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Napster and Kazaa with websites is tantamount to a drug dealer on the corner with a sign and them turning a profit is as disgusting as it gets. I've bootleged and pirated quite a few things but I nor anyone else should be making money off of that.

Sites like Whirlpool http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ indicate that the BitTorrent site originated from a user forum which posted the tracker, and the 'specialized' Archie's Web site was a DC hub IP filtered to Swiftel's addresses by it's originator, most likely a client. The MIPI is taking the filtering as evidence it's Swiftel's doing, which is based on some specious logic, particularly when they announced it before they had even raided the place and ascertained exactly what was taking place.

There's also a discussion on Whirlpool's and Swiftel/People Telcom's forums.

There's also a discussion on Whirlpool's and Swiftel/People Telcom's forums.

There's also a discussion on Whirlpool's and Swiftel/People Telcom's forums.

OzForces offer 64K/64K ISDN for $14.99/mo. Of course, this assumes you are in Australia. If you are in one of the 24 other countries which use dollars, perhaps you should be a bit more specific?

Unless you have a business account (which I need solely for the fixed IP address) Then you pay $105 p/m for 512/128 and a 2gb/month cap. I've watched the iiNet home plans soaring over the past 2 years, but have the business plans improved? Not really... The plan I'm on has been replaced with a $149/m 40gb/m 512/128 one. For me to upgrade to a faster speed, I'm looking at $199 per month. Nuts to that.

And because you pay that amount of money for that 512/128 connection, they'll keep on charging you for it for as long as possible - My local ISP charges $79.95 for a similar plan (512/128, static IP, unlimited dowload).

I pay AU$160.00 per month for an Unlimited 512/512 connection with a static IP address. And yes, I've tested it's "unlimited" status. >:)

That's at one ISP, and if you look at the Broadband Choice site on Whirlpool, you'll find several ISP's who offer similar plans.

Stop paying too much and help the rest of us DSL customers in Australia push the prices down.

Actually its not so lucky.

99.9% of australian broadband adsl servers provide download caps. Normally this is between 5gig to 15/20gig and is split into peak/off peak hours. Once that is passed there will be an extra charge or the service will be slowed down to 32-64kb/s depending on the provider.

Also on the story in order to get that you need to bundle with their phone service too ($29.95 per month AU), and you need to be on their DSLAM. Otherwise you are limited to 1.5Mb.

Alot of users are complaining about the bundling in this forum post, as if you dont bundle you will get a higher cost along with half the download quota.

Whirlpool has a current article on that too..
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1432

A trial was recently completed in Tasmania (Australia):
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1402

One easy way to set that up is to use subdomains that don't even resolve after a certain point. So you might have me@2004.example.com good for only three more weeks, or me@amazon.example.com good for as long as Amazon (or your "healthy" girlfriend) doesn't sell you out. You can get tricky, of course, and use subdomains that are not so easily subject to a dictionary attack or guessing.

This is exactly the same solution as I use, and I've found it very effective. I've written some stuff about it here - Mitigating spam.

Did we come up with it independently ? The first "thought" that triggered me thinking about it was when I moved house, and wanted to make sure that emails to my domain, while unavailable, were bounced immediately, rather than having the sending SMTP server keep attempting for up to 5 days (or what ever it was configured to be). My solution was to set the MX record for my domain to point to an A record that resolved to 127.0.0.1. That lead to the idea of creating "sacrificial subdomains", and then abandoning when I get too much spam by changing the MX record value.

Give the government full control over my internet access?

Two words come to mind buddy first one starts with an F and the second starts with a T.


They have full control over the road to your front door, don't they? At any rate, they can tap your telephone when they want, and subphoena your ISP too, for that matter.

I am not saying they should neccesarily be your ISP - that could still be in the hands of private companies.

Eg. In Australia, Telstra owns the phone network - the physical lines etc. Telstra is also the largest Broadband provider. There are many other broadband providers who compete with Telstra, but they have to buy their last mole connection from Telstra.

The problem is, Telstra used to be government owned, but is now half privatised. Because Telstra are also competing in the broadbnand market, and are being forced to allow other ISPs to use their network, they still have a tendancy to screw over the other ISPs where possible. (See this site for many discussions)

My argument is that the actual physical network - particularly the last mile, should be in public hands, so all the private ISPs can compete fairly.

The usual fastest australian ADSL plans are 1500x256 check out http://www.whirlpool.net.au/

stFuck the children.
So have the cops come around to seize your computer yet?

Hey, where's my fridge magnet? I thought Alston had quit, why do we have to have more internet blocking blah blah.

I mean seriously, if the set this thing up, how are we going to catch those those that are actually nonces (I've been watching the Bill)? And why should Christians decide what is and isn't appropriate for a country where less than half the population is christian. And in any case 39.2% are Catholic and 30.4% are Anglican (see nice graphs here). The churches are in Abbott's back pocket anyway.

Fundies like this dont really have much of a say in politics down here
Sure, they probably won't win a lot of seats, so it doesn't really matter. Unless there's a hung parliment (which let's face facts, it's so close it could be) then Family First could become a bit of a problem. Oh... they're only going for the senate... hmmm... they will get killed by the Democrats and Greens... I'm no longer worried... Aww... they've got a geek (sorta) running in Victoria. I might have to vote below the line...

Can't wait till the Jedi population increases (2001 0.37%). Then we can get goverment funded lightsaber grants.

Maybe you should all stop complaining about how you don't all have ten megabit connections?
Over here in Australia, we are almost all on 56k. I can count the number of people I know who have broadband on one hand.
In the USA, you recently got to 50% of households with broadband. Care to guess how many people in Australia have access to high-speed internet? One million as of June 2004. Out of more than 20 million. THAT'S FIVE PERCENT!!!

Your statistics are somewhat muddled. The recent news is that the number of broadband connections in Australia has reached one million. One million connections means a lot more than one million people. Most people in Australia DO have access to broadband, but you confuse that with actually taking it up.

Telstra claims that ADSL is available to 75% of the population, and the availability of cable in many Australian cities would increase broadband availability even further.

Most people I know have broadband. Anecdotes don't mean anything.

Just because some countries have faster internet, that doesn't mean you're falling behind.

Um, yeah, it does. Falling behind means you're not keeping pace with others.

I'd kill people to get a 512k ADSL line, but I'm just not able to. Be happy with what you already have.

Some people in remote areas don't even have 56k! Why aren't you happy with what you already have? Or at least, if it's so important to you, why don't you move to where it's available, or pressure Telstra to provide ADSL where you are?

What great business sense you have!

Good business sense is to occasionally question the "conventional". To question where all the money is going, when no benefit is gained.

It is good business sense to question why to continue to use and recommend Microsoft software, when better, more secure and cheaper solutions may exist.

I don't blame customers for make less informed decisions about what is good or bad software to use. I would ask that more informed people, probably such as yourself, be looking out for your customers best interests. Using web standards is in your customers best interests. A person with good business sense would make that advice available to their customers, as the customer benefits, and you, as the advice giver, are likely to get more business.

And by the way, you are one of those Gnu/Linux hippie types who gives Linux users a bad name because of your rhetoric about everything Microsoft.

Before calling me names, I'd suggest you find out more about my opinions.

Here is my opinion on the mandating of Open Source software in government - Deomcrats, Open Source and parliment.

Quoting myself,

Once the data format is open, then the government agencies can select the best implementation that suits their needs, based on budget, functionality, hardware capabilities etc, be it closed or open source.

I wouldn't encourage using MS software for web application development. That doesn't mean I'm against using it for any particular purpose. If it is the best, most cost effective solution, and the data formats are open, preventing vendor lock in, then I'd be happy to recommend it.

Hmmm... where are you?

Check around the ISP's, sounds like your pricing's stuck a few years behind. Might I suggest whirlpool , if you haven't already seen it? Anywhere that Tel$tra's got a DSLAM, you can also get any other ISP in australia that sells ADSL.

I'm in Mount Isa, and I get 512/128 from Internode at $59/mo. That's with 12GB download (capped at 40kb/s after that), a pile of quota-exempt mirrors (mmmm... gentoo rsync :-), a heap of free radio relays.. etc. If you don't like caps, you can get a "flat-rate" plan that does some prioritisation depending on your current download totals compared to everyone else currently using flatrate. But anyhoo, that's enough Internode fanboyism from me :-)

Not perfect, then again, spam prevention methods never are.

What I do

Expensive?

In Australia, sending traffic to the U.S is cheaper than sending traffic accross the road to Telstra, Optus, MCI or AAPT where you get billed per the MB since they refuse to peer with anyone else.

Practically every leecher in Australia has an ISP who doesn't charge traffic to ISPs who peer in IX'es in the same state. (i.e PIPE Networks IX and WAIX)

Just ask SprintLink.

And for people who don't know what low end broadband is priced like here, the cheapest are around $30 AUD for a 256/64 ADSL connection shaped (down to 28.8k or something around that) after 200-300MB. Some ISP's used to bill ~15c per MB, after that though, and customers got pissed.
Value varies from ISP to ISP though. Some ISP's offer shaped after limit or prioritised bandwidth (unlimited) plans, some offer free peering exchange traffic in the same state* and some just offer you a plain net connection. Have a look at Broadband Choice. Before anyone wonders, 1500/256k is the ADSL limitation here, except where ISP's have installed their own DSLAM's.

* If anyone is wondering, some ISP's promote this since the big 4 (Telstra, Optus, MCI, AAPT/TelecomNZ) here refuse to peer with smaller ISP's (they charge for transfers). SprintLink actually AS Path Stuffed traffic to the US and back in order to avoid paying Telstra. This means avoid the AARNet mirror and others (The OptusNet SF.net mirror and PlanetMirror) if you happen to be in Queensland and NSW and if your ISP doesn't happen to be a reseller of AAPT's DSL wholesale or someone else with generous arrangements with the group of four. (Which happens to be... nobody)

And for people who don't know what low end broadband is priced like here, the cheapest are around $30 AUD for a 256/64 ADSL connection shaped (down to 28.8k or something around that) after 200-300MB. Some ISP's used to bill ~15c per MB, after that though, and customers got pissed.
Value varies from ISP to ISP though. Some ISP's offer shaped after limit or prioritised bandwidth (unlimited) plans, some offer free peering exchange traffic in the same state* and some just offer you a plain net connection. Have a look at Broadband Choice. Before anyone wonders, 1500/256k is the ADSL limitation here, except where ISP's have installed their own DSLAM's.

* If anyone is wondering, some ISP's promote this since the big 4 (Telstra, Optus, MCI, AAPT/TelecomNZ) here refuse to peer with smaller ISP's (they charge for transfers). SprintLink actually AS Path Stuffed traffic to the US and back in order to avoid paying Telstra. This means avoid the AARNet mirror and others (The OptusNet SF.net mirror and PlanetMirror) if you happen to be in Queensland and NSW and if your ISP doesn't happen to be a reseller of AAPT's DSL wholesale or someone else with generous arrangements with the group of four. (Which happens to be... nobody)

This is quite common in Australia. Basically a pair gain allows one copper pair to multiplex multiple conversations (commonly two, but it may be more) allowing more phones to be connected without having to drag more copper through the conduits to peoples houses. A rim is a different device, basically a miniature exchange that connects via fibre optic cable to the main exchange building to avoid having to drag each individual copper pair all the way back.
Being on either device basically guarentees that you will be unable to get ADSL, although Telstra the company that owns the phone lines will now attempt to transpose over to plain copper if they are cajoled enough.
For more information on the Australian broadband experience have a look at whirlpool.

The forums on Australian broadband site Whirlpool show a good example of this. There's a sidebar you can open for watching the forums easily, but is not supported on IE. It's designed for Mozilla, but also works in Opera. And you gotta love the error message you get when you try to open it in IE...

Note: this doesn't break the site for IE users, but just denies them one piece of extra functionality

The forums on Australian broadband site Whirlpool show a good example of this. There's a sidebar you can open for watching the forums easily, but is not supported on IE. It's designed for Mozilla, but also works in Opera. And you gotta love the error message you get when you try to open it in IE...

Note: this doesn't break the site for IE users, but just denies them one piece of extra functionality

Duane Maxwell, the Lsongs author, is a dickhead (read the whole thread to see why).

That's not quite true. Nvidia users benefit by being able to use their video hardware fully under Linux. That's not something to sneeze at. Most users don't care if the driver is closed-source, as long as it's still free.

And that is sad. Although technically, due to the GPL, they aren't stealing, they have the same mindset a thief does - take something of value, and provide nothing in return.

Nvidia and ATi (to a lesser extent, they have released some programming info for their older cards), have a similar mind set. They take advantage of the market that Linux has created, yet also don't provide anything in return to the community that created that market - the open source community broadly, and specifically the Linux / XFree86 (and X.Win) communities.

I'm no kernel hacker, yet I return the value I've received from open source software, such as Linux, by regularly providing help in the Linux/BSD forum at Whirlpool. I realise I don't have to, however that is how I "maintain" my membership of the open source community.

I don't really care too much for the issues ATi or NVidia users have with the corresponding binary drivers. Those problems can always be traced back to the closed nature of the proprietory drivers. I prefer to spend my money with vendors of hardware who provide open programming specificiations. Even better if they sponsor open source driver development. I will reward them financially for understanding, and participating reciprically in the open source community.

I'm sure you can guess, NVidia will never see a dollar of mine. ATi maybe, although it will be for "old", "cheap" hardware (ie. the 9200 series, for which they openned the programming specs) that they make very little profit on.

I'm trying to keep a list of all the sites pulling pranks for 2004. Visit the site to see the up to the minute list and to submit new ones.

Current list:

www.urgo.org
mrtwig.net
southparkx.net
www.suprnova.org
www.cowsponge.com
Google
Slashdot
fark.com
www.thinkgeek.com
www.pimpworks.org
www.whirlpool.net.au
planetnintendo.com
Google Job
evercrest.com
www.heise.de (not sure if its a joke.. german)
www.homestarrunner.com
Weekly World News

As you can see, Telstra recently dropped its retail pricing rates below its wholesale pricing levels. This caused a major ruckus in the telecommunications industry, and a competition notice from the ACCC. As far as I can tell, Telstra does the bare minimum it can to keep the ACCC off its back, whilst slugging Australian users as much as it can get away with.

Case in point: one big problem with Bigpond (aka Bigpong in some circles), and the reason I would never take up an account with them, is that you are charged for both download AND upload traffic. This has resulted in more than a few stories of thousand dollar plus (including at least one in the multiples of thousand dollars) bills in a month from P2P traffic (amongst other things).

Telstra. "This is your monopoly calling." *spit*

Michael Malone from iinet has posted on the whirlpool forums saying that iinet was one of the four ISPs raided and that no subscriber information was asked for. What were they after then? A rumour I read is that some RIAA infringement notices were returned with a kind 'go to hell' and the raids are in response to this.

I know we give the Americans here on /. a hard time about their draconian laws and the RIAA acting like thugs. I have to say that I'm sad to see this sort of thing going on in my own country.

For complete Australian pricing see Broadband Choice.

Check out http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ for Australian broadband news and prices;
"Whirlpool is a non-commercial, non-profit, independent community web site devoted to keeping the Australian public informed on the state of broadband internet access in our country."

You will be able to find all Australian broadband prices there for comparison. Currently 1AUD ~= 0.777USD
--

In Australia, it's typically around AUD$50-60 per month (USD$39-46) for 128k ADSL, often with hard download caps of around 1 - 5 gig depending on provider. Lately the ADSL prices and conditions have been improving considerably with lots of new players in the market, but who knows how long they'll last. Some are even offering 'unlimited' downloads, where of course 'unlimited' doesn't necessarily mean unlimited, but means soft caps - bandwidth is throttled back to dial up speeds after a certain download volume.

Unfortunately service is not available everywhere, with ADSL not available in many places or cable not available in many. Often the only choice for many users is one provider, Telstra, who's prices and service are far from competitive. They charge AUD$111/month for 512k ADSL capped at 3G, with any data over this limit costing AUD$139 per GB (yes really, $139). Or if you are a low volume user you could go for their AUD$50/month plan and pay an extra AUD$199 (~USD$155) per gig, right from the first byte. Still think you're getting screwed in Canada?

There is heaps of information about the Australian broadband scene at Whirlpool.

aha!
but read this for a miracle that has happened in the last week or so! I nearly choked on my coffee when i first read this! Broadband has been given hope in oz!
btw be sure to read the other stories on that website as another provider has started to act accordingly!

aha!
but read this for a miracle that has happened in the last week or so! I nearly choked on my coffee when i first read this! Broadband has been given hope in oz!
btw be sure to read the other stories on that website as another provider has started to act accordingly!

I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.

Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!

I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.

This is crap. Poor journalism too.

IANAL, but it's my understanding that the Communications and Privacy acts make it illegal for telco's and ISP's to snoop on customer activity (wiretapping). As such, they are not responsible for what their users do. They are also not entitled to reveal the details of users who are up to illegal activity unless compelled to by a court or the police.

A while ago there was a thread in the Internode forum on Whirlpool about this, where one of Internode's representatives explained it all (well, what their lawyers told them)

Here is a synopsis of the plans where I live. For 512/128 unlimited ADSL, it's about US$70 per month, if you shop around and find a good value ISP.

How does that compare to where you're from?

That's rather interesting. Telstra in Australia also has been the laughing stock down under with email servers not working, etc. Whirlpool has the complete story if anyone is interested. Perhaps these guys got their story from the same "excuse file" as Telstra??

I've just checked the mail server logs on several of our filter servers (we operate a service which filters spam and viruses out of our customers' email), and it definately looks like Telstra have sorted out at least their incoming email.

We've got several thousand email customers who use BigPond, and our servers queues were clogging with huge amounts of email destined to extmail.bigpond.com -- mostly, our connection attempts were being refused. For most of the day yesterday (the 11th) and for at least a week prior, we couldn't get much of anything through; it wasn't until around midnight that we started to get email delivered.

Even when we were getting good connections, for a while there it looks like Telstra's servers ran out of disk space. From around 6pm last night until around midnight, we were getting errors like: "Error writing message temporaries - message exceeds disk space available at this time", or "Mail system storage is full; try again later".

Whoever manages Telstra's email infrastructure appears to be a rank amateur. Granted, they have a pretty large number of customers to serve, but with a scalable infrastructure there should be no problem. Other ISPs can do it -- Why can't Telstra??

As for Telstra's explanations as to the cause of this whole mess, I don't buy the "artifically increased the load factors" line. From our logs at least, it looks like they simply broke their servers, and then when they did get them back up they were absolutely pummelled by the volume of traffic which was backed up awating inbound delivery. Bloody amateurs.

In any case, from where I sit it does look like they've got their shit sorted out..

Simon Cocking
Network Operations
http://www.mailguard.com.au

Any suggestions for the trophy design?

Does it come with a $1.2M commission?

* Initially dismissing broadband as a gaming platform
* Calling a country-wide broadband rollout a "costly waste of time"
* Decreeing that consumers should be kept in the dark about their phone line
* Linking the takeup of broadband to pornography
* Allowing his department to spend $4,000,000 on a small and poorly developed website

In Soviet Australia, we already pay for bits, not bandwidth

I agree with this.

Firstly I believe this legislation is an EXCELLENT idea, HOWEVER, the attrocities including expensive websites and his blatant disregard for broadband in Australia are unforgivable.

I appreciate what he is doing here, but he's basically clueless with regards to technology.

One of his advisors (or his nephew etc. for all I know) need a pat on the back. He, on the otherhand, should be ousted before he does more damage.

My AU$0.02

For those that dont remember, Richard Alston is the Communications Minister that spent $4 million on a website. I dont car how many good deeds he does, he is still the worlds worst luddite. References for those who dont remember: $4 million website or $4 million website And he couldnt even spend that money on the local economy. His view of technology is that it has to be done with the big multi-national companies, local ones dont even get a look in (see the whirlpool link). Obviously the companies prefered are the ones that are likely to hire him as a consultant either now or later on.

Yes, the anti-spam bill is a good step, but he's still a Luddite.

There are only two reasons why Telstra would make a press release announcing their intention to use Linux:
(1) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their customers by their use of Linux, or
(2) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their competitors by their use of Linux.

That aside, if you go one step further, and read the article, you see that they're actually not using linux at all. They're beating around the bush with lines about XP and NT and Sun and HP-UX and Solaris and Linux and Citrix and XP-on-a-chip and you-name-it. The article is completely meaningless marketeer speak designed to trick some journo's into picking up on the key words "unix" and "linux", and it worked.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next guy if a large corporate makes the switch to Linux, but that's not what this article is about. Never lose site of the fact that Telstra are evil. Every bit as evil as Microsoft or SCO.

There are only two reasons why Telstra would make a press release announcing their intention to use Linux:
(1) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their customers by their use of Linux, or
(2) 'cos they've found a way to further screw their competitors by their use of Linux.

That aside, if you go one step further, and read the article, you see that they're actually not using linux at all. They're beating around the bush with lines about XP and NT and Sun and HP-UX and Solaris and Linux and Citrix and XP-on-a-chip and you-name-it. The article is completely meaningless marketeer speak designed to trick some journo's into picking up on the key words "unix" and "linux", and it worked.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next guy if a large corporate makes the switch to Linux, but that's not what this article is about. Never lose site of the fact that Telstra are evil. Every bit as evil as Microsoft or SCO.

http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1183?show=repl ies

for those who are unfamiliar with good ol tel$tra ;) .. this would be the first good thing they have ever done!

(anonymous to stop karma whoring)

Who knows, maybe the money they save can be put towards letting people connect to their 'broadband' service, which they kindly cap at 3gb/month? Or maybe educating our communications minister?

While it's nice to hear that Telstra are switching to Linux, this hardly makes them a good company - they're still monopolistic and evil, as I'm sure any Australian who's tried to get decent broadband will tell you.