Posts filed under 'IT News'
Surely this won’t pass the US Senate.
A bill making its way through Congress proposes to give the U.S. government authority over all networks considered part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Under the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009, the president would have the authority to shut down Internet traffic to protect national security.
The government also would have access to digital data from a vast array of industries including banking, telecommunications and energy. A second bill, meanwhile, would create a national cybersecurity adviser — commonly referred to as the cybersecurity czar — within the White House to coordinate strategy with a wide range of federal agencies involved.
Actually, I don’t know what’s more troubling here. The idea of giving any single man the power to turn off the Internet at will, or the government gaining access to data from the banks and telcos…and seeing as this includes the term “digital data” it could very well be a new form of “warantless wiretapping”.
Silicon Valley executives are calling the bill vague and overly intrusive, and they are rebelling at the thought of increased and costly government regulations amid the global economic crisis.
Others are concerned about the potential erosion of civil liberties. “I’m scared of it,” said Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group.
“It’s really broad, and there are plenty of laws right now designed to prevent the government getting access to that kind of data. It’s the same stuff we’ve been fighting on the warrantless wiretapping.”
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va, who introduced the bill earlier this month with bipartisan support, is casting the legislation as critical to protecting everything from our water and electricity to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records.
“I know the threats we face.” Rockefeller said in a prepared statement when the legislation was introduced. “Our enemies are real. They are sophisticated, they are determined and they will not rest.”
The bill would allow the government to create a detailed set of standards for cybersecurity, as well as take over the process of certifying IT technicians. But many in the technology sector say the government is simply ill-equipped to get involved at the technical level, said Franck Journoud, a policy analyst with the Business Software Alliance.
“Simply put, who has the expertise?” he said. “It’s the industry, not the government. We have a responsibility to increase and improve security. That responsibility cannot be captured in a government standard.”
I’m afraid that I couldn’t help myself. After hearing about this I was compelled to nominate Sen. Jay Rockefeller for Casey Hendrickson and Heather Kydd’s “jerk of the week” on KXNT:
* Your “Jerk of the Week” submission
Sen. Jay Rockefeller
Why should this person be the “Jerk of the Week”?
For trying to give King Obama the power to turn off the Internet. The Internet is the only way those of us on the other side of the world can find out what’s happening in the US…this bill could be the start of a reclusive North Korea type regime.
Your Name (Optional)
Samuel Gordon-Stewart
Oh, and turning off the Internet in the US would also take this website offline…but I’m slightly more concerned about the lack of access I would have to the US media.
Samuel
April 24th, 2009 at 04:53pm
It may, at this stage, only be an experimental feature, but after five years and a week or so of existence, Gmail supports inline images.
Posted by Kent Tamura, Software Engineer
Well, it’s about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you’ll see a new toolbar icon[.]
Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.
I’ve never really had much use for inserting images inline, but on the one or two occasions where I have needed it, it has been very annoying to not be able to make it happen. One of life’s little annoyances has been fixed.
Samuel
April 10th, 2009 at 05:32pm
The Federal Government’s mandatory Internet filtering plan will be the subject up for debate tonight on SBS’ Insight program at 7:30.
I am yet to hear a single argument for the mandatory filtering which holds up to logical scrutiny, so it will be interesting to see if getting a group of supporters together in a room will produce a coherent argument. I think they’ll be ripped to shreds by the opponents of the filtering.
What will be more interesting to me though will be working out how far in advance Insight is filmed. If it was filmed at any time today, then I expect Insight to use today’s statement from Federal Communications Minister and Senator Stephen Conroy, in which he said that the filtering will not stop child pornography.
I suppose that’s the final nail in the coffin for the supposed secret magical bits of technology that can determine whether a picture contains child pornography, as vaguely described to me by Jim Wallace, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby in an interview on 1WAY FM on December 22 last year.
Samuel
March 31st, 2009 at 03:37pm
Looks like Gmail doesn’t handle email timestamps which appear to be in the future as well as it could
Anybody feel like emailing the lotto numbers back in time to me?
Samuel
March 9th, 2009 at 03:57am
Update: I should update this before another person decides to inform me that Facebook have reversed their decision to take control of everyone’s content. I’ve read their statement, and I’m not convinced, because what they say they are doing is reversing the change for now, while they rewrite the change to make it clearer. I may just be cynical, but this really sounds like a temporary reversal, not a complete backflip. End Update
As I’ve said many times, I don’t like Facebook, I have no use for it, and I’m very pleased to not be a part of it. Today I get to add another reason to my list…Facebook have new terms and conditions which effectively say that they own the rights to any content which you contribute to their site, and continue to own the content forever even if you delete the content or suspend or cancel your account.
So let’s get this straight with an example:
A person attends a party and uploads photos of themself in an extremely intoxicated state, along with descriptions of activities undertaken during the course of the event, some of which could be construed in a negative way in the future, potentially impacting on job prospects etc. The next day when said person is sober and decides that they want to remove this content from Facebook, they do so, but face the prospect that Facebook own the content, and are still free to do with it as they please…if (to move to the less likely) they then run for public office with a campaign platform that Facebook disagree with (such as only allowing people with specific tea sets to be members of Social Networking websites), Facebook are able to dig up this content and run a public smear campaign against said person with it.
I can understand the whole “I grant permission to distribute this stuff” type of licence for a service such as Facebook where they need to be able to distribute the content across their servers in order for the service to work…but removing the “but I can withdraw my consent” provision is just beyond the pale for a site which stores as much personal data as Facebook does.
In reality, it’s like diary manufacturers being able to confiscate your personal diary and publish its contents at any time. It’s just nuts.
On the bright side, it gives me some fresh ammunition for the next time a particular person tries to convince me to rejoin Facebook.
Samuel
February 17th, 2009 at 03:11pm
Every now and then I take a look at the websites of various schools that I attended and have a look at their newsletters, and I did this over the weekend. Whilst poking around the Campbell High School website I stumbled on an interesting document: The “Acceptable Use Of Technology Resources Policy At Campbell High School” form which students and parents have to sign in order for students to be able to use computers at the high school.
The policy runs to five pages, and I’ve got to say that I was enthralled by it…not because it’s a particularly interesting document, but because I feel a great deal of responsibility for the introduction of the document after nearly being expelled from Campbell in 2003 for my antics with their computer network. I read through the whole thing, and was particularly interested by the following statements:
Staff will be encouraged to make effective use of the Internet to maximise student learning. Whilst teachers will make every effort to ensure that students do not access material which may be deemed inappropriate or offensive, it is not possible to screen out all such content. However, the ACT Department of Education does employ some filters on its Internet access.
[..]
If a student accidentally accesses any material which is illegal, obscene, dangerous or offensive, he or she should immediately minimise the screen and quietly inform a staff member.
Right now, the Federal government is trialling an Internet filtering system which will supposedly block out illegal content. There are a number of technical problems with this but I won’t bore you with them right now…instead I will pose the question that struck me as I read through Campbell’s IT policy:
If the Federal Government’s Internet filters are so good, why haven’t they shared them with state and territory governments? If they had shared them with the states and territories, Campbell wouldn’t need sentences in their policies about accessing illegal or inappropriate content on the Internet.
Samuel
February 17th, 2009 at 02:19pm
Two of them are on my mind at the moment
Vodafone: They have conveniently broken the online “My Account” system, meaning that I am not able to alter my call diversion settings or view my credit balance online. At the moment I would like to divert all calls to Call Minder which will send me a text message with the phone number of anyone who tries to call me. I suppose that I could just turn off my phone, but I don’t really want to send everyone to voicemail.
Microsoft: I’m performing a clean installation of Windows Vista for a family member. The computer in question has a 3Com 3C905B network card. These cards were quite popular at one stage, and are still relatively common, however Microsoft have decided that they don’t need to include the driver for these network cards with Vista, and Vista also seems to be incapable of identifying the network card. Annoyingly, this meant that I had to boot to another Operating System in order to work out exactly what network card it is, then visit the 3Com website to download the drivers (first download on the linked page), copy them to a flash drive and then extract them on the computer in question.
After installing the drivers for this 3Com network card, I ran Windows Update, only to discover that a newer version of the driver is available from Windows Update. If Microsoft can go to the trouble of having a newer version of the driver on Windows Update than is available directly from 3Com, would it really have been so much trouble to use up a few of the bytes of the Vista DVD with the driver?
Oh, and the default volume setting of Creative sound drivers…yes, I want to be blasted out of the room by your maximum volume.
Samuel
December 8th, 2008 at 11:16pm
Last night when I went to open iTunes, I was greeted by a rather annoying error stating that iTunes could not be opened due to a “detected” problem with QuickTime. Apple recommend uninstalling QuickTime and then installing it again under these circumstances, but that sounds like a bit of a “we don’t know, but this might help” solution to me.
Considering that nothing had changed since I used iTunes about 24 hours before receiving the error, I figured that I would see if I could sort the problem out myself before resorting to a reinstallation. I remembered that a few hours before the error I started loading a large MP3 (Samuel’s Persiflage #8 to be precise) in Firefox, but cancelled it by closing the tab it was in when I realised that for one reason or another, Firefox was insisting on downloading the full file before letting the QuickTime plugin play it, which is a change from its previous behaviour of letting the QuickTime plugin play the file while it is downloading.
My thought was that, possibly, a QuickTime process was still active and was preventing iTunes from loading QuickTime properly. I couldn’t see any QuickTime processes in the Task Manager, so I tested the theory by launching QuickTime from the start menu…oddly this resulted in an installation wizard, which produced the following rather insightful message:
I somewhat nervously hit “OK” and watched the progress bar indicate that the setup routine was doing something, although I haven’t the faintest clue what it was doing as I wasn’t prompted with a Windows UAC “Are you sure that you want to grant this program permission to do stuff?” message, which indicates that no changes were made in the Windows or Program Files directories.
Once Setup finished, QuickTime loaded, and iTunes was able to work. It’s beyond me what that was all about, but at least I didn’t have to waste time going through Apple’s website to find the somewhat hidden standalone QuickTime installer.
Samuel
December 5th, 2008 at 09:56am
The more observant amongst you will have probably noticed that every time I post a poll, a stray “n” appears just above it. Annoyingly, it’s not possible for me to remove this without manually editing the database which runs this site.
As it turns out, it’s a bug (as I suspected) in the Democracy plugin which runs the polls. I just didn’t connect the dots between that and me upgrading this blog to WordPress version 2.5.x a while back.
In lieu of a patch from the developer, it looks like the fix is fairly straight-forward. I’ll try it out at some stage in the coming days and see how it goes.
Samuel
December 2nd, 2008 at 02:24pm
According to Firefox’s Australian dictionary, “unticking” is a misspelling which should be corrected to “anticking”, whilst “untciking” is “unthinking”.
It might have a valid point.
Samuel
November 24th, 2008 at 03:36pm
Because I just won’t get to them otherwise…
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees solves the problem of incompetent ministers. Just sack them all and have a one man show.
Gmail Chat was always an effort to save the Google Talk client, and now finally the two can be considered equal: Gmail Chat has audio and video capabilities.
Got a spare $USD130 billion to give away each year? Good, because Barack Obama’s health plans could cost that much. And to think that political parties in this country bother to cost their promises before the election.
Using an “unsupported web browser” (or even an ever-so-slightly customised version of a supported web browser)? If so, Microsoft have introduced random bugs in to Hotmail for your convenience. That said, if you use Hotmail, you kind of deserve what you get.
Got a problem and the media won’t ignore it, but don’t feel like launching another inquiry? Kevin Rudd has the answer…declare war on it!
Samuel
November 14th, 2008 at 02:50am
Today: The Great Firewall of China comes to Australia
Tomorrow: Australia follows China’s lead and declares Internet Addiction a disorder
The next day: Kevin Rudd translates those “The Internets can be of harmful to healths” stickers from Mandarin to English…unfortunately needing to use the Google Translator because he doesn’t actually speak Mandarin.
Sometime next week: Internet access is outlawed simultaneously in Australia and China due to the “potential harmful effects of greenhouse gases emitted by routers and data centres”.
The next day: Cigarettes and alcohol are banned as well, the double standard was just too big too ignore.
It’s not entirely inconceivable is it? And surely both bans would work just as well as each other. We know that prohibition is always a wonderful success. I wonder what happened to the Internet being a crucial part of our economy? Wasn’t that one of Kevin Rudd’s pre-election mantras?
Samuel
November 12th, 2008 at 08:03am
Apparently the Internet contains pornography…
Teenagers and young children searching and downloading the latest tunes over the Internet are being exposed to pornographic images and websites.
The popular Internet tool LimeWire is at the centre of the pornography scare.
Searching for Britney Spears and even children shows The Wiggles and HI-5 return explicit images, and links to child porn websites.
That’s just a tad too selective…in truth, searching for anything on LimeWire is likely to produce results which aren’t what you’re searching for, and if you’re lucky you might find what you’re looking for as well.
But who came up with this astonishing revelation? The next paragraph of the article should clarify that:
Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, commander of the child protection and sex crimes squad, says police are seriously concerned about file-sharing programs like LimeWire and their capacity to expose children to inappropriate material.
“Police have previously received reports and conducted investigations into the receipt of this kind of material,” he told News Ltd.
Well, good luck Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, organisations with much more money to play with than you will ever see (the RIAA for one) have been doing their best to get rid of file sharing for many years.
For better or worse, where there is file sharing, there will be unsavoury content, this has been known for a very long time, so why it has managed to make the news today is beyond me. Surely Kevin Rudd has said something on his latest overseas trip…even if he was just ordering dinner, it would be more newsworthy than this tripe.
Update: news.com.au are claiming to have an exclusive on this story, and their article even links to the Limewire website. Does this mean that the folks at news.com.au want people to download Limewire and search for The Wiggles and HI-5, and then follow the yellow brick road to the content that the article whinges about?
While we’re at it, would somebody like to wake a sub-editor?
In April, ?? men were sentenced to jail in Queensland and the Northern Territory for also accessing child porn via LimeWire.
End Update
Samuel
August 20th, 2008 at 06:49am
As you would probably be aware by now, Google Street View was launched in Australia this morning, with pictures of many places across the nation now available as part of Google Maps.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, basically Google sent cars with cameras mounted on them around a large number of streets and how now made the pictures available in conjunction with their place on the map. It’s an interesting concept and good for a quick bit of research if you ever need to work out exactly what a place looks like before you get there…or maybe want to know what some of the nearby landmarks are.
I had a little play with it this morning and noticed, amongst other things:
I did briefly consider the possibility that Google’s project may nullify my plan for a photographic series after I finish the “Canberra’s Dams” series, where I was going to pick a random street in Canberra each week and take photos of it…but then I noticed that Google’s photos don’t come with a date attached, whereas mine would. Mine would also last longer than “until we decide to drive around again”, which means mine would have some lasting historical value. I think I’ll go ahead with my series anyway.
Samuel
August 5th, 2008 at 04:35pm
I don’t know if any of you remember PodZinger as it came and went from the public spotlight very very quickly a few years ago, but basically it was a semi-promising new search engine which aimed to automatically index and transcribe podcasts. If it worked, it would have been a good way to find information in what is otherwise an awful medium to search.
But of course, it was doomed from the beginning as anybody who has ever used voice recognition software would have known. To get a computer to recognise a voice with any amount of accuracy, you have to train it. Usually this involves two steps, the initial preset “read these sentences” training exercises where the computer gets to hear you say things that is asks you to say, and then the ongoing “no, I said “cat” not “hat”, the hat is not in the hat, the cat is in the hat…no, the cat is not in the cat either” intermittent corrections which also help the computer to learn how to understand your voice.
The reason we need to teach the computer how to do recognise an individual’s voice is that everyone has a slightly different voice and a slightly different speech pattern…and if humans who are predisposed to understanding the speech of other humans have difficulty understanding people with accents, what hope does an untrained computer have?
As far as I can tell, PodZinger had no form of quality control…the robot listened to the audio, produced a mangled transcript of it, and nobody bothered to check the accuracy of it. A system where corrections could be submitted by listeners could have worked better, but I don’t think PodZinger were ever interested in having masses of voice samples floating around in their system, nor do I think that having masses of voice samples from different people would have helped with individual transcriptions.
So, why am I babbling about an ultimately failed search engine of little-to-know consequence? Because they’re still around under a different name (EveryZing) doing much the same thing, albeit with expansions in to the more profitable and sane market of search engine optimisation, and expecting people to pay them for it. Maybe the transcription software is better today than it was in 2007, but I wouldn’t be willing to pay them in order to test the theory.
I noticed that they are still around on the weekend when I was wondering if they are still around and was shocked to find that they are. They also have all of their old archives…and if you search for my name, you can be informed about my Chinese communist leanings by their transcription robot.
It has transcribed the Feedback segment from Samuel’s Persiflage #13, specifically the section from 47 minutes and 58 seconds. According to their robot, in that segment I said:
can go to get sort of course if you concentrate back podcasted Samuel Gordon Stewart — Communists the email address or you can leave comments in the China nights or irritants Samuels who supplies were sought to
Maybe the robot’s ears are blocked, because when I listen to that segment, I hear:
feedback to get through and of course if you’ve got some feedback, podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com is the email address or you could uh leave the comments in the show notes or go to the samuel’s persiflage website and
That said, I have been (jokingly) accused of encoding secret messages in Samuel’s Persiflage…maybe they were on to something…I would have to be among the last people on Earth that anybody would consider as a possible communist, so I would have to be the perfect vessel for hiding and broadcasting such messages.
It leaves me pondering the question: “Why am I giving the conspiracy nuts something to work with?”
Samuel
June 30th, 2008 at 06:10am
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