Category Archives: Internet

Australian Government Upsets Google

Posted on by

The ABC is reporting that there is draft Australian copyright legislation (( legislation here thanks to KatteKrab )) that could make it a requirement for all commercial search engines to contact the copyright holder of every web page/site in Australia and obtain permission for their site to be spidered for indexing.

This is because apparently the proposed legislation will only

protect libraries, archives and research institutions but leave commercial entities like Google out in the cold.

Google’s submission is quoted as saying:

“Given the vast size of the Internet it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached,” Google submitted.

“If such advanced permission was required, the Internet would promptly grind to a halt.”

I disagree, the Internet wouldn’t grind to a halt, but we might find that Australian based sites would drop off the larger worlds radar as they were expunged from search engines. I don’t know how the legislation would impact sites like mine which whilst being written by someone in Australia (( OK, I’m in LA at the moment, but I’ll be back soon )) are hosted overseas ?

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

Posted on by

WordPress have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.5, you can see the changes at the Trac page for the release.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!

Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.

Update 2: Brian Layman has asked me to point out that this fixes some serious security problems.

SpamHaus Lawsuit (Updated)

Posted on by

There’s been a lot written about a spammer listed by SpamHaus sueing them in the US, but this lawyers account is worth a read. Basically it looks like SpamHaus made a legal mistake in the way they dealt with the US court:

3. That said, Spamhaus had a likely winner of an argument if they’d made it from the beginning: the U.S. court does not properly have jurisdiction over the U.K.-based company. […] it would have been possible for an attorney to make what is known as a “special appearance” before the court without acknowledging the court’s jurisdiction in the case. Reading the record, I’m puzzled that this wasn’t the strategy Spamhaus’s counsel chose.

4. Unfortunately, since that’s not what happened, Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today).

Most importantly, he says:

9. Finally, one last point: anyone who has a chance to talk publicly about this, if you are a friend to Spamhaus I would strongly urge you to refrain from making derogatory statements about the judge or the legal system in the U.S. Talk all you want about the evidence that you believe demonstrates e360 is a spammer. Talk about how important Spamhaus is to the functioning of email. But calling the judge stupid doesn’t help the case. Given the record, the judge had little choice other than to do what he did. So far as I can tell, Spamhaus presented no argument that would let him get out of this case, even withdrawing the answer that had been filed from the proceedings.

Anyway, he says a lot more than that so please go and read.

Update: The spammer who is suing SpamHaus is now being sued themselves in California on 87 counts of spamming.

LUV (Melbourne Chapter) October General Meeting: Intel Architecture and Hacked Slugs

Posted on by

Paraphrased from the original.

Start: Oct 3 2006 – 19:00
End: Oct 3 2006 – 21:00

Location: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. The University of Melbourne. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.

Intel’s Core Architecture by David Jones

David Jones is a Solutions Specialist with Intel Australia specialising in Server Architecture, working directly with end users such as Westpac Bank, Ludwig Cancer Research, VPAC and others advising on latest technologies available from Intel. David has been with Intel for 10 years and in IT for 20 years, coming from a UNIX background. Today David will introduce Intel’s latest Architecture (Core Architecture) and explain the differences between Hyperthreading and Dual Core technologies.

Hacked slugs, solving all your problems with little NAS boxes by Michael Still

This talk will discuss how to get your own version of Linux running on a Linksys NSLU2, known to the Linux community as a slug. This is a consumer grade network attached storage (NAS) system. These devices are quite inexpensive, are physically small, and run on low voltage DC power. I also discuss how to handle having your firmware flash go bad, and provide some thoughts on projects made possible by these devices. The presentation will also include extra demonstrations of the process of flashing and setting up one of these devices.

Ed: as usual there will be a pre-meeting curry at 6pm

Google Co-Op – Annotating The Web

Posted on by

Looks like Google is working on a new service to allow users to add labels to topics that they (hopefully) know something about. The idea then is that other people then subscribe to your labels if they feel you are accurate and that then influences their search results. Sort of like routing by rumour protocols in computer networks.

So their intention is to get around the fact that webmasters don’t put explicit semantic markup in their pages yet by exploiting the fact that it’s much easier to get other people who know about topics to provide annotations for existing pages through a third party site that (many) others can then use in their normal searches.

I guess the first thing there that springs to mind for me is “what an opportunity for guerrilla marketing” – PR companies subscribe as “ordinary people”, but skew their recommendations towards the people paying them. If that sounds far fetched then don’t forget that techniques like this have been around for over 2 decades – consider it the marketeers version of computer security’s “social engineering“.

Initially found via the Evolving Trends blog.

California Sues Car Companies & Exxon Secrets

Posted on by

Before I turn in for the night – the State of California has launched law suits against 6 car companies (GM, Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chrysler & Nissan) under the Federal Common Law of Public Nuisance. It contains this rather enlightening quote:

Defendants’ motor vehicle emissions in the United States account for approximately nice percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions

I don’t suppose I should be amazed by that, but it’s still a staggering statement – vehicle use in the US alone accounts for ~ 9% of global CO2 output.

You can read the actual law suit (PDF) mirrored at The Age. Thanks to my lovely wife for forwarding an email about the suit on to me..

On a related note, a friend and colleague (also called Chris) sent me a link to a site called ExxonSecrets.org where you can find out about the web of anti-climate-change organisations that get funding from Exxon and how they are connected.