Obviously this project has a significant return - otherwise they would not have invested some amount of time and energy into its implementation, knowing the backlash that was to be expected. That said, you really thought they'd give it up without a fight, especially considering the damage they've already done to their brand? Oh the arrogance.
I wonder what applications will fall over in a screaming heap if this is implemented? One would have a strong argument against this should it break something important - statistics perhaps?
Good point. A djbdns user myself, I'm not sure how BIND handles wildcards, but presumably the independent roots would have to get behind this for it to work 100%. It wouldn't necessarily matter if they didn't have *all* the roots, but one could argue that the roots should all return the same answer for a given query.
On one hand, Verisign wants us to believe they are sufficiently trustworthy to extort as much as USD1595.00 from us for a handful of 1's and 0's (SSL Certificates), and on the other they expect to be able to get away with the dispicable, annoying business practice of hijacking users' web requests? This is annoying enough as it is with opportunistic larrikins buying up misspelt domains, without the custodian of the database abusing its' position by returning effectively forged replies to queries for domains which do not exist. Reminds me of their recent foray into the domain 'Back-Order Domain Acquisition Service business.
IMHO they should be commended for this effort - I do expect it to offer some protection for Australian consumers, and for those businesses (like mine) who prefer to play by the rules.
The Australian Government will move to ban electronic junk mail (spam) and enforce this ban through the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) in legislation that will be introduced to Parliament later this year, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston, announced today.
Senator Alston said that Cabinet had yesterday agreed to anti-spam legislation including fines, along with a raft of other measures aimed at reducing the influx of spam into Australian e-mail inboxes.
Spam is a menace to home and business e-mail users and is a major scourge of productivity. Spam e-mails are the mosquitoes of the Internet - numerous, annoying and often carrying nasty viruses.
Australia will soon be applying a large dose of 'spam repellent' and sending a strong message to spammers that indiscriminate and unsolicited bulk e-mailing will not be tolerated. The adoption of an opt-in regime will make Australia world's-best practice on spam and put Australia in a strong position to participate in international efforts.
The Australian Government is committed to taking a strong stand against spam and has moved quickly to respond to the report by the National Office for the Information Economy The spam problem and how it can be countered released in April this year. This report provided a blueprint to take action against the problem to provide the maximum possible protection against spam.
While the report made it clear that there is no silver bullet against spam, there are many roles that all parties can play in a multi-layered approach. The anti-spam measures that the Australian Government will introduce include:
* National legislation, to be enforced by the ACA, banning the sending of commercial electronic messaging without the prior consent of end-users unless there is an existing customer-business relationship (an opt-in regime);
* Civil sanctions for unlawful conduct including financial penalties, an infringement notice scheme and the ability to seek enforceable undertakings and injunctions;
* The requirement for all commercial electronic messaging to contain accurate details of the sender's name and physical addresses and a functional 'unsubscribe' facility to enable people to opt-out;
* Banning the distribution and use of e-mail 'harvesting' or list-generating software, and
* Working together with international organisations to develop global guidelines and cooperative mechanisms to combat the global spam problem.
The Government will work closely with industry to ensure that Australia has a workable regime without harming legitimate business practices. The regime will seek to protect businesses which undertake legitimate e-mail direct marketing in line with the requirements of the Privacy Act. There will be a 120-day sunrise period without penalties from the enactment of the legislation for businesses to ensure their marketing practices are in line with the legislation.
Stakeholders including the Internet Industry Association (IIA), the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), small business associations and other not-for-profit organisations will be consulted on the details of the legislation.
The Government will also work with industry to develop relevant codes of practice to be registered with the ACA, building on initiatives such as the IIA's 'No Spam' campaign, which since April has enabled consumers to access anti-spamming technology for a free month's trial.
The measures announced today establish a framework for Australia to begin the important task of eradicating spam. The package will be accompanied by an education campaign to raise awareness of the nature of spam and anti-spam measures and to inform individuals and business of their rights and responsibilities when it comes to spam.
According to the NOIEmedia release, they aim to ban 'the distribution and use of e-mail 'harvesting' or list-generating software'. I read this as any software which trawls web sites etc. for addresses. While this in itself will make little difference to the educated few, it should curtail their ability to sell 'harvesting' as a service, and is thus a GoodThing[tm].
This should be implemented iff it can be overrided should the user request it (even if doing so means the user must agree to administer their machine properly). Using firewalling as a tool to differentiate between 'business' and 'residential' accounts is IMHO acceptable (but that said I'll consider it cheeky and will most likely use an ISP who does not make this differentiation, as I would one who charges a lot more for a service with a static IP number).
MXPS: the Mail Exchanger Protocol Switch
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
DJB's Internet Mail 2000 spec includes a method for interoperating with the existing mail infrastructure, by using low preference MX records as described below:
Normally,
when a client has responsibility to deliver a message to a remote recipient,
it looks up
MX records
and attempts to make
SMTP connections
to each of the addresses it finds.
However, an MXPS client that supports QMTP and sees the MX record
12801 mailin-01.mx.aol.com
will try a QMTP connection to mailin-01.mx.aol.com
before trying an SMTP connection to mailin-01.mx.aol.com.
The point is that QMTP is faster than SMTP.
Here is the general rule.
Particular MX
distances are assigned to protocols as follows:
12801, 12817, 12833, 12849, 12865,..., 13041: QMTP.
If the client supports MXPS and QMTP,
it tries a QMTP connection to port 209.
If the client does not support MXPS or QMTP,
or if the QMTP connection attempt fails,
the client tries an SMTP connection to port 25 as usual.
The client does not try SMTP
if the QMTP connection attempt succeeds
but mail delivery through that connection fails.
Of course, servers are obliged to continue supporting SMTP
for non-MXPS clients,
and clients are obliged to continue supporting SMTP.
In the far future,
if all clients are upgraded to support QMTP,
it will be possible for servers to switch from SMTP to QMTP,
turning off SMTP.
In the farther future,
if all clients support QMTP and all servers have switched from SMTP to QMTP,
it will be possible for clients to drop support for SMTP.
In the short term,
none of these simplifications are possible,
but clients and servers can benefit from the speed of QMTP.
History
I proposed MXPS in the documentation for the first qmail release in 1996.
In the original design,
distances 12801 etc. were assigned to QMTP without an SMTP fallback;
this type of assignment makes sense for potential future QMTP-only servers
but makes current QMTP+SMTP servers unnecessarily difficult to set up.
Message-ID: Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:26:36 +1000 From: Sam Johnston User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030718 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: bob@cringely.com Subject: The Business of Music Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Good Afternoon [Robert Cringeley],
A regular reader of your column, I write from Sydney, Australia to provide some feedback about your 'One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change' article (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpi t20030724.html). I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on how successful your model would be although at first glance it seems to be taking advantage of a loophole that would soon be plugged. Worse still, initiatives like this are clearly not in the spirit of 'fair use' and may jeapordise the future of fair use provisions. I believe the test is 'would it replace a sale', and on that front you're buggered in a similar fashion to mp3.com.
That said, you have correctly identified the (diminishing) role of music
companies. I currently have some guys in my office churning out HDTV ready broadcast quality footage using a $1,500 Mac, $500 in software and a $10k DV camera. Admittedly these guys won the 'Best Comedy' section of Tropfest (http://www.tropfest.com/) using similar technology earlier in the year, and thus possess some amount of technical and creative ability, but the point is that they are not requiring hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of equipment to generate content. I trust the same applies to the music industry.
Now, if new electronic distribution companies were set up which would allow content creators (note I'm using the generic term, rather than musicians) to sell their content with a 95/5 split (or thereabouts) in the creator's favour rather than the current (reversed) situation, and if the cost of the content was adjusted to maintain similar returns per sale, I believe we'd all (with the exception of fat record company execs and content creators who require significant investment - eg hollywood studios) be much better off. All of a sudden we're paying 90-95% less for content. Distribution is much cheaper and so the distributors are still able to make a profit (which is more in line with effort expended). Content creators still get $x/sale. However, content consumers are suddenly able to stretch their content budget much further. Say I spend $300/annum on CDs - that might be worth 20 CDs which are bulky, inconvenient and prone to damage. Instead, I get something like 20 times that, and in a format that is convenient. Note that even if I spend 1/20th of what I spend today, the artists are no worse off.
Users don't bother sharing it because:
- the distributors have fast, distributed networks as opposed to slow, intermittent connections that are oh so common on P2P networks
- their files are high quality, and are able to be converted (ideally 'peeled') to lower bitrates for portable devices
- the integrity of the files is guaranteed by checksums and/or digital signatures
- digital rights management (if any) is transparent and unobtrusive. an identifier - maybe a watermark if it could be implemented without quality degradation, or simply a header and digital signature (without which integrity could not be guaranteed) could be used in cases of copyright violation.
- i can still be sued by the distributor or industry associations and the value proposition is simply not worth the risk. this process is self funded, and without a secure way of ensuring my identity is concealed, is an effective deterrent.
- significant value is added in the way of being able to download content at multiple sites, maintaining and sharing playlists, etc.
Then why are you reading this and not writing a letter yourself sharing your views on the situation. I am sure that the views of Australian citizens will weigh in more than those of a potentially biased American based organisation backed by a company who will be directly adversely affected by the passing of this bill.
It is obvious that there are plenty of reasons to use FOSS in a government environment. If there is not a FOSS product for a given task (high end databases, specialised reporting applications, etc.) then the best product may indeed be closed source. If two products are similar in features/price then FOSS should prevail. The government still gets software which meets their needs, often significantly cheaper (especially in the long run), and the taxpayer benefits at the expense of proprietary software vendor(s) who are often (but not necessarily always) charging a ridiculous amount of money for an inferior product.
It would appear to me that the ISC is grossly misrepresenting their membership base by stating that 'together the ISC and CompTIA have 110 corporate and individual members in Australia'. I would suggest that a vast majority of those are individuals 'looking for the tools to develop [their] career[s]'. I would go so far as to say that without surveying their membership base, to say that members of the parent organisation are aligned with the values of its subsidiary is misleading, and if I were a CompTIA member I would be most unimpressed by this misrepresentation. If you happen to be a CompTIA member, perhaps you should make it clear that you do not necessarily agree with the ISC, and that these figures should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. In fact given this creative accounting, I would be wary of paying attention to anything this organisation has to say.
A number of people have pointed out that SCO have nothing to lose by taking on anyone and everyone, yet they are doing us all more damage than we probably realise. No doubt a majority of what they have been saying will prove to be untrue, and the reciprocal damages claims will be devastating. Yet those in control will walk away relatively unscathed, and if things go to plan for them they will be well rewarded for their efforts. I wonder if it will be possible to hold them personally liable for the damages they have caused, as a thief would be held liable for the $1,500 worth of damage [s]he does to your car while stealing your radio which will later be sold for $50. Where an instigator causes a large amount of damage for a relatively small gain, they should be punished switftly and severely.
My 1500/256 Nella Networks FlatRATE ADSL service came online today. It's using the Comindico IP Network and is a truly unlimited service. Aardvark were even offering cases of Red Bull to those who download the most! That said, I do pay AUD240/month for it (opting to avoid the slower unlimited services which start at around AUD90/month). You can get 'always online' service from TPG starting at AUD19.95/month, with the first 400mb costing ~AUD80, then capped to 10Gb and reasonable rates thereafter. Meanwhile, my 3G NEC e606 mobile handset from three gives me 3000 minutes per month of voice calls for AUD99 - significantly better than the AUD300-500 I was recently giving Optus for around a third of the airtime. I guess this makes me one of the lucky few well connected Aussies. If it weren't for me living in Sydney and being able to justify the expense I'd be putting up with an overpriced, flaky Telstra service like everyone else! I'm still perplexed as to how they have managed to hang onto the Telstra Rewards program for so long - would have expected the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to have raised an eyebrow over this some time ago.
In Australia we have the legislated Customer Service Guarantee which describes expectations in terms of services, appointments, repairs, etc. If the telco does not meet these expectations they must rebate the customer upto $40/working day. I note however that while these used to refer to monthly access fees ($11.65/month for residences some years ago, now more like $25/month and almost $40 for companies) they are now fixed at $12 and $20 for residences and businesses respectively. You can bet this is quite deliberate, although I'm surprised the Australian Communications Authority allowed for this change.
Slashdot Mirror
hence 'some amount of' - I certainly wouldn't say 'a lot' or 'enough', but obviously someone's had to build some servers and modify some zone files :)
yet they don't even trust themselves. The seal at the Verisign owned THAWTE site currently says:
Invalid Certificate
2003-09-23
and when you click on it:
This page (thawte.com/html/ISP/index.html) is not permitted to display the Thawte Site Seal.
Irrelevant, but amusing nonetheless.
Either we all decide ICANN has no teeth because they've been ignored by these larrikins, or we rally behind them... I wonder which it'll be?
Obviously this project has a significant return - otherwise they would not have invested some amount of time and energy into its implementation, knowing the backlash that was to be expected. That said, you really thought they'd give it up without a fight, especially considering the damage they've already done to their brand? Oh the arrogance.
You obviously haven't tried Coopers Sparkling Ale.
It's precisely beer o'clock down under (17:18 Friday), so while this article is otherwise a complete waste of 1's and 0's, at least it's aptly timed.
I wonder what applications will fall over in a screaming heap if this is implemented? One would have a strong argument against this should it break something important - statistics perhaps?
Good point. A djbdns user myself, I'm not sure how BIND handles wildcards, but presumably the independent roots would have to get behind this for it to work 100%. It wouldn't necessarily matter if they didn't have *all* the roots, but one could argue that the roots should all return the same answer for a given query.
I'll take care of my own insurance with the $1,570.00 change if you don't mind. And then I'll go on a holiday with the change from that.
On one hand, Verisign wants us to believe they are sufficiently trustworthy to extort as much as USD1595.00 from us for a handful of 1's and 0's (SSL Certificates), and on the other they expect to be able to get away with the dispicable, annoying business practice of hijacking users' web requests? This is annoying enough as it is with opportunistic larrikins buying up misspelt domains, without the custodian of the database abusing its' position by returning effectively forged replies to queries for domains which do not exist. Reminds me of their recent foray into the domain 'Back-Order Domain Acquisition Service business.
I guess with competitors closing the gap by offering virtually the same thing for a fraction of the price, they must be getting desparate.
IMHO they should be commended for this effort - I do expect it to offer some protection for Australian consumers, and for those businesses (like mine) who prefer to play by the rules.
Australian Government to ban spam
The Australian Government will move to ban electronic junk mail (spam) and enforce this ban through the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) in legislation that will be introduced to Parliament later this year, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston, announced today.
Senator Alston said that Cabinet had yesterday agreed to anti-spam legislation including fines, along with a raft of other measures aimed at reducing the influx of spam into Australian e-mail inboxes.
Spam is a menace to home and business e-mail users and is a major scourge of productivity. Spam e-mails are the mosquitoes of the Internet - numerous, annoying and often carrying nasty viruses.
Australia will soon be applying a large dose of 'spam repellent' and sending a strong message to spammers that indiscriminate and unsolicited bulk e-mailing will not be tolerated. The adoption of an opt-in regime will make Australia world's-best practice on spam and put Australia in a strong position to participate in international efforts.
The Australian Government is committed to taking a strong stand against spam and has moved quickly to respond to the report by the National Office for the Information Economy The spam problem and how it can be countered released in April this year. This report provided a blueprint to take action against the problem to provide the maximum possible protection against spam.
While the report made it clear that there is no silver bullet against spam, there are many roles that all parties can play in a multi-layered approach. The anti-spam measures that the Australian Government will introduce include:
* National legislation, to be enforced by the ACA, banning the sending of commercial electronic messaging without the prior consent of end-users unless there is an existing customer-business relationship (an opt-in regime);
* Civil sanctions for unlawful conduct including financial penalties, an infringement notice scheme and the ability to seek enforceable undertakings and injunctions;
* The requirement for all commercial electronic messaging to contain accurate details of the sender's name and physical addresses and a functional 'unsubscribe' facility to enable people to opt-out;
* Banning the distribution and use of e-mail 'harvesting' or list-generating software, and
* Working together with international organisations to develop global guidelines and cooperative mechanisms to combat the global spam problem.
The Government will work closely with industry to ensure that Australia has a workable regime without harming legitimate business practices. The regime will seek to protect businesses which undertake legitimate e-mail direct marketing in line with the requirements of the Privacy Act. There will be a 120-day sunrise period without penalties from the enactment of the legislation for businesses to ensure their marketing practices are in line with the legislation.
Stakeholders including the Internet Industry Association (IIA), the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), small business associations and other not-for-profit organisations will be consulted on the details of the legislation.
The Government will also work with industry to develop relevant codes of practice to be registered with the ACA, building on initiatives such as the IIA's 'No Spam' campaign, which since April has enabled consumers to access anti-spamming technology for a free month's trial.
The measures announced today establish a framework for Australia to begin the important task of eradicating spam. The package will be accompanied by an education campaign to raise awareness of the nature of spam and anti-spam measures and to inform individuals and business of their rights and responsibilities when it comes to spam.
Leg
According to the NOIE media release, they aim to ban 'the distribution and use of e-mail 'harvesting' or list-generating software'. I read this as any software which trawls web sites etc. for addresses. While this in itself will make little difference to the educated few, it should curtail their ability to sell 'harvesting' as a service, and is thus a GoodThing[tm].
This should be implemented iff it can be overrided should the user request it (even if doing so means the user must agree to administer their machine properly). Using firewalling as a tool to differentiate between 'business' and 'residential' accounts is IMHO acceptable (but that said I'll consider it cheeky and will most likely use an ISP who does not make this differentiation, as I would one who charges a lot more for a service with a static IP number).
DJB's Internet Mail 2000 spec includes a method for interoperating with the existing mail infrastructure, by using low preference MX records as described below:
MXPS: the Mail Exchanger Protocol Switch
Normally, when a client has responsibility to deliver a message to a remote recipient, it looks up MX records and attempts to make SMTP connections to each of the addresses it finds.However, an MXPS client that supports QMTP and sees the MX record 12801 mailin-01.mx.aol.com will try a QMTP connection to mailin-01.mx.aol.com before trying an SMTP connection to mailin-01.mx.aol.com. The point is that QMTP is faster than SMTP.
Here is the general rule. Particular MX distances are assigned to protocols as follows:
- 12801, 12817, 12833, 12849, 12865,
..., 13041: QMTP.
If the client supports MXPS and QMTP,
it tries a QMTP connection to port 209.
If the client does not support MXPS or QMTP,
or if the QMTP connection attempt fails,
the client tries an SMTP connection to port 25 as usual.
The client does not try SMTP
if the QMTP connection attempt succeeds
but mail delivery through that connection fails.
Of course, servers are obliged to continue supporting SMTP for non-MXPS clients, and clients are obliged to continue supporting SMTP.In the far future, if all clients are upgraded to support QMTP, it will be possible for servers to switch from SMTP to QMTP, turning off SMTP. In the farther future, if all clients support QMTP and all servers have switched from SMTP to QMTP, it will be possible for clients to drop support for SMTP. In the short term, none of these simplifications are possible, but clients and servers can benefit from the speed of QMTP. History I proposed MXPS in the documentation for the first qmail release in 1996. In the original design, distances 12801 etc. were assigned to QMTP without an SMTP fallback; this type of assignment makes sense for potential future QMTP-only servers but makes current QMTP+SMTP servers unnecessarily difficult to set up.
This fiaSCO is currently the main headline at Australian IT's site. Of particular interest is the various complaints to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission regarding alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act.
Message-ID:
.html). I am not a
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:26:36 +1000
From: Sam Johnston
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030718
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: bob@cringely.com
Subject: The Business of Music
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Good Afternoon [Robert Cringeley],
A regular reader of your column, I write from Sydney, Australia to
provide some feedback about your 'One Possible Future for a Music
Business That Must Inevitably Change' article
(http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpi t20030724
lawyer, so I cannot comment on how successful your model would be
although at first glance it seems to be taking advantage of a loophole
that would soon be plugged. Worse still, initiatives like this are
clearly not in the spirit of 'fair use' and may jeapordise the future of
fair use provisions. I believe the test is 'would it replace a sale',
and on that front you're buggered in a similar fashion to mp3.com.
That said, you have correctly identified the (diminishing) role of music
companies. I currently have some guys in my office churning out HDTV
ready broadcast quality footage using a $1,500 Mac, $500 in software and
a $10k DV camera. Admittedly these guys won the 'Best Comedy' section of
Tropfest (http://www.tropfest.com/) using similar technology earlier in
the year, and thus possess some amount of technical and creative
ability, but the point is that they are not requiring hundreds of
thousands or even millions of dollars of equipment to generate content.
I trust the same applies to the music industry.
Now, if new electronic distribution companies were set up which would
allow content creators (note I'm using the generic term, rather than
musicians) to sell their content with a 95/5 split (or thereabouts) in
the creator's favour rather than the current (reversed) situation, and
if the cost of the content was adjusted to maintain similar returns per
sale, I believe we'd all (with the exception of fat record company execs
and content creators who require significant investment - eg hollywood
studios) be much better off. All of a sudden we're paying 90-95% less
for content. Distribution is much cheaper and so the distributors are
still able to make a profit (which is more in line with effort
expended). Content creators still get $x/sale. However, content
consumers are suddenly able to stretch their content budget much
further. Say I spend $300/annum on CDs - that might be worth 20 CDs
which are bulky, inconvenient and prone to damage. Instead, I get
something like 20 times that, and in a format that is convenient. Note
that even if I spend 1/20th of what I spend today, the artists are no
worse off.
Users don't bother sharing it because:
- the distributors have fast, distributed networks as opposed to slow,
intermittent connections that are oh so common on P2P networks
- their files are high quality, and are able to be converted (ideally
'peeled') to lower bitrates for portable devices
- the integrity of the files is guaranteed by checksums and/or digital
signatures
- digital rights management (if any) is transparent and unobtrusive.
an identifier - maybe a watermark if it could be implemented without
quality degradation, or simply a header and digital signature (without
which integrity could not be guaranteed) could be used in cases of
copyright violation.
- i can still be sued by the distributor or industry associations and
the value proposition is simply not worth the risk. this process is self
funded, and without a secure way of ensuring my identity is concealed,
is an effective deterrent.
- significant value is added in the way of being able to download
content at multiple sites, maintaining and sharing playlists, etc.
Then why are you reading this and not writing a letter yourself sharing your views on the situation. I am sure that the views of Australian citizens will weigh in more than those of a potentially biased American based organisation backed by a company who will be directly adversely affected by the passing of this bill.
It is obvious that there are plenty of reasons to use FOSS in a government environment. If there is not a FOSS product for a given task (high end databases, specialised reporting applications, etc.) then the best product may indeed be closed source. If two products are similar in features/price then FOSS should prevail. The government still gets software which meets their needs, often significantly cheaper (especially in the long run), and the taxpayer benefits at the expense of proprietary software vendor(s) who are often (but not necessarily always) charging a ridiculous amount of money for an inferior product.
It would appear to me that the ISC is grossly misrepresenting their membership base by stating that 'together the ISC and CompTIA have 110 corporate and individual members in Australia'. I would suggest that a vast majority of those are individuals 'looking for the tools to develop [their] career[s]'. I would go so far as to say that without surveying their membership base, to say that members of the parent organisation are aligned with the values of its subsidiary is misleading, and if I were a CompTIA member I would be most unimpressed by this misrepresentation. If you happen to be a CompTIA member, perhaps you should make it clear that you do not necessarily agree with the ISC, and that these figures should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. In fact given this creative accounting, I would be wary of paying attention to anything this organisation has to say.
A number of people have pointed out that SCO have nothing to lose by taking on anyone and everyone, yet they are doing us all more damage than we probably realise. No doubt a majority of what they have been saying will prove to be untrue, and the reciprocal damages claims will be devastating. Yet those in control will walk away relatively unscathed, and if things go to plan for them they will be well rewarded for their efforts. I wonder if it will be possible to hold them personally liable for the damages they have caused, as a thief would be held liable for the $1,500 worth of damage [s]he does to your car while stealing your radio which will later be sold for $50. Where an instigator causes a large amount of damage for a relatively small gain, they should be punished switftly and severely.
My 1500/256 Nella Networks FlatRATE ADSL service came online today. It's using the Comindico IP Network and is a truly unlimited service. Aardvark were even offering cases of Red Bull to those who download the most! That said, I do pay AUD240/month for it (opting to avoid the slower unlimited services which start at around AUD90/month). You can get 'always online' service from TPG starting at AUD19.95/month, with the first 400mb costing ~AUD80, then capped to 10Gb and reasonable rates thereafter. Meanwhile, my 3G NEC e606 mobile handset from three gives me 3000 minutes per month of voice calls for AUD99 - significantly better than the AUD300-500 I was recently giving Optus for around a third of the airtime. I guess this makes me one of the lucky few well connected Aussies. If it weren't for me living in Sydney and being able to justify the expense I'd be putting up with an overpriced, flaky Telstra service like everyone else! I'm still perplexed as to how they have managed to hang onto the Telstra Rewards program for so long - would have expected the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to have raised an eyebrow over this some time ago.
seems to me you still have to pay for the licenses - the $100/seat is for maintenance only, yes?
There is an evolution package which is one of many maintained by Takuo KITAME.
In Australia we have the legislated Customer Service Guarantee which describes expectations in terms of services, appointments, repairs, etc. If the telco does not meet these expectations they must rebate the customer upto $40/working day. I note however that while these used to refer to monthly access fees ($11.65/month for residences some years ago, now more like $25/month and almost $40 for companies) they are now fixed at $12 and $20 for residences and businesses respectively. You can bet this is quite deliberate, although I'm surprised the Australian Communications Authority allowed for this change.
a gaggle of trolls perhaps?