other than to say that I quite like the calendar ticking over that way. Feels like a fresh start, whether you deserve it or not.

Having been through all of my photos and archived and tagged them for future reminiscing a couple of weeks ago, the one last task ahead before work restarts was my music. Initial poor decision making has left me with a music collection where half is in MP3 format and the other half in AAC. AAC is a more efficient file format, it takes up a little less space on your hard-drive, but as I found out when I tried to do some editing a couple of years ago using Windows Movie Maker, AAC format music just will not comply. Try to lay a soundtrack or backing music down for a video and you will find yourself with only the MP3s to choose from. Generally this isn't a problem except that naturally the track you want to put down is one of the AAC format files.

So I've been promising myself for two and a half years (not a word... grrrr) that I would go into iTunes and convert all the AAC files into MP3s on the off chance that I do indeed want to use them for something some day. It's holidays and I set a task for myself, so here I find myself spending new year's day not nursing a hangover but nursing a file transformation procedure that has so far consumed about 6 hours of the day. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this but right now I'm having to go through every single folder of music and see if it's AAC or MP3 then locate it in iTunes, convert the file formats, delete the original AACs in favour of my shiny new MP3s then start the process all over again with the next album or song. Sigh... I should have been doing this years ago...