By letting policymakers know just what we think of the "clean feed" Internet filter, we can bring about a policy change. You can help by contacting your representatives and spreading the word about this campaign.

Sign the petition.

Although a petition signature is no substitute for personal contact, every bit helps. Sign the petition here.

Contact Senator Conroy.

Contacting the Minister will let him know that his constituents, the Australian public, are not on board with his impractical plan.

Call the Minister.

There’s nothing like a personal phone call to get the message across. Call the minister’s office on (03) 9650 1188 and let them know your objections.

Write to the Minister.

A personalised letter to the Minister sends a powerful message: We don’t like the policy, and we care. Letters can be sent to the Ministerial office:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

If you’re not sure what to say, you might wish to use the following as a template:

Dear Minister,

As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your mandatory Internet filtering initiative.

Given the importance your Government has attached to modernising Australia’s broadband network, pursuing a policy that can only slow down and increase the costs of home internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all clean feed approach will not serve the public well. I don’t think it is the Government’s role to decide what’s appropriate for me or my children, and neither do most Australians.

Given the amount of Internet content available, the Government will never be able to classify it all and filters will always result in an unacceptable level of over-blocking. I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways both to protect children and improve Australia’s digital infrastructure. Australian parents need better education about the risks their children face online. Trying to rid the Internet of adult content is futile, and can only distract from that mission.

Sincerely,

Internet User

City, State

Email the Minister.

Although not as effective as a letter or call, every bit helps. Email Senator Conroy at: minister@dbcde.gov.au.

Contact your local representative.

Your local Member of Parliament is your representative and wants to hear about your concerns. Let your member know that you are unhappy with this policy.

Not sure who to contact? Find your local member’s contact information.

Contact your ISP.

Your Internet Service Provider is probably just as worried about this policy as you are, but letting them know your concerns will help in their own efforts.

Not sure how to contact your ISP? This list may help.

What is the Government’s plan?

Although the final details of the filtering plans have been kept under wraps, the Minister is on record as being firmly committed to a mandatory clean-feed internet to Australian homes, schools and public computers. A trial of filtering software by ACMA has already been performed, with a "live" field pilot to follow later this year. We must act fast before millions of dollars are squandered on this technically impractical and democratically unworkable solution in search of a problem.

What do we know so far?

• Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.¹
• The clean feed will censor material that is "harmful and inappropriate" for children.²
• The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA’s blacklist of prohibited content.³
• The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.⁴
• The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.⁵
• $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.⁶
• The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.⁷
• A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.

What we don’t know is just as important.

• What age level is the country’s Internet to be made appropriate for? 15? 10? 5 years old?
• Who decides what material is "appropriate" for Australians to see?
• How are lists of "illegal" material compiled?
• Who will maintain the blacklist of prohibited sites?
• How can sites mistakenly added to the list be removed?

All of us want to see children protected from content that could be disturbing or harmful. The clean-feed filter is not a good way to go about this, and could actually reduce the safety of children online.

What can I do to help?

There are technical issues.

The clean-feed, if attempted, will be a technical disaster. The Internet does not work in a manner that would let a filter be effective, and the World Wide Web contains far more content than could ever be effectively rated by a Government organisation. The host of technical hurdles include:

• Like asking Australia Post to filter out objectionable letters, a filter would require ISPs to examine all web traffic, causing enormous expense and technical headaches.
• A filter will slow Internet access down by up to 80% according to a Government report.⁴
• Even the most accurate software the Government has tested would incorrectly block 10,000 sites in every million.⁴
• The ACMA would be overwhelmed with the task of maintaining a blacklist. Millions of web sites, with the list changing on a daily basis, would need to be monitored by Australian bureaucrats - an impossible task.
• Only illegal material published on web sites could be targeted, completely missing other methods of distribution such as BitTorrent.
• Any determined user - including children - could bypass the filter quickly using an anonymizer service, open proxy, or VPN connection.
• The clean feed would be less customisable and effective than a PC-based filter.

In short, as the best experts in the country unanimously agree, Conroy’s plan does not make sense technically.⁸

What can I do to help?

There are free-speech concerns.

Although the initiative is intended and marketed as a tool to help protect children from the dangers of the Internet, this paternalistic scheme raises some troubling issues that affect all Australians. As a source of daily information, the Internet increases in importance every day. Do we really want the Government of the day deciding what Australian adults can and can’t see? Do we want Australia to join a censorship club in which Burma, China and North Korea are the founding members?

• The list of prohibited sites will probably be secret, so it will be hard to know what content the Government has effectively banned.
• Filtering will be compulsory in all homes, even where there are no children.
• It is unknown whether there will be any way to have content removed from the prohibited list.
• How far will the list go, now and in future? Will it filter out material on sexual health, drug use, terrorism… even breastfeeding? Euthanasia and anorexia have been touted by Government MPs as topics worthy of filtering.⁹

What can I do to help?

The Clean Feed is bad policy.

In short, even if it worked the filter would be terrible policy. By censoring the entire country’s Internet access down to the level of a child of indeterminate age, it robs Australian adults of ability to make their own decisions about what content they view.

• Most Australians don’t want the filter.Support for this overly broad policy is virtually non-existent, even from child-protection organisations. A recent survey shows that 51.5% of Australian net user strongly oppose the plan, while only 2.9% strongly support it.¹⁰
• One size doesn’t fit all. A single filter list can’t deliver results that are appropriate for all parents, teens and children, with no way to customise the filter for your household.
• The protection for children is minor at best, an illusion at worst. The clean-feed does nothing to protect children from real threats like cyber-bullying, online sexual predators, viruses, or the theft of personal information. It may provide a false sense of security to parents, reducing effective monitoring of their children’s online activities.
• The money is better spent elsewhere. The filter will cost tens of millions of dollars to attempt. Yet the Government’s own studies admit education is more effective than filtering in protecting children, and that "content risks" are less dangerous than other risks.¹¹
• No other democracy has a scheme comparable to the clean-feed. Comparable systems in Europe only filter a handful of illegal sites, and then only to prevent accidental access. ¹²

Further Reading

Websites

• Electronic Frontiers Australia
• SomebodyThinkOfTheChildren
• Libertus.net
• Defending Scoundrels
• Broadbanned revolution
• ACMA
• DBCDE
• NetAlert

In the News

• No opt-out of filtered internet
• Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children (ABC)
• Australia’s plans to filter Internet under fire (The Age)
• Filtering out the fury: how government tried to gag web censor critics
• Net Filters "required" for all Australians (Ars Technica)

Analysis of the policy

• EFA analysis of mandatory filtering
• Libertus.net policy analysis

Further documents

• Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety
• Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety

What can I do to help?

• ¹ See Conroy announces mandatory internet filters to protect children, also Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety
• ² See above.
• ³ See Labor’s Plan for Cyber-Safety: "…the Current ACMA blacklist under the Howard Government is inadequate. It does not contain enough sites to protect our children from harmful and inappropriate content… Labor’s ISP policy will prevent Australian children from from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by ACMA…"
• ⁴ Some analysis of the filtering trial here, see the report itself for more detail.
• ⁵ As above, "harmful and inappropriate". Also, from this Labor article: "What category of material will be banned under Labor’s plan? Labor will require ISPs to filter out R, RC and X rated material as part of a clean feed for home internet connections."
• ⁶Some info on the budget here
• ⁷The mandatory black-list - see Computerworld or Conroy’s own statements here
• ⁸For instance, some comments by Internet network engineer Mark Newton can be found here.
• ⁹Labor MP calls for banning of pro-ana web sites: here or here. Some discussion of euthanasia here.
• ⁵ Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety p. 48: "‘level of performance degradation… [ranging] from 18% through to 78%’." Also see Education the Best Filter for Young Australians on the Internet "Findings from recent NetAlert research into the use of filters in the broadband environment confirms that accessing the Internet through a content filter at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level leads to a significant reduction in network performance."
• ¹⁰ Whirlpool Australian Broadband Survey for 2007
• ¹¹ See above report, also Education ‘as effective as internet filtering’ or Education the Best Filter for Young Australians on the Internet, see also Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety for more discussion of Internet risks
• ¹² For a description of BT’s system, see this Register article. See also ISP "Voluntary" / Mandatory Filtering

What can I do to help?

• Go to the form where the mistake is.

• Put your cursor in the text entry widget and hit down until the incorrect entry is highlighted.

• Now press shift + delete

It’s that simple. I hope this helps. Kevin

Part 1 - File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 2 - Adding External Storage

It doesn’t matter if you have the 20GB, 60GB, or even the new 80GB PlayStation 3 — you can always use more storage space. All that available hard-disk space quickly disappears once you start downloading games, demos, and HD videos. Fortunately, Sony has designed the PS3 to allow console owners to perform their own hard-drive upgrades. You can go out and select your own hard drive instead of being forced to buy an official first-party hard-disk accessory. However, giving console owners that freedom means that aspiring upgraders will need to know how to select the right hard-drive upgrade and the proper installation technique.

Hard-disk manufacturer Seagate supplied us with a 160GB Momentus 5400.3 for our upgrade.

The first step to replacing the hard disk is going to the store or visiting an online retailer to pick up a new hard disk. The PS3 is compatible with just about any 2.5-inch SATA notebook hard disk. Both 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM drives should work fine. The physical size of the hard disk is important because it has to fit the PS3’s 2.5-inch drive tray. As far as storage capacity goes, it doesn’t make sense to go through the trouble of upgrading unless you go big: We’re talking 120GB, 160GB, or even 250GB.

Once you have your upgrade drive, the next step is to back up the data on your current PS3 hard drive to an external storage unit. You can skip this step if you aren’t attached to your music, videos, and game saves, but most of us will probably want to save all that information. The PS3 has a built-in software backup utility that can copy the PS3’s hard-drive contents to an external storage device, such as a USB thumb drive or a memory stick. The removable storage device must use the FAT32 file system in order for the PS3 to recognise it. If you have an external hard drive that’s formatted in NTFS, you can use the Disk Management utility in Windows to reformat the drive, but you’ll need to create partitions on large external hard drives because Windows can only do FAT32 on drives 32GB or smaller.

Save your data using the PS3’s backup utility.

If your storage device isn’t large enough to handle a full system backup, you can selectively copy data over through the various music, photo, and game menus in the XMB. Your PlayStation Network login and system settings will remain safe on the system during the entire process. After you have your data safely backed up, you can move on to the actual hard-drive swap.

You will need a Phillips-head screwdriver to complete this part of the installation process. The PS3 owner’s manual also includes step-by-step details on how to replace the hard drive, in case you need more instructions.

Turn off and unplug the system. Remove the plastic HD side-panel, and remove the blue screw.

Open the metal latch, move the drive tray to the right, and slide out the drive.

Remove the four screws that hold the hard drive to the tray. Use a screwdriver that fits snugly because the screws are extremely tight and easy to strip.

Swap in the new drive, and replace the screws.

Put the drive tray back into the system and slide it into place. Then replace the blue screw and snap the side panel back onto the system.

Turn on the console and let the system format the new drive. Then load up the PS3 backup utility to restore data from your external storage device back onto the PS3 hard drive.

At this point you should have a newly upgraded PS3 and the leftover hard drive. You could try selling the old drive, but small-capacity used drives might not fetch enough money to be worth the hassle of finding a buyer. If you still want to make the drive useful, you can buy an external drive enclosure to make it into a portable storage device.

So once again I have used of my favourite editing tools Animoto to edit our holiday photos. The pictures were taken at the Chinese Garden in Toowoomba, the swimming pool at our resort in Noosaville, and at the Australian Zoo in Beerwah.

The music for the video is Beautiful Reasons by Zach Gill which is available for download here.

Please Note - As this is a high resolution video it may be necessary to press the pause button and allow the video to buffer before playing.

To view the regular photo gallery click here.

Schedule SyncToy 2.0

While you do not have to schedule SyncToy to use it, some users may find it helpful to schedule recurrent SyncToy runs. Perhaps you have a folder pair that takes a long time to sync and you want to run SyncToy in the middle of the night, for example.

SyncToy does not provide a user interface to schedule folder pairs to run at designated times. However, there is a method to schedule tasks using the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Windows Vista

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, search for Task Scheduler.
2. Select Create Basic Task in the Actions pane on the right.
3. Add a Name and Description and select Next.
4. Choose when you want the task to start and select Next.
5. Choose date/times (if applicable) to run task and select Next.
6. Choose Start a Program option and select Next.
7. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe. (Programs, SyncToy)
8. Type “-R” in the Add Arguments textbox. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\ and that you want to run a folder pair named “My folder pair.” Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe” -R “My folder pair.” Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Windows XP

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, select All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Scheduled Tasks.
2. Select Add scheduled task to start the Scheduled Task Wizard. You will see a list of possible programs to run.
3. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe.
4. The wizard will next prompt you to enter how often you want to run the scheduled SyncToy (for example, daily, weekly, et cetera). Select a frequency.
5. The next page asks when to start the task. Select a start time.
6. The next page asks for the user name and password to run the program under. Enter your user name and password.
7. The final page contains an option to open the properties dialog when the wizard ends. Select this checkbox.
8. Modify the Run textbox to include the –R command line option. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0 and that you want to run a folder pair named “My folder pair.” Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: “C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe” -R “My folder pair.” Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Note: With this version of SyncToy, it is now possible to schedule execution of a folder pair in the following scenarios:

1. No one is currently logged into the machine.
2. A different user is logged into the machine.

Part 1 - File Sharing with Windows Media Player 11

Part 3 - How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

The Playstation 3 is available with several different hard drive sizes, but quite often you may want or need a bigger one. You can replace the internal hard drive using a standard laptop hard drive, but this tends to be expensive. An easier and cheaper method is to add an external hard drive to your Playstation.

1. Connect the hard drive to your computer using a USB cord.
2. Check what the drives  "File System" type is by going to Start, Computer, Right click on the USB drive, and select Properties.
3. The file system type must be "FAT32" in order for the Playstation 3 to recognize it. If it is a different format please read this article explain how to format a large USB drive.  
4. Once you have confirmed the file format you need to create a folder system identical to that on the Playstation 3.
5. Please create four folders labelled "Picture" (not Photo), "Music", "Video" and "Game".
6. Load all the music you want into your music folder, all the video you want into your video folder, and all the photos you want into your picture folder. Your game folder should still be empty.
7. Disconnect the hard drive by clicking the green arrow in the icon list and the bottom right hand corner of the screen and select "Safely remove…"
8. Once your computer tells you "XXX drive can now be safely removed", unplug the hard drive from your computer.
9. Connect the hard drive to your Playstation 3 and use the extra space to save information and access all your extra content saved on your external hard drive.

Tips

This is due in part to the fact that the Windows format tool can only format a drive using the Fat32 if the drive is 32GB or smaller.

While a great number of external hard drives are being manufactured with capacities in excess of 40GB we indeed need another method of formatting these devices using a single Fat32 partition.

After dabbling a bit with a few different free software formatting tools that are launchable from within Windows, I have come to a nice solution. The utility is called CompuApps SwissKnife and works great for those that need to format their USB hard drives from a Windows XP environment.

SwissKnife is a stand alone solution that will allow you to format your external USB devices as Fat32 so that the information you put on the device can be read across multiple operating platforms. This is great since some of us are using Linux, Unix and other operating environments along with Windows and wish to access our data via these platforms.

Below is a simple screenshot of the application:

The application is easy to navigate and straightforward to use.

It is completely free to use and you can grab it from HERE

The product website is HERE

Part 2 - Adding External Storage

Part 3 - How To Upgrade Your PS3’s Hard Drive

The PlayStation 3 is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. It is the first console with next-gen primary storage media, Blu-ray Disc, though it also supports DVDs, CDs, and with some models SACDs. It is capable of playing back content from Blu-ray Disc (BD) at a bit rate of multiplex 48Mbps, the maximum bit rate defined in BD standards. (Wikipedia)

I checked out the official PlayStation.com forums and I’ve seen some pretty useful info on how to allow media sharing between the PS3 and Windows Media Player 11.

Here is what I had to do with my set up. Some of this was necessary as my External Western Digital HDD is FAT32 at the moment, and without doing the below, the PS3 wouldn’t see the content stored on my FAT32 drive. NTFS drives were fine, just not other HDD formats.

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS:
Follow these instructions exactly and you should have no problems.

Before you begin:
1. Ensure your firewall is set up properly. Your software firewall must have the necessary changes to allow Windows Media Player to communicate out for UuNP. If you use Windows Firewall and enable sharing for WMP, WMP will make the necessary changes to Windows Firewall. If you use another 3rd party Firewall, like McAfee, you will probably need to go in to that software and add the right stuff, such as Programs that can communicate out on the network or trusted IP’s, etc.
2. Ensure your PS3 and Computer are within the same IP address range and subnet mask, so they can talk to one another. In other words allowing your computer and PS3, to obtain it’s information from the DHCP (Firewall router).

On Your PS3:
1. Disable Media Server Connection on the PS3.

On your PC, in Windows Media Player 11:
ENSURE YOU HAVE ALL THE NECCESARY PLUG-INS AND CODECS FOR WMP TO VIEW ALL TYPES OF MEDIA, LIKE AVI, QUICKTIME, ETC.
1. Install Windows Media Player 11 (unless it’s installed already).
2. In services.msc or "Computer Management", Change the account that Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service uses. Changed it to "Local System account", but leave "Allow service to interact with desktop" UNCHECKED. Restart this service. This was necessary to be able to add folders from my FAT32 External Western Digital HDD.
3. Click on Options
4. Click on Library
5. Click on Configure Sharing and then check mark "Share my media to:
6. Click on Settings
7. Put in something you want for share media as, and leave the default settings.
8. DO NOT click the "Allow new devices and computers automatically". Check marking this will allow everything to connect without you knowing and approving.
9. Click on OK to get back to the main properties screen.
10. Click the "Monitor Folders" button.
11. Once that is up, depending upon how you have your computer set up, and how many user profiles you have choose your options.
12. For me, since all my media is in different places other than my profile in "Documents and Settings", I did an add and ADDED the folders I wanted to add to the library.
13. Let WMP build the library up, and let it completely finish.
14. Click OK on everything till you get back to WMP.
15. Verify your library.

On your PS3:
1. Enable Media Server Connection on the PS3.

On your PC:
1. Once you sit down, you might have a pop up, if you left WMP running, to allow an unknown device access. You can verify your PS3 by checking the MAC address. WMP does not support the PS3 yet, so it will be seen as an unknown device.

If NOT……
1. Click on Options
2. Click on Library
3. Click on Configure Sharing and if things worked properly, you should see an "Unknown Device" Icon.
4. Highlight the Icon and do "allow", and do what ever else you feel necessary, such as customize, or right click the Icon for additional properties.

On your PS3:
2. Go to each Media choice in the XMB (Pictures, Music, Video), and under each do a "Search for a Media Server."
3. Once it has found a Media Server for each choice, you should then be able to see your PC show up with the funky "Windows ICON" and the name of the WMP share you created.

You should be able to take it from there. I used the above steps, and my PS3 is now getting tons of content from my PC. With the exception of a few formats, such as AVI and Quicktime. Some of my choices above were to ensure that my computer is still locked down and secure. If you choose certain settings, you’ll just open up your computer to vulnerabilities.

Feel free to comment on this collection of tips, mentioning if they worked for you or if you’ve experienced issues.