The Musings of Chris Samuel

The Musings of Chris Samuel

The Thoughts and Feelings of a Melbourne Person

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No Opt-Out for the Great Firewall of Australia

So it appears there will be no way to escape from being blocked from seeing sites that are false positives due to buggy & broken filters or incorrectly classified, etc..
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts [...]

McCain versus the Universe

I can’t tell which of these three things is worse about John McCain:

He can’t tell (or is willing to mislead) when Federal money hasn’t been spent on a project
He can’t tell an overhead projector from a planetarium display projector
He thinks that the idea of spending taxpayer money on aiding scientific education is a bad thing

This [...]

IPv6

Glen Turner has a nice blog on th what was going on at AusNOG, well worth a read if you’re a fan of the end-to-end connectivity model.
Back from AusNOG. It’s now clear that allocations of new IPv4 addresses will cease in 2010, so a lot of the conference was about NAT and IPv6. [...] So [...]

ISO rejects appeals against OOXML

So OOXML, the spec that nobody implements, not even Microsoft, and which isn’t even publicly available in its final form has had the four big appeals against it rejected.
A triumph of lobbying, committee stacking, hidden agendas and special interests over common sense and due process. I think ISO has just made [...]

A Tale of Two Transport Hacks

In the USA a court has ordered that three MIT students not talk at DEFCON about their security assessment of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) fare cards. Apparently the court believes that “discussing the flaws at a public conference constituted a ‘transmission’ of a computer program that could harm the fare collection system“, [...]

Are you sure you want to take a laptop to the USA ? (Updated)

From the Washington Post:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and [...]

HURIDOCS Looking for Open Source Developer

Announced via Groklaw:
[Groklaw] received a request from Tom Longley, Project Manager for Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems (HURIDOCS), a Geneva-based nonprofit. They’re looking for someone to help them reengineer their database software, WinEvsys, to be released under a Free Software license. That page has tons of info, including a fact sheet and a demo [...]

It’s the Planet, Stupid

I think it’s time for a new catchphrase in politics, as we currently have the Labour Party umming and ahhing over the impact of carbon trading on NSW and VIC’s dirty coal generators and jobs, the Liberal Party saying “do nothing, quickly” in the hope of appeasing their corporate paymasters under the guise of protecting [...]

CSIRO & BOM report - “Drought: Exceptional Circumstances” (not)

For those looking for the joint assessment by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO that’s all over the news at the moment, you can find it on the MAFF website. There is also a web page listed for the data and analysis in the report, but it’s not working yet (I guess [...]

GetUp spoof FuelWatch advert (Updated)

GetUp are trying to get donations to cover the costs of airing a great spoof government FuelWatch advert to try and get the politicians on both sides to think a bit more sensibly about what they’re doing.
Update: It’s now on YouTube.

Plus there’s a fact sheet.
Hat tip to Jeremy for the pointer via Jabber.

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