Why does Australia's internet suck balls?

So now I'm back, from outer space. What's the first thing a self respecting nerd does when he moves into a new house? Internet of course. Followed shortly by rants about the Internet, which is what this is.

This is how it works in Australia. We pay heaps for our Internet. We have slow speeds. We have low data allowances. We get charged heaps for extra usage. Bottom line, we're getting screwed.

Here are some boring graphs from here. The first one is how much we pay on average, the second one is how much we get charged for using extra data.

The reason there are only a few countries on that second graph is that the rest of them don't have download limits. Not only does Australia have limits but we usually charge you a shitload if you exceed them.

Case in point is Telstra. I know they are the worse for value, but to be honest the other Telcos are not that far off them. They have an ADSL 2+ plan for $70/month with 600MB of data. I was a little unsure of just how long it would take to hit that limit so I did a little test. I downloaded a 600MB file. Total download time on my ADSL 2+ connection... 12 mins. That's right, I could use up my whole monthly quota in 12 minutes, after that, the other 43817 minutes in the month, I am charged 15c a megabyte.

Then you have the lock in contracts, the endless product bundles, the deceptive language. Plus this is all being repeated with the increasing use of smartphones (iPhone, 3G phones etc). The data caps and excess usage charges the Telcos apply to these is laughable. The pricing terms, conditions and jargon used make my head hurt.

What is the consequence of all this? We're fucking up Australia's future. We're sacrificing the long term progress of our country for the short term profits of a handful of Telcos.

The Internet changed our lives 10 years ago, now it's a part of our lives. There is so much content out there right now that should be easily accessible by everyone but instead we're all stuck in the mentality that the Internet is a privilege that should be used sparingly.

You might argue that Joe Average doesn't want 400 terraflips of Internet. That might be true now, but I bet anyone using the net now is not going to reduce their usage in the next year. The US has HD blue-ray movies for download at the moment, the average Japanese spends more time online on their phones than their home computers, the iTunes store has sold 200 million TV shows so far. It's clearly only going one way here.

I applaud the current government for investing in this new Broadband network they are all talking about. 100mbps speeds would be a very welcome addition to the market but it will be useless if it's packaged with the same crap that we currently have. I shudder to think what Telstra will charge once they can offer those speeds. The point is that for a large proportion of Australia we already have, or could cheaply build, sufficient infrastructure to access the Internet at close to world leading speeds.

The problem is the current paradigm is to charge and trick users for a service that should be cheap and easy. I have no doubt that ADSL 2+ speeds at $30/month unlimited data usage for 90% of the population could be achieved within the next 6 months and for less than a few hundred million dollars if the government put its might and money behind it.

Australia's future is not in the manufacturing, coal or automotive industries, it's in technology. It's in using our smarts and our privileged position to become world leaders in the new technologies that will emerge in the near future. The Internet is an undeniably vital part of that.

We're shooting ourselves in the foot here.

Don't cry for me Wikipedia

News this week of another major disruption to the Middle East's Internet capacity. 

This one might look like just an accident, but I'm still not sure. How often do ships drag their anchors over cables in other parts of the world? I'm not going to check, so lets just say never. See, never!

Even if this one was an accident, the last disruption back in Feb was as fishy as the lunch menu at Uncle Hiroki's House of Sushi. 

Three cables in three days were 'damaged by ship anchors' effectively cutting off the internet for most of the region. If you had a sprinkler system installed in your front yard and three different pipes were damaged in a few days you'd probably think that someone was doing it on purpose wouldn't you? I would, and so would my dad who loves his front yard grass so much that that analogy would probably make him uncomfortable. But back to the international conspiracy to strategically disrupt the internet... well, I reckon it's an international conspiracy to strategically disrupt the internet. 

Current theories are: 

• It's the CIA and/or Mossad testing out the robustness of the Middle East link (possibly using robotic mini-subs, possibly with lasers attached) in preparation for an attack on Iran. They will shut down phone and internet communications so that we can't hear the screams of the innocent children as the bombs rain down on their kindergartens and the blood spills over into... Ahem, you get the idea. 

• It's the CIA planting advanced wiretapping equipment into the lines somewhere and they needed to cut them in order to install the gear. Robotic mini-sub may have been used here too. This is either part of the US's Echelon worldwide surveillance program or it is being run in parallel to it in the hope that Obama won't be told of it and the republican's (who have controlled network surveillance since '64) will can catch him getting a blow-job and they can get the US back into an old white-man's hands again. 

• It's Al Qaeda testing out their capacity for literal Internet terrorism as a precursor to instigating their much pursued Islamic fundamentalist overthrow of the government of Egypt and others in the region. They need to cut the cut the internet so that bloggers can't report what is going on and the local people will only have their 500 satellite channels to bring them news and confusion will reign. There is no evidence of mini-subs, but rumours indicated Suicide Divers may have been used (sorry). 
  

None of these are confirmed, but if they were, we would all have something to worry about. 

So what is my point here? Basically that last night the speed of my internet was slightly reduced because of either ships or international conspiracies and it is not acceptable. I am one of literally hundreds of people who have no television and rely solely on the internet for AV news and entertainment. I could barely stream the BBC World News last night, let alone download Battlestar Galactica while watching redtube porn. 

What ever the reason for this disruption I just want it to go away. I guess I should really hope for the second theory to be correct, because at least they would want it reconnected as soon as possible. An extended air campaign in Iran or the overthrow of the UAE government by violent Islamic extremists would probably mean an outage of months or possibly years. 

It goes to show that the real victim of unrest are not the ones you see on the news, but rather the unseen ones trying in vain to watch the news... over the internet. 

Animated gif fun!

There is an awesome site that lets you create easy amimated gifs of yourself.

The website is here. Go there and make something stupid of yourself and post it here.

After you have made one and said saved it will say Visit your web-cam-stop-motion-thing. Click on that and it will give you the code for it. Where it says Embed this Web-cam-stop-motion-thing: just copy the code underneath it

The code thing is in it's own little window and it looks like href="http://www.piterwilson-toys.com/wcsmt/...
If you copy that and make a comment I will post it here under my ones.

Here are some stupid ones I made. It's best to do it in the daytime because webcams suck in low light.










Web 2.36 Bitches

Google Street View is in Australia!

Google has just released StreetView for Australia. Check it out... now! It’s fucking awesome.

For those of you who don’t know what StreetView is it’s where the Google people drive around in a van with a multi lens camera on the top taking photos of everything every twenty metres. The result is that you can look at your house on Google Maps!

Here is my last place in Brisbane. They even caught the very lovely but clearly retarded lolly-pop lady who I used to chat to every now and then.


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And here is 98 East St Brompton. Home of the infamous ‘Straight Outta Brompton’ and ‘Hot August Ninth’ parties.


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Shit, Google are even more awesome than I though. You can click and drag those pictures to have a look around.

You know, the odds are pretty high that at least one of us is in these photos. I have an experiment. Find somewhere near where you live, find a nearby newsagent, zoom in on the newspaper board, read the headline, work out the date, remember where you were that day and find yourself. Easy... maybe.

Anyway, I'm off to see who was drinking at the Exeter that day.


---------------

Quick edit: Looks like adelaide was taken around October last year. (zoom in)


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Phun with Physics!

Ever do a little physics or mechanics and try to work out what would happen when you roll a ball down a hill or place a weight on one end of a see-saw? It’s full of calculations, boring as bat shit and will turn you to humanities quicker than you can say friction coefficient.

But it’s not really all that hard, it’s just time consuming and requires lots of calculating. Well some guy realised that and worked out that with the computing power we have lying around in our washing machines lately, doing all the calculations isn’t really going to be a problem.

I present PHUN!



It’s a fucking amazing physics program that lets you actually try out all the things that would normally take you several years to calculate. You can add motors and build all kinds of machines in it. There are hours of fun in this little program. Search on youtube for Phun.

If you want to keep it simpler and funnerer then there is another program that lets you play with physics but presents it as a game. It’s called Magic Pen and it’s as addictive as crack laced Pringles.


Seeing shit this creative almost makes we wish I didn’t spend all my free time drinking beer and watching old Simpsons cartoons. Almost.

ImADisturbedFreakWithACreditCard.com

Quick post for shits and giggles. Ever wonder how many websites there are out there? Well, according to this site there are currently 100 million domain names registered. For the uninitiated, a domain name is the www.SamsHentaiPorn.com/japanesesschoolgirls.html part of an internet address. Underneath the domains are the kazillions of actual websites, but the domain names are the things that are more highly sought after because they are easier to remember and the popular ones are actually worth a lot of money.

So there are 100 million domains currently out there, but what is more interesting is that there are 325 million deleted or expired ones. To own a domain you need to register it with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (don't they sound like a bunch of party animals). You pay a little bit of cash each year to keep ownership of the name, and if you forget to pay or don't want it anymore then it expires and someone else can come along and register it.

This site lists the staggering number of domains that have expired in the last month. Now anyone can make a webpage or blog on one of the billions of sites like blogger.com or geocities (check out my completely shit geocities website from eons ago) but it takes a little bit more effort to register a domain name. Presumably you have some kind of plan for what you want to do with the site. So that makes it all the more interesting when you have a look at the domains that people have registered.

So I've found a few gems. What the hell were these people thinking? And what stopped them from fulfilling their destiny?

HotChicks.com is probably a fairly valuable website, why not make a variant of that?

hotchickswhodatedouchebags.com - Are you a douchebag looking for that special someone?
hotchickswithsportspicks.com - Nothing gets me hotter than a women who picks all eight.


Hmm... How do I?

howdoibecomejewish.com - What?
howdoierectmypenis.com - When it happens, you'll know.
howdoifindmymugshot.com - ?
howdoihavemorecum.com - My secret shame.
howdoiknowifimpregant.com - Web 2.0 is amazing.
howdoimakefog.com - ?
howdoiputoilin.com - Very specific car maintenance site?
howdoirideabicycle.com - This site presumably went downhill due to lack of repeat business.
howdoishowthemlove.com - Them?
howdoitalianseat.com - Lika dis!
howdoithrowafrisbee.com - Come on. Seriously?
howdoitiemyselfup.com - ?


Worst Business name?

essentiallypainfree.com


The Internet, linking up people with bizarre fettishes since 1993...

eroticbeltbuckle.com
erotichypnosiscommunity.com
eroticmafia.com
eroticwhittling.com - Are splinters a problem?
sexyarabwomens.com - Suddenly more relevant to me.
sexybeggers.com
sexyblueprints.com
sexybusdrivers.com
sexyladyfarts.com - No, surely not.
sexyphysicist.com


Weird...

wherecanisellmygirlfriend.com
deathtowhitey.com
killthebroccoli.com
ihatetoeatvinegar.com
wherehaveallthebritishvirginsgone.com


Rate my pic is a successful site, how about its lesser known cousins.

ratemybabypoo.com
ratemycamelytoe.com
ratemygaskmask.com
ratemyinsides.com - That is quite creepy.


This site has potential

ihatemymother-in-law.com


Creepy...

ihatemysisteriwishshewasgone.com
iloveyouandimissyou.com


What is it with people named Sarah?

ihatesarahamilton.com
ihatesarahconnolie.com
ihatesarahgallagher.com
ihatesarahmalone.com
ihatesarahmarahall.com
ihatesarahmarashalls.com
ihatesarahmarchell.com
hatesarahmarsahall.com
ihatesarahmarshll.com
ihatesarahmicheal.com
ihatesarahmithcall.com
ihatesarahmrshal.com
ihatesarahmurphy.com
ihatesarahmurray.com
ihatesarahrichordson.com
ihatesarahshred.com
ihatesarahwilliams.com
ihatesaramarsal.com
ihatesaramarshel.com
ihatesaramichaels.com
ihatesaramiller.com


A chilling warning.

ihatevirginiatech.com

Post any good ones you find.

Occupation - The game with the heart of gold

I made this little flash game about the Iraq Invasion back in 2004-5. I figure now that I have a blog I can share it with both of you.

When I wrote it I had no idea how closely it would follow the actual war. They both involve pointless bloodshed, are poorly thought out and never-ending. Enjoy!

Use Arrow Keys to Move. Press Mouse Button to fire
your Democracy Bullets, Hold Down to throw a
Grenade.

	This is you. A well intentioned American in an ancient land, Preaching Freedom at 800 rounds per minute
	This is a Moderate Muslim Cleric. His calming words will convert Militants back into peace loving civilians.
	This is an Iraqi. He may be a Militant, he may be a civilian. Militants spout rhetoric for a while when they are newly converted, but then they realise that their best tactic is to blend into the population.
	This is a Radical Muslim Cleric. His Hate Filled Sermons will incite the civilian population to rise up against the invaders.

Beware the witnesses to your carnage: If an Iraqi witnesses the death of a fellow civilian he will rise up against you. They are especially sensitive to the death of a holy man.

How much does Australia’s Internet suck?

How much are you paying for your internet connection? Shitloads? I thought so. Well there is a report out there that just confirmed it. Australia's internet is slow and expensive compared to much of the developed world.

It’s from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (some yank Think Tank) and is appropriately title The Role of Competition in a National Broadband Policy. It’s appropriate because the lack of said competition is the reason that we score so low on the world rankings. When Telstra was the only dog in town they deliberately kept us in the dial-up dark ages.

They’re still miles behind the competition. If you are Bazza Sixpack and you call up Telstra to get yourself some broadbands these are the offers available to you.

256kbps	$30	0.2GB
256kbps	$60	12GB
1500kbps	$70	12GB
1500kbps	$100	25GB
24000kpbs	$60	0.6GB
24000kpbs	$120	25GB
24000kpbs	$150	60GB

Stats are boring I know, but the gist of it is that Telstra is screwing you blind. 256kbps should not be classified as fucking broadband (it's not in the rest of the world) and ADSL 2+ with a 600MB download limit means that at its theoretical top speed you could use up that $60 worth in three and a half minutes. Bastards. How can they legally even sell that?

It is worth noting that the only reason we have ADSL 2+ in Australia is that individual ISPs installed their own DSLAMs (magic internet boxes) in Telstra’s exchanges. Telstra didn’t start offering it until years later and presumably only did so because they were forced to to compete.

Now in Australia I’m on a pretty good deal with TPG, but compared to the rest of the developed world I’m being screwed. If we take the cost per month per Mbps ratio Australia works out at 2.4. In Japan that ratio is 0.27. In other words, for my $60 connection here in Australia I would be paying $6.50 a month in Japan.

25GB ADSL 2+ : Telstra - $120 a month, Japan Super Happy Internet Company - $6.50 a month. Yep, we’re getting the Joan Collins special.

But that’s not really the whole story, because I doubt if you would be able to get a new 24 Mbps connection in Japan. Australia’s average speed is 1.7Mbps while Japan’s is 60Mbps. That right, their average speed is 35 times what ours is. Japan and Korea are probably not fair comparison for Australia (they’re so advanced I hear their children are born with USB ports now) but even when looking at the rest of the world we are behind. Especially for a country like ours that considers itself technologically advanced.

Besides the absolute masses of illegal multimedia out there, there really is a huge swag of legal content available that is just inaccessible for slower speed/limit connections. Things like Miro, the free internet TV player (I recommend the democracy now channel), or the daily show putting it’s archives online recently. Not to mention all the video available on news sites. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that we have Aussie kids out there forced to download porno pictures instead of porno movies. Oh the shame.

Will the new Lib and Labor Internet plans fix the situation? Probably not entirely, but it should be a good start. Just keep Telstra out of it.

Protecting Australian Families Online or Confessions of an Internet Predator. Part 2

A filter for the Internet eh? Call me cynical, but I see this as the equivalent to trying to impose OH&S laws on a war zone. The Internet is intrinsically unorganised, unregulated, unstandardised. I just had to see how these filters would attempt to block the bad parts of the net without rendering it useless.

You can see the list of filters that the gov recommends here.

I chose Integard for testing because it seemed to have the most boxes ticked on the evaluation page.

So I installed it, tried to put myself back into my twelve year old self’s mindset, and immediately began searching for porn.

I first tried the links in my toolbar, and was embarrassed to find most of them blocked. The ‘messageboards’ I sometimes visit were mostly gone. Straighdope, SomethingAwful, 4chan. Fair enough, but surprisingly Slashdot was still accessible.

Next was Google. The blocking on this seemed to be just a simple keyword filter via Google’s SafeSearch option. This filtered the results somewhat but quite a few dodgy sites get though. Once you click on them though the Integard filter kicks in and you get blocked. Euphemisms are fine though. For example, typing ‘Anorexia’ is an obvious block, but for those in the know it is known as ‘ana’. So I could get to the pro anorexia site ‘My Friend Ana’ just fine.

OK, word filtering is easy. What about Google image search? As a test I tried ‘hot guys’ with filter on and off.

Filter on: Couple of shots of Mark Wahlberg and Orlando Bloom and a few suggestive pics from gay hookup sites but generally pretty clean.

Filter off: Same shots of the superhunks but also three cocks and a crude anime of two friends, um, wrestling. A win for the filter.

A few other searches revealed (I’d changed to non gay search terms by this stage) moderate nudity but nothing that crazy. Interestingly, when you click on a naughty pic the filter blocks the page from loading, but you can still click on the picture in the google image frame at the top and it will show you the picture in full.

Seems to be working reasonable well so far. Next up P2P.

TorrentSpy – Blocked
MiniNova – Enabled, though no porn shown
PirateBay – Enabled, though you needed to log on to see ‘adult’ content.

Incidentally, as I was trying to download Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’ via the Pirate Bay (it allowed me to download the .torrent but Azureus appeared to be blocked from downloading it, win for the filter) a pop up window appeared with a full screen add. It was advertising some stupid mobile phone service of little importance but the costs just blew me away.

The charges for this premium service were as follows. “$4.00 sign up fee plus $4.00 per msg inc. GST, Maximum 6 messages/week ($24.00 per week).” Nothing was stopping me from entering mummies phone number in that, although you did have to enter the confirmation number sent in a text message to get signed up. Probably no worse than what is in TV Week I suppose, but it does show another type of danger for Timmy twelve year old.

Wikipedia – The most obvious search terms were blocked but you could still get around it. For example, hitting the Scarification page showed me some quite disgusting pictures. Plus an external link from the page got me to a tattoo/scarification website, with embedded youtube videos of the same that I could play. Fail.

Gmail – It let me in but did weird things to the interface. I wasn’t allowed to view the spam folder, presumably because of all the crazy crap inside but I could still search the folder for specific emails. Once the search results were returned I could view the spam but not click the dodgy links inside.

Youtube – Once again I was blocked from the obvious keywords but others were let though. Searching for ‘beheading’ led me to a few infamous insurgent beheading videos (which I didn’t watch so I can’t actually confirm they were legit). I was stopped a few times by YouTube blocking what people have tagged as mature content, but you only need to sign up to see that anyway. As long as the video is not tagged with a banned keyword then you are good to go.

Well, what now? Oh yeah, proxies. A proxy is an intermediary between you and the site you are trying to visit. Most businesses use these to monitor your Internet access at work but they are also used on the net to hide what sites users are looking at. The filter can only see you browse to the proxy site, then the proxy site serves up pages to you that look like they came from it, but they actually wrap the banned sites you are trying to look at.

They can be quite sophisticated by doing things like masking the target page title and content tags (which search engines like Google uses to categorise webpages). The end result is a seemingly benign webpage sailing pass the filter that actually contains midget porn. I just did a simple test but in the end I was able to access 4chan with the filter on, and if you can access 4chan through an Internet filter it is not an Internet filter.

If after an hour I found out about using proxies (via a ‘How do I get around an Internet Filter’ Google search) then you can bet your penis enlarging spam that every 12 year old kid in the country will find out about it sooner or later.

So while chucking one of these filters on your family PC is probably a good idea, it is not a substitute for supervising your kiddies.

As a final note to the information freedom advocates out there, I understand the hesitation for any sort of Internet restriction, but I have also been on the net for quite a while and I have seen shit that would upset the stomach of a wartime morgue technician. Weird stuff you have never even thought of not only exists but has a strong user base full of punters constantly pushing the boundaries. Adults can, and do (oh God they do) what they like, but I think the kiddies need a little bit of protection from the horror that can be the Interweb.

These filters aint it though.

Protecting Australian Families Online or Confessions of an Internet Predator. Part 1

The Government has launched a new initiative promoting online safety for children and families.

NetAlert - Protecting Australian Families Online.

Safety on the Internet has now become an issue for our progressive Government and it’s net-savvy leader. Should have seen it coming really. The issue has all the elements that Howard salivates over. It provokes fear in middle Australia, involves an ambiguous threat and is mainly committed by foreigners.

Apparently the pamphlets have arrived in letterboxes around the country. I did not receive one personally, but they are available for download here.

Now while I usually present an air of false confidence when discussing topics wide and varied, the Internet is one where I can truly say I am an authority. I’ve been lurking unsupervised on the net for 14 years or so now. Ever since my friends and I would sneak into the University computer labs and post graphic genital piercing pics into wholesome chatroom discussions about horses. When reviewing material for this post I couldn’t help wondering if I am the kind of person the Government is trying to protect our children from.

So while I was initially very sceptical about NetAlert I can honestly say that I think it is a great initiative. The guide here is a well-written introduction for parents about what exactly lies out there in the big bad interweb. The pamphlet stresses the importance of education and supervision for children and encourages parents to educate themselves about the tools their children are using. I have often thought about how dangerous the web can be for the ignorant user and this is an important first step.

I also applaud them for including mobiles in the discussion. It has been a pet hate of mine how unregulated and exploitative the mobile phone industry has been in this country. From the late night sexy chat adverts on TV to the crazy frog ringtone offers during Saturday morning Video Hits. While not taking the regulatory steps I have been whinging about for years, the Government has at least started talking about the dangers of giving a 12 year old a mobile phone.

The website also stresses the importance of Internet filters, but it does it in a sensible way, in that it is not touted as a silver bullet of Internet safety. I tried out one of these filters, but I’ve decided to separate the review of it into it’s own post, to avoid lumping my criticism of it with the NetAlert program itself. As long as supervision is intrinsically linked to the use of filters I have no problem with them being promoted in the way they are.

But what good is a blog post if you have nothing to complain about? So lets get on to part two where I try to get around the Internet filter.