Worth a read over at The Age:

The Government’s plan to censor the internet is in tatters, with Australia’s largest ISP saying it will not take part in live trials of the system and the second largest committing only to a scaled-back trial.

I’m glad to hear of Telstra not being evil for once! If you don’t know what this post is about read more here.

I share with you a bizarre old Telecom Australia (Telstra) commercial.

It’s not ours anymore! Good for a laugh

I just signed a petition for a very worthy cause. I’ll quote the email they want me to send to everybody (but simply won’t - this is more effective):

Hi, Did you know the Government is proposing an internet censorship scheme that goes further than any other democracy in the world? I’ve just signed a petition to prevent the scheme that will make the internet up to 87% slower, more expensive, accidentally block up to one in 12 legitimate sites, will miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and is very easily sidestepped. The government of the day may add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist under the scheme. Our Government should be doing all in its power to take Australia into the 21st century economy, and to protect our children. This proposed internet censorship does neither. Can you join me and take action on the net today to save the net?

Sign it here, and read my opinion here.

I’m sure all you Aussies out there already know about the Rudd government’s plan to filter out the internet. But guess what, it’s not just for protecting children. It’s been announced that it will be a two tier system, with level 1 being content which is not suitable for children (which internet bill payers can opt out of) and level 2 (which can’t be opted out of) which blocks out illegal content.

It’s fair enough to block illegal content, but realistically where will it end? Will it get to a stage where anything which is controversial (stem cells, abortions, DARKCOLD) or could cause change (startling revelations or things you’re not meant to know) will be blocked out? I don’t want my government deciding for me what is appropriate and what isn’t. I want to protect the internet, and I don’t want to be fed selected news and facts from major media authorities.

It’s not all bad though, for example it will stop pedophiles, terrorists and any other bad people from accessing content. I believe though what they should be doing is going after the people who make the stuff and put it on the internet/share it in the first place, so it doesn’t make it on there. Harsher punishments maybe?

No content filter is 100%, even China’s great firewall. In China all content gets mirrored and sorted through to make sure everything complies, but information can occasionally still get through. We’d need to have a system like China’s for it to work well enough but if we did we’d be living in a very controlled environment. This is also not to mention what will happen to the speeds, with one of the proposed systems reducing speed by 75% (the fastest reduces the speed by 2%). I can’t believe they’re seriously considering this knowing what it will do to the speeds considering how frustratingly slow our internet is at the moment compared to the rest of the world.

In closing, I’m willing to bet it’ll (later in its life) destroy BitTorrent and other upcoming sharing protocols as well (which I use to download Linux ISO’s) because they happen to also get used by pirates. I remember using proxies back when I was in high school to get around internet filters, and I was a teen. People will figure out how to get around it.

You can read more about the plan over at BBC News.

It was just a matter of time before somebody harnessed all the processing power available in GPUs for evil.

Global Secure Systems has said that a Russian’s firm’s use of the latest NVidia graphics cards to accelerate WiFi ‘password recovery’ times by up to an astonishing 10,000 per cent proves that WiFi’s WPA and WPA2 encryption systems are no longer enough to protect wireless data.

I’m sure a GeForce 4 MX440 isn’t up to the task. Read the article via SC Magazine here.