Slashdot Mirror

There have been a couple of semi-ralted articles in the Sydney press in the past few days:

Consumers with mobiles can't hide: about the new services that 3G will bring - mainly push SMS advertising, walk past a department store and get an ad & discount voucher for that store (or it's rival).

Mobile network trap: about the IMEI database, called Find A Phone, now in service in Australia and it's ability to identify stolen mobile phones - even after they have had a change of SIM-card.

enjoy

The Sydney Morning Herald posted a very good story about Biodiesel last week.

...In a shed behind his Dural property he pours the waste oil into a drum before mixing it with 15 per cent alcohol and a dash of caustic soda. The concoction is left to stand overnight. The next day he has 20 litres of biodiesel ready to pour into the tank of his diesel van...

...He conceded his van smelt "like a Chinese kitchen" and that making fuel by the road sometimes attracted suspicion. "In Sydney the police think you are making a bomb."...

Erk, darned enter key. Anyway, there was a story from New Zealand flying around a while ago....here it is:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/09/pageone/pageone 1.html

which details someone catching two criminals on camera. Granted part of his solution failed as one of the thieves tripped over the phone cord, but it still got pictures of them, at least. The article doesn't say what software the guy used...it alludes to the fact that he wrote it himself, but papers tend to get things wrong. e-mail him and find out...

Cheers,
Reid

I don't recall if this has already been slashdotted, but this story is amusing along the webcam for security idea. It even contains pictures of the thieves (a bit grainy really har har har)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/09/pageone/pageone 1.html

I enjoy reading strange and interesting web sites -- I remember coming across a website a good while ago explaining how a person's house was broken into -- and their web cam grabbed pictures of the 2 robbers.

Try the Site that I saw this on (or if it is having trouble try bringing up the Google Cache)

There, a family had been robbed and decided to set up a web cam (with a motion detector) and caught 2 thieves the next time they tried to break into the house... the thieves didnt take the computer but they sure did like that cellphone they grabbed... sheesh... (but then I suppose walking down the street with a computer and monitor would look strange in SOME neighborhoods).
-------------

smh.com.au article
this was a while back... a laugh in oz.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried a vaguely similar story just today, however with an entirely different outcome.
"Extracts from the 15-year-old's diary, detailing massacre plans for Cecil Hills High School, were read to NSW Parliament by Mr Aquilina on April 10 and reporters later wrongly told there was a gun registered to his house."
"Mr Aquilina also announced his press secretary Patrick Low had taken responsibility for the debacle and had resigned."
-- kai

Verbing Weirds Language.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried a vaguely similar story just today, however with an entirely different outcome.
"Extracts from the 15-year-old's diary, detailing massacre plans for Cecil Hills High School, were read to NSW Parliament by Mr Aquilina on April 10 and reporters later wrongly told there was a gun registered to his house."
"Mr Aquilina also announced his press secretary Patrick Low had taken responsibility for the debacle and had resigned."
-- kai

Verbing Weirds Language.

Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.

Department of Energy is responsible for a massive failure to serve the public interest. Rather than budget the funds needed to explore this new, emerging science, our top national energy science officials have adopted what might be called, at best, a policy of benign neglect. At worst, it's a policy of fraud and deceit.

How could this be happening?

The stakes in the debate about cold fusion are enormous. In this case, an unholy alliance seems to have come together. The principle players are the fossil fuel industry, which has no interest in seeing itself eclipsed by a new, non-polluting source of energy, and the mainstream physics community, which wants to protect, seemingly at all costs, the federal funding it relies on to continue its massively expensive hot fusion experiments.

You need the secret 11 herbs and spices for the kernel package.

One interesting point is that the problems caused by the cut cable were nothing compared to the problems Telstra had on the night due to other factors. As this outage notice states, they had routing loops form within their network when the cable went down.

Also, an electricity substation supplying power to the main Telstra internet POP in Sydney exploded around the same time, cutting power to all of their routers. Power wasn't restored until the following morning.

More here, here and here (check the graphs).

The Sydney Morning Herald's take on the article.

In Sydney, there are three major newspapers (and their Sunday offsprings) - the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and The Australian.
I read the SMH daily (which would have to be the biggest one in Sydney), and all of the usual columnists publish their email addresses at the end of their columns... I think this makes the gap between journalists and the public much narrower, and although I'm sure they receive plenty of really crap email every day, it means that they are more approachable.
Maybe the NY Times has a different strategy behind their newsplan - to keep that gap and be like an "ultimate news source" or something. *shrug* I think that they're just behind the times :-)

what am i basing the IOC being out of the loop? you remeber Samaranch's explanation about his financial deal ings....

the IOC is a corrupt. he's old school. he's what's wrong with business today - old men with money living lavishly off the profits of the companies that they run.

as for why is the internet just so important:

i work alot. i get a lot of content at work. i buy stuff from work. i have both my work/personal life at work. the Olympics is financially motivated, just like baseball, football, and any other sport. so if king samarach denies the web from providing content - the he's denying profits. and if you think that the little old king isn't concerned about profits, go re-read the orginal story. that's billions with a capital B.

besides the $$? because i keep up with professional cycling. i actually give a shit. and the Olympics are huge for cycling. next to the Tour de France they may be 2nd for eyeballs. and for me, i want to be able to get that information at work. isn't a difficult concept. as a business, you put the content where people will use it. the all or nothing ideal of tv vs. the web is ignorant. and my guess is that Samaranch doesn't get it. i would venture that he sees it as dilution. in fact, it may be concetration. but the "dance with the date who brung ya" attitude is what makes this all possible. Samaranch is beholden to the medium that my parents are more in touch with than i am.

Michael Moore (of Roger & Me and The Awful Truth fame) has written a letter to the non-voting majority suggesting they join him in voting for Nader.

We could certainly do a lot worse than put a consumer watchdog in the White House. Ralph Nader has written in his weekly column that Congress and the President should disclose their records on the Internet. If he were elected, I'd love to see him follow through on that and run a wired administration.

I think Jesse Ventura showed that the non-voters can get off their couches and vote against the corporate-friendly centrists, if a third party candidate is famous and charismatic enough. Ralph Nader is famous, but he's not exactly mediagenic. The media that lavished so much attention on the Republican's sideshow didn't paid little notice when Nader appeared across town from the convention, which he denounced as a corporate-paid "political orgy".

Even if he is dry as dust, four years of Nader vs. Congress could be entertaining.

http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml
reject
can you say RIAA challenges federal disabilities act??????

This appears to be related to proposed legislation that would ban the use of data channels (datacasting) in digital television broadcast transmissions for streaming audio/video. The goal of the legislation is to prevent people from competing with the Australian television networks by stuffing video programming in a datacasting stream. See this article for a fuller description of the controversy.

Now I +really+ wish /. had an edit post option!

Try here for a newspaper article, probably the one I remembered reading, or here for a short paper with a few references that looks to have been written from that article. Gotta lova plagia^H^H research!

And speaking of bounty hunters, Boba Fett fans will be happy to learn that the ruthless bounty hunter and Han Solo nemesis will be making an appearance in Episode II. How much of an appearance is debatable, though, since Lucas is mum on the storyline as usual.

I bet you any money you like Boba Fett turns out to be a woman. I wouldn't put it past George Lucas to pull the "ruthless bounty hunter in a helmet turns out to be an attractive woman" trick twice.

1. Evangelists within the organization Nothing that a few good (depending on your definition of good) laws can't solve. Perhaps one day they'll also legislate against stupidity (IMHO the only serious long-term growth industry apart from tax evasion) but until then, maybe you can start up your own Church of the Anti-FUD :-). LL

First, Read this:
http://www.smh.com.au/ne ws/0004/03/features/features2.html

So, who are you? What is your background?

Who lives on the island?

Why would I host on a man-made island I could crash a plane into?


-Davidu

Some History:In the late sixties Roy Bates and his family occupied one of the forts and declared himself a soverign nation. This was upheld in British Court and the long bizarre history began. The tiny nation was attacked and captured by a German businessman and friends for several weeks until Roy could put a crew together to retake it by rappeling from helicopters. (There were no known fatalities from these actions.) Here are some fun links to learn more:

• The New York Times Article that started it all.
• What appears to be the official webisite:http://www.sealandgov.com/index.html
• The HavenCo homepage: http://www.havenco.com/
• A very nice article about the off-shore radio stations in England during the 1960's. http://fre\espace.virg in.net/line.design/forts/radioforts.htm. This includes a nice picture of the fort being installed: http://freespace.virgin .net/line.design/forts/sea_forts.htm.
• Some publicity shots of Sealand from their old (archived) website. http://www.fruitsofthese a.demon.co.uk/sealand/gallery.html.
• A Guardian Article about Sealand.
• A Sunday Telegraph Article.
• Dorothy Lerda at The National Geographic answers a question about Sealand. (Notice that she has what is likely to be the web address of the imposters responsible for selling passports.)
• A brief history of the forts with pictures and diagrams.

I wonder which aggressive nation will be the first to attempt to take them over.

The 2nd article claims a group of germans tried (actually took the island, and then were later forced off it by Prince Roy, and some of his (I assume army) friends). More details in the article.

One could also assume the UK made an effort (I assume a rather half hearted, or accidental one) in 1968 as "two Trinity House officials complained that they had come under fire when approaching Roughs Tower." That was probbably about as much as the USA used as an excuse to get into Vietnam (two rifle holes in a Battleship -- if I remember correctly).

The first incident is more intresting as a Germen offical of some sort negoiated with Sealand to get one of their citizens back. Or maybe the second one was, as that is the one the Judge dismissed after accepting the claim that Sealand is not part of the UK.

This article in the fluffy technology section of the Sydney Morning Herald discusses Intel's future in moving away from the Wintel alliance.

They say: Intel's first foray into box-building is something totally out of the box - a low-cost Internet access device ... The prototype, codenamed EON ("edge of network" device), runs the free Linux operating system and the Web browser Mozilla, which in turn is based on Netscape's Navigator rather than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
and illustrate it with a piccie of said device showing a slashdot page.

Sadly the web version of the article is missing the illustration.

Hacker 18, cracks details of Bill Gates's credit card

At least, AOL Australia is. See this news report from the Sydney Morning Herald. Not promising.

In light of Hawking's interview recently, what do you think about mankind breaking the speed of light barrier? I know that current scientific theory (ala e=mc^2) states that it is impossible, but do you think that technology will be developed to circumvent this theory? Or at least create other means of moving, like wormholes or the like?

The doomsday millennium; Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales.

What do you think of the Australian legislation? I'm Australian, and I was amazed that there was almot no public debate at all. Despite the EFA's efforts, stories relating to the bill were stuck in the middle of computer sections of the paper. I first heard about this on slahsdot, rather than through local papers.

Article such as the one about the police commissioner's 10 yar old daughter recieving pornographic spam (which I believe isn't covered by the new bill anyway) got page 3 treatment on the evils of the internet:

Mr Ryan said: "I thought it was disgraceful people could send unsolicited mail of that type to young children and I think it is a very very prevalent thing that's occurring."

Is it censorship to stop this sort of thing from occuring?

As well, there were lots of political aspects in this legislation, but to what extent do you think that politicians and the general public knows, or even cares, about both the issues as a whole, and specifically the technical problems with censoring the internet? I know that a quick survey of some (non CS) friends of mine showed that only about half had heard of the legislation in the first place, and most of the rest coulnd't see any technical problems in doing it.

... take a look at this article. This highlights the contrast between the traditional bread earners and the so called new IT revolution. One needs to question what is wealth creation or even the definition of profit. The capitalisation of a company is nothing more than the expected discounted income stream plus expected growth. Hence if a company is valued at say $1 billion, shareholders expect a company to earn at least that much in profits (or revenues in the case of .com fluff) over a period when it is deemed to have a competitive edge. For some strange reason the assumption is that share price is roughly analogous to dominance in market share (ie the number of customers you "own") which seems a little presumptious considering that with the reduction in transaction costs, there may be multiple paths/sources to obtaining the same good or service. Thus as soon as a new competitor arrives, the share price drops to indicate a dilution of the market. Why would an IT cartel have such a high "value" compared to a farm which produces so called essentials. Basically it relates to the laws of supply and demand and people mistaking a trajectory which they assume continues forever. Domain name registrations will slow down once every business and person has an account (or we run out of recognisable letters). Once the marginal costs reduce down to the actual operating costs of renewing a site, then you will see some serious cash-flow hiccups along with brutal competition to keep others from poaching your customers. and then maybe it might be smart switching your vaporcash into a real farm. IT companies only have growth potential so long as their products result in improved productivity and capabilities. Once the stress and pain becomes too much (as in the case of a not-so-popular OS) then people start resisting. The real competition to software is not other players but your historical software and customer habits. People tend to underestimate the risk premiums in share prices and until a crash or two happens to kill off the ignorant, rationality won't return to the share-market. Also, it would help if politicans kept their meddling hands out of the pot.

LL

is actually public opinion. Corporations find it very hard to sell things if they piss off (much less kill) their customers (though the tobacco companies has had a good run). Now everyone is entitled to social theorising but I think it is worthwhile injecting some cold hard reality into the talk. Large governments will always lord over corporations because the legal system is a codification of social conduct. I would argue that distortions are more likely to be created by the law of unintended consequences (e.g. the patent system) and that public corporations can only operate within the bounds of legal and thus social acceptability (though the law may lag the technology). Once someone screws up in a major way, then legislation will be passed so quick that you head will spin. Good example is the shooting in Australia a few years ago which galvanised the public (and thus the government) to ban automatic rifles, not to mention the expropriation of the guy's estate to reimburse the victims (a rather dubious precedent no matter how well-meaning). Similiarly with all the gee-whiz biotech advances that pundits are speculating on. It may well be that there is no market for gene-therapy once the risks are assessed. How many other markets have failed to eventuate despite the posturing of the big players (Farenhit, NetPC, etc)?

As for the money aspect, you have to spend money to get it back in the future. People forget that the costs are ultimately passed onto the consumer so all the big sums of money being thrown at private research will eventually end up in your medical bill for products/services at prices that the market will bear (otherwise it will just be droped as unprofitable). This you can thank the good old FDA for controlling the clinical tests and thus creating inelastic markets. On the other hand, the public system might be inefficient at research but at least it is more likely to address real social concerns rather than fee-paying cosmetic augmentation stuff.

People are always concerned about technology, you go back 10, 20, 50, 100 years and you'd find similar stories about cars, movie projectors, electricity, whats-not. In another 100 years it might be nanotech and mini-blackholes. The point about an open society is that any discoveries can be discussed and feedback applied to moderate excesses. Here one must be careful of all the things you read as opinions are not facts (e.g. the misinformation about Serb concentration camps). The voice of reason and some critical thinking will go a long way towards reducing the fears people have about biotech. At this state biocomputing is so early that it's like we haven't invented the equivalent of the transitor yet, much less understand the many different intracellular processes in great detail. However, if and when innovative applications appear, some simple moral questions to ask are would you be able to sell the concept to your mother? If the development background was splashed on the national front page, would people still be interested (one reason why artifical substitutes have been found to replace animal testing)? And most importantly, could you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning if you were the inventor? People are not stupid and trying to force your beliefs or dogma onto others is a sure way to create enemies and annoy friends.

LL

• • technical
    bandwidth - because of the lack of competition, Telstra has effectivly hindered any growth in high bandwidth access to the backbone. What access exists is too expensive, is inflexible. Telstra goes out of it's way to extract $ (and hugh profits) but any implementations of broadband is laughable.
    
    IT skills - it skills levels are good to very good, but there is a severe shortage coupled with a brain drain of top technical staff.
    
  
  
  • human rights
    privacy laws - lack of, hence allowing business, government and external bodies to push the limits of basic privacy and rights, that other countries take for granted.
    
    government censorship - federal government trying to force internet censorship that is technically very difficult even of it forces local ISP's for a lot of extra expenses.
    
    governent cracking - ASIO given rights to crack domestic computer systems with permission from the crown, no legal process can be involved.
    
    business - weak privacy laws allowing business (PBL) to attempt to capture, store and profile the entire country.
    
    
  
  
  • business
    business conservatism - banks, big business, the engines of change for the country are reluctant to go boots and all>.
    
    e-business's - toe-dipping, lack of funds, lack of business exploitation skills (not techincal skills) is holding back the growth of e-commerce.
    
    venture capital - venture capital is looking up. More vc's are looking at funding start-ups.
    
    
  
  
  • education -
    funding - funding to education is being cut (Monash University), privatisation and business driven courses is the word.
    
    course access - hard core science (and other non essential academic cources) are being replaced with vocational courses.
    
    
  
  

• • technical
    bandwidth - because of the lack of competition, Telstra has effectivly hindered any growth in high bandwidth access to the backbone. What access exists is too expensive, is inflexible. Telstra goes out of it's way to extract $ (and hugh profits) but any implementations of broadband is laughable.
    
    IT skills - it skills levels are good to very good, but there is a severe shortage coupled with a brain drain of top technical staff.
    
  
  
  • human rights
    privacy laws - lack of, hence allowing business, government and external bodies to push the limits of basic privacy and rights, that other countries take for granted.
    
    government censorship - federal government trying to force internet censorship that is technically very difficult even of it forces local ISP's for a lot of extra expenses.
    
    governent cracking - ASIO given rights to crack domestic computer systems with permission from the crown, no legal process can be involved.
    
    business - weak privacy laws allowing business (PBL) to attempt to capture, store and profile the entire country.
    
    
  
  
  • business
    business conservatism - banks, big business, the engines of change for the country are reluctant to go boots and all>.
    
    e-business's - toe-dipping, lack of funds, lack of business exploitation skills (not techincal skills) is holding back the growth of e-commerce.
    
    venture capital - venture capital is looking up. More vc's are looking at funding start-ups.
    
    
  
  
  • education -
    funding - funding to education is being cut (Monash University), privatisation and business driven courses is the word.
    
    course access - hard core science (and other non essential academic cources) are being replaced with vocational courses.
    
    
  
  

The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail.

I have heard of at least one person (in Australia, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 section about 2 years ago - I'd chase it up but their site seems to be having difficulties...) invoicing senders of postal junk mail for $70.00 for 'processing' - he got 2/3 to pay up. Don't know if he got taken off the mailing lists though :)

More information available from ;

http://wp.bpc-users.org
http://24.192.20.40/survey.htm
http://bpa.boxen.dhs.org/
http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?id=632
http://www.it.fai rfax.com.au/breaking/19991201/A10364-1999Dec1.html
http://www.newswire.com.au/9912/bighike.h tm
http://www.smh.com.au/news/991 2/02/bizcom/bizcom2.html

• The Sydney Morning Herald.
  
• The Daily Telegraph
  
• The Courier Mail.
  
• The Canberra Times.
  

Some posters have already noted the trend for computing magazines to be dumbed-down. This makes sense for various reasons. The first is that the market for non-technical computing magazines is far larger than the technical market simply because there are less people knowing more stuff :) And of course the market is smaller than you might expect because of online content.

So what you might call good computing magazines will be limited in number. Anyone wanting up-to-the-minute stuff gets on on the Web. D'uh.

But even if "News for Nerds" is suited to an online format, not everything is.

These are the magazines that might/do work (not for me, I'm cheap, I read them in the library!!):
1. Games (cover CDs alone will keep some afloat).
2. Introduction to Computer type magazines - the "really really new" market isn't going away. The Sydney Morning Herald's Icon section is still running "What is e-mail?" sections, as is internet.au.
3. Computer consumer magazines. OK, the market might be fading a bit thanks to online material, but in the same way some (lots of?) people read catalogues in their mailbox, some people want to look at ads for computers. And not all of them are going to go and visit a separate URL for each manufacturer. Especially if they're new to the market or buy computing equipment very seldom.

There are going to be computing magazines, just as there are for any other lesuire activity, even those centered around another medium - eg TV.

Fairfax probably shouldn't have FunkyCaps, because it's a family name. For whose who care, they are the publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne) and the Australian Financial Review.