The Geekorium

I’m still stuck on this idea of how to enable comments and feedback on personal netlogs[^netlog] in this world of Facebook and Twitter.

Almost everything I can come up with falls into a couple of broad categories.

1. Hosted by me. For example, enabling comments here or in a self-hosted forum. Comments here are obviously the easiest and I’ve had comments enabled ever since I started (although now limited to new posts only). A self-hosted forum is adding a barrier to entry that offers no incentive for people to bother, and isn’t really appropriate for my readership of three[^navel].

2. Outsourced. This includes all discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Telegram, Discourse, or Disqus. These all require readers/commenters and me to both use the platform, and give up our privacy/rights to those comments to varying degrees based on how much we trust those platforms.

I have a couple of guiding principals I believe in when it comes to the internet. One is that it’s super important it remains as open as possible - as free from government interference as possible (within reason), but also as free from corporate interference as possible too. Governments will always overreach and overreact, so it’s handy that for years the internet has sort of routed around the problem when governments go rogue. More could be done on this front of course, but to my mind the biggest threat isn’t government interference as it is citizen indifference.

By putting so much of our online lives in the hands of large social media companies, we’re dulling the gears that make the internet such a powerful force for social change. Think about it - imagine a group that uses Facebook to mobilise their protests and activism in a country similar to our own. I’m going to use Facebook through this example, but it could just as easily be any other large social site.

So imagine this group of activists - their message is irrelevant, suffice to say it’s something important to them, and potentially dangerous to powerful people in their country. For those powerful people, all it takes to decommission the group is cut off their access to Facebook. If that group hasn’t met in person, shared contact details outside of that channel, or prepared alternate means of communication then they’re effectively deaf and blind when they try to continue communicating. Not only that, but they are mute as well.

On top of that - to people in other countries not affected by the same struggles - they might as well be invisible if their only presence has been on Facebook. On the flip side, for people outside those problems we’re allowing a company - or even a foreign power - limit what we see. We’re also limiting ourselves to those formats that get traction on those sites - for Facebook it’s the Single Grainy Image With Text. How much can we learn about the world from a single picture?

I’m stumbling into /r/iamverysmart territory here, which is not my intention - I have a limited grasp of the socio-political realities of my own neighbourhood, let alone what other people are struggling with elsewhere in the world, but relying on Facebook (or Reddit, or Twitter) as our means of engaging with the world leaves us vulnerable and open to manipulation.

Which is why I miss the days of netlogs. It seemed like for a period of about two years, the internet was exploding with this vibrant eclectic mix of freely shared, highly personal content. Going through my site and cleaning it out I remembered I used to be subscribed to a guy who just talked about toy Transformers. That guy stopped writing in 2011 without any fanfare and I completely missed it. There was someone else who I discovered when I realised I needed a way to be a good parent to my child when my wife is a Christian, and I an atheist. That guy stopped writing his netlog in 2013 and again I didn’t notice the loss. So many more sites refuse to load at all - buried in a sort of DNS graveyard, or worse returned zombified as placeholder pages full of ads. The least worst fate is for a site to at least still load - quiet and untouched by human hands as a monument or shrine to the moments they capture.

How much of that is captured on Twitter or Facebook now? The content might be there - but it’s trapped behind accounts and subscriptions, real-time feeds and algorithms that show people what they’re told they want to see. And it’s making it easier for corporations, foreign powers, and your own leaders to hide what they don’t want you to see.

That’s enough of a trek into conspiracy theory and nostalgia for one night. I understand how much I’m teetering between crackpot and melodrama with the above. I really just want more people to think about this stuff. It’s much easier to talk about possible solutions when we’re on the same page. Because I don’t know what the solution is. Spinning this site up is step one. Figuring out how to discuss this stuff with people who want to talk is step two. … Profit?

[^netlog]:I will use this term unless one of you can come up with something better than blog [^navel]:It seems even more self-aggrandising than my self indulgent comment discussion navel gazing

If one of my heroes - and a highly successful tech journalist and writer

• feels like this sometimes, maybe it’s ok that I do too.

Some updates:

Spurred on by the outpouring of comments and (!) blog posts after asking for feedback, I got stuck into a few posts here and on my other site. Thank you everyone who responded and wrote replies - it gave me some much needed confidence and meant the world to me. I was buoyed for days afterwards (and loved the commentfest that followed here and elsewhere).

I officially quit Twitter (with my joshnunn account at least). I was leaving it open ended so I could come back without looking like a fool, but now I’ll have to hang my head in shame if I DO return.

First Waves is going great-guns. tjb654 tweeted “Wave on Slow Cook” and was retweeted by Pamela Fox (one of the Wave API evangelists). So I got a bunch of new readers and some more Facebook Fans!

I began re-working my portfolio site. I couldn’t be bothered installing a test environment on my laptop, so I put it up and started editing it live. It took me a little longer than I expected to make it usable though, as the documentation for MODx¹ went down just as I started, so I couldn’t figure out how to build menus. Eventually I got something I’m happy with up just before…

Lifehacker (!!) linked to my site What the F is that about?! I suspect I’ve stepped into a mirror world where the Joshua Nunn of this world produces things that interest people and that they want to read. I kinda feel sorry for the poor schmuck who got sucked into my universe, but then I remember he probably goes around with a goatee, so it serves him right.

Tonight I published a massive post on First Waves. I suspect that because I’m massively proud of it, it won’t be read by anyone and I’ll realise that my mirror-self managed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and switch us back… bastard. Or I could be pleasantly surprised that I get some people reading it. I’ve paid for a Clicky account, so now I’ll know when YOU are reading this… unless you’re using a feed reader… or I’m not on my computer when you do… What was i saying? This point has descended into a Rubenerd-esq sort of ramble. My apologies.

I don’t want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again - I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say “I love this new movie”, I’ll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone’s opinion as wrong¹ most of the time, then I will know that when they say “I love this song”, not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I’ve flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a “trusted” private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I’m not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It’s those oter people I worry about…

I should preface this post with an introduction.

I’m Cathie and I am the “bloody end user” component of this blogging team.  We figured that if Wave is going to be the ubiquitous thing that Google envisages, it will have to be workable by everyone - not just the more “savvy” of those amongst us.

So what I’ll be doing is coming at Wave from my perspective - perhaps not such a big picture view - but a fingers on keyboard aspect.

Okay … so one of the first things I looked for once I had my Wave account was a Twitter interface thingamabobby

Online communication fraught with peril. An innocent conversation with a friend can turn nasty in seconds with the slip of misplaced word. Umpteen times this week I have put my foot in my mouth, or written something only to spend the rest of the day worrying if what I wrote might have offended someone. Written communication has never been so difficult. Why has it gotten harder, the more ways we have to communicate?

Of course everyone knows that written communication is less effective at conveying emotion and subtleties of meaning than face-to-face conversations do. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a grimace and a hug, I’d say are worth far more. But online is how many of us choose to interact these days (it’s quicker and lets you continue to do other things while chatting) for better or worse, and we need a way to communicate that puts across our full meaning.

I hate writing. Not because I’m particularly bad at it,¹ but because once I start I feel the need to qualify everything I say with insight to show that I am not as dumb as my words would make me seem. I do it face to face too (which I suspect might be even more painful for the receiver than my written parentheses) because I can’t bear the thought of someone thinking I haven’t thought about what I’m saying enough to see the other side. When I write it though, it increases the effort I have to put in to produce something I’m happy with, and litters my writing with brackets and footnotes. If I’m not prepared to put that sort of effort in I just don’t write.

I’m kinda feeling the same way about Twitter too. Now with 140 characters, it might seem I shouldn’t have that problem, but the limit is exactly what make me nervous about tweeting. With so few words, how can anyone possibly make themselves completely understood? Most of the time it’s not a real issue, as what I say is fairly innocuous, but occasionally the limit can really hack meaning from your words and leave you with something that is drastically misinterpreted.

Personal chat is even worse. You think you have more scope to make yourself understood, but it’s much more immediate and often words come out, when you really should have thought about it more. It also gives you the illusion of knowing someone better than you actually do, so something you might say face to face with someone you know well sounds rude or mean in a chat.

Online communication has rendered my entire vocabulary meaningless in this new context. Words and their equivalent emotions are often entirely different online. We add emoticons and abbreviations such as LOL that we wouldn’t use in real life.² My favourite emoticon is colon-p ( :P ) which is my get-out-of-jail-free card for saying something that might be taken badly without it. It really is a cheap cop-out when a re-write or complete scrapping of the text might be a better option. I hate myself for using LOL and :D as I’m pretty sure my mother “taught me better than that”.

But the alternative is thinking everything through too much. and like I’ve said that doesn’t make me write better, it makes me not write. I had to just write this post, or risk never seeing it written, so you’ll forgive it’s slapdash nature.³

I would like to develop my online vocabulary. I’m not sure what that entails though. I suspect using Twitter has helped, but I’m still coming up short when it comes to making myself understood. Perhaps it will just take time, like learning any new language or culture. Perhaps I will never master it.

How has your vocabulary changed due to online communication?

Matt is a fellow school support officer, doing ICT at another large metropolitan high school. He’s highly qualified and extremely knowledgeable, and a huge Microsoft fanboy. He’s my first port of call for questions about Windows Server and Active Directory, as I know he’s always on top of the latest information from Redmond.

Commander Keen also has an iPhone fetish. For months he paid me out about mine, but it turns out he really was just jealous. So now he has one of those fancy ones that does video and your taxes. They are pretty neat I guess.

He looks out for his friends and is willing to drop everything to help out a mate. He’s a prolific poster on the ICT help forum and email lists we have in the department, and his answers are actually helpful¹ . Since he joined Twitter, I’ve discovered he knows half the geeks in Adelaide already.

So if you want to follow someone who really knows their tech, Microsoft², Open Source, and other geeky stuff and is super friendly and a good mate of mine — hit up @Talie5in.

As of posting, @networkvideohub hasn’t tweeted. I’m hoping that will change soon!

Today’s follow recommendation was a last minute ring-in. On a whim I suggested to Scott Thomas, the manager of Aberfoyle Park’s Network Video, that they should start a Twitter account, and he sounded keen. I thought it’d be neat to be able to tweet movie recommendations, check whether videos are in stock and generally interact with the staff there, who are all so nice.

The staff there have taken the time to learn my name, and give me recommendations when I go in of videos that I might like, having learned the type of videos that Camilla refuses to watch. And the Scott has very good taste in movies too, which is a good thing for a movie store manager. The other week I asked about the IT Crowd, and Ryan¹ immediately hopped online and ordered it. That’s service.

They haven’t got a website for me to link to unfortunately², so their Twitter account will have to do. Follow @networkvideohub if you want to support a local Adelaide business who’s trying something new. Follow them for information on the latest movie releases, movie recommendations and because the staff there are friendly and know videos.

I’ve never met Mo. You might think I’m afraid of him because he’s scary lookin’ or because he’s a “400ft tall doomsday megabot¹” but I’m not. I just haven’t had the opportunity yet. He isn’t scary online though - in fact he’s quite the opposite. His avatar shoots laser beams from his eyes, but I’m sure they’re laser beams of joy.

I’ve followed Mo soon after I joined Twitter. He’s one of the more active Adelaide Twitterers, despite the fact that he’s unapologetically² a Friendfeed fanboy. He’s just as active on both services though, and happily pops in and out of both to carry on cheerful conversations with his many followers. He’s helpful and talented, and an inspiration with his (rassafrassin) custom workouts. He tweeted the beginning of his plan to get fit, and has reported huge successes since, showing tremendous determination.

His ReactionDynamics site showcases his photography and 3D design work, as well as his impressive resume. It also contains a picture of Mo with his sweet Abraham Lincoln beard³.

If you wanna follow someone who’s well known to both Twitterers and Friendfeeders alike, who sometimes talks like a robot, has a wicked wit, and is and all-around overachiever, follow @mokargas. And on Friendfeed too, if that’s your thang.

Beau is one of my few core Twitterers who I haven’t actually ever met in person. But he’s the epitome of what the internet means for relationships for me. Though we’ve never met I’ve known him for about a year now, and I respect his knowledge of technology, I appreciate his perspective as a high school student, and I love his enthusiasm and sense of humour on Twitter.

He was one of the first people to follow me on Twitter (out of the blue), and then a few days later emailed me for access to a locked website I administer. I’m pretty certain it was completely coincidental¹ but if he hadn’t added me to Twitter I would have given him access, as it was only through Twitter I knew he was a high school student and not a teacher as I would have assumed - HA!

I’ve followed his websites in their various incarnations over the last year. Unfortunately I’ve only realised in writing this that his entire site has moved AGAIN, and I need to re-subscribe to his blog. It’s packed with tips and tech news and obviously updated a lot more often than I’ve been thinking for the last month or so!

If you want to follow someone who’s full of energy and enthusiasm, is a little quirky, has a passion for geekery, and I suspect may have a little of the drama queen in him² you can find him on Twitter @beaugiles.

Lord Folland of Albion (or David as he was known before he took the throne of Albion in a bloody muddy coup) has been a mate of mine for years. We used to attend the same church, and had enormous fun making videos together and editing them on his eMac(?) iMac.

We hadn’t caught up in years, until my early Twittering days he found and followed me. Now I appreciate his incredible intellect (he’s a trained SCIENCE teacher you know), his insight on IT, and his passion for education and literacy. He’s a complex and terrific man.

If you’d like someone in your twitter network who is always encouraging, a little bit goofy, and all sorts of smart, look no further than @lordfolland

While I was changing my Twitter picture I noticed that the service suggests that to be more personable and connect better I should use a picture of myself, rather than a random image as an avatar. Currently I use an avatar I created about two years ago that also doubles as my logo for business materials. I crafted it specially to capture something about me while still being abstract enough to hide my physical flaws. It was never about hiding behind a picture, I thought it was a nice way to promote myself consistently.

My logo and avatar for the last two years: E01

So tonight I thought I’d show you just how well my logo captures me, and stop hiding myself from all my new internet friends (I’m looking at you Twitter-buddies). This is me:

This is me… I don’t usually have a
plain white tile as my background.

Now just so you can do a face to face (so to speak) comparison, I’ve handily laid them both out together for you.

When people stop and smile and stare…

AND just in the interests of full disclosure, so you understand that I really do not wish to hide anything from you my loyal reader, I present a (by no means comprehensive) guide to “How my real face differs to that of my Avatar”, to whit:

Spot the differences

So there you have it. My simple guide to what I actually look like. I hope this makes us closer. Now you can be my bestest friends!

How well do your Avatars capture you? Show off your avatar in the comments below!

P.S. Why not check out another post I’m proud of that features illustrations of me? Hair passes forward, screams pass backward.

I’ve tried a number of Twitter clients for my iPhone now. Most of them have something that makes them stand out, and all of them have flaws. Here they are, a little mini-review:

Twitterific (and lite version)

This was my client of choice for a long time. The design is brilliant, and fluid. The paid version has no annoying ads (actually they weren’t that annoying) but I know most of my friends didn’t bother paying for something they could mostly get for free. It makes direct messages and replies very obvious when you’re scrolling through, and gives a nicely laid out bio of people when you go searching for their user info. The feature I got most used to was that it would refresh the stream, but leave the view where it left off, so I could continue reading. I didn’t realise it was a feature until I started trying other clients. The built in web browser is good. And a day or so after thinking “they should make the default twitter page it uses the mobile version”, they did it.

Things that could make it perfect: a way to follow/unfollow from the interface. Search?

Twinkle

This could be a good client. I know some friends of mine quite like it. It emphasises sharing media, and ties in with an online service when you post photos. I stopped using it after about ten minutes because the interface looked like they let someone at it with crayons. Plus side: it’s free.

Things that could make it perfect: make a similar client with a completely different user interface

Tweetsville

By the same people that made Twinkle, this app was the client I thought I was looking for after trying Twinkle. The interface is much improved (in fact, you can streamline it even more if you want) and can even be customised to put the things you find most important in easy reach. It does search, trends, retweets and all the regulars. It lets you follow from within the app, and check out a persons tweets without opening a browser (another feature I didn’t know I wanted till I tried it). The browser is a little simpler if I recall (I’m getting to that), but nothing I missed. It’s about $5 which is a lot cheaper than Twitteriffic Premium. Really it could be perfect except for a few show stopping flaws.

Things that could make it perfect: keep the stream where I left it. I have to scroll back through to find my place and then read up. Not cool. The other thing? Stop crashing! I truly thought this was the one for me, but it just stopped working one day, and won’t open for me anymore. I’m not doing a full restore of my phone just for one app… Sorry Tweetsville. I’ll try again if you update.

Twitterlator (and lite version)

I’m not sure why only Twitteriffic has a light version that’s just as pleasant to look at as the “pro” version. With the other clients I’ve tried, the free version seems synonymous with “we didn’t try very hard with the interface”. Twitterlator is no different. So I skipped the lite version and tried the paid one. And it’s OK. It’s not drop dead gorgeous, but it’s not as butt ugly as the lite version. And it’s got the usual trimmings. It actually seems more feature-packed than some of it’s brethren, but it comes across as clutter to me. The interface is not very intuitive either. Double-tap on a tweet to get details of the persons mentioned in the tweet. Click on a tiny icon to access a URL that’s mentioned. I think it might be deliberate, but interracting with it just seems clunky and slow. I kept trying this when Tweetsville fell over, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Things that could make it perfect: improve the interaction stuff. make it fluid and smooth and easy to grasp (single clicks, swipes etc.).

Twitterfon

I can’t remember why I’m not using this. A few of the Twitterers I follow have mentioned it in the last couple of days. I went to try and use it tonight to remind myself what I found lacking, but it’s got the same annoying crashing problem as Tweetsville. An article linked below suggests it’s something that can be worked around till a fix is pushed out, and maybe the fix could work for Tweetsville too. I’ll take another look at this when the fix is made.

Things that could make it perfect: work

Tweetie

My network raved about this app. Stephen Fry said it was the “best yet”. Unfortunately I have to agree. I say unfortunate because it’s got a number of shortcomings, but is still probably my current client of choice. Mainly due to it’s remarkable “not-crashingness”. It is fast - I’ll give it that - and it is very intuitive and clean. I like clean. It does trends and searches (including #hashtags), and lets me follow and unfollow from in the app. I can check out anyone’s recent tweets, and manage multiple accounts (not strictly necessary for me, but a nice feature) and the browser is as good as any other.

Things that could make it perfect: Let me use a less “bubbly” look. I hate it in the SMS app, and I don’t need it in my tweets. I’m getting used to it, but that’s not the same as liking it. Let me start where I left off. This is doubly annoying, because to get back to where I was, I have to load it page by page like I do on Twitter. I might as well use the web site.

The apps I’ve listed here aren’t exhaustive (‘cause we need thirty eight Twitter clients for each platform)¹ but they are the main ones that people use. If your favourite isn’t covered, I’m sorry - tell me about it in the comments. If one of them has a killer feature that I haven’t mentioned, let me know below. If you think I’m wrong, or think it’s unfair that I’ve reviewed apps that I can’t actually get working, tell me what you think of them.

Hopefully this info can help you get started finding a client you like. Check out the articles below for more info on some of the clients I’ve mentioned.

I love technology. The thrill of new possibilities. The excitement of learning. There’s nothing that beats it.

Actually, that’s a complete lie. There is something that beats it. Beats it hands down. Without question.

I love my baby girl. The thrill of her potential. The excitement of seeing her learn. By gum it’s the greatest feeling I’ve ever experienced, to watch her discover her world.

Hax0r the interw3bz

I’m totally looking forward to teaching her everything I can about the earth. The people on it, the cultures, the life, the bizarre phenomena we just can’t explain yet. I know she’ll be just as fascinated as I am. And I’m hoping that she turns out to be a geek like her Dad.

I’m not saying that technology can beat long healthy walks, or travelling, or hands on experience. But by golly, it can help fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. When Little asks why the sky is blue, we’re going to google it¹ . When Little wants to know where milk comes from, we’re going to look it up on Wikipedia together. And I’m going to use the technology I have at my fingertips to show her a wider world than I could, just on my meagre wages alone.

But the important part about it is I’m going to be with her.

When I give her the password to her shiny new Gmail account (it’s already set up!) I’m going to be there to hold her hand and teach her about spam. When I give her her own Twitter account, I’ll be there to show her how to block those strange people who just want her to buy things. And when I help her make her own web page (xhtml and css standards compliant) we’re going to explore the pros and cons of publishing an email address on the site, and how we can still communicate with people without exposing ourselves to harm.

I’ve been looking forward to this for over a year now. And by the time it comes to start all this, I’ll be ready. My wife will be ready. We’re going to show her the brave new world where information is at our fingertips, and new ways of communicating are instantaneous and free.

Except that maybe it won’t be. By the time my girl is old enough to read, the Australian Government may have implemented their “cleanfeed” policy. The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy has been pushing a plan (that starts trials this month) that will see every internet connection in Australia filtered for “illegal and inappropriate” material. This sounds good on the surface, until you realise that something similar has been tried by the previous government which was in Conroy’s own words “millions of dollars of wasted taxpayer’s money”. The new scheme, which will see the internet filtered by the internet provider, has had $126 million allocated to it already, and one can only presume that when they see how appalling the results are, even more money will be sunk into something that critics have been saying from the outset will never ever work as intended.

Why am I appalled by something that’s supposed to be about protecting my child? Something that stops Amelynne seeing nudie pictures, or spares her the horror of “goatse²” must be a good thing right?

Wrong. Here’s why:

1. I work in a school. I wrote two months ago that I see too many teachers (and parents) letting technology do their job for them. Years ago it was television, and now it’s the internet that we plonk our kids down in front of, and expect them to learn or be entertained. Then we complain that the device is teaching them the wrong values? How screwed up is that? If you are concerned for your child’s mind, teach them with their hand in yours. Don’t expect an electronic baby sitter to know what values you want passed on. If a filter goes in, how many parents will dust off their hands thinking the “internet problem” has been solved? That is dangerous.

2. I also see the technology fail to many times to be useful. We have mandatory filters in place in every school in South Australia, and I know how often legitimate sites are wrongly categorised, or overzealously filtered. I also see how much “inappropriate” material gets through regardless. The internet is spawning hundreds of new sites every day, and before a filter works, it has to have looked at each of those sites and classified it as safe or not. If you let the technology do it, you end up with false positives (or negatives) that can seem almost random, and if you get a human to do it, it’s subject to their prejudices or frame of mind. I think in a school it’s possibly a necessity to have something like this in place, but in every home? That’s madness.

3. The technology cannot keep up. As well as the millions upon millions of sites that must be blocked, you have the problem of the internet traffic of every user in Australia needing to go through some sort of filtering technology. I see massive slowdowns at work when even half our school use the internet at once. A lot of the slowness can be attributed to the filtering technology. It’s just not at the stage where it can reliably catch “illegal and inappropriate” material without slowing down the connection significantly. In a country that is simultaneously trying to create a national broadband network that improves broadband speeds, it’s inconceivable to put such a serious bottleneck in place.

4. We’ve already seen politicians use the proposed filter to further their personal agendas. Family First wants all pornography blocked, and even reliable old Nick Xenophon has made noise that he might want online gambling blocked. In both cases it might be argued that they are totally right to want these blocked, but how long before a new government or political lobby group decides that their particular bugbear - gay marriage, or abortion, or pre-marital sex - is inappropriate “for the children”, and we no longer see it on our internet? That’s all too possible.

5. It wont stop the damage being done by the real criminals. The majority of illegal activity online is done through “peer to peer” networks - that is, groups of people who bypass the Google and Youtube internet, and go straight for the content they want from other people that have it. It’s the way that people who download movies and music predominantly do it. This sort of traffic isn’t illegal in-and-of itself, and law makers cannot block it outright, any more than you could stop all Australia Post mail for the occasional illegal package that gets sent through it³. So regular folk will be inconvenienced in the ways I’ve mentioned, and criminals will continue to do whatever they want. Once again, Joe Six-Pack⁴ gets the raw end of the deal.

So that’s why I think this is a Bad Thing^TM^. But don’t take my word for it. Some smart people have written why they think its a colossal waste of money. Why it won’t do anything but hurt you and me, and do nothing to stop real criminals. Read their opinions, and make up your own mind. If you explore their sites, you’ll even find the other side of the debate. But keep in mind - no one with a knowledge of the technology has said it’s a good idea.

• Start with No Clean Feed

• Browse around “Somebody Think of the Children”

• Check out what average internet users are saying about it

These sites will also direct you in ways you can help oppose the proposal. I’ll be writing to my local member for a start, and if you’re concerned I recommend you do the same.

I truly hope we can stop this travesty. It’s a disgrace in more ways than one. I want my child to grow up in a world where information is at her fingertips, in a fraction of a second. The “cleanfeed” will make this a memory for us older folk. Don’t let that happen.