Virtually no ISP counts uploads as part of the monthly quota. Seeding torrents still involves a small download, but it's not much really. I seed torrents all the time and I doubt it adds up to much more than a few 100 MB per month.
As for upstream bandwidth, you have a point there. 384kbps is pretty painful these days, and is the standard upload speed for *Telstra resold ADSL1* (not ~all~ ADSL1... if I connect using G.Dmt on my link I get 1 Mbps up). Once you get your ADSL2+ upgrade you should get a megabit up, which for a home connection is great. Besides, slow upload speeds are not any different than the US market (not sure about Canada). Looking at AT&T's site, their TOP DSL plan only has 6 Mbps down and 768kbps up. So maybe life in Canada is rosy with huge upload rates on residential services but that's not normal in most places. Personally I'm on ADSL2+ with 1 Mbps upstream, and I could pay an extra $20 a month to upgrade that to a SOHO plan with Annex M, which would give me up to 2.5 Mbps upstream. Not worth it though. 1 megabit is plenty for remote desktopping, seeding torrents etc.
And yes, TPG was perhaps an extreme examples. They are dirt cheap but their network quality is not the best. I'm with Internode, renowned for great network reliability. They are considered one of the more expensive ISPs but even they don't approach your "90 bucks for 15 GB" figure (90 bucks on Internode would buy you 55 GB, and they have a HUGE selection of free file mirrors, game servers etc which you can usually grab most non-P2P downloads from).
Thing is in Australia, yes things are more expensive in Canada. But North America is the heart of the internet. Figures show something like 80% of all content accessed by Australians is on US IPs. The US is a long, long way away, and there are only 2 or 3 undersea cables that get there, which cost a lot of money to build and maintain. It's not like in Canada where you can cheaply build short transit links down into the US.
Incidentally, the opening of PIPE's new Australia-Guam cable later this year will add a heap more Australia-America capacity though and should bring down prices by a good 25% or more.
Wow, do Americans really care that much about where their cars come from? It is simply mind boggling to me to see such strong words used about something as mundane as an automobile purchase. Not flaming here, just astonished that there's such a cultural difference that I never would have realised if not for this thread.
Quite frankly, I don't think anyone in the rest of the world thinks about, cares about, or even realizes where their cars come from. Where I live, you see roughly an even spread of Asian (mostly Japanese or Korean), European (Renault, Merc, BMW, VW) and local makes on the roads (subsidiaries of US companies like GM, but locally designed and manufactured). People decide which to buy solely on price and the products' merits. I don't think country of origin even factors in at all for 99% of people.
You have a good point about why this mentality exists though. The 'big three' US car makers certainly played a huge role in creating much of the wealth the US was built on, and distributing that in such a way that it encouraged a large middle class to develop. So given that history, I can imagine Americans hold quite a bit of affection for their car companies. Elsewhere, a car company holds no more personal attachment for people than, say, a company that manufacturers broom handles;)
Yeah honestly, movie ticket prices in Australia are now ridiculous. I used to go to the movies a lot. Maybe 15-20 times a year. This was only 5 years ago or so when an adult ticket was $10 AUD and student tickets were only $8 or so.
In the space of just a few years, they've almost doubled in price. Hoyts charges $17 for an adult now. That's wayyy more than normal price increases related to inflation. Not to mention the food and drinks are still just as hideously overpriced as they always were. So they've almost completely lost me as a customer. I think I went to the movies only twice last year and only once so far this year.
The statement 'Bittorrent isn't an option' is wrong though.
Firstly, Australia actually has the highest per-capita usage of Bittorrent in the world.* This is mostly because we don't get all the decent US/UK shows until a year or more later, and Hulu etc. doesn't allow non-US IPs to connect.
Secondly, yes our internet is metered as you say, but your figures are massively exaggerated. 15 GB for 90 bucks? Only Bigpond would charge such ridiculous rates and noone with half a brain uses them. There are plenty of plans out there offering 100-200 GB for less than AUD ~70 per month. Which really, is heaps of data (considering a TV show compressed using Xvid or H.264 is like 200-300 MB for SD or 600-700 MB for HD, you could download half a dozen TV shows every day of the month). For instance, check out: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl2plus_pricing.php
So yeah - Bittorrent is definitely an option in Aus, and EVERYONE uses it.
Huh? I'm in Australia and have been watching ~only~ digital free-to-air stations for over 18 months? What do you mean we don't get digital until 2010?
What you probably meant was "in the particular locality where I live, we don't get digital till 2010". Which isn't all of Australia:)
But yeah, rooftop antennae + wall jacks FTW:) Even if rabbit ears work well with digital (which they do), they are ugly as sin.
(Although I must confess I'm currently using a pair of digital rabbit ears, cause I'm living in a multi-story townhouse and can't shove stuff up on the roof!)
Honest question here, I'm not trying to flame or anything. I find it hard to believe than TV-obsessed America your closest transmitter is over 50 miles away. That's insane! Doubly so considering you're on the relatively densely populated eastern fringe.
Here in Australia even small towns will generally have their own transmitter. If you truly live in the middle of nowhere (i.e. big farm with nearest other humans an hour's drive away), it might be an issue... but I find it hard to believe somewhere 50 miles from NYC is that sparsely populated. Do you live in a reasonably populated area? (doesn't have to be a town... even 'medium density farmland' is 'populated' by my definition)? If so, why don't they put a repeater up or something?
PS. As an aside... one curious thing I have noted in America though (I've visited the US eight times) is that you guys seem to broadcast stuff at much greater powers than we do, at least for radio (not sure about TV). In Australia if I drive out of my city, I'd be lucky to hold an FM radio signal further than 15 miles from the edge of town. Our transmitters are turned down pretty low, methinks. In the US though I've picked up strong signals from towns 50-100 miles away.
We do have a implied freedom of POLITICAL expression in Australia. So says the High Court. But yeah, you're right. It doesn't cover all expression, and the link with the internet filtering debate is tenuous.
Lol. What's really funny is that it's a false sense of security. Webshield relies on some pretty basic URL/IP filtering that any teen with half a brain could get around in 5 seconds.
So you sign up to a 'safe' ISP so you don't have to watch your kids anymore. And as a result, your kids are now unsupervised and actually download MORE porn than they ever could have before.
It's not. It's interested in blocking child porn, which is altogether a different thing.
Of course, the main objections are:
1) that perfectly legit sites (both adult and non-adult) will get blocked incorrectly as a result. The earlier trials showed it had a pretty high false-positive rate.
2) The government may eventually creep the scope of the filter beyond child porn to anything else that the government of the day feels inappropriate. THAT is a scary thing and starts verging on Chinese-style censorship.
3) It slows down the tubes. This will particularly irritate people in remoter parts of Australia who already have pretty slow tubes to begin with...
The ISP's haven't received the equipment yet, and even when they do, it's entirely opt-in. If you do nothing, your internet will remain exactly the same as it is now.
Guns. Revolution. Over internet filtering. That might be going a little over the top;) (Although I'm opposed to this filter more vehemently than almost anyone. I'm 98% confident it will never pass Parliament though - it doesn't have the support of either the Greens or the Liberals, and you need at least one of those onside to get anything through the Senate).
You know there are other options you might want to try first, like, protesting, debate, voting the responsible parties out etc.
And if all that fails maybe we could revolt. But a) you don't need guns necessarily; and b) there's still quite a few guns in Australia my good friend.
Just because we have regulated firearms ownerships laws and protections doesn't mean there aren't any firearms! Any farmer will show you a full rack of them in his garage. Americans seem to have this idea though that we don't have any firearms at all for some reason. That's not the case. You can legally own one if you have a reason to. Which I think is perfectly acceptable.
Yeah no kidding. Of these 6 so-called ISPs, I've only ever even heard of one of them (Primus). The other four probably have only a few hundred subscribers. Even Primus isn't really very big. For this trial to have any credibility, it would need to have at least one of the big players in the ISP industry here: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Internode, TPG, Westnet, AAPT etc.
Also, one of the participants is already exclusively a provider of filtered internet to schools and businesses! So nothing to prove there.
Really the filter trial will just show how pathetically useless the whole idea is. Kiddie porn isn't on the open web, so this filter won't do anything (except pointlessly slow down speeds for everyone else). The bad stuff is all encrypted, sent via invite-only IRC or private FTP servers, or on peer-to-peer networks. Most likely they use TOR to access it too.
Basically everyone knows this. It slows down access, blocks pages incorrectly (false positives), is trivially circumvented, and doesn't really stop the 'baddies' from getting the stuff they get in the same way as they already do.
Doomed to failure and will never pass Parliament, despite all the hype on Slashdot et al.
Well I can't speak for the whole world, but I honestly think that to some extent it IS a North American problem. But there's a reason for that, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
You guys have had it so good for so long, with your insanely cheap prices and unlimited data. I guess those two things have led to the current state of affairs.
I live in Australia 8 months of the year and the US for 4 months. I have DSL in both countries. I like both of my connections, but for different reasons.
In Australia, ISPs don't throttle, don't restrict, don't do deep packet inspection or anything else like that. It's truly a neutral net. They also don't oversubscribe their bandwidth - in fact my ISP has a proud policy of continually upgrading their capacity so that it can handle 150% of their observed peak demand. So my connection always hits its advertised (8 Mbit) speed, even in peak hours.
BUT... there is a flipside to all this. As you probably know, Australia has (and has always had) metered bandwidth. You pay for X gigabytes per month (plans generally range from 5 GB entry level to 200+ GB high end). Your line is substantially slowed if you go over that (although you don't pay excess fees). Because of this, the ISPs KNOW how much bandwidth is going to get used ahead of time (roughly), and they can manage their bandwidth/capacity upgrades better, I think.
So there are pros and cons either way. North American connections are cheap and unlimited... but they might do some funky stuff to your traffic (throttling, DPI, other non-traffic-neutral shenanigans). On the other hand, Australian connections are uncongested, always max out your line speed, and traffic neutral... but you pay for a set amount of total traffic per month.
Don't really know which I prefer. The Australian connection feels faster (especially for P2P), but the US connection can obviously pull down a lot more per month if I wanted it to.
Yep... if you are gonna cap/restrict something, then state it clearly. Couldn't agree more.
We went through the same thing here in Australia basically. Truly unlimited accounts used to exist back in the ISDN/early cable days, until high bandwidth applications became commonplace. Then they started putting on loosely worded conditions in their TOS (e.g. "unreasonable amounts").
People complained enough that now, the download and upload caps and policies are clearly worded, and you know what you are getting into (although there are still some offenders out there... I'm looking at you Dodo, and Bigpond to some extent since they count uploads, which virtually no other Australian ISP does).
Slashdot likes to laugh at us here in Oz because of our download limits. But honestly, I spend a lot of time in the US and a lot of time in Australia, and I actually prefer my Australian connection. Sure I have a monthly download limit, but I clearly know what it is, and can always upgrade my plan if I need more. But unlike they US, I can be confident that they don't do any of this QoS/deep packet inspection/other screwing around with my traffic. I get what I pay for - a pipe with x GB per month, and provided i stay under that, it's lightning fast (I'm on 24 MBps ADSL2+). And if I go over, my connection speed gets reduced until I either buy another data block, or wait until the next month.
(Having said all that, I do admit that your plans are a lot cheaper in the US for the same amount of downloads. That's the problem with living on an island continent 10,000 miles from anywhere and limited undersea cables I guess;))
What's really funny is that in Australia, the toilet is typically in a small room by itself (separate from the bathroom/restroom - whereas in the US it's almost universally in the same room as the shower/bath/basin etc).
So if you have an American guest here in Australia, they might ask "where's the bathroom" (when they really want to go to the toilet). So you tell them. And a while later they come back looking confused and ask again... "where's the bathroom?". Takes you a while sometimes to realise what they are actually looking for is the toilet!
I can see where you're coming from but that argument only holds if 'shadow' actually does evoke these gut reactions. In Australia, its such a standard term for the opposition minister with the same portfolio, that it doesn't have those connotations. People are just too used to hearing it in this context.
If anything, when I think of 'shadow minister', I think of someone who is 'shadowing', or keeping in check, the actual minister. As someone suggested, like someone opposite you on a playing field or basketball court. That word simply doesn't give me any gut reaction along the lines of 'sinister' or whatever.
The terminology is hundreds of years old and isn't being 'scaled down' at all. It's as strong as it's ever been. So yeah, I don't see it going anywhere. To me, 'alternative' minister sounds weirder... I just think of 'alternative' lifestyles or drugs etc, lol.
Back on topic though, it's nice to see what I always thought would happen to this Internet filtering scheme happening. It'll get held up in the Senate and die a quiet death, as the government knows it was a hugely unpopular move to begin with.
Everyone can see it was never going to work. And I'm still confident that, despite all the hype on Slashdot etc (OMG Australians are turning into the Chinese, what's going on down there!), this will never, ever get off the ground. It would slow down access, has a huge false positive rate, is trivial to circumvent, is massively unpopular even among non-tech people, and in the current economic downturn, the cost cannot be justified. Not to mention every Australian ISP has publicly stated they will refuse to participate and will fight tooth and nail to stop it happening (it's bad for their business, after all!)
Yep basically this issue hasn't registered on the mainstream public's radar, what with the economic crisis and all. Plus it's still only in trial phase. I imagine if they do eventually decide to try and actually roll this out, there will be a huge uproar from the general public (as soon as they realise their internets are about to get a lot slower due to the filtering).
There are so many gaping flaws in this, though, that I'm actually fairly confident it won't end up happening. Senator Conroy is pushing his agenda for all it's worth, but in the end, it's so ineffective and useless a measure that I can't see it making it through the House and the Senate.
The Liberal Party, who have numbers sufficient to block any Bill, have already publically stated they will oppose the proposed filter. Most ISPs, including the biggest (Telstra) and the most technically competent (Internode), have refused to have anything to do with it. Furthermore, noone in the current economic climate is going to throw money at something that slows down internet access, doesn't block all the content it's aimed at, accidentally blocks content it's NOT aimed at, AND is trivial to circumvent anyway. The budget numbers just don't add up (government projects usually have pretty strict rules about making sure money is actually achieving something - if it's not, projects get canned quickly, and I've seen this myself working for an IT company that mostly contracts with the Federal Govt. in Canberra).
So for all the hype on Slashdot, I remain at least 90% confident that this will go and die a quiet death during the next 12 months, or at the very least, it'll get scaled down massively into something very simple (e.g. removal of certain objectionable entries from DNS servers, which I don't really mind as it doesn't slow down my internet, and I can always use other DNS servers anyway).
Which is, in fact, how it works in Australia (and most other countries with 'metered' connections). You pay X dollars for Y GB per month. If you happen to hit that limit, they throttle your connection down to a slower speed, but you incur no additional charges. They also email/text message you when you hit 70%/90%/100% of your monthly quota.
So you're absolutely right... the safety of a fixed price is worth it. The ISPs here in Australia that tried to do 'excess usage fees' got bitten because the customers revolted and left the first time they got an abnormally high bill (often because of a virus, or because little Billy was downloading on BitTorrent far too much etc). So now the market pretty much dictates that metered plans are 'capped' at a set fee per month.
Similar to some phone plans here too incidentally, which would have saved the unfortunate guy in this story.
Well keep in mind that all the major Australian political parties are to the left of both of the major American parties. So the 'more conservative' of our two main parties is still probably as liberal, if not more-so, than the Democrats.
Both American parties are quite right-wing, if you look at the full spectrum of political parties across the world. What you guys call 'liberal' is still quite 'conservative' to us.
Mod parent up. The way this keeps getting brought up on Slashdot makes it sound like it's actually been (or about to be) implemented. Really puts Australia in a bad light when people just skim the headlines and think "OMG Australia has censored internet!". We don't. And we won't.
This thing will never get off the ground. It's just an idea in Senator Conroy's little head. As MANY threads on this will attest to, there are so many things wrong with this plan, it is so ineffective, and so technically flawed, that it will get canned before it even makes it as far as an official Bill of Parliament. You really think they are going to pass a proposal that has a false positive rate of something in the order of 1/50-1/100 pages? You really think that people will agree with something that cripples internet speeds (particularly in the light of this governments promise to boost internet speeds via the new National Broadband Network)? You really think that every company who does business over the Internet will not fight this tooth and nail?
Usually with 'controversial' proposals, you hear some for and some against. On the ABC news site earlier today there was a thread on this exact topic, and for the first time that I've ever seen, ALL the comments, literally 100%, were completely aghast and horrified at this censorship proposal. There is zero public support and fierce opposition from the telecommunications and software industries. People know it won't work and will be trivial to circumvent. It CAN'T work due to the very nature of the Internet. Just ask a Chinese person about their 'firewall' and they will laugh and say that ~everyone~ gets around it very, very easily.
Anyway, point is - its a horrifying proposal, but I'm not worried at this point. There's just so much wrong, and nothing right with it... and in these tough economic plans, any Government plan that isn't cost-effective will never see the light of day.
Yeah I saw that mistake in the summary and thought, haha - they screwed up. But as an Australian, we have just 'sprung forward' in the last couple of weeks. So the title was accurate for us Southern hemisphere-ites.
Having said that - I don't like DST either and would rather they just did away with it. Hate having to go round adjusting all my random non-NTP-connected clocks twice a year. I live at 35 deg S latitude and although I do appreciate the later sunsets in summer, I could do this just as effectively by getting my lazy ass out of bed earlier so I got home a bit earlier;)
And I thought I couldn't hate the TSA any more than I already do...:(
I'm Australian. But I have an American wife and we regularly travel back to the US for Christmas and other family occasions. Unlike most non-Americans that post on Slashdot, I don't have the whole 'OMG the US sucks' mentality... actually I love the US more than probably a lot of Americans do. It's a great country.
But I absolutely detest travelling by air to or within the US! Every time we fly back there, I dread the whole 'take off your shoes', the scary border dudes with sub-machine guns, the 'are you being honest about the purpose of your visit' (even though I'm with my US-citizen wife and have a record on their screen of over 50 previous US entries), the lovely little TSA notes in my luggage (we inspected your bags, we may have taken something... or not! who knows...) and your bottom-of-the-barrel airlines (seriously, the US is the only country where you don't get food on the plane unless you buy it).
So yeah, now I have another thing to add to that list: "some TSA dude might have taken your camera". Hooray!
Are you really sure about that? At least you can enter Australia without having all ten of your fingerprints scanned and stored indefinitely. And we don't have anywhere near as many CCTV cameras as the UK. I travel in all three countries (US, UK, AU) extensively and each one has its own areas where they are 'good' and 'bad' when it comes to these kind of things:
The UK is definitely the surveillance 'winner' and has the most governmental red tape it seems.
The US has the most invasive border/entry procedures (10 fingerprints + photos, and immigration officers that are, to be frank, rude and scary).
Australia has by far the strictest customs/import checks, and also quite strict border/entry procedures (although no fingerprints etc)... but once you're in, you can do whatever you like. As a foreigner, it's not difficult to, say, open a bank account here. In the UK though when I tried, it took months of fiddling around and paperwork, even though I was a permanent resident.
So I think all three countries are doing equally 'bad' on this race to the bottom:(
In Australia you have to provide some form of ID even for a prepaid phone. You can buy the SIM itself off a rack without ID. But it's inactive until you call up to add your initial credit, and they ask you to provide some details.
The difference is, I'm fairly sure that that information is only retained by the telephone company you are signed up with, in case the phone IS later used in a crime. The police can then come to the phone company with a warrant and grab those details. There is no centralised database like the UK proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
Virtually no ISP counts uploads as part of the monthly quota. Seeding torrents still involves a small download, but it's not much really. I seed torrents all the time and I doubt it adds up to much more than a few 100 MB per month.
As for upstream bandwidth, you have a point there. 384kbps is pretty painful these days, and is the standard upload speed for *Telstra resold ADSL1* (not ~all~ ADSL1 ... if I connect using G.Dmt on my link I get 1 Mbps up). Once you get your ADSL2+ upgrade you should get a megabit up, which for a home connection is great. Besides, slow upload speeds are not any different than the US market (not sure about Canada). Looking at AT&T's site, their TOP DSL plan only has 6 Mbps down and 768kbps up. So maybe life in Canada is rosy with huge upload rates on residential services but that's not normal in most places. Personally I'm on ADSL2+ with 1 Mbps upstream, and I could pay an extra $20 a month to upgrade that to a SOHO plan with Annex M, which would give me up to 2.5 Mbps upstream. Not worth it though. 1 megabit is plenty for remote desktopping, seeding torrents etc.
And yes, TPG was perhaps an extreme examples. They are dirt cheap but their network quality is not the best. I'm with Internode, renowned for great network reliability. They are considered one of the more expensive ISPs but even they don't approach your "90 bucks for 15 GB" figure (90 bucks on Internode would buy you 55 GB, and they have a HUGE selection of free file mirrors, game servers etc which you can usually grab most non-P2P downloads from).
Thing is in Australia, yes things are more expensive in Canada. But North America is the heart of the internet. Figures show something like 80% of all content accessed by Australians is on US IPs. The US is a long, long way away, and there are only 2 or 3 undersea cables that get there, which cost a lot of money to build and maintain. It's not like in Canada where you can cheaply build short transit links down into the US.
Incidentally, the opening of PIPE's new Australia-Guam cable later this year will add a heap more Australia-America capacity though and should bring down prices by a good 25% or more.
Traitors?
Wow, do Americans really care that much about where their cars come from? It is simply mind boggling to me to see such strong words used about something as mundane as an automobile purchase. Not flaming here, just astonished that there's such a cultural difference that I never would have realised if not for this thread.
Quite frankly, I don't think anyone in the rest of the world thinks about, cares about, or even realizes where their cars come from. Where I live, you see roughly an even spread of Asian (mostly Japanese or Korean), European (Renault, Merc, BMW, VW) and local makes on the roads (subsidiaries of US companies like GM, but locally designed and manufactured). People decide which to buy solely on price and the products' merits. I don't think country of origin even factors in at all for 99% of people.
You have a good point about why this mentality exists though. The 'big three' US car makers certainly played a huge role in creating much of the wealth the US was built on, and distributing that in such a way that it encouraged a large middle class to develop. So given that history, I can imagine Americans hold quite a bit of affection for their car companies. Elsewhere, a car company holds no more personal attachment for people than, say, a company that manufacturers broom handles ;)
Yeah honestly, movie ticket prices in Australia are now ridiculous. I used to go to the movies a lot. Maybe 15-20 times a year. This was only 5 years ago or so when an adult ticket was $10 AUD and student tickets were only $8 or so.
In the space of just a few years, they've almost doubled in price. Hoyts charges $17 for an adult now. That's wayyy more than normal price increases related to inflation. Not to mention the food and drinks are still just as hideously overpriced as they always were. So they've almost completely lost me as a customer. I think I went to the movies only twice last year and only once so far this year.
The statement 'Bittorrent isn't an option' is wrong though.
Firstly, Australia actually has the highest per-capita usage of Bittorrent in the world.* This is mostly because we don't get all the decent US/UK shows until a year or more later, and Hulu etc. doesn't allow non-US IPs to connect.
Secondly, yes our internet is metered as you say, but your figures are massively exaggerated. 15 GB for 90 bucks? Only Bigpond would charge such ridiculous rates and noone with half a brain uses them. There are plenty of plans out there offering 100-200 GB for less than AUD ~70 per month. Which really, is heaps of data (considering a TV show compressed using Xvid or H.264 is like 200-300 MB for SD or 600-700 MB for HD, you could download half a dozen TV shows every day of the month). For instance, check out: http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl2plus_pricing.php
So yeah - Bittorrent is definitely an option in Aus, and EVERYONE uses it.
* Source: http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-most-popular-in-australia/
Huh? I'm in Australia and have been watching ~only~ digital free-to-air stations for over 18 months? What do you mean we don't get digital until 2010?
What you probably meant was "in the particular locality where I live, we don't get digital till 2010". Which isn't all of Australia :)
But yeah, rooftop antennae + wall jacks FTW :) Even if rabbit ears work well with digital (which they do), they are ugly as sin.
(Although I must confess I'm currently using a pair of digital rabbit ears, cause I'm living in a multi-story townhouse and can't shove stuff up on the roof!)
Honest question here, I'm not trying to flame or anything. I find it hard to believe than TV-obsessed America your closest transmitter is over 50 miles away. That's insane! Doubly so considering you're on the relatively densely populated eastern fringe.
Here in Australia even small towns will generally have their own transmitter. If you truly live in the middle of nowhere (i.e. big farm with nearest other humans an hour's drive away), it might be an issue ... but I find it hard to believe somewhere 50 miles from NYC is that sparsely populated. Do you live in a reasonably populated area? (doesn't have to be a town ... even 'medium density farmland' is 'populated' by my definition)? If so, why don't they put a repeater up or something?
PS. As an aside ... one curious thing I have noted in America though (I've visited the US eight times) is that you guys seem to broadcast stuff at much greater powers than we do, at least for radio (not sure about TV). In Australia if I drive out of my city, I'd be lucky to hold an FM radio signal further than 15 miles from the edge of town. Our transmitters are turned down pretty low, methinks. In the US though I've picked up strong signals from towns 50-100 miles away.
Couldn't agree more. Great post.
We do have a implied freedom of POLITICAL expression in Australia. So says the High Court. But yeah, you're right. It doesn't cover all expression, and the link with the internet filtering debate is tenuous.
Lol. What's really funny is that it's a false sense of security. Webshield relies on some pretty basic URL/IP filtering that any teen with half a brain could get around in 5 seconds.
So you sign up to a 'safe' ISP so you don't have to watch your kids anymore. And as a result, your kids are now unsupervised and actually download MORE porn than they ever could have before.
It's not. It's interested in blocking child porn, which is altogether a different thing.
Of course, the main objections are:
1) that perfectly legit sites (both adult and non-adult) will get blocked incorrectly as a result. The earlier trials showed it had a pretty high false-positive rate.
2) The government may eventually creep the scope of the filter beyond child porn to anything else that the government of the day feels inappropriate. THAT is a scary thing and starts verging on Chinese-style censorship.
3) It slows down the tubes. This will particularly irritate people in remoter parts of Australia who already have pretty slow tubes to begin with...
Er...no.
The ISP's haven't received the equipment yet, and even when they do, it's entirely opt-in. If you do nothing, your internet will remain exactly the same as it is now.
Guns. Revolution. Over internet filtering. That might be going a little over the top ;) (Although I'm opposed to this filter more vehemently than almost anyone. I'm 98% confident it will never pass Parliament though - it doesn't have the support of either the Greens or the Liberals, and you need at least one of those onside to get anything through the Senate).
You know there are other options you might want to try first, like, protesting, debate, voting the responsible parties out etc.
And if all that fails maybe we could revolt. But a) you don't need guns necessarily; and b) there's still quite a few guns in Australia my good friend.
Just because we have regulated firearms ownerships laws and protections doesn't mean there aren't any firearms! Any farmer will show you a full rack of them in his garage. Americans seem to have this idea though that we don't have any firearms at all for some reason. That's not the case. You can legally own one if you have a reason to. Which I think is perfectly acceptable.
Yeah no kidding. Of these 6 so-called ISPs, I've only ever even heard of one of them (Primus). The other four probably have only a few hundred subscribers. Even Primus isn't really very big. For this trial to have any credibility, it would need to have at least one of the big players in the ISP industry here: Telstra Bigpond, iiNet, Internode, TPG, Westnet, AAPT etc.
Also, one of the participants is already exclusively a provider of filtered internet to schools and businesses! So nothing to prove there.
Really the filter trial will just show how pathetically useless the whole idea is. Kiddie porn isn't on the open web, so this filter won't do anything (except pointlessly slow down speeds for everyone else). The bad stuff is all encrypted, sent via invite-only IRC or private FTP servers, or on peer-to-peer networks. Most likely they use TOR to access it too.
Basically everyone knows this. It slows down access, blocks pages incorrectly (false positives), is trivially circumvented, and doesn't really stop the 'baddies' from getting the stuff they get in the same way as they already do.
Doomed to failure and will never pass Parliament, despite all the hype on Slashdot et al.
Well I can't speak for the whole world, but I honestly think that to some extent it IS a North American problem. But there's a reason for that, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
You guys have had it so good for so long, with your insanely cheap prices and unlimited data. I guess those two things have led to the current state of affairs.
I live in Australia 8 months of the year and the US for 4 months. I have DSL in both countries. I like both of my connections, but for different reasons.
In Australia, ISPs don't throttle, don't restrict, don't do deep packet inspection or anything else like that. It's truly a neutral net. They also don't oversubscribe their bandwidth - in fact my ISP has a proud policy of continually upgrading their capacity so that it can handle 150% of their observed peak demand. So my connection always hits its advertised (8 Mbit) speed, even in peak hours.
BUT ... there is a flipside to all this. As you probably know, Australia has (and has always had) metered bandwidth. You pay for X gigabytes per month (plans generally range from 5 GB entry level to 200+ GB high end). Your line is substantially slowed if you go over that (although you don't pay excess fees). Because of this, the ISPs KNOW how much bandwidth is going to get used ahead of time (roughly), and they can manage their bandwidth/capacity upgrades better, I think.
So there are pros and cons either way. North American connections are cheap and unlimited ... but they might do some funky stuff to your traffic (throttling, DPI, other non-traffic-neutral shenanigans). On the other hand, Australian connections are uncongested, always max out your line speed, and traffic neutral ... but you pay for a set amount of total traffic per month.
Don't really know which I prefer. The Australian connection feels faster (especially for P2P), but the US connection can obviously pull down a lot more per month if I wanted it to.
Yep ... if you are gonna cap/restrict something, then state it clearly. Couldn't agree more.
We went through the same thing here in Australia basically. Truly unlimited accounts used to exist back in the ISDN/early cable days, until high bandwidth applications became commonplace. Then they started putting on loosely worded conditions in their TOS (e.g. "unreasonable amounts").
People complained enough that now, the download and upload caps and policies are clearly worded, and you know what you are getting into (although there are still some offenders out there ... I'm looking at you Dodo, and Bigpond to some extent since they count uploads, which virtually no other Australian ISP does).
Slashdot likes to laugh at us here in Oz because of our download limits. But honestly, I spend a lot of time in the US and a lot of time in Australia, and I actually prefer my Australian connection. Sure I have a monthly download limit, but I clearly know what it is, and can always upgrade my plan if I need more. But unlike they US, I can be confident that they don't do any of this QoS/deep packet inspection/other screwing around with my traffic. I get what I pay for - a pipe with x GB per month, and provided i stay under that, it's lightning fast (I'm on 24 MBps ADSL2+). And if I go over, my connection speed gets reduced until I either buy another data block, or wait until the next month.
(Having said all that, I do admit that your plans are a lot cheaper in the US for the same amount of downloads. That's the problem with living on an island continent 10,000 miles from anywhere and limited undersea cables I guess ;))
Hehe true that.
What's really funny is that in Australia, the toilet is typically in a small room by itself (separate from the bathroom/restroom - whereas in the US it's almost universally in the same room as the shower/bath/basin etc).
So if you have an American guest here in Australia, they might ask "where's the bathroom" (when they really want to go to the toilet). So you tell them. And a while later they come back looking confused and ask again ... "where's the bathroom?". Takes you a while sometimes to realise what they are actually looking for is the toilet!
I can see where you're coming from but that argument only holds if 'shadow' actually does evoke these gut reactions. In Australia, its such a standard term for the opposition minister with the same portfolio, that it doesn't have those connotations. People are just too used to hearing it in this context.
If anything, when I think of 'shadow minister', I think of someone who is 'shadowing', or keeping in check, the actual minister. As someone suggested, like someone opposite you on a playing field or basketball court. That word simply doesn't give me any gut reaction along the lines of 'sinister' or whatever.
The terminology is hundreds of years old and isn't being 'scaled down' at all. It's as strong as it's ever been. So yeah, I don't see it going anywhere. To me, 'alternative' minister sounds weirder ... I just think of 'alternative' lifestyles or drugs etc, lol.
Back on topic though, it's nice to see what I always thought would happen to this Internet filtering scheme happening. It'll get held up in the Senate and die a quiet death, as the government knows it was a hugely unpopular move to begin with.
Everyone can see it was never going to work. And I'm still confident that, despite all the hype on Slashdot etc (OMG Australians are turning into the Chinese, what's going on down there!), this will never, ever get off the ground. It would slow down access, has a huge false positive rate, is trivial to circumvent, is massively unpopular even among non-tech people, and in the current economic downturn, the cost cannot be justified. Not to mention every Australian ISP has publicly stated they will refuse to participate and will fight tooth and nail to stop it happening (it's bad for their business, after all!)
Yep basically this issue hasn't registered on the mainstream public's radar, what with the economic crisis and all. Plus it's still only in trial phase. I imagine if they do eventually decide to try and actually roll this out, there will be a huge uproar from the general public (as soon as they realise their internets are about to get a lot slower due to the filtering).
There are so many gaping flaws in this, though, that I'm actually fairly confident it won't end up happening. Senator Conroy is pushing his agenda for all it's worth, but in the end, it's so ineffective and useless a measure that I can't see it making it through the House and the Senate.
The Liberal Party, who have numbers sufficient to block any Bill, have already publically stated they will oppose the proposed filter. Most ISPs, including the biggest (Telstra) and the most technically competent (Internode), have refused to have anything to do with it. Furthermore, noone in the current economic climate is going to throw money at something that slows down internet access, doesn't block all the content it's aimed at, accidentally blocks content it's NOT aimed at, AND is trivial to circumvent anyway. The budget numbers just don't add up (government projects usually have pretty strict rules about making sure money is actually achieving something - if it's not, projects get canned quickly, and I've seen this myself working for an IT company that mostly contracts with the Federal Govt. in Canberra).
So for all the hype on Slashdot, I remain at least 90% confident that this will go and die a quiet death during the next 12 months, or at the very least, it'll get scaled down massively into something very simple (e.g. removal of certain objectionable entries from DNS servers, which I don't really mind as it doesn't slow down my internet, and I can always use other DNS servers anyway).
Which is, in fact, how it works in Australia (and most other countries with 'metered' connections). You pay X dollars for Y GB per month. If you happen to hit that limit, they throttle your connection down to a slower speed, but you incur no additional charges. They also email/text message you when you hit 70%/90%/100% of your monthly quota.
So you're absolutely right ... the safety of a fixed price is worth it. The ISPs here in Australia that tried to do 'excess usage fees' got bitten because the customers revolted and left the first time they got an abnormally high bill (often because of a virus, or because little Billy was downloading on BitTorrent far too much etc). So now the market pretty much dictates that metered plans are 'capped' at a set fee per month.
Similar to some phone plans here too incidentally, which would have saved the unfortunate guy in this story.
Well keep in mind that all the major Australian political parties are to the left of both of the major American parties. So the 'more conservative' of our two main parties is still probably as liberal, if not more-so, than the Democrats.
Both American parties are quite right-wing, if you look at the full spectrum of political parties across the world. What you guys call 'liberal' is still quite 'conservative' to us.
Conroy is very conservative (in the moral/religious sense, not the political sense - they are two somewhat related but distinct concepts).
Mod parent up. The way this keeps getting brought up on Slashdot makes it sound like it's actually been (or about to be) implemented. Really puts Australia in a bad light when people just skim the headlines and think "OMG Australia has censored internet!". We don't. And we won't.
This thing will never get off the ground. It's just an idea in Senator Conroy's little head. As MANY threads on this will attest to, there are so many things wrong with this plan, it is so ineffective, and so technically flawed, that it will get canned before it even makes it as far as an official Bill of Parliament. You really think they are going to pass a proposal that has a false positive rate of something in the order of 1/50-1/100 pages? You really think that people will agree with something that cripples internet speeds (particularly in the light of this governments promise to boost internet speeds via the new National Broadband Network)? You really think that every company who does business over the Internet will not fight this tooth and nail?
Usually with 'controversial' proposals, you hear some for and some against. On the ABC news site earlier today there was a thread on this exact topic, and for the first time that I've ever seen, ALL the comments, literally 100%, were completely aghast and horrified at this censorship proposal. There is zero public support and fierce opposition from the telecommunications and software industries. People know it won't work and will be trivial to circumvent. It CAN'T work due to the very nature of the Internet. Just ask a Chinese person about their 'firewall' and they will laugh and say that ~everyone~ gets around it very, very easily.
Anyway, point is - its a horrifying proposal, but I'm not worried at this point. There's just so much wrong, and nothing right with it ... and in these tough economic plans, any Government plan that isn't cost-effective will never see the light of day.
Yeah I saw that mistake in the summary and thought, haha - they screwed up. But as an Australian, we have just 'sprung forward' in the last couple of weeks. So the title was accurate for us Southern hemisphere-ites.
Having said that - I don't like DST either and would rather they just did away with it. Hate having to go round adjusting all my random non-NTP-connected clocks twice a year. I live at 35 deg S latitude and although I do appreciate the later sunsets in summer, I could do this just as effectively by getting my lazy ass out of bed earlier so I got home a bit earlier ;)
And I thought I couldn't hate the TSA any more than I already do... :(
I'm Australian. But I have an American wife and we regularly travel back to the US for Christmas and other family occasions. Unlike most non-Americans that post on Slashdot, I don't have the whole 'OMG the US sucks' mentality ... actually I love the US more than probably a lot of Americans do. It's a great country.
But I absolutely detest travelling by air to or within the US! Every time we fly back there, I dread the whole 'take off your shoes', the scary border dudes with sub-machine guns, the 'are you being honest about the purpose of your visit' (even though I'm with my US-citizen wife and have a record on their screen of over 50 previous US entries), the lovely little TSA notes in my luggage (we inspected your bags, we may have taken something ... or not! who knows...) and your bottom-of-the-barrel airlines (seriously, the US is the only country where you don't get food on the plane unless you buy it).
So yeah, now I have another thing to add to that list: "some TSA dude might have taken your camera". Hooray!
Are you really sure about that? At least you can enter Australia without having all ten of your fingerprints scanned and stored indefinitely. And we don't have anywhere near as many CCTV cameras as the UK. I travel in all three countries (US, UK, AU) extensively and each one has its own areas where they are 'good' and 'bad' when it comes to these kind of things:
The UK is definitely the surveillance 'winner' and has the most governmental red tape it seems.
The US has the most invasive border/entry procedures (10 fingerprints + photos, and immigration officers that are, to be frank, rude and scary).
Australia has by far the strictest customs/import checks, and also quite strict border/entry procedures (although no fingerprints etc) ... but once you're in, you can do whatever you like. As a foreigner, it's not difficult to, say, open a bank account here. In the UK though when I tried, it took months of fiddling around and paperwork, even though I was a permanent resident.
So I think all three countries are doing equally 'bad' on this race to the bottom :(
In Australia you have to provide some form of ID even for a prepaid phone. You can buy the SIM itself off a rack without ID. But it's inactive until you call up to add your initial credit, and they ask you to provide some details.
The difference is, I'm fairly sure that that information is only retained by the telephone company you are signed up with, in case the phone IS later used in a crime. The police can then come to the phone company with a warrant and grab those details. There is no centralised database like the UK proposal.