I am not arguing for censorship of the internet or overbearing control over the financial system, but for some sense of community responsibility from both.

Internet service providers claim that there is nothing they can do about scamming websites but this is self-serving rubbish.

All they need to do is to observe the types of ''know your customer'' rules that are imposed upon and largely observed by the finance sectors around the world.

No identification no website.

Such proposals have been put forward in international IT forums and it is mainly a lack of worldwide political will that prevents them from being implemented.

Then the perpetrators of scams such as the one we heard of yesterday could be identified and put on trial.

Credit card companies, who calmly tell scam victims they'll get their money back, don't help. Of course, the rest of us will now pay for their apparent generosity through higher fees.

What these companies should do is report all instances of credit card fraud to police, so that the police actually have the full picture of fraud patterns.

They currently don't do this, apparently on the grounds that they would lose business if customers knew the real extent of fraud. So offenders know there is little chance of detection, and the police are left fighting fraud with only half the information.

John Walker, chief executive, Crime Trends Analysis, Queanbeyan, NSW

Funding shortage

It is good news to read that scientists at CSIRO and ANU are hopeful of unlocking the answers to the world's food shortage problems (''Centre for plant excellence aims to reap world food gains'', August 2, p9).

But then we read in the same Canberra Times edition that CSIRO' s budget has been cut by $63million (''Cash-starved CSIRO cuts 50 jobs, shuts food plant'', p2).

Given that there are concerns the Australian economy will be hurt as we embrace carbon emissions trading, it is very difficult to accept that research into food related matters have to be scrapped, especially in areas where we have world leader status.

It is surely a little ingenuous of Federal Science Minister Kim Carr's spokeswoman to claim that it was ''inappropriate for him to comment on the CSIRO cuts to food research.'' If not him, then who?

Ann Darbyshire, Gunning, NSW

Price control needed

Housing affordability just keeps getting worse (''Rental crisis hits home in Territory'', August 4, p1).

Government ''remedies'' merely protect the society-destroying housing-finance/investment and spec-building ''industries'', and punish or discriminate against the innocent.

In particular, the ACT Government should have heeded the warnings of this impending disaster and the uselessness of its affordability program, and induced the much-needed overall market correction early on, by slashing new land prices to correctly reflect income-to-price indicators, and implementing measures to stop construction cost gouging.

Do it now Jon Stanhope.

Jack Kershaw, Kambah

In your article ''Rental crisis hits home in territory'' (August 4, p1) Jon Stanhope said he has no ''silver bullet'' for sky-high rents. When the Feds ran Canberra, they held land auctions restricted to first-time home buyers as well as open-slather auctions. By ensuring block supply kept pace with demand, block prices at first-timer auctions roughly equalled a worker's annual wages.

Today, workers earn around $60,000 a year. John Stanhope adds $200,000 and charges $260,000 for land he got from the Feds for free.

Graham Macafee, Latham