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I have just installed an old Three mobile phone with 3G broadband for my parents home network access for the reasons described in my cheap net access in Australia post [1].
The first problem I had was that the pre-paid Three SIM just wouldn’t work at all. I ended up phoning the Three support line and had a guy guess at which version of Windows I was running, after guessing every version of Windows from the last 10 years and Mac OS/X he finally asked what OS I use and then told me that Linux isn’t supported. I said “I HAVE TWO SIMS FROM THREE, ONE WORKS AND THE OTHER DOESN’T, IT’S ON THE SAME PC WITH THE SAME 3G ACCESS DEVICE, THE PROBLEM IS WITH THE SIM OR THE SERVER NOT MY OS“. When the support guy discovered that one sim was pre-paid he said that there is a configuration difference, instead of an APN of “3netaccess” for post-paid (contract) you have to use “3services” for pre-paid.
There are a bunch of web pages describing how to get Three 3G broadband working on Linux in Australia, some say to use 3netaccess and some say 3services. None of the pages I read stated correctly that 3netaccess is for when you are on a contract and 3services is for pre-paid. I’ve submitted a suggestion for the Ross Barkman’s GPRS Info Page (which seems to be the best reference for such things) [2].
After getting the pre-paid 3G SIM working for net access from the Huawei E1553 USB 3G modem I was unable to get it working from my LG U890 mobile phone. I never figured out how to solve this problem, I left my parents with the SIM that is connected to my $15 per month contract plan for 3G net access and am now using the pre-paid SIM for my own use. Of course this means that as I’m using a SIM registered to my mother and she’s using one registered to me I’ll surely have some problems getting the support center to help me with problems in future.
I found that the 3G net access got better reception when the phone was higher than the computer, so I used a USB extension cable to allow it to be placed on a shelf above the computer. The extension cable also allows it to be easily unplugged and plugged in again – I’ve already seen one situation where Linux got confused about the state of the USB device and replugging it was necessary to solve the problem. I was using Debian/Lenny.
Here is my chatscript for connecting to Three with my 3G modem on a pre-paid SIM – which also allows roaming to Telstra (I haven’t tested whether pre-paid allows roaming, I’ve only tested Telstra roaming with a contract SIM):
ABORT 'BUSY'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
'' AT
OK ATQ0V1E1S0=0&C1&D2+FCLASS=0
OK 'AT+COPS=0,0,"3TELSTRA",2'
OK AT+CGATT=1
#OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess"
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3services"
OK ATDT*99**3#
Here is the ppp configuration for connecting via the USB 3G modem. For use as a permanent connection you want to also include persist and “maxfail 0“:
/dev/ttyUSB0
230400
noauth
defaultroute
logfile /var/log/ppp.log
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/three"
For connecting with an LG U890 mobile phone you need to use “ATDT*99***1#” as the dial command and the device is /dev/ttyACM0 .
Andrew Dowdell and Michael McGuire have an interesting article in the Adelaide Now about censorship in the South Australian election [1]. The South Australian government wants to force everyone who comments on the upcoming SA election to provide their name and postcode. Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law was “all about honesty“. However a law that forces someone to not comment as “Anonymous” and instead forces them to use a name that sounds like something that might appear on a birth certificate and a postcode is not going to increase honesty at all.
I think it’s much better to honestly say “I’m not telling you my name” than to lie and claim to be revealing your name. When the government forces people to give precise but totally inaccurate information it seems that it’s going to be bad for everyone. It’s even bad for the people who want to be identified, if most people who comment on a blog post are anonymous then I’d like to be distinguished as the person who uses their real name!
In the vast majority of cases the effort of determining who is using their real name will not be worth the effort. If someone comments on my blog under the name “John Howard from Bennelong” I will be very suspicious that they are using a fake name. But probably the vast majority of the English speaking population of the world wouldn’t immediately identify such a name as fake. If someone wants to comment on my blog and they don’t have a published phone number then I won’t have any good way of identifying their address. If their name and postcode match an entry in a phone book then they still might be faking it – they could take a random name from a phone book. If I was to demand that people who enter blog comments provide their phone numbers then I would have to pay the expense of phoning them as well as dealing with cases of people who are away from home, should I delay a blog comment for a month until the author returns from their European vacation?
I have had a moderate amount of experience in writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and I have only once had an editor phone me to verify my details. In all other cases I guess I could have fooled them if I wished.
I believe that there are already precedents regarding libel, if I approve a blog comment (or fail to unapprove it in a reasonable amount of time if it meats the automatic approval criteria) then I could be sued for libel if the contents of the comment are deemed to be suitably damaging. So if I was to try to get the real names of people who make comments on my blog then it wouldn’t make it any easier for an idiot who wants to sue – also anyone who wants to sue regarding an Australian political issue will probably find me a better target than most people who comment on my blog (a significant portion of whom are from the US and have much greater legal protections of their freedom of speech).
Extending such a law to US based services such as Twitter is just silly. The stockholders and employees of a US based corporation can freely laugh at Australian censorship laws. Also it’s pretty stupid to have a global scope on such laws, as a Victorian why should I care about the South Australian state laws? Implementing laws that can be easily broken inadvertently and can never be enforced against anyone who cares is just pitiful and will result in the MPs who vote for such laws being the object of derision.
Vote for the small parties and independent candidates. Both Labour and Liberal want to censor us, put them in the second last two spots on your vote card!
Now this law doesn’t take affect until the writs for the March 20 election are issued. I encourage Australian bloggers to write bad things about the Liberal and Labour parties after the writs are released which are not libelous and which don’t include your postcode. If they try to apply the new law then your blog post gets wide attention. If you plan to be a professional blogger then you could consider the $5,000 fine to be an advertising fee. If you don’t want to be known then you can use a US based blogging service.
I’m going to continue to write political blog posts whenever I feel like it and I won’t be telling anyone where I live. I will rely on the Streisand effect to save me.
Update:
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won’t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.
Since playing with the IBM Seer augmented reality software [1] I’ve been lusting after a new mobile phone which can do such things. While the implementation of Seer that I tried was not of great practical use to me (not being a tennis fan I was only there to learn about computers) it was a demonstration of an exciting concept. It will surely be implemented by IBM in other venues that are of more immediate interest, and we can probably expect other vendors to write similar systems to compete with IBM.
So the question is how to get a phone that will run such things well. The answer is probably not to rely on a contract plan for this, currently Vodaphone [2] is currently the only Australian telco that sells a phone that can run Seer, it is offering a HTC Magic (which was released in April 2009) on a $29 per month plan. A phone that is 9 months old isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the has been out for more than 6 months and has some significant benefits (such as a 5MP camera).
- My current provider is Three [3] and their cheapest plan is $29 per month (with or without a phone) which allows 200 minutes ($160) of free calls to other Three phones every month as well as up to $150 of other calls per month and 1GB of data. Calls cost 40c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee. Currently I’m on a plan that gives me the same thing for the same price without data transfer but which includes a “free” phone. So it seems that the 1GB of data per month has an equal cost to a mobile handset (such as an LG Viewty).
- Virgin [6] has a $25 per month plan that gives $60 worth of calls and 300MB of Internet data with unlimited talk and text between members with the added bonus of unused talk and text credit being rolled over to the next month. The cost for calls is 90c per minute plus 40c connection fee, video calls are the same cost as voice calls!
- Vodaphone [2] has a $20 per month phone plan that allows up to $150 of calls per month with the option of either free calls to a single specified Vodaphone number or free calls in the evenings and weekends. They have a $4.95 special offer for 200MB of Internet data per month. Calls cost 44c per 30 seconds plus 35c connection fee.
- Telstra [4] has a $20 per month plan that only includes $20 worth of calls and which has call fees of 47c per 30 seconds plus 27c connection fee. They clearly don’t compete on price, I think that there is no reason for using Telstra unless you live in some of the rural regions where they are the only provider to offer good service.
- Savvytel [7] charges $3.07 for GPRS Internet data so they can’t be considered for an Internet enabled phone. But they do seem very economical for basic phone service.
- Optus [5] has a hopelessly broken web site that wouldn’t give me any information on mobile phone pricing. My previous experience with Optus Internet makes me unlikely to do business with them again anyway.
So it seems that Three (my current provider) is probably the best option at this time. Virgin would save my $4 per month, but would only give me 300M of Internet data per month, and the Virgin limit of $60 per month of calls might not be enough for me. Vodaphone offers a deal for $25 that only includes 200MB of data, that might be enough for just phone use, but wouldn’t be enough for tethering for laptop net access.
I wonder how well tethering works on an Android phone, can you make a phone call while transmitting data from a tethered laptop? I find that with my Viewty when I receive an SMS or phone call it stops the net access. That makes a tethered Viewty impractical for some support tasks as it’s fairly common that I need to talk to someone while logging in to their server – I’m sure that most people who use mobile Internet services regularly need to phone someone while using them.
My current Three bill is $29 per month for the phone plan and $15 per month for Internet access. If I’m going to buy phones outright instead of getting them with the plan then I want to reduce the overall amount of money I spend on phone plans and using tethering instead of a 3G USB dongle would allow this. I think that I can get something that comes close to my ideal mobile phone [8] (apart from being able to connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor) if I import it from overseas.
We really need more competition in the Australian mobile phone market. We have only two phone companies offering Android phones, Three is sold out of the obsolete model that they offer while Vodaphone has stock of an obsolete model.
Based on my experience testing the IBM Seer software on an Android phone [1] I have been considering what type of mobile phone to get when my current contract expires. Here are the features above what is common in current smart phones that I think most people will sorely miss if they don’t have them for the 2011-2012 period:
- Camera that takes reasonable quality pictures at a 5MP resolution.
- High resolution screen (VGA or better).
- GPS (for navigation and augmented reality.
- Digital compass for augmented reality.
- An open market for applications which allows free software to be installed – such as OpenSSH.
The first two items shouldn’t be a problem, there has been a constant trend towards better cameras and higher resolution screens in phones. The difficult ones are GPS and a Digital compass which require phone software to use them. I get the impression that Android and iPhone are going to share the market for fully functional smart phones (because they have the market of applications). So I predict that by 2012 the phone market will have iPhone and Android fully functional smart phones as well as budget phones that don’t support running applications (and will probably lack a compass and GPS).
Here are the features that while not essential, will greatly increase the experience of using a phone for serious users:
- At least 2G of storage built in – installing a 2G micro-SD card is not adequate.
- A screen that can be easily read during the day – maybe Pixel Qi.
- The ability to give a good quality of sound for playing video and audio recordings with a regular headphone jack (so I can use my Bose headset).
For my use a hardware keyboard (such as is used in the Motorolla A855 “Droid”) is essential. I want to have a pocket sized ssh client for emergencies, and I want to be able to type notes reasonably quickly.
I wonder what portion of the smart-phone user base actually needs a keyboard. I’ve seen many people who use a smart-phone as just a regular phone that can exchange photos. Even among people who are moderately serious about smart-phone use there are probably many who only want to take high resolution photos and tag them with GPS data. Currently there are no Android phones on sale in Australia that have a hardware keyboard, I’m worried that this may be an ongoing trend which will result in people with my requirements being forced to either pay significantly more or compromise on features due to the market meeting the needs of average people.
Finally I would like to have a smart-phone that has a regular USB port for plugging in devices (which would of course require an adapter as the size of a phone doesn’t permit a regular USB port). That would permit copying files from USB flash devices, driving a digital SLR camera, and printing photos directly to a USB printer. It would also allow connecting a USB video device, keyboard, and mouse to make a mobile phone work as a desktop workstation. Current smart phones have a lot more compute power than the desktop machines I was using in 1998, so there’s no reason that one couldn’t be used as a workstation with the appropriate peripherals.
On Monday the 25th of January 2010 I visited the Australian Open [1] – it’s one of the world’s greatest tennis championships and it’s on in Melbourne right now. IBM sponsored my visit to show me the computer technology that they use to run the event and display the results to the world via their web site and to various media outlets.
The first thing that they showed me was the IBM Seer software on the HTC Hero phone (which runs the Google Android OS). Seer can be freely downloaded from the Android store. The most noteworthy feature is that it uses the camera in the Android phone to display a picture of whatever you are looking at with points of interest superimposed (such as the above picture where I asked for locations of events and toilets). But it also displays a map view and has some other features I didn’t get a chance to test such as viewing twitter data relevant to the event. We really need this augmented reality feature enabled with tourist data for major cities. I’m sure that there’s lots of interesting things I haven’t seen in my own home city, if I could just pull out a phone and see a map of what’s around me whenever I’m bored I could see some of them. I think that this has the potential to change the way we use phones, in theory this was available as soon as Google Maps was released, but Seer seems to be the start of a whole new range of developments. One of the uses of this will be for identifying the background in tourist photos, no more of the “me in front of old building” descriptions.
Here is a Youtube Video of the Seer software in action [BMLgHGV4zWM].
The tour guide explained that to get the software to work on an iPhone would require the 3GS for navigation as the earlier iPhones don’t have a compass. The Seer software was initially developed for The Championships, Wimbledon 2009 which happened at about the same time as the iPhone 3GS release. I expect that there will be enough iPhone 3GS units sold before Wimbledon 2010 to give IBM a good incentive to port Seer to the iPhone.
Three (my phone company at the moment) has just sold out of the HTC Magic which has a digital compass. They are selling the HTC Touch Pro and HTC Touch Diamond that appear to lack a digital compass. Vodaphone is offering a HTC Magic free on the $29 contract right now. The other Australian mobile phone companies don’t seem to offer any Android phones. So it seems that the only option right now if I wanted to purchase a phone in Australia that can run Seer is the Vodaphone HTC Magic, and that’s a phone that was released almost a year ago (a long time with recent progress in phone development – it’s the modem before the HTC Hero I tested) and which has only a 3.2MP camera (the LG U990 Viewty I used to take the picture for this post has a 5MP camera and is older than that). So I expect that there aren’t many people using Seer in Australia.
If you happen to be in Melbourne and have an Android phone with a digital compass then you may want to visit the Australian open to try the Seer software. It should work equally well from outside the security fence…
I’ll write about the other things I saw over the next few days.
Chris Smart writes about the latest money making schemes for OS distributors, Canonical is getting paid by Yahoo to make them stop using Google as the default Firefox search engine [1]. I think this is OK, the user can easily change it back if desired and it allows them to pay the salaries of more employees – who contribute code back to upstream projects.
 
Above are sections of my Webalizer output related to my blog which show the data transfer use of search.msn.com (Bing presumably) which is 50% greater than that of Google and Yahoo combined. Why does MSN need to do 455MB of transfer so far this month to scan my blog when Google gets the job done with 189M and Yahoo only takes 109M? Also judging by the referrals Bing is only 3% as much use to me as Google.
Above is a sample of the Webalizer output from www.coker.com.au, MSN is using 525MB of data to scan the site which contains about 1.2G of static files that change very rarely. A Russian malware site seems to be downloading it three times a month, and Google only takes 35MB of data transfer to scan the site (which is probably still excessive).
If Bing was a quality search engine that returned appropriate results then this could be forgiven. But however it is a very poor search engine that returns bad results. For example if you query Google or Yahoo for “bonnie++” you will get an entire page of search results concerning my Bonnie++ benchmark, and those results are ordered in a sensible way. If you ask Bing then the first four results concern “Bonnie” (three women and a plant) and most of the first page don’t concern my benchmark.
Some time ago I had blocked MSN from scanning a server that I ran. The server in question had all the web servers for my domain plus quite a few other small domains. The total MSN data transfer was 3G per month which was almost half the data allowance for the server in question (data plans in Australia suck – that’s why my web servers are hosted in Germany now), so it was a question of whether to allow normal operation of the business or MSN searches. With Microsoft not running a popular search engine (then or now) it was an easy decision.
I think that anyone who accepts money from Microsoft/Bing is doing their users a mis-service. Bing is simply an inferior search engine, it gets bad results and imposes excessive costs on service providers. Yahoo however seems to be a reasonable service, not as good as Google for the web hosters but not too bad.
I wonder what would happen if Yahoo offered some sponsorship money to the Debian project in exchange for being the default search engine. I’m sure it would be dramatic.
I’m running Debian/Unstable on an EeePC 701, I’ve got an SD card for /home etc but the root filesystem is on the internal 4G flash storage which doesn’t have much spare space (I’ve got a full software development environment, GCC, debuggers, etc as well as running KDE4). On some of my systems I’ve started the practice of having two root filesystem installs, modern disks are big enough that usually it’s difficult to use all the space, and even if you do use most of the space the use of a second root filesystem only takes a fraction of a percent of the available space.
Today I discovered a problem with my EeePC, I had upgraded to the latest Unstable packages a few days ago and now when I run X programs the screen flickers really badly every time it’s updated. Pressing a key in a terminal window makes the screen shake, watching a video with mplayer makes it shake constantly to such a degree that it’s not usable. If that problem occurred on a system with a second root filesystem I could upgrade the other a few packages at a time to try and discover the root cause. But without the space for a second root filesystem this isn’t an option.
I hope that Btrfs [1] becomes ready for serious use soon, it seems that the btrfs snapshot facility might make it possible for me to preserve the old version in a bootable form before upgrading my EeePC (although even then disk space would be tight).
So I guess I now need to test different versions of the X related packages in a chroot environment to track this bug down. Sigh.
In the past I have had parents ask for advice on buying a digital camera for a young child. For some years there have been digital cameras on sale for much less than $100 – cheap enough that no-one will be THAT bothered if the child breaks it, so digital photography is a good hobby for a young child. Such cameras are however quite bulky and require AA batteries – which often don’t last that long between charges. Some of the cheap phones are large enough that a 3yo child can have trouble carrying them.
I recently gave an old LG U8110 phone to a young child for use as a camera. The phone has a 640*480 resolution camera and a display that is a few centimeters wide. It’s no good for any remotely serious photography, and among other problems I never managed to get it’s USB connection to work so the only way I ever managed to get a photograph off it was to MMS it to a newer camera. But it’s quite adequate for a child to play with, it’s small, light, and the battery stays charged for ages. Also the phone has a clock built in which is a handy feature – it seems that nowadays the trend in society is away from wearing a watch and towards using a mobile phone to discover the time.
Also a phone is a fairly capable computer, I think that the first two computers that I owned had significantly less CPU power and RAM than an LG U8110 and lots of newer phones compare well to PCs that were manufactured in the mid 90’s. The trend has been towards having an increasing number of applications and games on phones which of course gives more things for a child to play with. I believe that playing with computers that have a variety of different user interfaces and sets of applications is good for the education of young children.
Now to make a phone work you need to have a SIM. If a phone was designed by someone who was intelligent and who was acting on behalf of the owner of the phone then it would support the camera etc without a SIM. But it seems that mobile phones are either designed by idiots or they are designed to act on behalf of the phone companies to the exclusion of the customer’s interests, so I haven’t seen a camera-phone that is usable for any purpose other than calling the emergency services when there is no SIM installed. Fortunately it is possible to get old SIMs, I had one that was replaced due to an intermittent fault that caused calls to drop out. I also have some SIMs from other telcos that would probably work (I’m not sure whether a phone that is locked to one carrier will take photos if a SIM from another carrier is installed).
Update: It seems that there is a range of phones that operate without a SIM, a Nokia N900 (if you consider it to be a phone rather than an Internet tablet), an Android, or a phone running the Symbian OS. I suspect that the majority of phones that are currently in use and due to be replaced soon will require a SIM though.
One final notable aspect of giving a phone to a child is the possibility of it being used to call emergency services (which will work even when there is no SIM or a SIM that is not associated with an account). If you are planning to give a phone to someone else’s child then you should ask the parents first, some parents believe (either correctly or incorrectly) that the chance of their child making prank calls to the emergency services is too great. A present that a child receives which is undesired by their parents will probably get lost or broken quickly…
When such a phone gets broken by a child (they are tough, but almost everything that is used without restriction by a child gets broken) the next thing to do is to disassemble it. With modern design and manufacturing probably all that a child could really learn from a phone is how the keyboard works – and not even that for a touch-screen phone. But it’s still a good experience for a child to take apart old machines. When I was young my father gave me many old machines to take apart, I had a lot of fun and learned some interesting things.
I find it really sad to see those boxes for recycling old phones at the mobile phone stores which are full of 2yo phones that are mostly in good condition. Almost everyone has some young relatives or friends who have children who could find a good use for that stuff. Send the bits to be recycled AFTER the children nearest to you have finished doing things to the old phone!
The following was written by Stefano Cosentino in regard to the ongoing efforts of the Australian government to censor the Internet with “protecting the children” as an excuse.
All these Internet filtering ideas that have been in the news lately has made me voice my own opinion on the matter as a non-expert. I’m an IT advisor. I take someone’s problem and help them fix it.
I have a few clients who provide laptops to their students, everything is done with these laptops. The students have no books. The school provides laptops to their primary school students as well as their high school students. They have done this long before the public system started to hand out laptops to a select number of high school students.
When you provide a child with anything, there are always areas where a child will find that you may have overlooked. In fact, a young kid will probably find a host of things that you might have totally missed or didn’t ever know about. One of these things is the inappropriate nature of information you may find that are associated with computers. This can be anything. But specifically, what the filtering argument has been about has been leaning towards Internet pornography and I would imagine, more specifically content of a pedophiliac nature.
I’m not against child pornography being banned or filtered. I personally think this is one of the most cruel, inconsiderate, disrespectful and self centered behaviors a person could display. Their psychological makeup isn’t the scope of this article. However these ideas must be conveyed when discussing the Internet as a modern technological device that can be used for both good and bad.
The primary school students that I attend to aren’t very interested in this stuff and as it has been mentioned long ago by others who have joined this argument, are more interested in online flash games that include characters such as Ben 10, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. When I’m called in to scan these computers during the school holidays and hand the laptops back to the kids or when they get handed back after 3 years for new ones, I find that the older primary school kids computers are usually more prone to the adult orientated content. To me this is the first sign of a filter’s failure. This customer of mine spends more money on the filtering devices they use on campus than I charge them for a few days of work.
Does it work?
Sadly, I hate to report that no, it does not. It’s completely useless. The kids still have files and traces of files on their computers that isn’t suitable for young children. Not only pornography but also content of a violent or morbid nature. As young and impressionable people, everything they read, see and hear is absorbed. This shapes the way society will become in years to come. Since no one can realistically tell the future, wouldn’t it be nice if we could make sure that the people looking after us and our lives forty or fifty years from now have a sane mind free of blemish?
It’s a different story for the high school children. While scanning their laptops I have to contact the police on a daily basis because of the nature of the content I find during my day. Some things you can let slip, today’s version of a pinup girl, or a provocative pic of whatever skimpy clad girl the record companies are flogging off these days as musicians. But sadly that’s rare. I won’t go into detail of what I find on these laptops of 14 year old boys, but it ranges from some innocent growing up curiosity right to perverted, sick and most if not all of the time, illegal content. The filters fail again. The kids find a way around it. And they find it easily.
I’ve seen filters work and not work at all with young kids right through to young adults. All the filters do is either hinder the poor kids actually trying to do research of scholastic nature or prolong the inevitable and temporarily block a determined child’s interest in the search for some adult related material. The filter might prevent accidental viewing but it doesn’t stop the deliberate finding of pornography and other illegal content.
How does a filter stop this from happening? How does a filter stop a child taking their parents adult videos and copying them to their laptop or finding dad’s stash of Penthouse? How does it stop a school mate bringing this stuff to school to show everyone at lunch time or to trade for other content they found by other means. Remember back to when you were their age and caught a glimpse of your big brother’s room wall. How many times did you try and catch a peak at that Samantha Fox poster hanging off the wall?
Where’s the filter now? Here’s some thing to think about.
The filter shouldn’t be a thing, it should be a person. They’re called “responsible”. They’re called parents.
What priorities do parents have if their child feels that what they look at online that is of an adult nature is acceptable? Or maybe the kid knows better, knows it isn’t acceptable but still goes out of their way to get the stuff on their computer? Sneaker Net still exists, USB memory sticks are cheap and can now have two or three straight DVD rips on them, or perhaps five or six encoded films on there. Hundreds and thousands of images and so on. Filter failure again.
When the kids go online, they know of the technology used to block them from gaining access to what they want to see. Chances are, they’ll know what a proxy server is and does. Then they’ll figure out what they need to do to get around the filter. I, myself did this back in high school and TAFE when I couldn’t find photographs of a particular device I was researching. Turns out the name is also a form of sexual activity, in another language, but still. The filter stopped me from not only looking the offending content but also to look at the legitimate data that I needed to complete an assignment.
I got around the problem by researching some more information and the following day I was breaking through firewalls and proxy servers with easy. Filter failure.
How do I get around this issue when speaking to younger kids that need guidance and knowledge on how to deal with this situation? I hold talks at the school I provide my services to. I talk to the parents, no kids. The talk costs less than a broken filter they keep throwing money at keep up-to-date. The school puts these filters in place to appear responsible, because while the kids are attending their school, the school is in fact responsible. In fact, there is nothing more the school can do. They could educate the children, but you can tell someone what to do, and the chances of them doing it are pretty dismal. Music is not allowed on their computers either. Yet we constantly find iTunes on there and a host of music that traces to certain peer to peer applications where they acquired the stolen music.
If a kid can learn how to do that, imagine what sort of influence can be placed on them from a more positive angle. Like maybe parents providing an explanation for starters of what it is they’re looking at. What it is they’ll find online. What material is inappropriate. What material should you tell an adult about. Why do I get stupid emails with Russian girls wanting to marry me.
Kids absorb everything. Parents have relegated responsibility but not delegated it. This filter idea might help slow down a child’s enthusiasm to learn about everything, both good and bad. But educating the kids from an early stage in life about morals and the modern world where lets think about it, we have absolutely everything we need and want at our finger tips will be more valuable than any filter. But the fact that we have so much available makes it difficult to say what is and isn’t appropriate for a child to see. It is up to us to inform the children of what’s out there is the world. It may or may not stop them from seeing the adult related content, but it will help them respond to it in a mature and adult manner. We all know, kids aren’t stupid.
So, if the filters worked, why am I called in once a year, every year to give my talk to parents?
Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to “The thieves“.
It’s unfortunate that Bruce doesn’t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote “There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft” and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn’t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2].
Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen “I’ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software)” which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate.
I did mention in a comment on Bruce’s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter.
Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn’t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn’t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging – corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce’ blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used.
I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers.
The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a “three strikes” law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony.
Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce’s RSS feed then it wouldn’t matter (I’m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the “Three Strikes” law.
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