Eleanor Hall from The World Today, a national ABC radio program, today interviewed Federal Justice Minister, Senator Chris Ellison, who basically said not very much about Schapelle's case as he believes it would be inappropriate, but did confirm that the Australian Federal Police are looking into the claims of drug smuggling rings operating within Australia via airport baggage handlers.
Transcript of the interview is online, where you can read Ellison repeating his lines about it not being right to comment on the Corby case due to it being in progress now, etc, etc, respecting their courts, blah blah yada blah.
Look, sure, I understand the ethics involved in bringing in media, talking about the case, observing foreign social and legal customs, and so on. However, it is just such an awful, frightening situation going on over there -- Schapelle is required to prove her innocence in order to save her own life. This is not the Australian courts, in which the prosecutor would be needing to prove her guilt. This is Bali, place of widespread poverty and ongoing religious war on one side, and politicians lapping up their privileges and paying off their enemies on the other.
I disagree with you Ellison; we should be using the media. As much as we can. It wasn't until Bakir stepped in that anyone from the Aus. government even commented on what was going on.
What if this were someone else's daughter? Your own? Would you be wanting us all to be silent then too?
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Profile of a Teen Killer
The Smoking Gun has published some chilling information from the latest American boy to go psycho with a gun at his school.
The snapshot from his MSN profile (now removed from the MSN site) includes gems like:
How long was it there, I wonder? Did anyone see this, and question such antisocial words? How many other teens with hatred and misunderstanding soaked through them are sitting around spinning evil online?
Another shocking bit of footage from the dead teen killer: a short Flash movie, Target Practice. Rather well done, in fact, if one ignores the bloody content. If only Weise had seen his talents as potential for a good life, rather than wasted and pointless, only good for creating horror and fear.
The snapshot from his MSN profile (now removed from the MSN site) includes gems like:
Category Interests: Military, High Schools, Death & DyingFrightening stuff.
Hobbies & Interests: Planning, Waiting, Hating
How long was it there, I wonder? Did anyone see this, and question such antisocial words? How many other teens with hatred and misunderstanding soaked through them are sitting around spinning evil online?
Another shocking bit of footage from the dead teen killer: a short Flash movie, Target Practice. Rather well done, in fact, if one ignores the bloody content. If only Weise had seen his talents as potential for a good life, rather than wasted and pointless, only good for creating horror and fear.
Schapelle's Trial Moves Slowly On
I haven't been writing so much about Schapelle Corby of late as my original aim was simply to get her case known. As there is now so much more in the media and elsewhere about her awful situation, I don't feel so strongly that she is being ignored -- in fact, I am hopeful now that she will be released. Eventually.
Ever since the generous Ron Bakir stepped in to offer financial and legal assistance to Schapelle's defence team, things have been moving along relatively well:
Lots of finger pointing and blame throwing. Continuing the trend started by the Bali customs officers who accused Schapelle in the first place, I guess.
John Ford, the prisoner, is risking a heckuva lot coming over to Bali. He's had death threats from other Australian prisoners for exposing the interstate drug traffickers methods, not to mention some of their names, and he's likely going to be a target for anti-Schapelle and anti-drug crusaders in Bali who'd like to silence him before he can help her cause. Bakir is calling for a closed courtroom for Ford to take the stand, and he's been under heavy guard from the moment he left Australia, but I can't help but be suspicious of even the Bali police who are "protecting" him at the moment. Aren't they looking for a scapegoat? They certainly wouldn't want Ford's testimony to ruin their chance at proving foreigners pollute their pristine, drug-free country. Ha.
Many people are commenting that Ford is only doing this to save his own skin, however I feel this is a misguided judgement. Firstly, as I've just stated above, he is risking his own life. And secondly, all that is needed for Schapelle to be freed is for the Balinese jurors and judges to think there is a chance, a possibility, that what he is saying could be true. Even if it's not the prisoners Ford is naming who were responsible for planting the drugs, they just need to believe it is possible for someone to have done it. Someone unrelated to Schapelle. Then, by Australian law at least, there would be enough doubt in the truth of the charges that she would be freed.
Of course, this trial is happening in Bali. Corruption is rife, and the lead prosecutor himself stated early on in the trial, "There is no need to fingerprint her. She is guilty. They always say they're innocent. It is common."
Sends shivers down my spine. Keep thinking of Schapelle, readers. This case has a long way to go yet.
Ever since the generous Ron Bakir stepped in to offer financial and legal assistance to Schapelle's defence team, things have been moving along relatively well:
- the Australian government was put under the spotlight for not assisting more
- attempts were made to get airport security camera footage (which apparently had already been wiped)
- Australian baggage handlers were contacted for information relating to the case and last week one of them, a Qantas employee, Scott Speed from Brisbane Airport, gave evidence in support of Schapelle
- Schapelle's friends have taken the stand
- various other media personalities and politicians have spoken up to criticise the government's lack of action
- Downer said he'd try and intervene if Schapelle was convicted
- Howard said he was worried about a fair trial for Corby
- Schapelle's boogie board and its bag were shown in court as evidence
- Downer agreed to help Schapelle's legal team (and he met with them once. Wondering how that constitutes "helping". )
- Expert witnesses have testified for Schapelle
- Schapelle herself took the stand to plead for her life
Lots of finger pointing and blame throwing. Continuing the trend started by the Bali customs officers who accused Schapelle in the first place, I guess.
John Ford, the prisoner, is risking a heckuva lot coming over to Bali. He's had death threats from other Australian prisoners for exposing the interstate drug traffickers methods, not to mention some of their names, and he's likely going to be a target for anti-Schapelle and anti-drug crusaders in Bali who'd like to silence him before he can help her cause. Bakir is calling for a closed courtroom for Ford to take the stand, and he's been under heavy guard from the moment he left Australia, but I can't help but be suspicious of even the Bali police who are "protecting" him at the moment. Aren't they looking for a scapegoat? They certainly wouldn't want Ford's testimony to ruin their chance at proving foreigners pollute their pristine, drug-free country. Ha.
Many people are commenting that Ford is only doing this to save his own skin, however I feel this is a misguided judgement. Firstly, as I've just stated above, he is risking his own life. And secondly, all that is needed for Schapelle to be freed is for the Balinese jurors and judges to think there is a chance, a possibility, that what he is saying could be true. Even if it's not the prisoners Ford is naming who were responsible for planting the drugs, they just need to believe it is possible for someone to have done it. Someone unrelated to Schapelle. Then, by Australian law at least, there would be enough doubt in the truth of the charges that she would be freed.
Of course, this trial is happening in Bali. Corruption is rife, and the lead prosecutor himself stated early on in the trial, "There is no need to fingerprint her. She is guilty. They always say they're innocent. It is common."
Sends shivers down my spine. Keep thinking of Schapelle, readers. This case has a long way to go yet.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Upgrade to Firefox 1.0.2 and Thunderbird 1.0.2
Mozilla have today released a small but important upgrade to Firefox: version 1.0.2, which offers just 3 fixes for potential problems:
Thunderbird was also upgraded yesterday, with 1.0.2 quietly replacing the previous download on the site. A few more fixes in this one, the other important one being a potential problem if users download .pif, .lnk, or .url files twice via the mail app.
- buffer overflow when using an obsolete Netscape extension for GIF processing
- malicious sidebars that could load nasty code into the browser
- a variation on a problem fixed in 1.0.1, the firescrolling bug, in which dragging components could hijack and run privileged XUL code
Thunderbird was also upgraded yesterday, with 1.0.2 quietly replacing the previous download on the site. A few more fixes in this one, the other important one being a potential problem if users download .pif, .lnk, or .url files twice via the mail app.
Yahoo! 360° + Flickr = Blogger Beater? Or Just Follow the Leader?
Hot on the heels of news about Blogger's problems comes the announcement of Yahoo's new blog offering: Yahoo! 360°. (Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? "Yahoo three sixty degrees"... "Yahoo three sixty" would be better. Which gets me wondering about titling this post "Yahoo comes full circle", heh. Although it hasn't really. But anyway.)
Yahoo's 360° isn't yet open to the public, but in the meantime they've been playing in another of Google's sandboxes lately, purchasing the popular and clever photo sharing site Flickr. Google bought Picasa last year, and while they haven't rechristened it with a more Google-centric name yet (Piccle? Picca? Plogger? Ick!) apparently that is on the cards for down the track once they determine exactly how best to make use of it.
Microsoft also jumped into the blogosphere last year, launching MSN Spaces (is anyone actually using that?) and one must ponder whether they will follow the pack again and buy up a true online photo sharing tool soon. (They already offer simple photo sharing via MSN Messenger, but it's integrated, not standalone.) There are a few photo sharing sites still available for them. (If they hurry.)
[Prediction? I'm putting my money on Pixagogo, which offers photo printing on true photo paper as well as the sharing bit, plus international shipping. Nice, clean UI, added value for money-hungry MSN-ers. (Although, one must ask, are printed photos a dying species?) Then there's ImageEvent, who have a similar but more expansive service, allowing prints to be made into jigsaw puzzles, calendars and other gifty-type things. I'm guessing one of those two will be snapped up soon.]
That's not all the players in this battle though: HP have recently acquired SnapFish, moving in hard on the photo printing scene.
And also this week, Yahoo! Mail matched Gmail's super-sized 1Gb of email space winner, just after Gmail has started offering accounts to random Google users. (A bit too late, some would say, although possibly they had a whiff of Yahoo's plans and were forced to play their trump card to stay ahead of the pack.)
Back to the issue though, can someone please tell me: What is it with these groups? There seems to be an awful lot of follow-the-leader going on lately. (With MS doing an awful lot of tailing.) Why do these mega-giants confine themselves to constantly fighting for the same group of users online?
Web applications are growing at a rate of knots, even making uneducated CNN editors predict we'll all be ditching our machines and logging onto a web-based thin client-type operating system sometime in the near future. And even though said editor really has no clue, [yeah, like we'd trust Google -- or, worse, MSN -- enough to beam them all our data] it is interesting to watch the flap going on amongst the web giants, each eager to grab that one special tool that will next drive our world.
Yahoo's 360° isn't yet open to the public, but in the meantime they've been playing in another of Google's sandboxes lately, purchasing the popular and clever photo sharing site Flickr. Google bought Picasa last year, and while they haven't rechristened it with a more Google-centric name yet (Piccle? Picca? Plogger? Ick!) apparently that is on the cards for down the track once they determine exactly how best to make use of it.
Microsoft also jumped into the blogosphere last year, launching MSN Spaces (is anyone actually using that?) and one must ponder whether they will follow the pack again and buy up a true online photo sharing tool soon. (They already offer simple photo sharing via MSN Messenger, but it's integrated, not standalone.) There are a few photo sharing sites still available for them. (If they hurry.)
[Prediction? I'm putting my money on Pixagogo, which offers photo printing on true photo paper as well as the sharing bit, plus international shipping. Nice, clean UI, added value for money-hungry MSN-ers. (Although, one must ask, are printed photos a dying species?) Then there's ImageEvent, who have a similar but more expansive service, allowing prints to be made into jigsaw puzzles, calendars and other gifty-type things. I'm guessing one of those two will be snapped up soon.]
That's not all the players in this battle though: HP have recently acquired SnapFish, moving in hard on the photo printing scene.
And also this week, Yahoo! Mail matched Gmail's super-sized 1Gb of email space winner, just after Gmail has started offering accounts to random Google users. (A bit too late, some would say, although possibly they had a whiff of Yahoo's plans and were forced to play their trump card to stay ahead of the pack.)
Back to the issue though, can someone please tell me: What is it with these groups? There seems to be an awful lot of follow-the-leader going on lately. (With MS doing an awful lot of tailing.) Why do these mega-giants confine themselves to constantly fighting for the same group of users online?
Web applications are growing at a rate of knots, even making uneducated CNN editors predict we'll all be ditching our machines and logging onto a web-based thin client-type operating system sometime in the near future. And even though said editor really has no clue, [yeah, like we'd trust Google -- or, worse, MSN -- enough to beam them all our data] it is interesting to watch the flap going on amongst the web giants, each eager to grab that one special tool that will next drive our world.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Blogger Speeds Up
That last post was my first since reading about the Blogger development team's commitment to improving the speed of this here blogging tool, and I must say it was suuuuper fast!
Apparently the Blogger service has had an upgrade, server capacity upped 20%, then upped again, the changes coming about after Blogger folk (who use their own stuff thus suffer the same prob's) noted some lag last week.
Sounds like they ain't been using their own stuff all that long, then, as I've been noting such problems for a while now. But not to complain, as now we're cooking with gas...
Apparently the Blogger service has had an upgrade, server capacity upped 20%, then upped again, the changes coming about after Blogger folk (who use their own stuff thus suffer the same prob's) noted some lag last week.
Sounds like they ain't been using their own stuff all that long, then, as I've been noting such problems for a while now. But not to complain, as now we're cooking with gas...
AmazType
Get your search results in graphical form.
AmazType is an amazing Flash web application, programmed by Yugo Nakamura, which uses Amazon's search API to return results as book cover thumbnails, and then arranges them to form your search words.
This guy is just too cool.
Check out another new offering from Nakamura for Japan's NID (Nagaoka Institute of Design), a fascinating UI for displaying students, teachers and other artists of the institute along with their work in a compellingly interactive way.
AmazType is an amazing Flash web application, programmed by Yugo Nakamura, which uses Amazon's search API to return results as book cover thumbnails, and then arranges them to form your search words.
This guy is just too cool.
Check out another new offering from Nakamura for Japan's NID (Nagaoka Institute of Design), a fascinating UI for displaying students, teachers and other artists of the institute along with their work in a compellingly interactive way.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Aust Government Upgrades to Panoptic Search
The Australian Government web site has upgraded its search facilities to use the Panoptic enterprise search engine, ZDNet Australia reported yesterday.
Panoptic is another great CSIRO-developed technology offering deeper and broader search capabilities than traditional and currently popular engines for larger companies. It integrates standard searching of web pages and documents with a host of database indexing capabilities, HTTPS crawling, dynamic site indexing that works with cookies and session id's, highly customisable XML format and metadata searching, and integrated CMS searching, including Lotus Domino, Microsoft, Oracle, Verity, and Vignette.
In addition, it enables companies who already run their own proprietary or customised search engines to extend what they already use easily and seemlessly, allowing for faster, more relevant, higher quality results.
Australian companies already taking advantage of Panoptic's offerings include the ABC, NineMSN, Australian National University, Westpac, the ACCC (Australia's consumer watchdog), and Bluepages, a depression information site.
For more information, see the Panoptic website.
Panoptic is another great CSIRO-developed technology offering deeper and broader search capabilities than traditional and currently popular engines for larger companies. It integrates standard searching of web pages and documents with a host of database indexing capabilities, HTTPS crawling, dynamic site indexing that works with cookies and session id's, highly customisable XML format and metadata searching, and integrated CMS searching, including Lotus Domino, Microsoft, Oracle, Verity, and Vignette.
In addition, it enables companies who already run their own proprietary or customised search engines to extend what they already use easily and seemlessly, allowing for faster, more relevant, higher quality results.
Australian companies already taking advantage of Panoptic's offerings include the ABC, NineMSN, Australian National University, Westpac, the ACCC (Australia's consumer watchdog), and Bluepages, a depression information site.
For more information, see the Panoptic website.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Online Petition to Government: Save Schapelle
Anton Bouwer has created a petition at the free online petitions site, Petition Spot. Topic: We want government intervention in the Schapelle Corby case. Target number of signatures is 5000.
Please sign his petition, the more noise we make, the more they listen, and hopefully, the sooner Schapelle will be freed.
Please sign his petition, the more noise we make, the more they listen, and hopefully, the sooner Schapelle will be freed.
New Witness Statement Clears Schapelle's Name
ABC's The 7:30 Report tonight relayed information that a man has given a sworn statement to police and the Corby defence team, giving the name of a known drug trafficker as being linked to the 4.1kg bag of marijuana, blowing apart the prosecution's claim that Schapelle Corby owned the drugs and intended to sell them in Indonesia herself.
Apparently this man has been trying for over two months to get the Australian Federal Police to listen to him, but with no luck. The statement was faxed to Corby's defence team in Bali last night, just in the nick of time, and has been passed onto authorities for investigation. The defence now plans to ask for an extension to the trial, in order to clarify this new info for presentation before sentencing next month.
Hope and pray that more evidence can be found to support the man's claim. So far he has also offered corroborating accounts to police, although it appears he is hesitant to take the stand in Bali himself.
More information:
Apparently this man has been trying for over two months to get the Australian Federal Police to listen to him, but with no luck. The statement was faxed to Corby's defence team in Bali last night, just in the nick of time, and has been passed onto authorities for investigation. The defence now plans to ask for an extension to the trial, in order to clarify this new info for presentation before sentencing next month.
Hope and pray that more evidence can be found to support the man's claim. So far he has also offered corroborating accounts to police, although it appears he is hesitant to take the stand in Bali himself.
More information:
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