djm's scribble

If you are not Australian, don’t use the Internet or are living under a rock, you may not be aware that the Australian Federal Government has plans to implement mandatory Internet censorship, ostensibly to block child pornography. Needless to say, I believe this to be a terrible idea for a number of reasons which I spelled out in a letter I sent to my local Member of Parliment, Kelvin Thompson:

Dear Mr. Thompson,

I am writing to express my concern at the government’s proposals for mandatory Internet censorship. As an Internet security professional of 10 years experience, I know that the proposed scheme cannot fulfil its stated goals but has the potential to do a great amount of harm in the process. The technology required to perform this filtering simply does not exist - the incomplete solutions that do exist will degrade Internet speeds, will fail to block some child pornography, will misclassify harmless pages as child pornography, will make the Internet less reliable and will cost an exorbitant amount of money.

Furthermore, it would be possible to trivially circumvent any system that has a hope of being implemented in Australia. The price of building a circumvention-proof censorship system would be breaking many legitimate uses of the Internet that individuals and businesses rely upon daily. Even the so-called “Great Firewall of China” does not go that far. People seeking paedophillic content will therefore be able to find it, despite the mandatory filtering.

Any filtering approach is doomed to be incomplete. Therefore, as a parent, I would not be able to rely on such a system to keep paedophillic material from my child (nor would I). As a crutch to absolve parents of their supervisory responsibilities, the proposed system fails here too.

Finally, as someone who cares about our fragile civil liberties, I am deeply concerned that such a system would rapidly grow in scope beyond its original remit of blocking purely illegal material. Already there are calls to block legal material that some senators simply find objectionable. In the future, these calls and the political temptation to yield to them will only grow stronger. It does not take great leaps of cynicism to see how such a system could be abused once it is in place.

Hopefully I have made a convincing argument against mandatory Internet censorship. If you are interested in further discussion on any of the technical issues relating to this subject then I am happy to assist. Thank you again for your time.

Kind regards,

Damien Miller

If you feel the same way, I suggest that you email your local member to inform them of your concerns as soon as possible.

Some time ago I wrote about the US Department of Homeland Security’s crazy plan to gather science fiction authors to think of crazier “security threats”. Apparently this gathering has happened, and the results are far more comedic that I could have possibly imagined:

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

…

David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described ‘rant’ on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis.

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

There is more in the article - you just can’t make comedy this good up…

More shark-jumping from the Department of Homeland Stupidity: since they have obviously run out of absurd threats (I thought liquids on a plane was the nadir, but no…) - they have stuck upon the genius idea of tapping science fiction authors for still crazier ones. Note that at least one of these authors (Pournelle) has a track record in beating up crazy threats and responese, having campaigned for the failed “Star Wars” missile defence system with Reagan. The late, great Isaac Asimov’s take on that matter is just as relevant now as it was 22 years ago: “I have as my theme that violence is the last resort of the incompetent.”. Hear hear.

Finally! At last my insatiable need to find out my IP address, while shopping for shoes can be met.

I’m so relieved.

Could this be the moment where John Howard jumped the shark? He has just attacked the US Democratic party and presidential candidate Obama as being the party/candidate that terrorists “pray” for. Apart from being a bizarre and hypocritical attack on another nations domestic politics (he strongly criticised the previous opposition leader for an attack on George Bush, but notably not the entire Republican party), it seems to be completely out of touch with both Australian and US opinion on the war. I’m sure that his motivation was just to shift debate from domestic matters where he is taking a thumping, but this seems to have backfired spectacularly - the opposition has used it masterfully to demonstrate Howard is once again an ideologue, has endangered the long-term AU/US relationship and to portray him as subservient to Bush. More amusing is that the level of press coverage that the story has received in the US, which may actually help Obama’s candidacy. Nyah ha!

Peter Gutmann released an excellent paper: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection that does a brilliant job in explaining the horrendous costs that Microsoft’s misguided attempt at currying favour with the media industry will foist on producers and comsumers of computing equipment. It is full of his fine wit, so it is depressing and amusing.

The ABC has axed its most popular comedy program, The Glass House one week after a government senator criticised it for being “biased”. Perhaps they should have been more “balanced” in satirising the powerless as well as the powerful… I was disgusted enough by this latest interference in our supposedly independent national broadcaster to write an angry letter to The Age newspaper, but I was a bit late and they didn’t publish it. Here it is:

The axing of The Glass House demonstrates that a government need not appoint a censor to exert editorial influence over a broadcaster; it need only demonstrate that the way to a position of power, influence or money lies through publicly and faithfully holding an approved ideological line. How is this achieved? Look at the constituents of the ABC board - political appointees chosen for ideological compatibility and not for broadcasting experience or business acumen. Once the carrot is waved, the greedy and sycophantic will follow.

I just stumbled across this paper (via Charlie Stross’ weblog): A False Sense of Insecurity by John Mueller. Here is a taste:

Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

(the “War on accident-causing deer” just doesn’t have the same ring to it). This quote slightly misrepresents the paper as whimsical, it is not - it is a very sober assessment of terrorist threats and appropriate policy responses. Like other such comparisons, I expect this to to be completely ignored by our leaders. The Power of Nightmares it just too tempting for those who want to retain control.

For the last week, I have been receiving spam emails with titles such as “eigenstate is?” and “What?? biconnected?”. Unless these are targetted, I can’t possibly imagine what audience would respond to them.

My weekend consisted of cleaning, and recovering from same. Recovering? Well, I used a fair quantity of a product called “Exit Mould” to clean the bathroom and it tore the crap out of my throat and lungs, despite wearing a (light) mask, ventilating the area and limiting the duration of my exposure while the spray was lingering in the air. Today, I have finally stopped coughing up blood but am still a little hoarse.

Apparently, I’m not the only one to have had trouble with this product - Choice magazine reported that a substantial proportion of their testers suffered throat or nose irritation when using it. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the active ingredients are bleach and caustic soda :)

Never again.