You may’ve closed the pop up window when you first came to my blog so I thought I’d write a bit about it and why I don’t support the Australian government’s proposed Internet censorship.

I’ve taught computing for the last ten years and a lot of this has been to parents. I’ve made a point of teaching them how to help their children when they’re using the Internet. Just like you have rules or limits for everything else with your kids you need to set up rules for Internet use too. www.cybersmart.gov.au is the government’s new online safety website. It doesn’t look as good to me as the old www.netalert.gov.au which is still up but doesn’t contain the good content it used to. I might have a look and see if I’ve still got some of their printed materials.

Don’t get me wrong, if you choose to use Internet filtering software at home for your family then that’s entirely up to you. That’s your choice. 🙂 If you do use it just remember it’s not the entire solution.

I think everyone should be able to choose for themselves what Internet content is suitable for them and their family. I would hate to see censorship and filtering go overboard and start blocking websites dependent on their religious beliefs or if they criticise the government. Homeschooling is illegal in some countries the Australian government might decide to filter out pro-homeschooling websites.

When you think about it has censorship of any kind ever really worked? Did burning books work? People will always find another way.

The government is pushing the need for a filter as ‘Child Protection’ but it isn’t actually going to protect children and here is why:

A web page can be made and uploaded to the world wide web in an hour or so. I doubt that the government’s filter can keep up with the thousands of webpages being uploaded every day. Google can’t, so how can our government?

Illegal material is most often shared via peer to peer file sharing and in chat rooms. Kids know how to use peer to peer file sharing and will access content if they want to. The government’s filtering system will not prevent this from happening.

Also

We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?

This quote is from the Great Australian Internet Blackout website:

There are sites uploaded all the time to teach kids how to bypass filtering such as www.beatfiltering.com

Please research this issue for yourself and see what you think!

Last year I got in touch with a cousin of mine through our online family history research. Today we met and it was wonderful! We all got along extremely well. These are the photos of all of us- Tony and his family, my brother Michael and my daughter Jessica.

I received a voucher for Koorong Bookstore for Christmas and spent it today.

I bought Chuck Girard’s album “A Heart On Fire” from the Legacy Series. I listened to a lot of Chuck Girard growing up and have several of his albums. I need to ask my friend Cliff very nicely if he’ll tranfer them to cd for me 🙂

Love Can Turn The World music DVD from Bill and Gloria Gaither

and the DVD movie Faith Like Potatoes

I’m looking forward to listening to and watching them all!!!

I went to the World Tennis Challenge last night (Tuesday 12 Jan) here in Adelaide. It was terrific! I had a wonderful time. The gates weren’t even open yet and I saw Mark Woodforde. Saw Paul McNamee a couple of times later in the night too. Had a nice tea there and then went to find my seat.

The first match was Bernard Tomic (Australia) versus Robby Ginepri (USA) It was a close game and Bernard won.

Next Mansour Bahrami (International) played Henri Leconte (Europe) one of my favourite tennis players! They put on a wonderful show for the audience hitting balls whilst talking to the audience, serving 2 balls at once, pretending to fight with the umpire and with John McEnroe (playing on the other court) and other antics and trick shots. Henri won this match.

The doubles match was Australia versus USA. Pat Cash and Bernard Tomic against John McEnroe and Robby Ginepri. It was a great game. USA was leading for quite some time and then Australia came back and won it. The McEnroe serve didn’t have quite its old fire but it was still a sight to see! I was amazed at how really skinny he is. Pat Cash is still in good shape but he looked big compared to John.

If you look closely at this shot you can see the ball sailing through the air towards John McEnroe.

All the scores and a write up about the evening are here on the World Tennis Challenge website. BTW I thought the grammar in this article was terrible. I know my grammar isn’t great but in an article for the world, to publicise and promote an event which you want people to attend……not good.

There are more tennis and sunset photos in my facebook photo album here. Please stop by and leave me some comments.