Using The Age/SMH‘s cringeworthy Vote-A-Matic quiz…

iOS4 is out and I’ve updated my 3GS. Seems pretty good, but my initial impression is that it’s slowed things down a bit. Obviously the multitasking and wallpapers take a bit more RAM to keep running, but I wasn’t expecting the hit to be as noticeable. Folders are great – I’ve gone from having too many apps to fit on all the screens down to two not-yet-full screens of organised folders. Likewise, the multitasking/quick-switching is pretty handy. Backgrounds to the menus are just plain distracting for the most part; however, I did find a great one on the Macrumors forums that is based on a desktop wallpaper found on Zixpk and looks great with the iPhone icons which is where most wallpapers struggle. Click on the thumbnail here to get to the full-sized iPhone version. This is about the only one I’ve tried that I like though.

iPhone 4 is very tempting. The new display is what I like the look of the most, to the point where I’ve gone off the idea of getting an iPad until it is updated to the same Retina Display. The difference that the increased resolution will make to printed material, I think, will be phenomenal. Just need to work out how I can upgrade my phone without paying Optus a ridiculous amount of money.

Eve Online is still sucking away hours of time and I’m moving between hi-sec and the null-sec home my corp has setup, although the bits of news about Civilization V that are coming out promise to suck me in pretty swiftly. This preview and video on Joystiq are interesting. I do like the new look of the interface and I hope that they have taken some lessons from Civ Rev and will be able to mix them with the complexity of Civ IV.

I’ve been a huge NFS fan (currently playing Shift) and, looking at the below image, yep, I’ve played every last one of them. That’s a lot of wiped-out Lamborghinis.

My personal favourite is still High Stakes, even though it’s been ten years. The race modes, weather, graphics and damage modeling really made it a stand out. Also, for a one-maker game, Porsche Unleashed was pretty awesome too.

I’m looking forward to seeing if they can actually make a decent racing game for the Wii with Nitro and as long as they keep releasing, I’ll keep driving.

Via The Inquisitr

Best news ever. Such a stupid, backwards plan in the first place.

The ‘Clean Feed’ internet censorship plan put forward by Stephen Conroy as part of the Rudd Government’s ‘Cyber-Safety‘ initiative is one of these. The general idea is that the internet is filtered by the ISP to all its customers removing all pornographic and illegal content. While there is the option to opt out of the filter for some adult content, there is no option to opt out of the filter altogether, which means that if you have an internet connection in Australia, you will be filtered whether you like it or not.

Let’s look at a few points in more detail and answer some questions:

Who decides what is filtered?

This is probably my main concern – who or what decides what is to be blocked out by the filters? The definitions of suitable content vary wildly from person to person and I’m sure that my views on this will be quite different from someone who would be in charge of these decisions. Some things are more or less clear-cut, such as child pornography and pirated software and there are guidelines already in place that can be used to specify these. However, with the abuse of the idea of ‘terrorism’, ‘national security’ and other loosely defined themes of the day, the line between illegal and legal can and does get very blurred. There have already been too many instances of overzealous laws and regulations put into place as knee-jerk reactions where the only result has been inconvenience and anger. Look at most new airport security measures and, more locally, the recent lock-in curfew placed on Melbourne bars for examples of where the frustration has arguably outweighed the benefits.

How does the internet get filtered?

Filtering is a really tough area. Electronic automated systems are nowhere near effective, let alone perfect. After all these years, the best spam filters are still only just adequate and spam is an area that has fairly routine patterns to look for. An automated system that is meant to filter the entire spectrum of web traffic would be woefully inadequate and would either by ineffective and pointless, or overly effective and frustrating. The typical example is legitimate sex education or advice websites, which is a resource (often much appreciated by curious and embarrassed teenagers) that is usually filtered out with adult content. Searching for something as mundane as the practical gardening applications of fertilizer is something that is bound to end up on the terror blacklist before too long as well.
The alternative to automated systems, manual filtering, is even more of a joke. According to the well-written information offered by Electronic Frontiers Australia in their response to the proposed plan, in the past five years, the Australian Communications and Media Authority have only found less than 3,500 site to be prohibited (this is a generous rounding up). Of a very roughly estimated eight billion sites on the web.

That’s not even worth working out the percentage.

What would be the impact on service?

Apart from obviously not being able to rightly or wrongly access certain sites, overall internet performance and speeds would drop due to the fact that all traffic would need to pass through the filter. At best, this would still be a bottleneck and, at worst, it would have considerable impact on performance at a time when more and more services are being hosted online and require all the access speed you can get. Australia already has atrocious internet broadband speeds, with many ‘broadband’ plans offering speeds that are far under what the rest of the world would consider broadband. Adding in another speed bump would only make things worse.

How effective would it be?

Not very, basically. Internet filters, whether they be nanny-style and aimed at children or more involved and designed for companies, are largely ineffective. This is partly due to the difficulties described above regarding their implementation, but also because they are so easy to circumvent. The average teenager quickly finds a way around the filter installed by their parents and of the five or so filters that have been used in workplaces I have been in, all were circumvented within a week. Even the Great Firewall of China is not impenetrable. Proxy servers are still an incredibly effective way of getting around most filters, with most not even requiring that level of complexity.

But shouldn’t illegal material be blocked?

There may be a case to answer if we were able to block only clearly-defined, illegal material with no other implications. However, that is far from the present case. While I do not necessarily defend the right to download clearly illegal material in the name of free speech, I do very much defend the right to browse every single thing that does not fall into this category, even if that may be tasteless, dangerous, inappropriate or otherwise not wholesome family viewing. It is a very slippery slop to start down when you start making judgment calls on what people can and can’t see, even if it is under the veil of their own good or protection.

What about the children? Won’t somebody think of the children?

Children under a certain age are required to be under adult supervision and responsibility. It is the role of this person or these people to ensure that the child is cared for and protected. Somewhere along the way, it seems that most people have forgotten this and now expect the government or someone else to do it. The same can be said for television, video games, movies, books and life in general. It is high time people started taking responsibility for themselves and their children. If your children are looking up things on the internet they shouldn’t, resolve the situation your bloody self, don’t expect someone else to do it. I can’t believe this needs to be said.

What about cost?

This won’t be cheap. Every ISP will need to implement this and that means money for servers, support and resources. If this comes from the Government, it is wasting tax dollars, and if it comes from the ISPs, then expect to see a much higher bill at the end of the month. There is no way around this. Internet access in Australia is already grossly overpriced without the added burden of funding this proposed plan.

Is this plan going ahead?

No, I seriously doubt that the planned filtering will be put into practice. The logistics and cost/benefit are enough to can it straight away and hopefully there is enough uproar and common sense to shut down the plan if talk does continue.

However, it can be seen as a first bid; that is, an initial platform from where negotiations can start. Clearly, the government is bidding too high with this offering, but if we get caught in the negotiations, we’ll only end up paying more than we bargained for and the cost will be in our online freedom and ability.

What’s a better option then?

Education. Make people aware of what is out there on the internet. Make parents aware of what their children could find online and how to properly supervise them. Help parents to have the right conversations with their kids. Help people to exercise common sense when getting online. All too often, people see a computer and turn their brains off, thinking that it is something they don’t understand, or that things work differently there. Most of the rules of the real world still apply, things like don’t talk to strangers, don’t give out personal information or financial details; this stuff is very basic.

What do I do now?

If you don’t like the sound of what’s being proposed, you should read up on the Electronic Frontiers Australia website and their No Clean Feed site. Their document about the plan is quite good and covers many different aspects. You can then visit their ‘Take Action’ page and let someone know you disapprove. Also, just tell people about it through conversations, blogs, whatever. The more people aware of the plan and the more voices that join in rejecting pointless and counter-productive schemes such as this, the more chance of having them put down early.

Russia’s Putin saves TV crew from Siberian tiger – Yahoo! News

Cheney accidentally shoots fellow hunter – CNN

I know which one I’d want holding the gun when we’re stuck in the forest…

Anne Fairbairn - image from The Age

Recently, a couple of articles appeared in The Age about how $36 million was lost by Australians to Nigerian scams. The first article was about the high number and the details of the scams, while the second article (titled ‘Poet pays price of naivety’) presented the case of Anne Fairbairn AM, who was a ‘victim’ of one of the scams.

$36 million is a lot of money. An awful lot of money. That people are willing to throw that kind of money away in a bid to make a profit from a completely unknown Nigerian ‘government official’, ‘prince’ or whatever is a sad reflection of the average level of intelligence that passes for common sense these days. It’s not just a lot of people losing a little bit of money each, either. According to The Age articles, individuals have lost up to $35,000 and businesses up to $5 million. Just how you manage to invest $5 million of your companies money in a scam in the first place boggles the mind.

Increasingly, it seems that people are losing the ability to rationally make decisions, particularly when they are in front of a computer for some reason. As any technologically competent person who has instructed someone else how to use a program will have experienced, many seemingly intelligent people are suddenly unable to read or comprehend what is on a computer screen in front of them. The question “How do I compose an email?” requiring the answer: “Press the button with ‘compose’ written on it” is an all to common experience.

Unfortunately, this also relates to how people deal with the contents of their email. Things that would be absolutely preposterous if they were encountered in everyday life are seriously considered. You wouldn’t buy Viagra from some guy who approached you on the street, why the hell would you buy it from some unsolicited and poorly crafted email?

So, looking at the Fairbairn article offers a crystal clear example of this kind of thinking. To recap the article, Fairbairn “doesn’t know much about technology and rarely uses a computer or mobile phone”. After receiving an email claiming to be from Yahoo!, she replied to it with her details, including the account’s username and password. The scammers were then able to use the account to send out a request to her contact list that she urgently required money after being stuck in, of all places, Nigeria. Unbelievably, some people who received the email actually sent money via Western Union as requested.

Starting with Fairbairn: If you don’t know much about technology, you should be particularly cautious. You don’t dive into unknown water without checking the depth. This applies not just to technology but to anything – if you don’t know something, you start out slow and suspect that things might not be has they seem. If someone came up to her in the street and asked for the key to her post office box, what do you think the answer would be? It’s the same thing. However, my favourite quote of the article from Fairbairn is:

Being an idealist – and I always have been pretty naive – I trust everyone … I just didn’t know it was possible to be a victim of this sort of thing.

Now surely this is one of the most pathetic things I’ve heard in recent times. It’s one thing to be an idealist, but it’s quite another to be this unrealistic. I’m pretty sure you can work out which house is hers by the open front door and valuables lying on the front step, as surely noone would come and take them. For this reason, I have no sympathy for what has happened. In today’s society, you have a certain level of responsibility to ensure your own security, and if you do not maintain that level of responsibility, you have no right to even be surprised, let alone upset, when something adverse happens as a direct result.

However, Faribairn herself got off on this quite lightly – after all, it was only her email account that was compromised. There was another level of incompetence in this story: the people that sent money. This is probably a more serious level of ineptitude than Faribairn’s alone; after all, where is the responsibility in sending money (no small amount either; $2500 was requested in the email) via a notoriously insecure method (Western Union does not keep details of transactions, for ‘privacy reasons’, according to The Age) without properly investigating the situation?

These are the people who really are bereft of any common sense. In this case, the $2500 they sent off without a thought in the world truly is a stupidity tax. If anyone asks you for money, particularly if it’s thousands of dollars, surely you make sure that everything is legitimate. Am I the only person that this seems blindingly obvious to? Sometimes I’m amazed that people like this manage to survive day to day.

A follow-up article that appeared a couple of days later quoted the Nigerian high commissioner, Sunday Olu Agbi, as saying that, with regard to the traditional 419 type of ‘Nigerian’ scams, “people who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money”, as it is their greed that leads them into ‘investing’ in the fictitious, but still shady, deals, such as transferring money out of the country illegally. Understandably, it is the wider population and government of Nigeria that is paying the price of the scams and the impact has been felt in legitimate businesses. As it is their lack of judgement, common sense and attempt at getting rich quick that compounds the problem, Olu Agbi places the ‘victims’ who perpetuate the profitability of the scams in the same category as the scammers and worthy of arrest themselves.

To sum up, I don’t feel any sense of sympathy to Fairbairn, nor to her acquaintances who lost money in the scam. Not when the ruse was so obvious and so easy to detect if anyone had taken the time to exercise some common sense. If anything, it is to Olu Agbi and other honest Nigerians that I feel bad for, as the reputation of their country is slowly being destroyed by both the scammers and those who take part in the scams. However, I do feel that Fairbairn’s story is an accurate depiction of the incompetence shown by many people and the sheer lack of common sense used in today’s society.

If $36 million dollars in stupidity tax is the price we have to pay for common sense to start making an appearance, I’d say we got a bargain.

(edit – title changed, original was bad)

I can’t say that I’m much of a conservationist, but we did turn all the lights off for Earth Hour last night. There didn’t seem to be too many other people who did as there wasn’t much difference around the city. Even the pictures of the city usually showed one landmark with dimmed lights with the entire city lit up behind it. Still, that’s not the point I guess, it’s the thought that counts and most people knew it was happening and why, so mission accomplished in that respect, I suppose.

TransitCamp follows the BarCamp-style of conference (or unconference, whatever that is supposed to mean). It brought together a wide range of people that have an interest or investment in the Bay Area transit system with a view to make things better. Not to complain, not to piss and moan about the problems with the system, but to find solutions. As the information says, the event is a ‘not a complaints department, it is a solutions playground‘. By reading Miss Rogue’s account of the day, it sounded like a fantastic success.

I’ll repeat some of the points she outlines in the recap on HorsePigCow. Naturally, these may or may not be applicable outside of the Bay Area, but it shows what kind of thinking comes out of such events.

• Creating symbols or colored lines on the roads to show people where the buses physically go. This way non-riders would start to notice that buses from their neighborhoods go to neighborhoods that they want to go to.
• “If you build it, I would come” – the ability to vote for your route. Maybe you don’t currently ride the bus because it is just too inconvenient, but if you had a better bus system that could take you to and from work everyday, you would totally ride it. A simple clickable map with the ability to input the amount of time maximum you would tolerate (and the times you would travel) may bring in some good data for transit planners.
• Share A Route! So, why can’t we help encourage our non-transit friends to take transit by planning out a good route for them and sharing it? Sounds like a pretty simple solution to me!
• Transit Buddy System. This is a no-brainer as well. If you buy monthly Transit passes, you should be able to take 1-2 friends with you for free. You are promoting the system and encouraging ridership.
• Welcome Wagon Transit Packets. I remember the nightmare of moving to the Bay Area and trying to figure out the transit system. BART? Muni? Caltrain? Etc.? There were so many to figure out! How about a packet with links and information for new people. Promote them to big companies in the area who are importing people in.

Even just with ideas such as these being thrown around, it shows that there are people willing to discuss the issues rationally, looking for mutually beneficial answers. All that I can see in Melbourne at the moment are the commuters losing patience and joining the ‘I hate Connex’ Facebook group or the 38,000 Google results for ‘I hate Connex‘ out of frustration from the poor service, and the service providers on the other hand trying to reduce fare evasion, cut timetables to save money and still try (and fail) to keep customers happy. I’m certainly not going to claim that I’m pleased with the service that is currently offered.

The problem is that there are so many people that would prefer to just criticise and complain and so few who would be willing to talk things through to a solution. And I mean this on the part of everyone involved, not just the customers.

Public transport in Melbourne has quite simply not kept up with the city’s development and some major changes are needed. What better way for this to happen than in discussions with all the players in the game? Not just the companies and governments trying to get out of it cheaply and not just the commuters wanting unsustainable services.

Congratulations to everyone involved in TransitCampBayArea. After an insufferable train trip home tonight, it was just the thing I needed to read about to remain hopeful.

Image via Miss Rogue on Flickr

Reading about the ‘anti-vandals’ or ‘cultural guerrillas’, referred to in articles as Untergunther, a sub-group of the larger UX organisation, is fascinating. They seem highly organised, but appear to have fairly benevolent intentions to restore Paris’ cultural sites, such as the catacombs and crypts under the city. The motivation behind it all is a frustration with the French government and despair at the degradation of cultural sites.

While on the surface it can seem that the group poses a security risk, it is very hard to argue with the intentions and not surprising to learn that the charges against them were dropped. I can’t wait to read more stories of their exploits

via BoingBoing