This is the first of our occasional posts on Australian web, tech and related news.
TPN Broke: The Podcast Network, the first podcast network on the planet is in dire financial straights. The company is unable to meet its monthly hosting bill and is soliciting donations, needing $3,000 to keep the door open…until next month.
The network had a difficult 2008, first suffering a hacking after security patches weren’t applied to WordPress installs, then in December losing the majority of its back catalog when a server failed.
Wikileaks Censored: pages on Wikileaks has been censored in Australia, although technically there’s no way to enforce the ban…yet. The pages banned relate to a list of banned sites from the censorship regime in Denmark (ironic really). To make matters worse, the Australian Communications Media Authority is threatening sites with a $11,000 AUD fine per day if they link to the page on Wikileaks.
I’m not going to link to the page, even if this site is hosted in the US, however you can read Wikileak’s response to the ban here. In Australia, it’s illegal to link to content that might be illegal, even when you haven’t published the content yourself. Proto-fascism cometh.
Fake Stephen Conroy outed: Australia’s favorite Twitter imposter Fake Stephen Conroy has been outed as Telstra engineer Leslie Nasaar. Telstra, who’s as popular as herpes in Australia, have naturally reacted in their usual fashion, which is to force the account offline and shut everyone up. Still, at least they haven’t sacked him yet, the fate handed to one worker/ blogger a couple of years back who dared to speak the truth on Telstra’s corporate blog.
