As I said last night, there is no way I could attempt to blog about everything I missed in the last week, but here are some links to things that would have caught my eye were I well enough to scour the web in the way I usually do. Although several of them are very interesting and worth commenting on in some detail, I can only do so much to catch up.
Australian News
Most importantly (I’m joking here … sort of) – the identity of David Tench was revealed by The Daily Telegraph – it is stage actor Drew Forsythe. Read more here. (Thanks for the heads up Matthew Hickey.)
The Australian reported that Mark Vaile has predicted that fine-tuning of media ownership laws will be required to quell the concerns of Nationals MPs over their impact in regional areas. Read the story here.
The latest ACMAsphere is available here.
Information about the QUT moot teams competing this week can be found here.
IT News
Google celebrated their eight birthday yesterday!
On a different note, Google defied a Belgian court order to publish a ruling that prevents it from running summaries of news reports and links to articles in Belgian. Read about this copyright dispute in the New York Times here.
A cardinal with a blog? Read about it in the New York Times report here and visit Cardinal O’Malley’s blog, who is the leader of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, here.
Australian IT reported that a group calling itself Hacktivismo has launched a web browser that promises to protect the privacy of internet surfers from "hostile governments" or "data thieves." Read the story here and check out information about the browser, which is based Mozilla Firefox, called Torpark here. (Thanks for the heads up Shane Connor.)
Also from Australian IT:
ICANN to stay in US hands (read about it here).
Google to stick with search as it focus – not content (read about it here).
China has built its own version of an ultra-fast, next-generation internet network that promises to reduce the nation's dependency on foreign firms (read about it here).
Ten has had talks with News Interactive about striking a digital alliance, which would be a very exciting development (read about it here).
Last week Australian IT also had a good report on phishing (and see my ALTA presentation on phishing from earlier in the year here). The Age had an interesting report on phishing a few days ago too (read it here).
Commentary (by others)
Errol Simper on how media diversity will fade away if we ditch the Keating media rules. Read it here.
Kim Weatherall had some interesting thoughts on the Exposure Draft and the Lexmark/Sylink issue and the interoperability issue.
From one side of the world to the other, Susan Estrich had a good piece on the Bill Clinton phenomena.
Media Issues in the US
The Motion Picture Association of America banned the Deliver Us From Evil movie trailer, citing issues with sexuality and children in a documentary about a pedophile priest. Decide for yourself if that ban makes sense by watching the trailer here.
The US Senate has been holding hearings on the proposed federal shield law for reports - The Free Flow of Information Act 2006. The Media Law Prof Blog covered it here.
The Federal Communications Commission revised the rules regarding broadcasters' obligations "to protect and serve children in their audiences". Read the media release here.
A Democratic Senator laughed on FoxNews at the "Fair and Balanced" FoxNews slogan:
And now, a final link to check out
Finally, The Washington Post had a really interesting article on the copyright implications of plagiarism checkers. Here is an extract:
When McLean High School students write this year about Othello or immigration policy, their teachers won't be the only ones examining the papers. So will a California company that specializes in catching cheaters.
The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else's words.
But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school's action will tar students at one of Fairfax County's academic powerhouses.
Read the rest of the article here.
Anyway, I think that will do it for now …
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