The VCE exam body has been accused of plagiarism and breach of copyright in a contentious English paper sat by more than 40,000 students. The English exam featured a column on tattoos by Melbourne writer Helen Razer without her permission and without acknowledging she was the author – The Age

On face value, it would seem that some overly hasty clicking has landed the VCE exam body in a spot of bother. Try as I might, I can’t help but draw comparisons to an ill-prepared student on the eve of an assignment due date: A quick Google and a few swift clicks and edits later, and you’ve got yourself something worthy of submission. You might even get away with it too, if your teacher has never used a computer or thinks the Internet is something seen on a tennis court.

As a body crafting a paper to test skills in English, it might not have been the smartest move.

In the spirit of a fair fight, and to immediately jump on the moral high-horse, let’s assume an innocent clerical error is at fault here. After all, it’s not as if basic referencing skills (let alone those for new media) have existed for that long.

But, If you’re putting together a paper that’s so devoid of content (and the masses of printed material doesn’t fit your appetite for choice) that you find yourself trawling the blogosphere for an article with some teeth, don’t sell the idea short. Leverage the worlds’ largest network computers as you will, but don’t stop at snipping and re-working just a single blog post.

Push the envelope to keep an exam on Australian-English relevant and engaging for the students sitting it. How about a passage written entirely in net-lingo (OMG, srsly!?)? Or, a Twitter-esque component, challenging students to answer a study question in 140-characters or less (with bonus points for a celebrity mention or inventive smiley emoticon).

If the sole intent here is to ensure the paper is relevant and engaging for students, it’d be irresponsible to head in any other direction.

As for the gold pot of ideas? Don’t worry, you can thank me later.

The voyeur that I am, though, I can’t resist being the smug fly-on-the-wall when somebody else has an about-face:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. – Adobe, speaking to ZDNet about Flash

Let us all bow our heads for a sombre moment, mourning the loss of what was surely a feature-killer for the Android and Blackberry platforms.

With those camps now pushed to the back and crying over spilt binary, the folks on iOS devices sit perched atop the winners chair, having comfortably taken this round. It would seem that things like better overall user experience and battery life do, indeed, count for something.

Better still, Adobe has reaffirmed its support for HTML5, something that will benefit all users (regardless of platform) in the long run.

I know it’s tough. But, we must band together and maintain a stiff upper lip. And, at the end of the day, it’s not all bad news.

Flash will continue to exist on other computing platforms, like the PC and Mac. You’ll still be able to play those annoying games on Facebook and watch the latest YouTube sensation chant tone-deaf pop songs into their hair brushes.

Nothing, in that respect, has changed.

And, as an extra cherry, Flash will continue to chew your resources and crash your machine -  just as it always has.

Naturally, there are takedowns – not everyone thinks it’s a great idea to spew your sentiments freely. The Australian government has issued it’s latest weapon on free speech: internet filtering. Consisting of massive pipes physically directed to the homes of Prime Minister Rudd and Senator Conroy, the aim here is to keep the internet squeaky clean for the netizens of Australia. Thank god someone’s stepping in, for a while there I was starting to get worried.

Paint brushes and placards down before we start the picket lines, the filters are very specific. Conroy’s (fairly) adamant that they’re only going to push for the ban of illegal content with a specific emphasis on child pornography. There’s no need to worry – yet. Still, I couldn’t help but think of net censorship as a catapulting snowball: it’s going to slowly roll toward us, creeping up ever so slowly. Until it’s no longer a snowball, but a gargantuan white wrecking ball.

So, in the interests of staying ahead of the game, I present the revised list of topics or sites that will be added to the blacklist in the future:

• Video streaming: the videos showing pets trying to attempt human like behaviour are both misleading and dangerous. Displaying such content publicly could prompt an uprising of the lesser species in a Darwinian-esque power struggle. We are trying to cull the amount of baboons, monkeys and seagulls running the country – not increase them. Furthermore, that video of your Mum (sister/brother/grandma) blasting “My heart will go on” into her hairbrush is not only preposterous but repulsive.
• Online shopping (conditional): with the flagging economy, it will no longer be acceptable for you to purchase goods from sites outside of Australia. Why on earth would you want to bail another country out of the slimy economic disaster anyway? Besides, by stomping out all non-Aussie sites we’ve made it easier for you to choose what we you want to buy. Sure, it might cost a fraction more. But, as long as you’re not buying new undies, we’re keeping the jobs in-house.
• News websites: they’re completely impractical. Nobody wants the inconvenience of being interrupted by current news and events as they happen – it’s too hectic. With those computers whirring away all day long, it’s simply not environmentally friendly. Let’s return to the glory days: broadsheets and tabloids from media conglomerates. It’s not stifling the news, we just want to make sure everyone’s on the same page (pun intended).
• Online gaming: we need to get back to the grass roots of what the internet is about – productivity and sharing information. Let’s use it as a governmental tool to keep you all in the loop about how we’re doing. It’ll still be interactive. There’ll be buttons you can click with feedback (that disappears into the ether) that you can submit too. It will be awesome. Wayne Swan has already started coding it.

The future looks rosy in net-land, no? Outlandish as they may seem, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that our government could consider. I don’t like to play fear card often, or even be serious. But net sensorship is a blood-boiler for me. I’m simply not willing to accept that our traffic online should be monitored in Orwellian like fashion.

Because, it starts off with child porn and P2P and progresses eventually to China. And I’m not good at using chopsticks.