Yeah I think this point was brought up in the dw-world article (in English) linked to this story. It's like Internet Banking, if you use it from a computer which isn't secure or which you can't reasonably trust (eg. a computer in an internet cafe) you can't expect your session to be secure. Same with this system.
I think the idea is to create a system where verified emails and documents can be securely sent, eg. if I want to cancel the contract with my phone company I use my ID+PIN reader gadget to send them a verified email or document. Instead of the current way of sending a paper letter with my signature on it (which sure as hell is not a secure system). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail (the en wikipedia article is just a stub)
You wouldn't expect people to use such a system from cracked or internet cafe computers any more than they would use such computers for their internet banking.
For those who can't read German here's a basic summary of the article:
There is a vulnerability not in the ID cards but in the desktop software that makes use of them for authentication on the Net. This software's update mechanism is apparently vulnerable to a DNS spoofing attack that would allow a skilled attacker to download and unpack a ZIP file on the user's machine (but not directly execute any code). The article was updated to say that the government agency responsible for this software has stopped downloads of it as of yesterday and there's no a press release on that agency's website saying they're working on a fix: https://www.bsi.bund.de/sid_9CC745E82FC9ED59215EB75FB9479819/ContentBSI/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/AusweisApp_101110.html (Also in German)
The ID cards for the health system are a completely different thing in Germany. Since it's run on the basis of insurance companies* (Krankenkassen) you get a normal chip-and-PIN card from your insurance company that you then give to the doctor or hospital staff when it comes time do sort out the paperwork.
These ID cards on the other hand are only for German citizens and are issued by the federal government and have a much more general usage. Foreigners like me who live here can't get a German ID card and everybody will still have to have a health insurance card.
* Organised through insurance companies but not like the US - it's universal healthcare and still majority taxpayer-funded
Well, it's like changing a tire, writing your own interrupt handlers, or hand-optimizing memory usage.
It's something everybody should do at least once in their life so they understand the process.
It's not at all like changing a tyre, there is absolutely no reason for a normal non-technical user of Linux (ie. someone who just wants to use the computer without worrying how it works) to compile a kernel. All the non-experimental (and some of the experimental) hardware drivers are already included in all the major distros and if a non-technical user stuffs up their computer so that it no longer boots the best solution is to simply re-install.
I'm a sysadmin and even we don't compile kernels, not because it's some lost art but because it's unnecessary and introduces custom unsupported configurations.
There's nothing more frustrating than seeing people put off Linux because some geek told them they need to know how to compile a kernel/use vi/some other arcane task which is unnecessary with modern distros and config tools.
Are we talking passenger trains, freight trains, or both?
Freight and passenger trains. One of the politicians behind it stated a major goal of it was to virtually eliminate the need for truck traffic over the Alps to and from Italy for trade. Both because of the environmental costs in the delicate Alpine environment and the simple fact that they don't want to have to keep building new freeways in such a small country.
Will this (presumably) be an electrified train system, so no fumes in the tunnels, or something else?
Electric, just like the rest of Switzerland's railway network.
Any word on where the power is expected to come from if electrified (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro? I'm guessing you wouldn't run a train system on wind or solar, but perhaps I'm wrong)?
The Swiss Federal Office of Energy describes where electricity in Switzerland comes from: "Hydropower plants contributed 56.1% to overall electricity production, followed by nuclear power plants (39.0%) and conventional thermal and other power plants (4.9%)."
It brings to mind the old joke comparing European heaven and European hell - in European heaven the Swiss are running the government, and for good reason.
The Java, Flash and restricted codecs are all in the Opensuse repositories. Opensuse installs flash and java automatically when you install it if you have the 'non-oss' add on CD. If not you can simply add this repo after installtion and install them. The restricted codecs are a 1-click install: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats [opensuse-community.org]
The procedure might be slightly different from Ubuntu's but it couldn't be simpler, really.
(double-post the other one I accidentally clicked 'post anonymously')
From what I've seen, and heard from Dutch people, the only problems created by legal marijuana where caused by the 'drug tourists'. People (usually ordinary people, not druggos) from the UK, Germany etc. who went there (in particular to Amsterdam) for a wild weekend. The organised crime and harder drugs followed them there.
Or put it another way, if there were Dutch-style 'coffee'-shops in London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels etc. there'd be nothing dirty or infamous about Amsterdam, it'd be just a pleasant city on some canals.
Am I the only person here still using Mandriva? It certainly would explain why some bug reports I've filed seem to have taken forever for anyone to look at them, and even longer for a fix.
As a previous long time Mandriva user I can tell you this has always been the case. Even one where I provided a fix in the bug report wasn't looked at for over a year. In fact it only got looked at because I made a fuss on a mailing list or forum when I was talking about another problem and someone told me I should file a bug.
One of the reasons that I moved to Opensuse last year, and haven't regretted it.
For example, it wouldn't play MP3s out of the box (ridiculous!) so I went to the OpenSUSE site and found a very lengthy and poorly formatted forum-style wiki on setting up non-free decoders. I tried several of the different options and none worked. So after hours of hunting I came across a blog walking me through adding the gstreamer back end for Phonon and all of the restricted codecs, which were in a separate Packman repo with a dubious cert. After about 8 hours and a couple reboots I was finally able to listen to MP3s.
I don't know what wiki you're referring to but the opensuse-community one couldn't be simpler (1-click install): http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats This is the page linked to in the sticky post in the multimedia forum, the one people who ask about codecs in the forums are directed to and it is, or is linked from, the first 2 websites listed from a Google search for 'opensuse mp3 codec'.
(the opensuse-community.org wiki exists basically to serve up this page, and a handful of others, that can't go in the main opensuse.org wiki because of these legal issues)
"For a given quantity of light, an incandescent light bulb produces more heat (and consumes more power) than a fluorescent lamp. Incandescent lamps' heat output increases load on air conditioning in the summer, but the heat from lighting can contribute to building heating in cold weather. [Prof. Peter Lund, Helsinki University of Technology, [http://www.tkk.fi/Units/AES/staff/lund.htm] on p. C5 in Helsingin Sanomat Oct. 23, 2007.]"
Yeah obviously incandescent bulbs produce more heat, the whole idea of replacing them with fluorescents is that the fluorescents don't waste nearly so much energy by radiating heat instead of light.
If you get rid of the incandescent lights in your house then your central heating system will pick up the slack and will most likely to it much more efficiently since the central heating is actually designed for that. If you can find a study comparing the efficiency of heating a house with the waste heat from lightbulbs compared to getting the same amount of heat from a central heating system you might have a point.
Yes, there was a lot if controversy mainly because the mining lobby ran a huge and very well funded propaganda campaign.
Rudd went because it became obvious he just couldn't handle it, he was just too unwilling to compromise and did t&he whole response to it ineptly. I doubt there's a majority of aussies against a tax in some form - just look at the combined raw %age who voted green or labor, both parties strongly for the tax
That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states, with a housing price epidemic and using sweet fuck all sustainable power - but hey we can get really fast internet!
Australia also has the world's 2nd highest standard of living (HDI), per capita GDP that put it among the top few richest nations on the planet, the smallest government debt and deficit of any major western economy etc. It'll always be possible to point out problems in the country but that doesn't mean we should not do major infrastructure projects, we clearly have a national weak-spot in telecommunications so why not fix it?
Apart from that it's a simple false dichotomy - doing the NBN doesn't prevent us from solving the other problems you listed at the same time. The government's already tried pumping billions into the house market through the FHG and all it did was inflate prices so some more fundemental reforms are needed (eg. no more negative gearing on investment properties). The (shameful) lack of sustainable power will hopefully get some progress this term as the Greens push the government towards either a carbon price or a real ETS that doesn't have too many concessions to be useful.
If we followed your mentality we'd still have dirt-roads and septic-tanks everywhere, instead of bitumen and sewerage pipes.
but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already
It's not since we'd be fools to just let large mining companies take *our* resources out of *our* ground without paying a reasonable tax on them. The government isn't squandering the money either, they're using it to help fund superannuation increases meaning we might be the about the only western country that can actually afford to fund the retirement of our ageing population.
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability.
More than on the cusp, in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and some states of Australia for example, prostitution is a legal, regulated industry.
thanks for that information. Its a whole lot easier a pill to swallow that one elected nutjob is making outlandish remarks rather than having to swallow the entire country is bonkers and more than one elected nutjob has come up with this idea.
Who said he was elected? He's just a well-connected lobbyist who has a disproportionate influence on government policy, he's not and never has been (AFAIK) elected to any public office.
The organisation he runs is probably the closest thing to being extremists on road-safety that you can get. They don't just campaign against the usual (and quite real) problems on the roads - drunk driving, speeding, unlicenced drivers etc. They're against everything:
-They're against tow bars because pedestrians walking behind a car with a tow bar can hit their shins on them (open your bloody eyes and don't walk so close to the car!) -they're against the expansion of cycle paths and cycling in general because they believe it hostile to pedestrians - they're against segways (they might be wanky but there's nothing really dangerous about them) - they want to put completely unreasonable restrictions on young drivers such as not allowing them to take passengers at night (great way to increase the numbers of drunk drivers when everyone needs to drive themselves).
Simon Singh is an idiot if he thinks he can make libellous comments about the BCA *without having the proof to back up what he says*. There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
1) The judges ruled that Sing's comments fell under 'fair comment', an expression of his opinion that was allowed under freedom of expression, whether or not what he said was actually true. See http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/350.html
2) The BCA was asked to show the evidence it had that Sing was wrong - ie. that chiropractors could treat common childhood illnesses. The evidence was examined in the British Medical Journal and found to be a load of crap - half the studies they cited had nothing to do with chiropractic, they misrepresented the conclusions of others and the remaining had basic methodological errors making them invalid: http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2766.full?view=long&pmid=19589818
So far from being an idiot Sing was proven completely right - not only he can make 'libellous' comments against chiropractic because of free speech laws but those comments were actually proven to be correct.
What is it with Australia? They want to filter the Intertubes in was that make Iran look like an island of freedom,
Actually thanks to the recent election this filter is basically dead, it will never get through the senate.
Are the people that propose these law actually elected and represent the views of the average Aussie?
They're elected but the elections are on topics like the economy and boat people. Most Aussies think things like internet filtering and copyright are irrelevant side issues and don't elect politicians based on these issues, so nothing changes.
Exactly, so distros have started incuding extra packages which apply either a KDE or GNOME theme to Firefox and OO, eg. on opensuse 11.2 I have: OpenOffice_org-kde4 MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE
The idea that you can understand something like privacy laws, which are complex and nuanced, from a half-nonsense google translate is just crap. My German isn't perfect but here are the main points of the article from the German original (http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,713153,00.html):
* Video surveillance is banned in areas that have a 'private character' to them such as toilets, change rooms and rest/break rooms. It's still allowed in other areas as long as employees are informed and there's no attempt to hide the cameras
* Recruitment - no data from social networks such as Facebook may be used as part of the recruitment process, social networks specifically designed for recruitment (I reckon they mean ones like Linkedin) are still allowed to be used
* You're still allowed to use any other publicly accessible data off the net, although there may be restrictions related to how old it is or whether the employee/candidate has access to update or remove the data
* Medical examinations - may only be used when there's a good reason
* Screening (they define it as comprehensive comparisons of one employee against another) may only be used under strict conditions. The data must be handled anonymously unless it shows strong evidence of a problem (eg. criminal activity).
* The law establishes conditions under which phone and email communication can be monitored. These conditions vary depending on documentation requirements, the type of business and the individual usage agreements for IT in each company.
Is this really what the average Australian wants? Surely the Assie public is not this stupid?
No and no. The problem is that just like in any other western democracy internet issues tend to be more of a sideshow. People focus on the economy, healthcare and education. This allows fuckwit politicians to sneak in these laws once elected.
Still, even though Labor's likely to win the election this week, there'll be a big swing to the Greens. Add that to the fact that the Liberals (conservatives) have said they'll vote against Internet censorship and it's likely that at least that bill will never be passed.
I doubt this mobile phone censorship bullshit will go anywhere either - it's just not practical and is probably just something suggested by an idiot politician who can't operate a VCR.
Anyway reading through it it shows a stunning amount of common-sense, practicality and rationality. Really the Labor party should dump the shit that's currently in their social policies and replace it verbatim with this and they might be back on track.
'As yet, there's also no way of downloading [Google] maps to a memory card for offline navigation, so you could have major problems in areas without a 3G signal'
It's not just areas without 3G signal, in Europe if I drive a few hundred kms (as little as 100km in one direction) I'm in another country. Despite the EU brining them a bit under control the data charges are still punishingly expensive - it's not worth it to pay 20 Euros in data charges just to navigate somewhere.
As I said all the software is available for free in the online repositories, the commercial stuff (java, flash etc.) is in non-oss but still available for free whether you bought the box or downloaded for free.
You are only paying for the support and the convenience of not having to download everything using online repositories.
(This is as far as I can tell from forum posts and info on the opensuse website, if you have other info from a reliable source please post the link.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I think this point was brought up in the dw-world article (in English) linked to this story. It's like Internet Banking, if you use it from a computer which isn't secure or which you can't reasonably trust (eg. a computer in an internet cafe) you can't expect your session to be secure. Same with this system.
I think the idea is to create a system where verified emails and documents can be securely sent, eg. if I want to cancel the contract with my phone company I use my ID+PIN reader gadget to send them a verified email or document. Instead of the current way of sending a paper letter with my signature on it (which sure as hell is not a secure system). http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail (the en wikipedia article is just a stub)
You wouldn't expect people to use such a system from cracked or internet cafe computers any more than they would use such computers for their internet banking.
For those who can't read German here's a basic summary of the article:
There is a vulnerability not in the ID cards but in the desktop software that makes use of them for authentication on the Net. This software's update mechanism is apparently vulnerable to a DNS spoofing attack that would allow a skilled attacker to download and unpack a ZIP file on the user's machine (but not directly execute any code). The article was updated to say that the government agency responsible for this software has stopped downloads of it as of yesterday and there's no a press release on that agency's website saying they're working on a fix:
https://www.bsi.bund.de/sid_9CC745E82FC9ED59215EB75FB9479819/ContentBSI/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/AusweisApp_101110.html (Also in German)
The ID cards for the health system are a completely different thing in Germany. Since it's run on the basis of insurance companies* (Krankenkassen) you get a normal chip-and-PIN card from your insurance company that you then give to the doctor or hospital staff when it comes time do sort out the paperwork.
These ID cards on the other hand are only for German citizens and are issued by the federal government and have a much more general usage. Foreigners like me who live here can't get a German ID card and everybody will still have to have a health insurance card.
* Organised through insurance companies but not like the US - it's universal healthcare and still majority taxpayer-funded
Well, it's like changing a tire, writing your own interrupt handlers, or hand-optimizing memory usage.
It's something everybody should do at least once in their life so they understand the process.
It's not at all like changing a tyre, there is absolutely no reason for a normal non-technical user of Linux (ie. someone who just wants to use the computer without worrying how it works) to compile a kernel. All the non-experimental (and some of the experimental) hardware drivers are already included in all the major distros and if a non-technical user stuffs up their computer so that it no longer boots the best solution is to simply re-install.
I'm a sysadmin and even we don't compile kernels, not because it's some lost art but because it's unnecessary and introduces custom unsupported configurations.
There's nothing more frustrating than seeing people put off Linux because some geek told them they need to know how to compile a kernel/use vi/some other arcane task which is unnecessary with modern distros and config tools.
Are we talking passenger trains, freight trains, or both?
Freight and passenger trains. One of the politicians behind it stated a major goal of it was to virtually eliminate the need for truck traffic over the Alps to and from Italy for trade. Both because of the environmental costs in the delicate Alpine environment and the simple fact that they don't want to have to keep building new freeways in such a small country.
Will this (presumably) be an electrified train system, so no fumes in the tunnels, or something else?
Electric, just like the rest of Switzerland's railway network.
See the article "Die Stromversorgung 50 Hz und die Kabelanlagen im Gotthard-Basistunnel" (50Hz Electricity Supply and Power Cable Systems in the Gotthard Tunnel) from the website of the Tunnel's construction company: http://www.alptransit.ch/de/projekt-alptransit-gotthard/bahntechnik/fachartikel/
Any word on where the power is expected to come from if electrified (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro? I'm guessing you wouldn't run a train system on wind or solar, but perhaps I'm wrong)?
The Swiss Federal Office of Energy describes where electricity in Switzerland comes from: "Hydropower plants contributed 56.1% to overall electricity production, followed by nuclear power plants (39.0%) and conventional thermal and other power plants (4.9%)."
http://www.bfe.admin.ch/energie/00588/00589/00644/index.html?lang=en&msg-id=26388
It brings to mind the old joke comparing European heaven and European hell - in European heaven the Swiss are running the government, and for good reason.
The Java, Flash and restricted codecs are all in the Opensuse repositories. Opensuse installs flash and java automatically when you install it if you have the 'non-oss' add on CD. If not you can simply add this repo after installtion and install them.
The restricted codecs are a 1-click install: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats [opensuse-community.org]
The procedure might be slightly different from Ubuntu's but it couldn't be simpler, really.
(double-post the other one I accidentally clicked 'post anonymously')
We use RHEL at work here too - for the servers, and it's fine. On my workstation laptop I have a nice new Opensuse 11.3 install.
It's a case of needing to use the right tool for the job, and RHEL definitely isn't the right tool for the job of desktop or laptop OS.
From what I've seen, and heard from Dutch people, the only problems created by legal marijuana where caused by the 'drug tourists'. People (usually ordinary people, not druggos) from the UK, Germany etc. who went there (in particular to Amsterdam) for a wild weekend. The organised crime and harder drugs followed them there.
Or put it another way, if there were Dutch-style 'coffee'-shops in London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels etc. there'd be nothing dirty or infamous about Amsterdam, it'd be just a pleasant city on some canals.
Am I the only person here still using Mandriva? It certainly would explain why some bug reports I've filed seem to have taken forever for anyone to look at them, and even longer for a fix.
As a previous long time Mandriva user I can tell you this has always been the case. Even one where I provided a fix in the bug report wasn't looked at for over a year. In fact it only got looked at because I made a fuss on a mailing list or forum when I was talking about another problem and someone told me I should file a bug.
One of the reasons that I moved to Opensuse last year, and haven't regretted it.
Maybe so, but these problems have been fixed in the 11.x releases. zypper works beautifully now, and fast too. And installing the codecs couldn't be easier: http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_formats/11.3
For example, it wouldn't play MP3s out of the box (ridiculous!) so I went to the OpenSUSE site and found a very lengthy and poorly formatted forum-style wiki on setting up non-free decoders. I tried several of the different options and none worked. So after hours of hunting I came across a blog walking me through adding the gstreamer back end for Phonon and all of the restricted codecs, which were in a separate Packman repo with a dubious cert. After about 8 hours and a couple reboots I was finally able to listen to MP3s.
I don't know what wiki you're referring to but the opensuse-community one couldn't be simpler (1-click install): http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats
This is the page linked to in the sticky post in the multimedia forum, the one people who ask about codecs in the forums are directed to and it is, or is linked from, the first 2 websites listed from a Google search for 'opensuse mp3 codec'.
(the opensuse-community.org wiki exists basically to serve up this page, and a handful of others, that can't go in the main opensuse.org wiki because of these legal issues)
"For a given quantity of light, an incandescent light bulb produces more heat (and consumes more power) than a fluorescent lamp. Incandescent lamps' heat output increases load on air conditioning in the summer, but the heat from lighting can contribute to building heating in cold weather. [Prof. Peter Lund, Helsinki University of Technology, [http://www.tkk.fi/Units/AES/staff/lund.htm] on p. C5 in Helsingin Sanomat Oct. 23, 2007.]"
Yeah obviously incandescent bulbs produce more heat, the whole idea of replacing them with fluorescents is that the fluorescents don't waste nearly so much energy by radiating heat instead of light.
If you get rid of the incandescent lights in your house then your central heating system will pick up the slack and will most likely to it much more efficiently since the central heating is actually designed for that. If you can find a study comparing the efficiency of heating a house with the waste heat from lightbulbs compared to getting the same amount of heat from a central heating system you might have a point.
Yes, there was a lot if controversy mainly because the mining lobby ran a huge and very well funded propaganda campaign.
Rudd went because it became obvious he just couldn't handle it, he was just too unwilling to compromise and did t&he whole response to it ineptly. I doubt there's a majority of aussies against a tax in some form - just look at the combined raw %age who voted green or labor, both parties strongly for the tax
That's fantastic, a country with a serious water crises in at least 3 states, with a housing price epidemic and using sweet fuck all sustainable power - but hey we can get really fast internet!
Australia also has the world's 2nd highest standard of living (HDI), per capita GDP that put it among the top few richest nations on the planet, the smallest government debt and deficit of any major western economy etc.
It'll always be possible to point out problems in the country but that doesn't mean we should not do major infrastructure projects, we clearly have a national weak-spot in telecommunications so why not fix it?
Apart from that it's a simple false dichotomy - doing the NBN doesn't prevent us from solving the other problems you listed at the same time. The government's already tried pumping billions into the house market through the FHG and all it did was inflate prices so some more fundemental reforms are needed (eg. no more negative gearing on investment properties). The (shameful) lack of sustainable power will hopefully get some progress this term as the Greens push the government towards either a carbon price or a real ETS that doesn't have too many concessions to be useful.
If we followed your mentality we'd still have dirt-roads and septic-tanks everywhere, instead of bitumen and sewerage pipes.
but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already
It's not since we'd be fools to just let large mining companies take *our* resources out of *our* ground without paying a reasonable tax on them. The government isn't squandering the money either, they're using it to help fund superannuation increases meaning we might be the about the only western country that can actually afford to fund the retirement of our ageing population.
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability.
More than on the cusp, in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and some states of Australia for example, prostitution is a legal, regulated industry.
thanks for that information. Its a whole lot easier a pill to swallow that one elected nutjob is making outlandish remarks rather than having to swallow the entire country is bonkers and more than one elected nutjob has come up with this idea.
Who said he was elected? He's just a well-connected lobbyist who has a disproportionate influence on government policy, he's not and never has been (AFAIK) elected to any public office.
The organisation he runs is probably the closest thing to being extremists on road-safety that you can get. They don't just campaign against the usual (and quite real) problems on the roads - drunk driving, speeding, unlicenced drivers etc. They're against everything:
-They're against tow bars because pedestrians walking behind a car with a tow bar can hit their shins on them (open your bloody eyes and don't walk so close to the car!)
-they're against the expansion of cycle paths and cycling in general because they believe it hostile to pedestrians
- they're against segways (they might be wanky but there's nothing really dangerous about them)
- they want to put completely unreasonable restrictions on young drivers such as not allowing them to take passengers at night (great way to increase the numbers of drunk drivers when everyone needs to drive themselves).
Simon Singh is an idiot if he thinks he can make libellous comments about the BCA *without having the proof to back up what he says*. There is the concrete defence against libel cases in the UK - be able to prove what you say. Simple.
1) The judges ruled that Sing's comments fell under 'fair comment', an expression of his opinion that was allowed under freedom of expression, whether or not what he said was actually true. See http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/350.html
2) The BCA was asked to show the evidence it had that Sing was wrong - ie. that chiropractors could treat common childhood illnesses. The evidence was examined in the British Medical Journal and found to be a load of crap - half the studies they cited had nothing to do with chiropractic, they misrepresented the conclusions of others and the remaining had basic methodological errors making them invalid: http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2766.full?view=long&pmid=19589818
So far from being an idiot Sing was proven completely right - not only he can make 'libellous' comments against chiropractic because of free speech laws but those comments were actually proven to be correct.
What is it with Australia? They want to filter the Intertubes in was that make Iran look like an island of freedom,
Actually thanks to the recent election this filter is basically dead, it will never get through the senate.
Are the people that propose these law actually elected and represent the views of the average Aussie?
They're elected but the elections are on topics like the economy and boat people. Most Aussies think things like internet filtering and copyright are irrelevant side issues and don't elect politicians based on these issues, so nothing changes.
Exactly, so distros have started incuding extra packages which apply either a KDE or GNOME theme to Firefox and OO, eg. on opensuse 11.2 I have:
OpenOffice_org-kde4
MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE
The idea that you can understand something like privacy laws, which are complex and nuanced, from a half-nonsense google translate is just crap. My German isn't perfect but here are the main points of the article from the German original (http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/0,1518,713153,00.html):
* Video surveillance is banned in areas that have a 'private character' to them such as toilets, change rooms and rest/break rooms. It's still allowed in other areas as long as employees are informed and there's no attempt to hide the cameras
* Recruitment - no data from social networks such as Facebook may be used as part of the recruitment process, social networks specifically designed for recruitment (I reckon they mean ones like Linkedin) are still allowed to be used
* You're still allowed to use any other publicly accessible data off the net, although there may be restrictions related to how old it is or whether the employee/candidate has access to update or remove the data
* Medical examinations - may only be used when there's a good reason
* Screening (they define it as comprehensive comparisons of one employee against another) may only be used under strict conditions. The data must be handled anonymously unless it shows strong evidence of a problem (eg. criminal activity).
* The law establishes conditions under which phone and email communication can be monitored. These conditions vary depending on documentation requirements, the type of business and the individual usage agreements for IT in each company.
Is this really what the average Australian wants? Surely the Assie public is not this stupid?
No and no. The problem is that just like in any other western democracy internet issues tend to be more of a sideshow. People focus on the economy, healthcare and education. This allows fuckwit politicians to sneak in these laws once elected.
Still, even though Labor's likely to win the election this week, there'll be a big swing to the Greens. Add that to the fact that the Liberals (conservatives) have said they'll vote against Internet censorship and it's likely that at least that bill will never be passed.
I doubt this mobile phone censorship bullshit will go anywhere either - it's just not practical and is probably just something suggested by an idiot politician who can't operate a VCR.
Yeah, the wikipedia info is a copy-paste of their policy page: http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php/policies
Anyway reading through it it shows a stunning amount of common-sense, practicality and rationality. Really the Labor party should dump the shit that's currently in their social policies and replace it verbatim with this and they might be back on track.
With the enormous caveat that:
'As yet, there's also no way of downloading [Google] maps to a memory card for offline navigation, so you could have major problems in areas without a 3G signal'
It's not just areas without 3G signal, in Europe if I drive a few hundred kms (as little as 100km in one direction) I'm in another country. Despite the EU brining them a bit under control the data charges are still punishingly expensive - it's not worth it to pay 20 Euros in data charges just to navigate somewhere.
As I said all the software is available for free in the online repositories, the commercial stuff (java, flash etc.) is in non-oss but still available for free whether you bought the box or downloaded for free.
You are only paying for the support and the convenience of not having to download everything using online repositories.
(This is as far as I can tell from forum posts and info on the opensuse website, if you have other info from a reliable source please post the link.)