Threats on Aussie swimmers? I was advised by an athlete who has chosen not to attend the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, that he/she had been advised that an attempt was made by “terrorists” to hold up the bus carrying members of the Australian swim team. I do not expect that this information will be revealed until after the Commonwealth Games. But it would be interesting to know what contingencies are in place for protecting athletes if the resources of the Indian government are not up to scratch.

Rumblings on Ayres Rock Resort deal. The Indigenous Land Corporation board approved the purchase of Ayers Rock Resort on Friday but rumblings in government are growing on the value of spending $300 million on an asset when the ILC mandate is employment for indigenous people yet this will not generate significant employment. You have to wonder the real objectives of the ILC board.

NBN getting heavy. Your article on the culture of NBN Co barely scrapes the surface of the arrogant way these blokes carry on. I work in a utility company that has had some dealings with them and they are the rudest bunch of people you are likely to meet. They basically came and demanded access to our infrastructure. They also treated us like idiots as if they were the only ones who knew anything about engineering.

We explained that we needed to see their plans and assess how they would affect our service delivery and our agreements with local councils. They then threatened that they would talk to the minister who could pass a law to give them access whether we liked it or not. We still haven’t seen their plans and we are pretty sure they don’t exist. I spoke to some of my mates who work in other companies and they have had the same experience. They also reckon that they are ripping through money like it’s no ones business.

Where’s Australia’s disability report? Whatever happened to Australia’s shadow report on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, due as it was before the government’s initial report on August 10? I know that there was much internal dissent amongst the gaggle of ‘experts’ gathered together to frame this report, notably the split between those who are passionate advocates and those who are passionate critics of Australia’s condititional ratification of the CRPD and its optional protocol. In particular, those experts who support the arbitrary continuance of forced interventions and those who oppose it.

Moreover, the process by which the shadow report was informed was contrary to UN guidelines, which call for direct participation by people living the experience of disability (hence the catchcry of the CRPD: ‘nothing about us without us’). Instead, and to appease federal and state governments, the gaggle of experts opted for a process where they would rely on government-funded disability services to provide the evidence of adherence to, progress toward or breaches of the CRPD. In effect, that obliges those disability services to critically evaluate their own practices and also, potentially, to brown off their primary, if not sole source of income.

Does the ABC have Uhlmann in training? Is the ABC running an in-house on-the-job training quest? The question comes to mind with the starting of a new program on ABC News 24 called Capital Hill. It’s hosted by Chris Uhlmann, one of the trio of front-runners said to be in the frame to replace Red Kerry at The 7.30 Report. The others are Tony Jones and Leigh Sales — both of whom have hosting gigs with political interviews embedded at Q&A and Lateline respectively. But Uhlmann, the political editor of News 24, didn’t have an overt hosting gig with the certainty of strong political interviews everyday. Now he does.

It will air on Fridays at 5.30pm  and cover the week’s political events and news, as well as carry interviews with the key players of politics. It is a terrible time, hardly anyone will see it so consider it more of an in-house screen test for Uhlmann. It would be like Seven or Nine carving out 30 minutes or an hour on one of their digital channels to run a show hosted by a highly regarded talent. They don’t do it.

But the ABC’s problem is that Uhlmann doesn’t currently have a vehicle to show off his political interviewing skills; he is more a reporter and commentator, something that he briefly did as The 7.30 Report‘s political editor before getting his current gig on News 24. To be a serious contender for Red Kerry’s big boots, he needs to get his interviewing skills up to speed and on a par with Jones and Sales. So a vehicle was invented for him by management. How kind.

The European net filter example. After analysing European internet block lists targeting child p-rnography, a German working group has come up with some results that debunk a lot of Senator Stephen Conroy’s claims. None of the sites were hosted in locations where they couldn’t be easily taken down, in fact the majority were in the USA. Rather than adding them to a blacklist that is, as has been demonstrated, easily bypassed by anybody, such sites can be easily removed.

Banks remove fraud sites in as little as four hours, so removing them should be easy. At the moment ACMA have been shown to take months to make an assessment — a result Labor should be ashamed of themselves for encouraging. Blocking misses its target. Here, Australia gets a special mention before the system has even been implemeneted for managing to blacklist small businesses.

YouTube highlights net censorship. YouTube’s transparency project has provided an excellent way to visualise various regimes censorship of the internet, with traffic graphs in various countries for all their sites over time. Turkey should be a standout for Australia considering their censorship legislation is eerily similar to that proposed by Labor. You can see on the graph the traffic for YouTube gradually dropping off over time as various groups work to censor the site and the legislation gets tightened to close off the many, many filter bypass methods.

Where’s Qantas’ footy spirit? Travelling with Qantas on AFL grand final day and during the match, we hurried to the Qantas departure lounge to catch an hour of the big game on the TV. Although I can never recall being on a Qantas flight where the entertainment system worked properly, I was sure the departure lounge TVs would be working on the big day. Not so.

We toured all of the adjacent lounges and were faced with old partly-cannibalised CRT televisions that were either flickering or producing purple distorted images and of course no sound. Our lounge #24 was probably the only one with a TV with a visible image, but sadly a golf tournament was on display. No footy at Melbourne Airport on grand final day? So much for ‘the spirit of Australia’…