Dear Stephen Conroy,

I work in the IT Industry in Sydney and so I have been closely following the proposal to filter the internet at an ISP levels. I won't re-iterate what I'm sure other more experienced experts than myself have already told you: that the plan is unworkable both from a technical level and from a government level or that it is going to cost millions of dollars and be unlikely to deliver any real outcomes.

I'm writing to you about the international press about the plan which is hampering Australia's ability to be taken seriously in the IT space. Articles such as this one, which came out today, have long lasting detrimental affect in terms of the reputation of Australia's tech-saviness:

ars technica net filtering article

Americans and Europeans read articles like this and quite rightly think Australians do not understand the internet at a government level and are still trying to treat it like books, TV and Film. In a globalized economy this ignorance damages our ability to be participate in the tech economy. Listen to the ISPs, your technical experts, consumers and voters and stop this plan which is designed only to make those who do not understand it feel a sense of protection that they do not have.

Thanks

Here are some photos of a recent trip I went on up to Oxley: Oxley run photos 26/10/2008.

I wrote a quick script called test-sudoers.py which reads a sudoers file and can answer questions like "what commands can a particular user run on a particular host?" and "can a particular user run a command?". The latter is particularly useful because using return codes that can be scripted and allow certain actions based on whether they can run a specific command.

Its also very useful if you are writing a massive sudoers file (as I manage at my current job) and need tools to probe and prod it before rolling it out.

Next on the feature list is netgroup support through NSS but so far I haven't had much luck working out the best way to go about that. Stay tuned.

An Australian party running for the senate which allows you to Vote Online on each issue they vote on.

I had a similar idea recently thinking about how referendums and so forth are only extreme because of the human cost of organising and counting them. With computers that cost can be very low.

Literally digg up this bill I love it.

I went to the train station because I was running late and foolishly thought it might be slightly faster than walking (in my case its not I've since found out). At the train station I saw I had two $10 notes and not wanting to get a fistful of change out of the machine headed over to one of the windows. I handed him the note and said where I was going, he took it and then gave me change for a $5. I told him I had given him a $10 and became slightly irate. He gave some bullshit story about how they always put the money on the side of the cash register, took a $5 note out and placed it on the side claiming it was mine.

I told the supervisor, he took down my details and gave me a call a few hours later. He informed me that they had balanced up the till and that it had balanced perfectly.

I'm 100% certain that I gave a $10 note so I'm left with this burning question as to why they would steal it. I can only think that with the prices of trains these days the average person would be unlikely to notice that they are short changed and they use this to supplement their wages. Is there supervisor in on this scam as well? How much would they skim in a typical day, $100 at most surely otherwise people would notice. Why not just give up the game when I caught him out? Maybe it really was a mistake and the guy got lucky and just overpaid someone else.

Wikipedia mentions that shoe tossing may indicate gang warfare, where to buy crack or heroin, or sites where people have been murdered.

I think Rage Against the Machine promoters are performing some kind of DOS on eBay. Check out the prices on these tickets. In case the link is dead this is a ticket bid up by 5 bids to $100,000 and there are others for $16 million. A tad excessive perhaps.

Kanye West is outselling 50 Cent. 50 cent may have just bet the rest of his change.

I'm selling my Sony Vaio SZ15GP on EBay, if you know anyone in the market for one send them the listing.

Guide for SUSE linux.