Archive for category Uncategorized
Jim Wallace’s Lies and Misinformation and the Idiocy of the Mandatory Filter
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, Uncategorized, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on 29 January, 2009
In response to Mark Newton’s factual statement that the ACMA blacklist (the mandatory component of the government’s proposed ISP-level filter) will block legal content including:
- All R18+ and X18+ material that does not have a government-approved age-verification page (none of them have this, currently)
- MA15+ material that is used for commercial purposes
- All RC material (which is legal to own and view privately in most of Australia)
Jim Wallace’s response to this fact is that it is “utter nonsense”. Well Jim, I think you need to do a little more research. These four responses from Senator Stephen Conroy prove that you are wrong and misleading the public, unlike Mark, who states the facts.
Not only that, but who gave you or the government the right to decide what is right for all children in Australia. Household values differ. In some houses, parents might not want their children to have access to internet chatrooms and social networking like facebook or myspace while other parents might be 100% happy to let their children access these types of sites. These sites are possibly harmful to children who ostensibly might run into online predators (a recent study shows that this risk is smaller than was thought by many) but the an ISP-level opt-out filter provides no flexibility to provide for differences in parental values. Surely you aren’t suggesting that your own conservative christian values are the only values that parents have, or worse that those should be the only values that parents should have.
As an adult, I am becoming more and more worried about the future of our internet. If, according the the above blacklist, MA15+ content used for commercial purposes is blocked, does that mean that subscription-based online games such as Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings online, etc. will be blocked? While on the topic of online games I would like to restate that anything (such as a filtercensor) that increases australia’s internet latency is completely unacceptable to me as a gamer. Finally, the mandatory filter is not there to protect children, it is there to prevent access to “prohibited” content. At this task it fails dismally: it can be bypassed in less than 10 minutes by anyone with even a slight understanding of the internet and it doesn’t block the major source of “prohibited” content: peer-to-peer. If my opinion (and the opinion of the majority of internet users) matters at all, scrap the mandatory blacklist. It fails at its task, it cannot succeed. So why have it at all?
14/3/08
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 14 March, 2008
Since no one except Daniel (and maybe the spambots that keep trying to post junk) and me reads this, I won’t write write here very often. But myspace is still broken… and it’s annoying. Maybe it will just stop working one day and no one will use it anymore and use facebook instead. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. It may be because myspace is trying to add opensocial support, and doing that in 3 different languages simultaneously may be challenging, but that’s no reason to break the site every 2 days.
Also, my laptop is finally (almost) working perfectly in linux. The graphics worked perfectly after installing the nvidia restricted drivers (via restricted-manager) but the wireless required a windows driver to be downloaded in order to get it working. But it now works perfectly, albeit at a max speed of 24MB/s.
Swinburne’s wireless seems is stupid (a customised eduroam WPA Enterprise network). Even windows users find it drops out from time to time. In linux (now my preferred OS) it’s even worse, with random dropouts all the time and problems with re-authentication once it has dropped out. If anyone IS reading this who can throw some light on the cause of this problem, please help ><
Funny parts listing
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 10 June, 2007
I haven’t posted for a while due to myspace use lagging my internet…
But anyways, this website - http://www.decparts.com - has the best items. Like ”4GB Narrow Brick”s and “Fiber Optic Adapter Male DB25 connector” for accessing your printer if it happens to be in Sydney while you live in Melbourne.
(No more wasted time for warranty repairs)
MySpace
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 21 May, 2007
I swore I’d never use myspace, but here I am using it as an excuse to avoid homework! What’s happened to me? I must be going mad, book me in for the psych… wait already done that… WTF
Feisty Uninstalled
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 21 May, 2007
OMG I deleted Feisty!
It was taking up space, I wasn’t using it much, if at all; and I needed that space to install Shivering Isles. So I deleted it.
Ubunt Feisty Installed
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 25 April, 2007
I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Fesity Fawn) today and installed the nvidia-glx package as well. There also seems to be a nvidia-gkx-new package, but it both requires and conflicts with nvidia-glx. meh. The current package works great with beryl (no more Copy method=increased framerate).
Next, I need to get my wireless working. Manually installing ndiswrapper was a nightmare – it failed for reasons i don’t know – so I’m going to try the packages from the repos now.
Feisty seems to come with a version of compiz
but the window decoration is broken – I must need cgwd – not that I really care at this stage as beryl works fine and the beryl-compiz merge doesn’t seem to be very far along.
[edit] CGWD is included, I just had to enable it, Heliodor also works with compiz but not beryl, but it’s the one from the beryl repositories, explain that! [/edit]
Finally, there was some problem with the audio that adding this to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:
# Added according to tips from launchpad.net.
options snd-hda-intel model=3stack
seemed to fix. [edit] It didn’t actually fix the problem so I’m going to google around for a solution [/edit]
Safe mode + Networking = BSOD
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 24 April, 2007
This morning, while I was mucking around on old computers at school, I found that if you started the incredibly slow Celeron 600s in Safe mode with networking (Windows 2000 Professional), you’d get a Stop Error, due to ‘INACCESSABLE BOOT DEVICE’.
I then decided to do this to every computer in the room. So now there are 8 computers stuck on a BSOD in a room of 12.
Comments!!!
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 23 April, 2007
I’m amazed that someone managed to find my blog (the domain’s only been active for 3 days).
In all the 8 months that my last blog was up I only got visits from people who I knew in the real world…
Ubuntu Issues
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 22 April, 2007
I just finished downloading Feisty, and before I install it I guess I need to bitch about how hard it is to get all features working under Linux.
First of all, the graphics card (Geforce Go 6150 UMA) only works in 16-bit colour with no Direct Rendering with the open-source drivers, and obtaining drivers with no net connection (as I will explain, the wireless does not work) under Linux is quite difficult
Next, the integrated nVidia sound adapter is a bit useless, it kind of works most of the time, but the microphone,
headphone socket and wine do not work at all.
Now, the worst problem, the wireless adapter (Broadcom 4311) does not work natively under Linux. However, ndiswrapper does not work either, as there is some sort of IRQ conflict between the ndiswrapper-ed drivers and the nVidia proprietary binary drivers.
Finally, my GRUB spontaneously somehow ended up pointing to the wrong partitions on my hard disk and no manual,
editing of the config files would get it working again.
I sincerely hope that most, if not all these issues are resolved in Feisty. I’ll install it when I have time this week.
And the line breaks in this are also borked
My Compaq Presario V3118AU Notebook Computer
Posted by Aaron in Uncategorized on 19 April, 2007
This will category contain – when I get around to it – anything to do with my new laptop (I’m not going to write out its model again). I’m actually writing this on my laptop.