HE'S DONE IT! Malcolm Turnbull unites left and right with piracy policy Australia's communications minister Malcolm Turnbull was found, in November, to be Australia's preferred Prime Minister in a Fairfax/IPSOS poll. The erudite and intelligent Turnbull polls well because appeals to moderate voters in his own Liberal Party and the opposition Labour Party. Turnbull's now again demonstrated his …
I've often wondered. For a member of the Liberal party he seems to be quite remarkably with-brain, a very rare thing in that group indeed. But mainly, I have just been waiting for him to emerge from the wings and stab the other clowns in The Rich Peoples' Party in the back and take its throne. Stay chooned...
This will probably turn out to be as stupid as Turnbull's other fiasco--that of banning incandescent tungsten light bulbs!
As usual, Turnbull's ideas may be noble but his implementation of them is always stuffed. Here in Oz, a mandatory edict from Turnbull replaced incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents without any proper QA specs etc. The consequences were and still are that a large percentage of them would barely last the nominal length of incandescents (1000 hours instead of the supposed 8000+) without failing*; they had stuff-all EMR radiation suppression thus killed much country AM radio reception; and they cost considerably more than incandescents--both in their manufacture and environmental disposal. There was and is a NET LOSS to everyone including the environment--oh, except for the Chinese manufacturers who laughed all the way to the bank!
I won't dwell here on Trunbull's supposed expertise on the NBN and all things ISP-ish as it's too painful to recall. (He once had shares in OzEmail and thinks himself an expert on all matters internet.)
...But what else can one expect from a lawyer who thinks himself knowledgeable about all things technical.
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* I've had many of these newer compact fluorescents of Asian manufacture fail between 40 and 100 hours. The older Wotan and Philips ones would easily last well over 15,000 hours.
That is when you, and other consumers so afflicted by short-life CFL bulbs start mass mailing the dead ones to his office with notes attached, expressing your admiration for such a well written bill to be passed, one that had in effect no QA standards for the CFL technology it pushed, and was so carefully crafted as to allow such shoddy product into Australia.
Give him BIG KUDOS for that. Each and every time a bulb fails before it should.
Shame and keep shaming and throw the onus for disposal of the poor-quality bulbs upon his office. You've got to out dick the politicians - esp. ones that are buffoons.
If the LNP wanted to promote Internet secrecy and ever more secure VPN usage, they probably couldn't have adopted a better way to do it.
Now every man and his dog will be out there checking out VPN software (which costs between $50 and $100 per annum to use), and tunneling their internet traffic in hyper-encrypted form through to overseas services, the useful metadata (from the packet headers) that the Australian intelligence services were planning on getting a look at - will disappear - and all the LNP's security initiatives will be badly affected.
To my mind, Malcolm, George and the LNP probably deserve an award from the EFF (let's call it the Snowden Award) for promoting the use of heavy encryption, data tunneling and the cause of Internet privacy above and beyond the call of duty. (Of course, their intelligence mavens won't be so happy - but that's their problem.)
Also, don't forget that Labor tried this as well and failed. They also had a chance to kill it off in the Senate, which they didn't do. They are as responsible for this as the Liberals. Both parties and the independents need to be ashamed of themselves.
No Labor were very smart actually, I expect they voted this way specifically to spite the Fibberal's, they knew this was stupid but after being called liars and having everything blocked, all through Labor's reign, Labor are getting a good number of kicks into the soft belly of the Fibberal's as payback. If they can make them look like utter moron's at the same time, that's just icing on the cake.
"If they can make them look like utter moron's at the same time, that's just icing on the cake."
And this is why I've come to despise Bill Shorten: Labor are more interested in cheap points scoring than what is good for the country. They look more and more like the LNP every day...
I despair of government in this country. The choice is Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Even Dumber.
I think the answer is, let P2P users become the distribution network, set a central ORG to co-ordinate, "paypal" like system to collect fees, and money distributed to copywrite holders, charges on sliding scale depending on size, age, popularity, if 90% of fee goes to copywrite holders its probably more than get now, 10 % to run Central servers, and run over itunes on way past ...
P2P users are protrayed as evil, not all are, the files I share are mirrors of old silents & Newsreels, sci-fi etc from www.archive.org, which are constantly being downloaded, this vids are all out of copywrite, so no issues for me , except if I hook to a server to do a search, then because all searches on server, are being passed to all machines, I may get P2P notice, not about a file I had anything to do with, but someones search passed thru my machine, so my answer is not use servers, so stay a "passive" on network, so now no notices, since I stop using those server searches, so now only people getting the files I got online like from 1906 ....
http://www.archive.org/details/TheStoryOfTheKellyGang-FragmentsFromTheFinalReel
BUT, if that works for me, it will also work for those causing trouble, so bury the servers in a deep pit, Malcom, but it won't do any good, the internet was designed to link machines, it will continue to do so ...
So let it, don't go to the expense of all this filtering etc, make P2P users the solution, the networks are there, distribution is happening, and I think what Turnbull & Movie studios needs to realise is the world has moved on, but they would see more money.......
By the way with "Smart" TV recording to USB, somebody could hack smart tv to do P2P ?, or sneakernet it over to friends place on USB, will they have to ban TV stations ?
...for those new to VPNs, proxies, SSH tunnels, seedboxes, usenet over SSL and the like.
I remember back to TV news video of large groups of senior citizens learning how to bypass the government's internet filter (back in 2006 when an "internet filter" was a policy looking likely to happen) - all of those people can now apply the same lessons to their use of torrents, if they are using them.
In 2012 I thought we maybe had heard the end of the filter, when the policy was abandoned by the then labour government. Here in 2014 we are talking about it again, but instead of a focus on child pr0n we now have a focus on pirates.
Just like in the UK though, don't expect anything to be filtered until after the next election in 2016 - there is a small window of opportunity early next year where we could see it pushed through, but it seems there is enough opposition to this from enough senators to hopefully block it's passage for long enough that the government looks up, sees an election coming like a freight train, and ducks for cover on the issue again.
I hope.
For the sake of the uninformed Internet user anyway. We have enough a problem with the cost of living in this country as it is, without struggling low-middle income earners losing it at their teenage kids because they have a legal letter demanding $5,000 in payment that they don't have, and subsequently turning off the Internet all together, which leads to it's own set of problems (every one less connection to the Internet is a problem).
If that doesn't happen, then what happened in NZ is probably what will take place here:
Suddenly, connections of encrypted tunnels will surge and nobody (in the mass media) will be able to explain why. (since the mass media are the ones who bribed the pollies to have this reality in the first place, they will never admit they were wrong)
It's a simple panacea, look tough, don't make waves which might come back to you, don't actually do anything, but be seen do be doing things. Maybe make a speech which resonates with the public. Just when Tony's at a very low ebb. Mal's up for the top job and couldn't do any worse than Tony.
But Mal's in for a broadside from Labour, raising the republic debate for Australia Day, to cause tension with the LNP conservatives, but can Mal resist a republic comment for his possible future as PM.
I love the political thrust and parry.... wankers
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