More about Australian Internet Censorship

December 11, 2008 | etbe

As the Australian government wants to show how well they understand technology, they have started a blog about the “Digital Economy” [1]. So far they have hundreds of comments, most of which just tell them that their censorship ideas are wrong.

In what may be related news, Barack Obama has announced details of some of his plans [2]. He will spend money on improving net access (something that the Australian government could learn from) and on improving schools (which will probably be about as effective as putting lipstick on a pig). I really hope that we don’t have someone in his administration deciding that improving schools requires censoring the Internet for the entire population (people tend to turn their brains off when it’s time to think about the children). He is also allocating money to road building (a stupid idea when cars are becoming increasingly expensive and world fuel supplies are running out – he should be building train and tram lines). But his idea about improving the energy efficiency of federal buildings is a really good idea, that will lead the development of technology that everyone can use to increase efficiency. He also wants to “modernise” the health-care system by moving to electronic medical records – this seems unlikely but I guess that all spending on IT is somehow good for those of us who are involved in the computer industry. One of his advisors has realised that there are economic benefits to really fixing the health-care system, so there is some hope that it will get fixed [3].

The FLOSS Manuals project has released a document about circumventing censorship systems [4], I expect that many people will be using them before the government even gets their Chinese-style filter installed (if they ever do).

Other Reasons for not Censoring the Net

November 18, 2008 | etbe

Currently there is a debate about censoring the Internet in Australia. Although debate might not be the correct word for a dispute where one party provides no facts and refuses to talk to any experts (Senator Conroy persistently refuses all requests to talk to anyone who knows anything about the technology or to have his office address any such questions). The failures of the technology are obvious to anyone who has worked with computers, here is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about it [1] (one of many similar articles in the MSM). I don’t plan to mention the technological failures again because I believe that the only people who read my blog and don’t understand the technology are a small number of my relatives – I gave up on teaching my parents about IP protocols a long time ago.

One of the fundamental problems with the current censorship idea is that they don’t seem to have decided what they want to filter and who they want to filter it from. The actions taken to stop pedophiles from exchanging files are quite different from what would be taken to stop children accidentally accessing porn on the net. I get the impression that they just want censorship and will say whatever they think will impress people.

I have previously written about the safety issues related to mobile phones [2]. In that document I raised the issue of teenagers making their own porn (including videos of sexual assault). About four months after writing it a DVD movie was produced showing a gang of teenagers sexually assaulting a girl (they sold copies at their school). It seems that the incidence of teenagers making porn using mobile phones is only going to increase, while no-one has any plans to address the problem.

The blog www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com has some interesting information on this issue.

Two final reasons for opposing net censorship have been provided by the Sydney Anglicans [3]. They are:

Given anti-vilification laws, could religious content be deemed â€œillegalâ€ and be filtered out? Could Sydneyanglicans.net be blocked as â€œillegalâ€ if it carries material deemed at some point now or in the future as vilifying other religions? If itâ€™s illegal in Vic say, and there isnâ€™t state-based filtering (there wont be), will the govt be inclined to ban it nation wide?
Given anti-discrimination laws, if Sydneyanglicans.net runs an article with the orthodox line on homosexuality, will that be deemed illegal, and the site blocked? You can imagine it wouldnâ€™t be too hard for someone to lobby Labor via the Greens, for instance.

So the Sydney Anglicans seem afraid that their religious rights to discriminate against others (seriously – religious organisations do have such rights) will be under threat if filtering is imposed.

I was a bit surprised when I saw this article, the Anglican church in Melbourne seems reasonably liberal and I had expected the Anglican church in the rest of Australia to be similar. But according to this article Peter Jensen (Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop) regards himself as one of the “true keepers of the authority of the Bible” [4]. It seems that the Anglican church is splitting over the issues related to the treatment of homosexuals and women (Peter believes that women should not be appointed to leadership positions in the church to avoid “disenfranchising” men who can’t accept them [5]).

It will be interesting to see the fundamentalist Christians who want to protect their current legal rights to vilify other religions and discriminate against people on the basis of gender and sexual preference fighting the other fundamentalist Christians who want to prevent anyone from seeing porn. But not as interesting as it will be if the Anglican church finally splits and then has a fight over who owns the cathedrals. ;)

A comment on my previous post about the national cost of slow net access suggests that Germany (where my blog is now hosted) has better protections for individual freedom than most countries [6]. If you want unrestricted net access then it is worth considering the options for running a VPN to another country (I have previously written a brief description of how to set up a basic OpenVPN link [7]).

Support Gay Marriage in case You Become Gay

November 5, 2008 | etbe

A common idea among the less educated people who call themselves “conservative” seems to be that they should oppose tax cuts for themselves and support tax cuts for the rich because they might become rich and they want to prepare for that possibility.

The US census data [1] shows that less than 1% of males aged 15+ earn $250K. For females it’s less than 0.2%.

On the Wikipedia page about homosexuality [2] it is claimed that 2%-7% of the population are gay (and 12% of Norwegians have at least tried it out). Apparently homosexuality can strike suddenly, you never know when a right-wing politician or preacher will suddenly and unexpectedly be compelled to hire gay whores (as Ted Haggard [3] did) or come out of the closet (as Jim Kolbe [4] did).

So it seems that based on percentages you are more likely to become gay than to become rich. So it would be prudent to prepare for that possibility and lobby for gay marriage in case your sexual preference ever changes.

But on a serious note, of the people who earn $250K or more (an income level that has been suggested for higher tax rates) there will be a great correlation between the amount of education and the early start to a career. Go to a good university and earn more than the median income in your first job, and you will be well on track to earning $250K. A common misconception is that someone who has not had a great education can still be successful by starting their own company. While there are a few people who have done that, the vast majority of small companies fail in the first few years. Working hard doesn’t guarantee success, for a company to succeed you need to have the right product at the right time – this often depends on factors that you can’t predict (such as the general state of the economy and any new products released by larger companies).

Christian Principles in an Election Year

November 4, 2008 | etbe

The National Council of Churches in the US [1] has produced some advice for Christian voters titled Christian Principles in an Election Year [2]. It starts by saying “Your church, your communion, and the National Council of Churches USA do not endorse any political party or any candidate” (which is in bold in their text) and then lists 10 issues that Christians should consider when voting.

Here are the 10 section headings, the full article has a sentence or two explaining each one. I think that most good people (regardless of religion) will agree with all of this – maybe substitute “God” with the name of some other entity that has not been proven to exist or with “humanity”.

War is contrary to the will of God.
God calls us to live in communities shaped by peace and cooperation.
God created us for each other, and thus our security depends on the well being of our global neighbors.
God calls us to be advocates for those who are most vulnerable in our society.
Each human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite worth.
The earth belongs to God and is intrinsically good.
Christians have a biblical mandate to welcome strangers.
Those who follow Christ are called to heal the sick.
Because of the transforming power of Godâ€™s grace, all humans are called to be in right relationship with each other.
Providing enriched learning environments for all of Godâ€™s children is a moral imperative.

The Blogger Joy Reid [3] often uses the term “Matthew Christian” to refer to Christians who follow the book of Matthew and act in ways that would be considered to be good by most people regardless of belief. This is in stark contrast to some of the nasty people who call themselves Christian and who promote hatred, inequality, and war – such people give all Christians a bad reputation (see the comment section of any blog post concerning religion for examples).

John Goerzen’s post titled Politics and the Church (which references the NCCUSA article [4]) is also worth reading. Interestingly his blog post had a Google advert for “Christian Masturbation” when I viewed it. John also has a good post explaning why he is voting for Obama – based on his Christian beliefs and “Traditional Values” [5].

The Next Miserable Failure?

October 17, 2008 | etbe

Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch).

Here are some links about John McCain:

Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1].

The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000.

Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination.

The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him.

Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture – I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“.

Here are some links about Sarah Palin:

Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades – I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known.

There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities – including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4].

Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports.

The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell.

The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9].

Update: Corrected URL [6].

Solutions for the Housing Crisis

October 2, 2008 | etbe

Currently we have a huge husing crisis in the US which involves significant political corruption including the federal government preventing state governments from stopping predatory banking practices [1].

The corrupt plan to solve this is to simply give the banks a lot of taxpayer money, so the banking business model then becomes to do whatever it takes to make a short-term profit and then rely on federal funds for long-term viability. The bank employees who caused the problem by aggressively selling mortgages to people who could never repay them if the housing prices stabilised – let alone if the prices fell.

If the aim is to protect families, then the first requirement is that they not be evicted from their homes. The solution to this is to void the mortgage of anyone resident home owner who purchased a house on the basis of false advice from the bank or who unknowingly entered into a mortgage that any reasonable person who is good at maths can recognise as being impossible for them to repay. The bank would end up with clear title to the property and the ex-homeowner would end up with no debt. Then such properties could be set for a controlled rent for a reasonable period of time (say 5 years). The bank (or it’s creditors) would have the option of renting the property to the ex-mortgagee for a minimum of five years or selling the property to someone else who was willing to do so. Of course the ex-mortgagee (who would not be bankrupt) would have the option of seeking out a new mortgage at reasonable rates and then buying thier home again.

Also to benefit families the rent control period could be extended for as long as they have dependent children.

The losers in this would be the banks and the people who purchased multiple investment properties (the ones who caused all the problems).

Finally what is needed is a cultural shift towards austerity (as described by Juan Enriquez and Jorge Dominguez) [2].

Glen makes an interesting point about the irony of typical homeowners in the US demonstrating more financial literacy than the people who run banks [3].

On Talking to Police

August 3, 2008 | etbe

The lecture by Professor James Duane about why you should not talk to the police (in the US at least) is doing the rounds at the moment. The Google video site doesn’t work for me, so I downloaded it from youtube with the following references:
part 1 [rVq6N0xAEEM]
part 2 [-Z0bpj3EEHI]
part 3 [44-GSZofXIE]
part 4 [zSvxiaO-TG8]
part 5 [gzYHnWrqfWg]
part 6 [BErNzdOnWGY]

The first thing that struck me about this is that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone clearly state the problem with the excessive number and complexity of the laws. It’s impossible to know whether you are breaking the law. This is obviously wrong and it should be a legislative priority to reduce the number of laws and the complexity of the laws. If for every law they sought evidence regarding whether it helped people or helped preserve the state then that would be a good start.

The excessive number of laws is not just a problem due to the risk of accidentally breaking a law, but also due to the fact that a malicious cop could arrest anyone that they wished – it would merely be a matter of following them for long enough. In the second half of the lecture Officer George Bruch from the Virginia Beach Police Department gives his side of the story. At one point he cites an example of the road laws where he can follow a car and find a legitimate reason for booking the driver if he wishes.

Virginian law allows the police to destroy primary evidence. If they tape an interview then they can transcribe it to a written record and then destroy the original tape. If the transcription removes some of the content that has meaning then the defendant is probably going to suffer for it. It’s often stated that on the net you have to make extra effort to make your meaning clear as jokes can’t be recognised by the tone of voice. It seems that the same effort would need to be made in a police interview (but without the possibility of going back and saying “sorry I was misunderstood” that you have in email).

It’s also legal for police to lie to suspects. While I can imagine some situations where this could be reasonable, it seems that at a minimum there should be some protection for child suspects against being lied to by police (there have been some travesties of justice stemming from children trusting police in an interview room).

It seems that if someone doesn’t get a good lawyer and refuse to talk to the police then they will be likely to be convicted regardless of whether they are guilty or innocent. Officer Bruch says that he tries to avoid interviewing innocent people. So I guess whether someone ends up in jail or not will depend to some extent on the opinion of a cop who may or may not interview them.

While I guess a high rate of success at securing convictions is in most cases a good thing, the fact that convicting an innocent person is the absolute best way of letting a criminal escape justice seems to be forgotten.

Another issue is the fact that a witness may have reason to believe that they could be a suspect. The advice that a suspect should never talk to a police officer seems to logically imply that intelligent people will be hesitant about providing witness statements in situations where they may be a suspect.

I wonder how the legal system in Australia compares to the US in regard to these issues. I know that we have far too many laws and too many complex laws which can not be understood and obeyed by a reasonable person.

Bad Telstra

July 23, 2008 | etbe

77020 packets transmitted, 18029 received, 76% packet loss, time 77049435ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 20.026/130.848/2245.752/287.550 ms, pipe 3

Above are the ping results from pinging my server (hosted on a business DSL connection). Telstra stuffed up and appear to have entirely disconnected DSL for a few suburbs (based on reports from a client who has several clients in that region that all went offline simultaneously). It’s affected at least two ISPs (every DSL service uses Telstra’s backbone). The above ping results show almost 17 hours of outage, but it was really more like 18 (I didn’t start pinging until I realised it was down). Telstra’s response to the problem reports (which my client raised via two ISPs) was that it would take until the end of the next business day. The problem was reported at 10AM, so Telstra was apparently happy with two entire business days of outage.

I think that the root cause of such problems is the terrible performance of Sol Trujillo [1] (or “Telstra’s Sole True Hero” as suggested in Crikey [2]). Under Sol’s leadership Telstra stock has not performed well (it’s a monopoly – it’s supposed to reap money), it’s lost market share in every area where competition is permitted and it hasn’t made it’s customers happy.

Sol is taking an approach to business that works well for some big companies in the US (and for the mining and automative industries in Australia). He has been trying to force the government to extend the Telstra monopoly with the Fibre To The Node (FTTN) plan [3]. His idea was to have small Telstra boxes (nodes) spread around the suburbs with short copper runs to each home, each node would have absolutely no spare space for other ISP equipment and therefore the other ISPs would not be able to provide a service. The claim was that FTTN was needed for decent performance but ADSL2+ has been shown to work well in the areas where FTTN was proposed.

Telstra even sent out brochures to stock-holders encouraging them to lobby members of Parliament on behalf of Telstra’s rent seeking [4]. However Australia is not like the US and this didn’t work, they couldn’t even get Telstra stock holders to support such plans. Speaking for myself, my interests as a Telstra stock-holder (and I own more Telstra shares than the median stock holder) are vastly outweighed by my interests as a consumer of telecommunications services.

I would like to see the government nationalise the local loop and the exchange buildings and then provide fair and equal access to all telephone companies and ISPs (including Telstra). Then we can have true competition in this market and the companies that provide the best services will win. Currently Telstra resembles one of those inefficient Soviet monopolies. We need some capitalism in the telco industry!

Logic and Pants

July 14, 2008 | etbe

I just read an interesting post about proposed new laws in the US prohibiting exposing underpants [1]. This is not a new thing and is part of a debate that has been taking place in many countries since the trend of “hip hop” saggy pants.

The first thing that occurs to me is to wonder what the difference really is between underpants and bathers. It seems to me that bathers are simply underpants that don’t turn transparent when they get wet (and which are made of materials that don’t degrade easily when exposed to sea water, UV light, and chlorinated water from swimming pools. So it seems that unless there is some clear legal difference between bathers and underpants such laws will not be effective. Could an underwear company produce products that are essentially the same as it’s regular products but which say “swimming attire” on the label to allow it’s customers to escape silly laws? In fact why not label all underwear as “swimming attire” just in case?

Would the prudes who object to a glimpse of underwear want police to go checking the labels of underwear to determine if they are permitted to be seen? The fascist trend in first-world countries is already quite bad, I don’t think we want to add underpants inspection to the list of police powers. Also it should be noted that a small portion of the police officers are corrupt, the idea of corrupt cops inspecting underpants is really not appealing…

It would be possible to define any clothes worn under other clothes as “underwear”, but this has problems too. For example when I was younger I used to often wear jeans over my bathers when on the way to/from a beach (often there were no adequate facilities for changing clothes near a beach). If I was to wear jeans over my bathers while walking to a beach could I get booked for showing a small section of my bathers over the top of my jeans – and then legally entirely display my bathers while swimming? Of course there are legal nude beaches in many localities, but blurring the distinction between a regular beach and a nude beach by permitting activity that would be “indecent exposure” on all beaches seems likely to have results that would not make the prudes happy.

The next logical implication of laws against exposing underpants is that they encourage wearing smaller underpants. My experience is that it is impossible to wear boxer-shorts without them being exposed above the top of my jeans. Should I be essentially prohibited from wearing boxer shorts because of the risk that if my shirt is not tucked in then someone might catch a glimpse of my underwear?

Now if “underwear” was defined to be “anything work beneath the outer layer of clothes” then what about the situation of having multiple layers of clothes? For example when an athlete who wears a track-suit over shorts, are those shorts “underwear”? If so do they cease being “underwear” once the track-suit is removed? Is there a race condition [2] where an athlete can wear shorts on the track, a track-suit on the bench, but they have to remove the track-suit as fast as possible because they are committing indecent exposure while removing the track-suit?

If underwear is defined as being the innermost layer of clothing, then what of the practice of “free-balling” (the practice of a man wearing a track-suit with no underpants) and the Scottish tradition of “nothing is worn under the kilt”? Can a track-suit or kilt be defined as underwear? If so how would it be enforced, would police look up the kilts of all men to ensure that the kilt is not the underwear?

As for “plumber’s crack” the only solution seems to be to compel plumbers to wear overalls. Of course then plumbers would increase their rates to cover the expense and inconvenience involved in a forced change of attire. I think that most people would prefer to hire a cheap plumber who shows some “crack” than an expensive plumber.

I’m Skeptical about Robotic Nanotech

June 13, 2008 | etbe

There has been a lot of fear-mongering about nanotech. The idea is that little robots will eat people (or maybe eat things that we depend on such as essential food crops). It’s unfortunate that fear-mongering has replaced thought and there seems to have been little serious discussion about the issues.

If (as some people believe) nanotech has the potential to be more destructive than nuclear weapons then it’s an issue that needs to be discussed in debates before elections and government actions to alleviate the threat need to be reported on the news – as suggested in the Accelerating Future blog [0].

I predict that there will be three things which could be called nanotech in the future:

Artifical life forms as described by Craig Venter in his talk for ted.com [1]. I believe that these should be considered along with nanotech because the boundary between creatures and machines can get fuzzy when you talk about self-replicating things devised by humans which are based on biological processes.
I believe that artificial life forms and tweaked versions of current life forms have significant potential for harm. The BBC has an interesting article on health risks of GM food which suggests that such foods should be given the same level of testing as pharmaceuticals [2]. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, the potential use of Terminator Gene technology [3] in biological warfare seems obvious.
But generally this form of nanotech has the same potential as bio-warfare (which currently has significantly under-performed when compared to other WMDs) and needs to be handled in the same way.
The more commonly discussed robotic nanotech, self-replicating and which can run around to do things (EG work inside a human body). I doubt that tiny robots can ever be as effective at adapting to their environment as animals, I also doubt that they can self-replicate in the wild. Currently we create CPU cores (the most intricate devices created by humans) from very pure materials in “clean rooms”. Making tiny machines in clean-rooms is not easy, making them in dirty environments is going to be almost impossible. Robots as we know them are based around environments that are artificially clean not natural environments. Robots that can self-replicate in a clean-room when provided with pure supplies of the necessary raw materials is a solvable problem. I predict that this will remain in science-fiction.
Tiny robots manufactured in factories to work as parts of larger machines. This is something that we are getting to today. It’s not going to cause any harm as long as the nano-bots can’t be manufactured on their own and can’t survive in the wild.

In summary, I think that the main area that we should be concerned about in regard to nano-bot technology is as a new development on the biological warfare theme. This seems to be a serious threat which deserves the attention of major governments.

etbe – Russell Coker

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