Category Archives: Australia

Australia

Returned Afghan Refugees Murdered

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Reported at the BBC, talking about Afghan asylum seekers held under the Pacific Solution by the former government:

they were assured by Australian immigration officials that it was safe for them to return home, and told that they would be held in detention for the rest of their lives if they failed to do so.

Sadly these assurances of safety were pure illusion, and it appears that this deception led to a number of those who did return being murdered by the Taleban:

It documented the deaths of nine of the failed asylum seekers at the hands of the Taleban and believes the true figure is actually closer to 20.

The current minister has asked for more information whilst the former minister takes spin and a lack of empathy to new depths:

“It is the case that Afghanistan is a dangerous place but the [United Nations] Refugee Convention does not say you cannot be returned to a dangerous place,” Mr Ruddock said. “The fact that somebody might tragically die [in Afghanistan] may well be as tragic as a road accident in Sydney.”

Hmm, road accident versus murder.. Yes, both tragic, but not quite the same..

No Opt-Out for the Great Firewall of Australia

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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 say.

According to preliminary trials, the best Internet content filters would incorrectly block about 10,000 Web pages from one million.

I guess if John Howard was still around he’d want us to be blocked from seeing un-American content too.

No Ubuntu Linux Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for Australia :-(

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At work we’ve been interested in the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (Dell’s answer to the eeePC), especially as everywhere you go you’ll read about it being shipped with Ubuntu Linux, which was great news.

Unfortunately I’m sad to say that my sources in Dell have told me that it’s only going to be available in Australia with Windows XP, no Linux version for Australia. 🙁

Victoria has Driest September on Record

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Sigh, our 12 year drought continues ever onwards..

With 12 mm for the month, Melbourne has recorded it driest September since records began in 1855. The previous driest was September 1907 when 13.4 mm of rain fell. Historically September is one of Melbourne’s wetter months averaging 57.9 mm.

Looks like we’re also set to record 12 consecutive years of below average rainfall, the previous record was just 6 years. and ss I write Melbourne’s water storages are still under 35% full as we come out of winter.

All of this makes me wonder if some of the concerns about the drought affecting electricity generation last year will start to actually happen this year.

IPv6

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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 it’s going to be “carrier-class network address translation”. That is, your ISP will run NAT (and if you are the average customer, you will run NAT on your ADSL router too).

This will give the ISP’s far more control than they have now (forget net neutrality) and so if you want to escape from these potential walled gardens you’re going to be needing IPv6 to continue to enjoy what you currently have access to now..

MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia

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Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!

Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉

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

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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 they forgot the webmaster doesn’t work on weekends).

It’s about 35 pages long and is fairly technical, but not overly daunting. The content, however, is pretty scary. For us in Victoria is it predicting:

  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally hot years are likely to affect about 75% of the region, and occur every 1.3 years on average;
  • by 2010-2040, exceptionally low rainfall years are likely to affect about 10% of the region and occur about once every 12 years on average;
  • by 2030, exceptionally low soil moisture years are likely to affect about 11% of the region and occur about once every 9 years on average.

Historically it says that Victoria and Tasmania are down 109 mm in rainfall since 1950 and average temperature is up by almost 0.8C over the same 50 year timescale.

The most worrying thing is that these predictions are based on a lower level of CO2e emissions than we are currently tracking towards.

Observations since 1990 show that we are tracking the highest IPCC emission scenario, called A1F1, but climate simulations have not been performed using the A1FI scenario. Most climate research institutes around the world did simulations using the mid-range emission scenarios, called A1B and A2. Hence, in this report, projections for the next 20 to 30 years are based on simulations using mid-range emission scenarios.

So if we carry on how we’re doing now, then the reality could be much worse..