Archive for January, 2010
Internet Censorship in Australia… again
Posted by Aaron in Filter Circumvention, Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on 17 January, 2010
It is with huge disappointment that I see Conroy still pushing ahead with his brainless attempt to censor the Internet. The policy has morphed slightly, it’s now only blocking “RC” content.
Conroy claims that this is to “bring the Internet in line with other media, like publications, radio, TV and Movies”. However, anyone who knows where the word “Internet” comes from will (hopefully) immediately see the problem: The word “Internet” comes from shortening “Interconnected Network”. The Internet isn’t a media for publication or broadcast. It’s a communications medium like the telephone or postal systems. We don’t “filter” them, so how, exactly, is the “filter” going to bring the Internet in line with similar mediums?
The results of the government’s 12-month-late live pilot were unsurprising, for the most part. After all, the government left it up to Enex to determine what were acceptable success criteria.
As a result, we end up with gems like the claim that a 10% speed reduction is “negligible”. Let me explain why this is just wrong. I have an ADSL2+ Internet connection. Being around 2km from the exchange, I get around 13Mbps. A 10% reduction in speed equates to around 1300kbps, or around 160kB/s. While it is true that this is not much, it does not meet the definition of “negligible”. According to wikipedia: “In engineering, mathematics, physics and similar disciplines, the term negligible refers to the quantities so small that they can be ignored (neglected) when studying the larger effect.”
The result of the test? A success, of course. It was a foregone conclusion, due to their being no success criteria specified. Not to mention that it failed to test the really important things. For example: whether the filter will still be effective in 10 years, when we have 100Mbps internet (the filters weren’t tested above 8Mbps) and are using IPv6 (none of the filters can handle IPv6 traffic, but Enex didn’t even test it), or even if the filterboxes are susceptible to DoS attacks.
Now to explain again why we still shouldn’t go ahead with this:
- The Internet is not a broadcast media like TV or radio, nor a publication like a magazine or newspaper. Trying to classify it as if it is is just stupid.
- The majority of RC content is not illegal to possess or view anyway. It’s only illegal to display (in public) or distribute (within Australia).
- An ISP filter cannot hope to block even a tiny fraction of the RC material on the web. The blacklist will be compiled by a complaints system. Complaints have been shown to take months to process. The current ACMA blacklist currently contains considerably less than 1000 RC URLs (1000 is actually very generous, since the ACMA blacklist contains stuff all the way down to MA15+). There are well over 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique pages indexed by google. If there is only 1000 out of 1,000,000,000,000 URLs on the Internet that are actually RC (0.0000001%), then the problem is so small that there is no need to spend millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars (both taxes and increased ISP fees to cover the cost of implementation) on such a small problem. If there really is so much RC stuff on the web, then such a tiny blacklist, that takes months to add new sites is not going to have any appreciable effect upon people “accidentally stumbling” across it.
- It will not work. Anyone suitably determined is not going to be stopped by a blacklist-based ISP filter anyway. As I have pointed out on this very blog, it is incredibly simple to bypass the majority of filters. The live pilot results confirmed this, showing that none of the products tested were able to block even the majority of circumvention techniques. The Internet is not designed to be censored. There are many, many ways to bypass censorship, and the only way to make it effective is to do what China is doing (cutting itself off from the rest of the Internet) at which point it stops being the Internet.
If Conroy wants to continue with this mad scheme then he should not be surprised when it blows up in his face.
I have returned. And I am bored…
Posted by Aaron in Random ramblings on 17 January, 2010
As the title says: I am bored. Boredom is the only real reason I update this blog anymore.
This post will be about whatever comes across my mind. Therefore, expect random topic changes.
My Desktop PC
My parents don’t like it. “It uses so much power…” They’re right, at least in part: I tend to leave it on overnight in order to take advantage of our 60GB of off-peak quota, since I could (if I really tried) burn through our 60GB peak in 2 weeks, or so. The specs of the system don’t help, either:
- Gigabyte P35-DS3 motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo, overclocked from 2.33 to 3.5GHz
- 4GB of G.Skill DDR2 RAM, overclocked from 800Mhz to 1GHz (in order to get the CPU above 2.8GHz)
- 512MB Sapphire Radeon 3870
- 4 Western Digital Hard Disks:
- 1 x 80GB (IDE)
- 1 x 320GB (SATA)
- 2 x 640GB (SATA)
- Pioneer 20x DVD burner (SATA)
- 600W Coolermaster PSU
- Logitech G15 Keyboard
- Logitech G5 Gaming Mouse
- Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2
- Logitech Dual Action
- IBM Model M Keyboard
- Samsung 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor
- Some old, Dell-branded 17″ CRT from 1997
As you’d probably expect, that PC uses a fair amount of power. However, for a 2-year-old PC, it doesn’t perform too badly when gaming.
There are, of course, other ways to do offpeak downloading, but they are not without their own problems. My laptop doesn’t really have enough free space for me to fill it up with torrents while I wait for them to seed and setting the desktop to shut down after completing its downloads doesn’t really reduce its power consumption by all that much.
What I really want is a nice, small, quiet, Intel Atom-based, mini-ITX form factor PC that I can use as a storage server, and downloader. The prices aren’t so great at the moment, however, with the Aussie dollar weakening against the US.
Clacky Keyboard
While I definitely would not consider myself a “keyboard enthusiast”, I still consider my IBM Model M keyboard to be second-to-none in terms of typing feel. I bought it for the bargain price of 50AUD and it even came with a matching IBM PC for free (or that’s the way I see it). While that PC has long since been retired to the attic, the keyboard remains. The only reason I keep the Logitech G15 is because I use its USB hub, and its screen is useful in certain circumstances (the media display is quite handy, for example)
Music
Some soundtracks that I believe are completely awesome:
- Naruto, especially Shippuuden. Current-day rock, metal (and some other genres) blended with traditional Japanese instruments makes for some extremely epic music.
- 3 Key visual novels: Air, Kanon and Clannad. The soundtracks are so good, they’re used as the soundtrack in the (gorgeously animated) Kyoto Animation adaptations
- Final Fantasy. Especially VI and X (though that might be because those are the two I’ve played the most). The Black Mages have some extremely good (progressive/power metal) arrangements too.
- Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins. Epic soundtracks that seem perfectly suited to each game.
- Beyond Good and Evil.
- Serial Experiments Lain. While not an epic soundtrack, the soundtrack is so perfect that whenever there is music playing, it’s almost unnoticeable, or is exactly what you’d expect at that point.
- Full Metal Panic! and Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid.
Sensorium
Sensorium is an app I am currently developing for a specific purpose. Once I get that mini-ITX PC, I plan to mount it inside my current desktop’s case, with a 7″ LCD mounted in the front, displaying the desktop’s internal sensors’ values (temperature, fan speed and voltage). The problem, I discovered, is that there is no way for the mini-ITX PC to access this sensor data directly.
So I set myself a task: to write a piece of software to send it over ethernet. The requirements were these:
- The server had to run on both Windows and Linux and retrieve all available sensor data
- The client had to run on Linux, at least, and be able to receive and display the sensor data
Of course, the problem was the first point. The client could easily be cross-platform, but there is no cross-platform way of retrieving sensor data. Linux has libsensors, at least, but in Windows, there is no standardized way to access the sensors. I have overcome the Windows problem by using SpeedFan’s shared memory, which provides the sensor data.
Sensorium was initially programmed in Java, but some severe limitations appeared: the native DLL I was using had to be compiled for the same instruction set as the JRE the app was running under (ie. 64-bit DLL for 64-bit JRE, 32-bit DLL for 32-bit JRE). Upon discovering that C# had something similar to, but much easier to use than, Java’s JNI, I decided to start from scratch in C#.
C#’s P/Invoke is much better than Java’s JNI for two reasons:
- There’s no need for any helper DLLs, meaning I can code the entire app in C#, as opposed to Java and C++
- Coding entirely in C# (and therefore compiling to MSIL), means no need for separate 64-bit and 32-bit libraries
Even better, I discovered that P/Invoke also works in mono (on UNIX OSs) meaning that, again, there would be no need for helper libraries, that I could code the entire app in C#, and still have it cross-platform with minimal to no differences between platforms.