Still As Life

I was just reading a post by Duncan Riley about the potential for banning of things that are commonplace and acceptable today, purely because of the possibility of porn being received via these channels.

Duncan outlines just a few possibilities, Second Life, Skype, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Usenet, BitTorrent, Blogs, Twitter, regular Google searches and Image searches, internet archives including Google's caching system.

In addition to this, what else is there? If Skype has the potential to allow the receipt of porn and anything else deemed unacceptable, which it no doubt does, than logically so does MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and so on. Any other search engine can potentially be used to search for porn as well as Google.

While I don't deny that a porn filter would be a great thing, if it could be done effectively, as I have said before, when you start this sort of mandatory filtering, not only does the question arise about where does the line get drawn on what content gets filtered, but where does the line get drawn on what methods. Duncan even offered up the fact that porn can potentially be received via email as well, and often is in spam.

So what things get filtered and what don't? As BitTorrent is often deemed as a means for illegal downloading, despite the huge amount of legitimate uses for it, the excuse to filter it out would no doubt be jumped at, but what about everything else?

To filter out all of the possible sources leaves us with practically no internet at all, and then at speeds reduced to up to 78% slower than our already slow connections.

Mr Rudd, you and your ministers need to let go of the controlling attitude and stop even discussing this possibility. When it comes down to it, the only viable solution is to let parents teach their kids and teach parents how to use software filters. If you want, provide education about it in schools. Don't try to filter out the vast majority of the internet though.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

Theres a great article on the Australian from yesterday covering the pitfalls and problems with ISP level filtering and various forms of filtering. It is probably the most accurate and reasonably presented article I've seen from a newspaper yet, even though the quotes are predominately from IIA spokesman Peter Coroneo's rather than someone from the current government.

"...he warned it could never be completely successful in blocking access to all pornographic sites, just the ones on the blacklist.

If new sites were launched that were not included on the blacklist the clean feed would not restrict access to them, he said. "You've got to be aware of the fallibility of the approach," he warned.

There were millions of pornographic websites and if all of them were included in the blacklist "there is a potential for slow downs in access to occur", he said.

"The more sites you attempt to block the greater the effect on the network performance and speed," he said.

This is because every time you type a request into your search engine it will have to be checked against all the sites on the blacklist, he said.

In Britain where a clean feed policy is being pursued, only between 200 and 1000 child pornography sites have been included on a blacklist.

But if Australia insisted on including millions of general pornography sites and others that include violence it could undermine internet users' speed of access to websites, Mr Coroneos said.

A 2005 pilot study carried out by the former Howard government found a clean feed approach could cut down speed of accessing the internet by between 18 to 78 per cent depending on what was being blocked.

The Rudd Government campaigned on a platform promising to speed up Australians' access to the worlwide web by rolling out broadband around the country.

Mr Coroneos said any clean feed policy would have to be carefully balanced.

He said households that really wanted to block out pornographic material would be better off investing in a home based filter system." - From the Australian

Labels: internet, politics

With newspapers Australia wide running near identical articles on the latest announcement today from the Australian Labor Party, and blogs worldwide abuzz, I can't help but be astounded.

How is mandatory ISP level internet filtering a smart idea? Whether it causes a speed difference or not, which I believe it will, it makes me wonder how they can see this as viable at all.

What advice are they given? Do they not realise how rapidly content changes? How are they planning on maintaining the black list?

Will they ban IP's or IP ranges? Will they just waste my tax money paying people to trawl the ever changing, constantly evolving, millions of websites out there and individually choose what they think is appropriate for me to see?

Will my blog be inappropriate because I'm voicing my opinion about KRudd's failure to represent the people of Australia only a month into his leadership?

What a way to end 2007, but to announce a system that requires the citizens of Australia to opt out of a system that is not wanted in the first place.

I see the reason for it, there is the belief in some groups that the government should do their parenting for them but filtering content so that they don't have to actively monitor the activities of their children.

Okay, so maybe I'm being overly cynical, and sure, I can understand the desire for content filters for children, as exposure to unsuitable material is increasing in virtually every media, from television and radio, through to the internet. The difference with the internet is that it doesn't have a content rating on everything.

Really, in an unfiltered connection to the internet, a child could stumble upon virtually anything. A point in regards to this though is that the public school system already has filters in place for the internet connections through schools, or NSW does anyway, I am not 100% certain on other states. If NSW state education system can do it though, why couldn't they use a similar system in other states and throughout the various private schooling systems?

Then there are the public libraries, why can't they use this system as well? What other places can children access the internet? This just leaves the home. Who is responsible for the connection at home? Parents.

There are plenty of software filters available that can do this, but with the school kid that got around the system there's all that kerfuffle, but really, a kid could get around the ISP level if they wanted to. There are plenty of proxy servers out there that are relatively simple to use, though they can be slow and annoying.

So, if parents aren't taking the responsibility to actively educate their kids about what is suitable and what isn't, such as they would (one would hope), teach them when it is suitable and safe to cross a road. If the government has to take responsibility for this, then is it not telling parents that it's okay to not worry about what their children do on the internet, because there is a filter in place?

A filter cannot and will not block everything without effectively allowing only government approved websites and nothing else. So where does this leave us, well, for me, I see it as a waste of my taxes. Why on earth would I want to pay for something I don't want, then be required to opt out of it if I don't want it, then continue to pay for it anyway?

Should I choose to opt out, will that mark me as someone that should have my internet usage monitored? If i decide not to opt out, where is the line drawn on content filtering?

It is intended to be a porn filter, this is all well and good and I have to agree is a great idea, because even when actively monitoring a childs internet usage, there will no doubt still be some form of unwanted exposure. However, does it stop at that? Or once this method of control is in place, does it get taken further? Filtering out anything deemed inappropriate by those in power?

There are idea's thrown around all over the web, but something the springs to my mind is, regardless of whatever pressure is on the government for this filter, from whatever source, can they not see that if they put a filter like this in place, when it fails, it will come back on them? They are offering a sense of security. If, and I believe when, something that should be filtered isn't, who is to blame? The people maintaining the blacklist.

Duncan Riley makes an interesting point in his blog on TechCrunch, "Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet" where he points out:

Notably Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was a former Australian Diplomat in China, and speaks fluent Mandarin; given Australia’s boom is fueled by mineral exports to China, it would seem that Australian Government policies are now by China in return.

An interesting thought, and is well and truly believable. Whether it is or not, who knows, regardless though, the day a filtering system such as this comes into effect is the day that the government is effectively given complete censorship control.

More information can be found on the Labor website.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

Well this is interesting, I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about energy ratings for computers. There have been a lot of things going on as far as energy conservation and greenhouse emissions goes lately around here. First there was the introduction of the star rating system for plasma and LCD tv's because of the (in my opinion) unfounded argument that they both use significantly more power than CRT's. Now this is fine really, except that I don't agree with much of what I read, but that's for another time.

Now though there is talk of a rating system for computers themselves, from 1 to 5 stars, similar to the system used on white goods like freezers and refrigerators. The article which can be found on the Sydney Morning Herald website from earlier today goes into findings and so on, and sure, I can see why greenhouse emissions need to be reduced and energy needs to be conserved, but as was pointed out in the article, "...most big-brand computer and component makers are already likely to be complying, as they must meet the stricter European laws to ensure global sales." So in this regards, the 24 million or so computers in Australia will be predominately from these big brand manufacturers. Optima, Dell, IBM, HP, Apple and the big brand laptops like Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple and so on. So this means it will most affect the smaller computer stores that put together computers themselves.

These smaller companies are using your everyday components that you find on the shelf and many are not put together with minimum power consumption in mind. Many of the smaller computer store's I have been involved with don't even have the equipment to check the power consumption of a computer.

So any computer that doesn't meet the minimum standard will become illegal to sell. Currently it is being considered for implementation by 2009, so thats plenty of time for these smaller companies to sort out things like this, but I expect it will increase the cost of computers through the small stores and thus affect their sales and income.

This then raises another question for me, unless individual parts are made illegal to purchase, there is no way to police the power consumption of all the computers being produced. While it's not the main computer source, there is a large market of people who build their own computers and computer's for others at no charge. These people aren't going to be checking power consumption, and I don't see any way that this can even be checked.

Aside from making individual parts illegal, which I expect would be a very bad move for the government, the only way I can see for this to work is to put pressure on the component manufacturers to make each individual part meet power requirements, presumably also using a similar system. Of course, this is not unreasonable, but it is going to be quite difficult and a lot of work to implement. To make this worse, the configuration of a computer is near limitless, even in computers from a manufacturer like Dell, anyone can add something else without much difficulty. The only computer market that is even remotely controlled in this regard is the laptop market.

I mean, the chances of there being multiple computers setup exactly the same as my desktop are quite low. I know one person with the same motherboard and CPU as me, and a similar video card, but thats about it, and even in that regard, my motherboard is slightly different. Of course theres far more to it than that.

Power supply: Antec TrueBlue 480w
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ 939
RAM: 2x 512mb Kingmax DDR400
Video card: HIS Radeon X800 GTO 256mb, 256bit
Optical drive: LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Optical drive 2: Pioneer DVR-109 DVDRW
Wireless: Belkin 802.llg PCI wireless card
Additional HD Controller: Promise SATA1510 TX Series
Hard drive 1: Seagate 120gb PATA
Hard drive 2: Samsung 30gb PATA
Hard drive 3: Western Digital 80gb PATA
Hard drive 4: Seagate 200gb SATA
Hard drive 5: Seagate 400gb SATA
Hard drive 6 & 7 in RAID 0: 2x Seagate 320gb SATA
2x 120mm fans
2x 80mm fans

Sure, I don't doubt there is any number of combinations of my hardware in Australia, but the number of combinations is huge, to control this will be a massive undertaking, and as I see it, any attempt to remove the control I have over the hardware in my computer in this regard is an attempt at my freedom as this is something I love being able to do exactly what I want with, when money permits of course, which it hasn't for a while now as much of the hardware would show.

I think this is a very extreme measure and doubt it would come to that but I suppose with some of the inaccurate "proof" I've seen for power consumption for the plasma's and LCD's (for another article), I expect there could be just as much of this around for cutting back computer power consumption, so I suppose one can only hope it doesn't get too bad.

Labels: hardware, politics, rants, technology

I was just having a read through a news article on the Sydney Morning Herald regarding Kevin Rudd's new education plans and am I the only one that finds "...the Government's plan to provide computers to every high school student..." a complete waste of my taxes? I knew about this before Labour were elected, yes, and this was one of the many things I counted against them.

I just went and had a look at the details on the official Australian Labour Party Website at an article from November 14th titled "Federal Labor's Education Revolution - A School Computer For Every Student In Years 9-12"

So reading through this, that's all well and good, but "A Rudd Labor Government will invest $1 billion over four years to turn every secondary school in Australia into a digital school." And, "The National Secondary School Computer Fund will allow secondary schools to apply for capital grants of up to $1 million to acquire new or upgrade information technology equipment."

That's a lot of taxpayer money, but here's what I don't understand about it, every student has access to computers anyway, why do they all need their own, and if they do, why shouldn't they have to work for it like every other person in the country? Sure, I have my own computer, I have my own laptop as well. Actually, if we want to get into specifics, I'll be completely upgrading my desktop in a few weeks time at which point I will have two quite powerful computers, along with my Macbook Pro, and my old laptop which is still decent, despite its generally dieing. And hey, you know what, I'm a university student that doesn't live at home. I have to pay all my own bills, rent, phone, internet, power, car, etc and aside from my HECS, I get no government assistance at all. I get no money from Centrelink, no rent assistance, no free computer gear, I have to work for it all and pay FULL taxes at the same time.

So here is the biggest thing, yes, my university has better computer facilities than most school's, but the fact is, the vast majority of school's already provide adequate computer access for students, along with internet access. As it was, at one of my schools, albeit a private school, they had almost as many computers as they did students, and it was a small school, I'm talking 50 students. My other school, a public school, had at least 5 computer labs that I know of, for all I know there could have been more as I kept finding them all over the place as well as the library which had a computer section with 40 or so computers in it. Additionally, they had laptops and projectors that were loaned out to students for use in classes if they needed them for whatever reason. As I said, this was at a PUBLIC school.

I am sure the grant would be great for schools to upgrade labs and so on, but in my experience, most schools already have systems in place for this sort of thing. The public school I mentioned had a 3 year rotation in the 3 main labs and library. One lab would be upgraded each year and any extra money in the budget meant one of the other smaller labs would be upgraded as well. Every 3rd year the library would be upgraded along with one of the labs.

So yes, the grant would no doubt be helpful in that way as it would allow a bigger budget, but for a lot of schools, my question is, is it really needed? And as far as buying students their own computers, I have to pay and always have had to pay for all of my own equipment and I don't see how it is fair at all that I should have to pay for other peoples gear. I personally think something like this should be restricted to the school only, even having enough computers for one per student located at the school is a waste of money. They aren't all going to be used all at once and I believe it will be a long time before they ever will be, if they ever will be. They can be used for most things yes, but for food tech, visual arts, music, drama, industrial arts, any of the creative and performing arts subjects cannot be completely reliant on computers, they can only partially be computer oriented and I'm sure there are more subjects as well that fit this bill.

The money would be better spent actually upgrading school facilities, such as air conditioning in more classes, and better lab equipment and so on.

Please note, this is just my perspective on it all and I am sure it will benefit someone somewhere, I just don't believe it is a worthwhile use of my and every other taxpayers money.

Labels: politics, rants

Ha! So I hear Prince is threatening to sue fan sites, that sounds logical to me, don't you? Fan's get more people to listen to my music, therefore, sue them. Ah wells, that's his problem I suppose. Knew there had to be a reason I never liked him.

In more interesting news, I just received my shiny new MacBook Pro. All I can say is. SWEET! I got the basic 15" 2.2ghz version with 2gb of RAM, 120gb hard drive, etc. and yet it is still more powerful than my desktop. I think that means I need to upgrade the desktop. Actually I need to anyway, but this just gives me another excuse.

It would seem that yet again, one of my current web design client's has changed their mind. Their website was meant to be live almost two weeks ago now to coincide with the start of an advertising campaign, yet they keep changing their mind. I have just received today, a redesigned layout. New colours, extended navigation, almost every image has been changed and so on.

Thankfully the majority of the changes can be done in CSS, but due to some...creative differences...between myself and my boss, parts of the layout, particularly the navigation, have been coded largely in HTML instead of using CSS to control them so they could be a bit of a pain to modify across the entire site. Oh well though, I'm getting paid extra so it's alright.

On another note, why is it so hard to find information about what laws there are in regards to workplace bullying?! (Different workplace to the web design one)

Labels: hardware, politics, technology, work

At work at the moment we are looking for more staff and there are job advertisements on places like Seek, University of Queensland Student Union Employment, Queensland University of Technology Student Guild Employment and so on. Now there have been a lot of resume's come through and since I do most of the email work, I have the job of going over each resume and deciding which one's are worth printing and forwarding to my boss, and which ones will get a lovely little email in response that reads:

"Dear Jeremy,

Thankyou very much for your application, however at this stage all of the interview places have been filled. Should any of these fall through, we will be in contact again.

Best regards,

Management"

Isn't that nice?

Anyway, here I am going through these resume's, and only a couple of them I would even consider interviewing, but the majority met my boss's criteria, so theres 8 or so got printed out and forwarded onto her. Then there was this one:

Name: Billy K

Address: 85 Bad St

Phone: 0400 000 000

Email Address: billy.k1989@hotmail.com

Drivers Licence: No

Personal Qualities: Friendly, Fun, keen, patient

Interest & Hobbies: Hanging out with friends, going to

movies, talking to peple

Schooling: ********** State High School 1998

Objective: To get a job to save some money and get

Work experience

Availability: Casual

References: Will give when you call.

Of course, this isn't the actual resume, but this is exactly how it was formatted and the exact same way it was written, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, some things not formatted the same as the rest, and so on.

Now, I'm not the employer, but just reading that, why would I want to work with them? So why would an employer want to consider employing them? The resume doesn't even take up a page.

So apart from that, what's wrong with it? Where have they worked before? There's no employment history, there aren't even any references, he says he will only supply them on request, so how do we know anything about him prior to speaking to him? He hasn't even given his last name, just an initial!

Additionally, he only has one school listed, which he left in 1998, so either he is in his late 20's (which is fine), or he dropped out of school. Either way he's been out of school for 9 years and doesn't have an employment history, has he even worked at all in that time? He hasn't said he's doing anything else at the moment, such as tertiary education, nor does he have a drivers license, so how do we know he's even motivated to do anything but the absolute minimum?

His interests are fine, but they show nothing and are basically wasted space. Everything likes those things. They don't stand out. So again this works against him as it builds on what I said before, it shows he isn't motivated. In addition to this he doesn't have any skills listed aside from his "Personal qualities", so how do we know what he can do?

Even his "Objective" is shocking. It confirms our belief that he most likely has not had a job before, despite being out of school for almost 10 years and that he isn't motivated!

This in turn leads us to wonder if he is even being honest in his "Personal qualities" as he clearly is not "keen", not about working anyway.

So please, someone tell me, why oh why would someone want to employ him?

It leads one to wonder about the effectiveness of Centrelink and their job diaries. People have to apply for jobs to keep getting paid by Centrelink, of course they don't have to get one...

I cannot stand these people who seem to think they shouldn't have to work and should get everything for free.

Seriously, this place is so easy to get a job if you show any interest or initiative at all, I mean, its a surf shop, I'm not even interested in surfing or anything surfing related, yet I got a job here!

Labels: politics, rants, work

From - Microsoft Clipart

Why does it not surprise me in the slightest, that despite the fact that a study has proven that P2P music downloading actually has increased CD sales in Canada as quoted below, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) swears black and blue that this could not possibly be relevant in Australia?

"...our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing. We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year."

According to a telephone survey conducted in Australia, apparently it has the opposite effect, and of course logically, if people are getting music for free, then why would they download it, right?

I disagree with this. I am inclined to believe that the Canadian study is correct, and relevant in Australia. I mean seriously, who is going to go out and buy CD's of a band they have never heard of? Thats no sales for that band from thousands of prospective listeners. However, if someone downloads some of their songs because they were recommended by someone, or even just because they were curious to see what they sound like, if they like what they hear, they are far more likely to go buy an album.

The same study found that there was no clear relation between legal and illegal music downloading, but according to some figures shown as part of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, legal download sales have increased!

"Sales figures for the first six months of the year, released by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), show total physical music sales dropped by almost 16 per cent in unit terms, but legal download sales increased by just under 90 per cent." From - Sydney Morning Herald

So if legal download sales have increased by almost 90% shouldn't that be a pretty good reason for physical music sales to drop? Even if it's not the entire reason that should really be taken into account rather than saying it is caused entirely by illegal downloads.

As Rob, the author of the www.demonbaby.com blog points out in his article after OiNK was shut down almost 2 weeks ago, the music industry is outdated and has not kept up with technology. I know I myself am in no way interested in legally downloading music. It's all low quality and far too expensive! I would much prefer to buy the CD's and actually know that I am getting high quality music rather than the legally downloadable music that at most seems to be 192kbps and is full of annoying DRM. Seriously guys, why would I pay more to get something of lower quality that has its usage restricted through digital rights management? I'm not interested in single tracks and entirely digital collections. I want entire albums in a tangible form that I can do what I want with. Why on earth would I not buy anything I download when I want it as high quality as I can get it. 192kbps does not cut it. Update your business model or lose customers is all I have to say to the labels that are part of the RIAA. I know I personally will be doing exactly as Rob suggests, and I won't be buying music that is published by any label that is part of the RIAA. Thanks to the RIAA Rader website, it's really easy to tell which are and which aren't.

Nine Inch Nails have the right idea, making their entire new album available online for free for the basic version and only $US5 for the higher quality versions. With an offer like that, I wouldn't even have to think twice about buying it.

I wholeheartedly agree with Rob, if we stop giving the major labels our money by purchasing CD's from them, they will have to change the way they do business, and maybe then we can get a reasonable service from them. You know, maybe Google should start up their own label, they would no doubt do a better job than the major labels out there at the moment.

Labels: music, politics, rants