TimWeb

What is it?

The Australian Federal Government is introducing a mandatory ISP-level filtering of all Refused Classification (RC) rated content. This means all websites (or part-thereof) which have been refused classification under Australia’s classification laws will be blacklisted.

See the Electronic Frontiers Open Internet website for more information.

What can I do?

The simplest thing you can do is sign the EFA’s online petition.

Additionally you can contact your local member of parliament or contact Senator Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

Take Action!

As a lot of people are probably already aware iiNet was taken to court by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for allegedly allowing its customers to illegally download copyrighted material (e.g. movies, music, etc).

This morning Justice Cowdroy has ruled in favour of iiNet stating that “I find that iiNet simply can’t be seen as approving infringement”. His verdict was that the “copyright (infringement) occured as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet” and that “iiNet has no control over (the) Bittorrent system and (is) not responsible for (the) Bittorrent system.”

Common sense and Australia’s Internet Freedom prevails, for now (see mandatory Australia Internet Censoring).

Internet filtering plan may extend to peer-to-peer traffic, says Stephen Conroy.

THE Federal Government’s controversial internet censorship scheme may extend to filter more online traffic than was first thought, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy revealed today.

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

Update 24÷12÷08: Internet filter ‘technically impossible’… lets hope so :-)

One thing that I love about FireFox is it’s vast library of add-ons. Not only does Mozilla provide an easy to search online repository of add-ons, but installing add-ons with FireFox is easy as three clicks. Although there are many useful add-on, there are also quite a few of not so useful add-ons — So I thought that I would share some of the add-ons that I commonly use.

• Clipmarks — Allows you to save sections of a page, without having to book mark the entire page. Useful for saving sections of a blog or news article. *requires registration
• CSSViewer -  A Simple CSS Property viewer. Provides a great, web 2.0 looking, floating window that displays CSS Information about the item your cursor is currently over.
• Dog Ears — Mark important parts of a webpage to easily relocate them. Lets you dog-ear long pages, with persistent marks, so that you can skip straight to those marks the next time you return to that page.
• FasterFox — Performance and Network tweaks for FireFox. I would recommend that you lower the performance increase back from “Turbo Charged” to at least “Optimized”, to help prevent overloading web servers.
• FlashGot — Download helper for FireFox. Absolute must have, especially if you have a download manager.
• GoogCal — A very simple add-on which lets you add a Google Calendar button to your toolbar.
• GreaseMonkey — Allows you to customise the way a webpage displays, using JavaScript. Scripts can be downloaded from userscripts.org.
• Locationbar — Changes the look of your location bar by putting emphasis on the domain.
• PDF Download — Allows you to choose if you want to view a PDF inside the browser, as a PDF or as HTML, or in your default PDF application. Another must have.
• Resizeable Form Fields — Lets you click and drag form fields to increase, or decrease, their size.
• Tab Scope — Shows a thumbnail preview of your tabs, when you hover over a tab.
• View Formatted Source — Displays formatted and color-coded source and CSS information for elements. Great for reading messy or long html source.
• Web Developer — A useful toolbar which gives you various web developer tools. Can also be useful for non web developer as it lets you disable JavaScript and CSS.
• Zotero — Helps you collect and manage citation information. Great if you’re doing research or you frequently require saving citation information.

One of your favourite add-ons not in the list? Post a comment with the add-ons you use.

Apple have just recently released Safari 3 beta and with this release they have included an XP and Vista version, for the previously Mac only browser. Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari 3 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (see video here) and showcased some of its features and benefits. Aside from the claims of being “the best browser ever”, Jobs also claims that Safari is 2x faster than IE7 and 1.6x faster than FireFox 2.

Personally I’m not a fan the Mac look and feel, especially that big grey toolbar, however there are a few features which are useful, if not at least intriguing. For example, while tabbed browser, you can drag a tab off the tab toolbar and a new window will be opened with that tabs contents displayed. Another useful feature is the ability to resize text areas, without the need for this to be implemented by the website (of course this is available in FireFox through the use of a Resizeable Form Fields extension by Justin Watt).

Aside the aforementioned features of Safari, it does appear to render HTML quicker than IE7 and FireFox. However, there are a few bugs or unimplemented features which should be included. One notable downfall is the lack of support for the scroll wheel click feature (I’m not sure if this is lack of support for my Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 or if it’s not included at all), which is presumable a direct side affect of the mac mouse having a 360 scroll ball instead of a wheel. Another downfall I noted was that the tab toolbar does not always close once you close all of the tabs (excluding one), but granted it is only a beta I’m sure that bug will be fixed before the final release.

All-in-all I think Safari is just another standard browser really, and I’ll be sticking to FireFox for now. However, if you would like to try out the new Safari you can head to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and download your free beta copy. Or alternatively you can download the real “best browser” from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.

Update June 13^th: Apparently there have already been several vulnerabilities found in Safari.