www.nickhodge.com

As com­men­ted over on Stephen Collin’s Blog: Dumb decision by our new gov­ern­ment over ‘Net fil­ter­ing. Some people men­tion this is a mere policy dump on the last day of 2007. Of course, the Aus­tralian web 2.0 com­munity is not neces­sar­ily happy about all this talk of cen­sor­ship.

OK, can we then get our trusty gov­ern­ment and ACMA to stop the SPAM I get from Nigerian scam­mers liv­ing on the Gold Coast; offers to enlarge my crown jew­els and keep them shiny and big­ger than other jew­els; Phish­ing attempts for all those off­shore bank accounts on dodgy islands in the Pacific; get-rich-quick schemes co-promoted by mem­bers of bor­der reli­gious hill cults.

Since Opt-out is the new word for hid­den cen­sor­ship, that is: how would the non-savvy inter­net user know they are get­ting a dumbed-down inter­net feed, maybe it’s time to ask the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment to do more.

Here is my list:

1. Spam fil­ter at the bor­der. Why should Spam fil­ters need to be installed on email serv­ers at schools and at home? As Spam is inter­net traffic, just block nasty emails at the digital bor­der. Usu­ally spam con­tains naughty words like p3n15 enlarge­ment that our women-folk should not have to read about.

   All we need are vir­tual drug– and foliage– sniff­ing dogs, just like Cus­toms owns, and train them to sniff for spam.

2. Stop an Nigerian Scams (419 Schemes) from both inter­net via email and via fax, too. The first Nigerian scam I saw was a fax sent to a work col­league in Perth about 12 years ago.

   Stop­ping the out­flow of funds by non-savvy Aus­trali­ans, pre­sum­ably the same ‘gull­ible inter­net users’ the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment is attempt­ing to pro­tect, will help our balance-of-trade.

3. Phish­ing. Since the suc­cess of cap­it­al­ism over that nasty com­mun­ism and the fall of the Iron Cur­tain, malevol­ent Rus­si­ans have found a quick way to read­dress the last 60 years. Send­ing out emails that look like your bank’s login page. Hey presto! User­name and pass­word is logged, and some geek slave of an ex-KGB Col­onel is remov­ing your hard earned South Pacific pesos and turn­ing them into Euros.

   As this is just inter­net traffic, the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment must help us to extend the cold war and pro­tect us from new capitalists.

4. Iden­tity Theft. A few google searches, and some search­ing in Face­book, LinkedIn, Twit­ter — all legit­im­ate ser­vices, and a scam­mer could pre­tend to be any­one. Even me.

   Using my details, they could attempt to falsely claim social secur­ity bene­fits. Get the $60-odd per month I get and route it to their accounts on a former Aus­tralian immig­rant pro­cessing centre in the Pacific. As iden­tity theft can occur over the inter­net, the Gov­ern­ment should just fil­ter this out too, and pro­tect us all.

All of the above are illegal either dir­ectly in stat­ute or in com­mon law.

In none of the above cases can any Gov­ern­ment provide a safe envir­on­ment to all its cit­izens all the time. Just how far is our bene­vol­ent Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment will­ing to go to pro­tect it’s citizens?

I’d prefer the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment set up a divi­sion of Depart­ment of For­eign Affairs online ready to help out net­izens as they travel to this unique uni­verse, not just fear­fully block­ing. Use the tech­no­logy to edu­cate people.