In an act of net activism the Australian Classification Board’s website was hacked last Thursday in protest of the Australia ISP level internet filtering scheme. The hackers infiltrated the site and inserted text into the introductory text; displaying the following message:

This site contains information about the boards that have the right to CONTROL YOUR FREEDOMZ. The Classification Board has the right to not just classify content (the name is an ELABORATE TRICK), but also the right to DECIDE WHAT IS AND ISNT APPROPRIATE and BAN CONTENT FROM THE PUBLIC. We are part of an ELABORATE DECEPTION from CHINA to CONTROL AND SHEEPIFY the NATION, to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. All opposers must HATE CHILDREN, and therefore must be KILLED WITH A LARGE MELONS during the PROSECUTION PARTIES IN SEPTEMBER. Come join our ALIEN SPACE PARTY.

The controversial filtering plan was first announced in 2007, an $189 million anti-pornography initiative which would cause all Australian servers to filter internet traffic and block all inappropriate content.

Get Up Australia who are responsible for the Save the Net Campaign have been petitioning against the proposal and to date have achieved 99,264 signatures, a few thousand short of their 105,000 target. According to them the filtering system will slow internet by up to 87% and 1 in every 12 block sites will be block incorrectly.

There have been a few hiccups in the government’s testing plan. Back in June 08 tests showed bad results with 5 out of 6 filters degrading network performance by 20%. A leaked list of potential black listed sites also revealed many to be of legitimate content.

The hacked page has now been taken down and the HP show a page load error.

A lot of us took for granted the access to computers and games when we had when we were growing up. It’s hard for me to imagine school holidays without my SNES and Diddy Kong. Well for many kids growing up in developing countries computer games let alone computers are a whole virtual world away. There are a lot of initiatives out there trying to get technology into the hands of these kids, the most well know probably the one laptop per child project spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte which began distributing their bright green laptops in Colombia earlier this year.

I came across another group called Play power.org who have dedicated themselves to bringing Computer Aided Learning to children in developing countries. Similar to OLPC project Playpower take a cost effective approach to the problem by looking at what is currently accessible to these kids and modifying it. They are currently targeting 412 TV -Computers in China, India and South America.

This is a great cause that highlights the staple status of play in a childs congnitive learning plus helping them develop necessary technical skills for the future. This is truly great design at work because it solves a problem, PlayPower’s work recycles old technology and most importantly makes it accessible to people who need it. Find out more about their progress at the PowerPlay blog.

It’s coming and industry pundits are already calling it the most significant development in Search since Google. It’s called Wolfram Alpha and it’s an answer engine; and represents the first real developments towards the sematic web.

Unlike Google, a search engine which searches and finds information in the database of knowledge people have published on the web, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that computes answers to questions based on collective knowledge.

Wolfram Research is well known for its work in scientific and technical computation. Their product Mathematica has been consistently setting the standard in this field for the last 20 years. So it comes as no surprise that there are equally high hpes for Wolfram Alpha.

The product launches in May 09 and you can read more about the details in this review by Noval Spivak.

In February Facebook updated their terms of Service so that users could no longer delete their data when they left the service. Data ownership online is a massive issue and not really one to tackle in a blog post but it is an important area that seems to be developing too slowly and one I feel compelled to blog about. Anyway back to the story… Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook responded to the outrage this policy change caused by saying that sharing data online inherently transfers ownership to the recipient/s. He used the example of an email exchange; even though you may delete the conversation chain from your inbox it still exists on the recipient’s end, and as it should.

But the difference is that an email conversions are fairly controlled in who the recipients are; unless you forward it on, but none the less they remain fairly private. Photos and comments and on people’s walls and picture are accessible to all your friends whether it was meant only for you or not.

The whole data ownership issue is a messy one because when it comes to online we have to reassess what we normally accept as our property. Once your photos, videos or words are online they are just a Ctrl + C away from being in someone else’s possession.

Robert Scoble of Scolbelizer.com argues that data ownership doesn’t matter on Facebook at the new terms of service amendment doesn’t change the users relationship to Facebook.

“Facebook already showed how they treat you by the way they can delete accounts; they have complete control and you have none…just realize your here to serve Facebook, not necessarily the other way around.” (From this post)

But either way this debate highlights that there is still much uncovered terrain around law and policy about online usage. There is so much grey in online usage and with the internet creeping further and further into our lives it’s an area that needs to be developed.

The Creative Commons is an organization looking at realistic ways to preserve ownership on the internet, offering a variety of copyright licenses for free to the public to protect their work. Find out more about Creative Commons here.

Personally I take Scoble’s side cause if you going to put a photo up on Facebook you know it will be seen but I think that Zuckerberg over simplifies the issue by comparing it to email exchanges. Read more about the debate here.

So while housing prices in the real world are falling, realestate on the internet is still booming. Well known Toy Store Toys R Us has just bought the domain name toys.com for $5.1 million in a neck and neck bidding war with National A-1.

National A-1 is a company that buys premium domains and re sells them with huge margins; some examples of the domain’s they own are free.com, boys.com, girls.com, divorce.com, etc.

All other companies eyeing the hot property toys.com bowed out at the $3 million point, with Toys R Us and National A-1 fighting out the remaining 2 million.

But if Toys R Us want to be the first thing people think of when it comes to toys then $5.1 million was worth it, highlighting the growing acceptance of the internet as a primary distribution channel. Purchasing a Domain name like toys.com is probably already worth a couple mill in branding dollars not to mention the SEO value Toys R Us will be reaping from this, effectively saving them large amounts in PPC spend as well.

National A-1 have also recognised the value of online realestate, making their business dealing domains – interestingly their own home page can be found at www.catnip.com, obviously one that hasn’t been snatched up for millions yet.