So the folks at The RiotACT have a slide show of photos from the Canberra Thunderstorm up at YouTube (embedded below).
Below is a picture linked from their site of water running through a light fitting at the Canberra Center.
News stories on Google News.
Myself and Jeremy have just received the following SMS from the Connex Melbourne SMS Service (run by Platypus World). It looks like they’ve been hacked.. 🙁
ALLAHU AKBR FROM CONNEX! our inspectorS Love Killing people – If you see one coming, run. Want to bomb a train? they will gladly help! See youin hell!
Not a good SMS message to get from your train company in the current climate..
Update 1: A Muslim friend of mine tells me that the message doesn’t make sense, Allah hu Akbar (God is great) is not the sort of thing that people say to each other.
Update 2: Looks like quite a few others got it too..
Update 3: I wonder if they also got hold of the phone records, or whether all they figured out was just how to feed a random message into their SMS everyone workflow..
Update 4: Last night (22:39 AEST) another Connex SMS message arrived, this time apparently legitimate, saying:
A hoax message was sent tonight to some users. Connex apologises and is investigating with the police.
There is a news story on the ABC this morning saying:
Around 10,000 people who have signed up to a timetable update system received a threatening message last night, after hackers broke into the system. […] Connex spokesman Andrew Cassidy has apologised for the incident and has reassured subscribers that their personal information is safe.
They are trying to reassure people that their details are safe:
“As far as we can see, the individual was able to get in, type this message and get it sent [and] had no other access to information stored in that database.”
The question is, then, how did the attacker get in ? Well, it seems like it was that age old problem..
Connex says passwords to the system have been changed to prevent further incidents.
My guess is it’s either people picking easy to guess passwords or (increasingly likely these days) a Windows system getting attacked by a virus or trojan and having a keylogger installed.
Update 5: It appears that the company that runs the SMS service for Connex are running their public facing systems on Windows, so it’s probably not that surprising that this hack happened. 🙁
Strangely enough this hack hasn’t made it onto their making news page.
Update 6: Just found an alternative rendering of the quote from the Connex spokesman:
“All they were able to do was to hack in and act as though they were a staff member doing a remote access to send a message to subscribes.”
Oh, so that’s all they could do..
After a bit of stochastic web-enabled research (( i.e. random searching looking for the conclusion of this case triggered by catching up on a story of Rich’s. )) I found this little piece of information from the UNSW Law Journal that everyone should bookmark away just in case they need it..
But what is the legal position in relation to damage caused by the return to Earth of a space object such as Mir? Are there any rules in place to cover such an eventuality? Under what circumstances would Russia have been responsible at international law for any such damage? What would be the extent of its liability? How is damage to be measured and what procedures (if any) are in place to facilitate compensation claims and to arrive at a determination of responsibility and its consequences? Once a determination is made, is it a legally binding and enforceable decision?
Just remember where you read it when you need it.. 😎
In January 2007 Melbourne used a grand total of just over 35 million litres of water, down 24% from January 2006.
Each day in South Australia BHP uses over 32 million litres, all extracted from the Great Artesian Basin, and doesn’t pay a cent for it. Still, at least they didn’t increase it to the 150+ million litres a day they wanted to..
NB: BHP’s water use does not impinge on Melbourne, so don’t think I’m saying I don’t believe in the water savings that are so necessary here!
Power outages all over Melbourne (as well as Victoria). The Age says:
Large parts of Victoria including much of metropolitan Melbourne are now without power, after bushfires in the north-east of the state knocked out vital transmission lines connecting Victoria to the national power grid.
To see the areas around central Melbourne affected you can go to the CItipower Outages page.
Traffic lights are out, trains are still running (but delayed). Be careful folks..
Update: This report says that the fire has disrupted 2 gigawatts of power that the state would normally have access to.
Donna and I went out tonight to see if we could see Comet McNaught, but the smoke haze from the bushfires meant it was obscured. 🙁
The BOM is forecasting clearer conditions tomorrow (asides from possible thunderstorms) so that might work out – though it will be 39°C!
Amazingly we have had a white Christmas here in Australia, with NSW, Victoria and Tasmania all getting snow on peaks, much to the relief of the firefighters and residents up there who can have a bit of a break from worrying about the encroaching bushfires.
That’s Lake Mountain in Victoria at midday today (25th December 2006).
Here in Melbourne we had a white Christmas of a different sort, lots of hail (though sadly it rapidly turned to rain). The storms brought another present, Mount Dandenong had over 47mm of rain from midnight to around midday today (other areas got similar amounts too).
Happy holidays everyone!
Category: News article
Topic: Politics
Author: Michael Ellerman
Year created: 2006
You absolutely have to read Michael Ellerman’s satirical news article “John Howard to be deported after failing citizenship test“.
I hereby lend it any Google foo that I have..
Tags: citizenship deported failing howard john+howard citizenship+test australian+citizenship michael+ellerman satirical satire liberal+party
Apparently there are 1.3 million of us here in Australia, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.
As the bushfires rage today the BBC is reporting that it was the hottest December day in more than 50 years, at 41.1C.
I went looking around the Bureau of Met website but could only find the spring records for 2006, and something caught my eye. Now I knew that this spring was very dry, with the north east having their driest spring recorded and most places getting less than half of the usual, but the new record for Wilsons Promontory shocked me. The previous record was in 1911 with 112.6 mm of rain, but now the new all-time (134 year) record is just 58.2 mm, barely half the previous record.
Not good records to see broken.