Oct 17
Not to be outdone by China, Australia wants its own national filtering system for ALL users of the internet. The problem, as I see it, is that ‘illegal’ content is, and always will be, hidden from plain view. Such as system will have one hell of a time trying to inspect every packet going in and out of Australia and attempting to determine whether it is ‘legal’ or not. It will make all Australia suffer in terms of speed and access to legitimate content for the sake of preventing the casual observer from looking at material deemed ’sensitive’. Of course, anyone that really wants to look at it (child or otherwise) will be perfectly capable or doing so with relative ease (via anonymisers, open proxies, etc). Attempting to secure the internet in such a way seems to require such gross misunderstanding of its, and our, nature that I have lost all hope in this Government’s tech credentials.
From what I understand, the blacklisted sites will not be published, so most Australians will not even know what sites they are not allowed to view and why not. Who decides who gets to see what? and who prevents those people from abusing this power (using anti-terror laws for political end, just like in the UK). So much for freedom of speech.
http://nocleanfeed.com/
Aug 01
Authorities destroyed a suspected bomb outside a medial centre, strapped to a tree. Turns out that it was placed there by an employee and was actually a weather monitoring device.
Suspicious box turns out to be weather station - Roanoke.com
May 15
Does this mean the MPAA is in violation of the DMCA? Can you copyright and legally prevent the publication of a number? What about publishing the offset in Pi where this sequence exists? What about the content of a web page who’s hash is the AACS key? What about this two dimensional representation? Or this fantastic t-shirt?
Presumably, its not the key itself that is contestable, but rather the provision of information that informs one on how to use the key to bypass DRM, such as HOWTOs and software. However, these are just a sequence of numbers to, and they can be represented in a multitude of ways to. So how many layers of abstraction must there be before the actual information or tool is non-obvious, and can be published or linked to without fear? What if a DRM-breaking tool’s documentation and purpose is obfuscated using DRM, would that render the establishment of its purpose ‘illegal’?
In my, rather obvious, opinion, AACS, like all DRM, is a waste of time and money. Ultimately, it increases the cost of the product and decreases its usefulness.
The fact is, it is often faster and easier to download a DVD rip of a movie than it is to rip it from your own DVD. When competing in the market, you must assume your competitors are always trying to out-do you, and ‘internet piracy’ (for want of a better phrase) is just another competitor; the terms were set by economy, not by teenage file-sharers.
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