Awesome article

Just wanted to say thanks.

The sooner the better

Introducing this legislation won't change anything, any more than introducing legislation allowing the NSA to put mass taps into AT&T's exchanges didn't change anything. They were already doing it.

Likewise anybody who thinks communications that passes through a central choke point (Microsoft, I'm looking at you with Skype traffic) that can decrypt it won't be decrypted is living on a different planet to me.

To put it another way, Companies that advertise snake oil like secure communications will have a new road block in their path. If this legislation passes they effectively have to claim they are breaking the law. Hopefully that will make a debacle like Hushmail a lot less likely.

That's got to be good, surely.

Oh, if you really want secure communications, it isn't hard. You just need end to end encryption implemented in open source software. That's another thing this legislation will make plain - at least to those who think about it.

Jeeze, where did you spring from?

The tightest, most information packed review of competing cloud systems I've seen. Where the fuck you did you come from?

We are all saved!!

Well, it's either that or there is a typo. 46 KW*hr per kilo corresponds to specific energy of around 165 MJ / kg, which is extraordinary. Diesel is only manages 46 MJ / kg.

If it is true I predict electric cars and renewables will be running the world by the end of the decade, and global warming is henceforth a non-issue.

That's what the beer is for: Here's hoping!

How does this work?

One of the patents listed in the licence agreement, 8,032,656, was filed in 2007. The SIP RFC is dated 2002. How does that work? In fact about 1/2 the patents were filed after the first SIP RFC was published in 1999.

BT - Brittan's Troll.

NZ shows the way ...

Being an Ozzie I don't normally go looking at NZ posts web site, but today I did so for a friend. And bugger me, one of the products listed is a USA Shipping address:

http://www.nzpost.co.nz/products-services/online-shopping/youshop

Those Kiwi's are sneaky bastards. And yes, in this case bastard is an Ozzie term of endearment.

Spin, spin, spin

I'd lay odds piracy is only a minor concern, and here is being used as a foil for what their real problem is: competition.

They have an effective monopoly on terrestrial pay TV because of their tie in with the owners of that cable. With the NBN anyone can set up a pay TV network, and undoubtedly quite a few will try their had at it.

There goes the cosy monopoly. Now that's really going to hurt.

Maybe they could try selling something...

Observation: from Seven West Media's 2011 annual report, Channel 7's revenues was $225 million last year. They are by far the most profitable, so if you combined Channel 7, Channel 9, Channel 10, and Foxtel, I doubt their yearly revenues would hit $1B/year.

Put your hands up if you would be willing to pay $20/month for 150 hours of video content (ie 5 hours/day), without ads. If every house the NBN passes did that, the total would be $1.4 Billion - ie more than they are making now, and being legit would be far easier than pirating it! See - it doesn't take much imagination to fix the problem and make money.

PS: Where did Kim pull that $1.37 Billion figure from? (That is purely a rhetorical question - I have a fair idea where it was pulled from.) He appears to be claiming TV's would be more than double what they do now if only piracy was stopped. Yeah, right.

And thanks to Richard ...

For bring this torch out of whatever dark hole it was hiding in so we can all see it. It's nice to have numbers to quantify things.

If you want to be remembered as the Captian that went down with your ship

... then you absolutely have to make sure the ship goes down.

And Dell joins the club.

Take the Dell Precision 4700 laptop, in the one default configuration offered www.dell.com.au:

From www.dell.com: $1549.

From www.dell.com.au: $3599.

That's a 232% increase. I wish it was a joke, but I think they are serious.

Fuck, I hope not.

I have to live in this country.

And to be honest, with Tony Abbott championing the canonization Andrew Bolt as patron saint of free speech, it seems very unlikely.

Clam down people

The surface is based on the same OS as WinPhone. Why are they panicking? No one is going to buy the thing anyway.

CEO of firm tells region they must spend $1.1 trillion on products his firm manufactures.

Clearly El Reg went to some lengths to find a completely unbiased source for this article.

@Ragarath: that's a seriously good spot

+1, an unbelievably good spot that destroys the integrity of, well, someone. I wonder if the award is based on a fraud?

Hosting companies

Surely there is no argument DMCA was always intended to cover hosting companies and the like. This isn't a surprise, it is how it's designers intended it.

NZ$15,000 for downloading songs that sell for $1? I thought the Kiwi's had lost lost all sense of proportion when they starts jailing parents for smacking their kids, but clearly not. There was still some left to lose.

Amazing how they consistently get it wrong

Blind freddy can see Nokia's WinPhone experiment has been a total failure (with even the N9 outselling the WP7 models), Elop's judgement calls in the smartphone area a complete train wreck, and yes Google's 20 man Android dev team leaves Microsoft's WinPhone team eating it's dust. I assume even Nokia now realises their smartphone platform is dead.

However this does not mean Nokia is dead. Nokia is primarily a feature phone maker. They make most of their revenue from feature phones (obviously, since they don't sell significant numbers smartphones any more). Nokia's survival hangs on whether they continue to do this. They are fighting tooth and nail in this area. (As one wag pointed out in another forum, Nokia's feature phones actually do more than their smartphones do now.)

So this "analyst" has it completely arse about. Nokia's survival doesn't depend on WinPhone 7. It depends on Meltemi, which is what the next generation of Nokia's feature phones will running. It is a Maemo / Meego derivative, ie Linux. It never ceases to amaze me how these people manage to get it completely wrong, and still manage to make the news headlines. Brickbats to ElReg for putting them there.

You know the game is up ...

It's been a great scam while it lasted, but you know the game is up when even the pollies have caught on.

I recall many years ago our federal Government enthusiastically supported the creation of these dirty little back room cartels by clamping down on "grey marketing". I think that was back in the Frazer years, but while Hawk & Keating tore down most of it, the most recent example of it was the Labor governments continued support of the ban on parallel import of books.

Retail is in for a rough ride as these cosy little back room relationships are torn apart by competition. We will all be better off because of it.

Phones? What phones?

I remember mobile phones. They were quaint little things. You could fit 5 of them in your pocket, they lasted 2 weeks on a single charge, and you could leave them on the car roof, watch them bounce down the street, pick them up and they would still work. If people wanted phones they would still be buying those things. I hear some people still do.

The rest of us are buying mini computer than allows us to browse the web, read emails, draw pictures, take and edit videos, play movies, navigate down a street, be a wifi access point, yada, yada, yada. Oh yeah, you also make phone calls on them but compare those old mobile phones they aren't too good at that - too big, too power hungry, too fragile.

Turns out for most of the things you do with these newfangled things big is good. People get over their shock at the Galaxy Note by using the thing to browse the web and read emails, and rapidly come to the realisation that it is really, really good at doing those things. And it does actually fit into a pocket or handbag and is light enough to carry around all day without noticing. Yes it sucks at making phone calls - holding something that big up to your ear looks funny and feels awkward. But then again, if making phone calls was the priority, you would have bought a yesteryear mobile phone, and you didn't.

Ah, another reason for the NBN

If it survives the NBN will eliminate this problem. It replaces the current switch fabric with VOIP - ie the internet. The circuits in the exchanges that clogged will become land fill. And the volume of traffic that caused them choke will barely be noticed on the internet backbone, as it already carries orders magnitude more traffic now.

Bravo again Richard

Yet again you have produced an exemplary piece of science reporting.

@scottf007: I think the first guy is wrong

*shrug* What can I say? There will be no law banning competition on the local loop. They are all gone. Look it up yourself if you don't believe me. The proposed bill is online.

@scottf007: One company owning all access, this means one company will set prices with no other companies to compete(I think the first guy is wrong).

Firstly a gentle reminder: this is what we have now. One company, Telstra owns almost all the access. The one exception is the Optus HFC network which is dying a slow agonised death as we speak.

You talk about how wonderful competition is, but ignore the fact no country on the planet have managed to produce a competitive local loop delivery. The reason is plain as the nose on your face: no one in their right mind will roll out multiple cables to your house. It would be like running two water mains, or two selects of electricity poles. Just insane. That short period were we did take a short trip on the other side of sanity lead to the two HFC networks being rolled down the one street, and now the eventual death of one of them.

So local loop competition won't happen. You are demanding the impossible. Forget the fantasy, and just accept the idea that one company will own the sole land line connection to your house. If they are a private company they will charge you as much as they think you can bear. Of course no one can stomach that, so Telstra is regulated and charges whatever the government determines. The NBN will be a government owned company and so in that case the government sets the price. Can you spot the difference? Neither can I.

But there is one difference. Telstra used it local loop monopoly to keep a tight grasp all the rest of the communications infrastructure. Most of the back haul in the country is owned by Telstra. It is by far the biggest mobile operator. When you own the key piece of the puzzle, the local loop, that everyone must connect to it is easy to make it difficult and expensive for competitors. Thus we ended up with a one near monopoly operator who controls all of Australia telecommunications infrastructure.

The NBN will fix that. In return for being allowed to own the natural monopoly, it must stay out of all other areas. So in the long term we should see lots more competition in back haul and retail.

Did you get that - because I think you are missing the big picture. In fact you've got it 180 degrees arse about - just like Turnbull. Here you are saying the NBN will squash all competition, whereas in fact the new regulations separate the industry into multiple segments so there will be more competition.

In fact it is no different to what happened in Electricity. It used to be your local generator owned everything from the power station, to the transmission lines, to the suburban poles, to the meter box in your house, and you paid whatever they said. Then they broke it up. So now you have generators, who bid in a market to sell to retailers, who in turn sell to you. And so you have a choice. In fact everyone has choices and there is competition everywhere where they used to be none. But did you notice there is one area there is no competition? That would be the suburban poles and wires. They are still owned by a monopoly. The government usually. How odd - with the NBN we end up with the same situation in telecommunications.

@scottf007: We are getting bent over.

Maybe we are. But again you are making no sense. You are saying that with the current situation we being ripped off. Fair enough. But now the government proposes to change that situation in a way that might fix it, you are using that argument that we are being ripped off now to oppose it?!? Weird.

NBN ending competition

Turnbull is promoting a fantasy here. He claims, repeatedly that the NBN is a monopoly guaranteed by law. It is complete bs. Even those supposed "anti-cherry picking" provisions were some journalists invention.

The new laws do insist the industry is split into segments - local loop and the rest (retail and back haul), but that's it. Any and every one is free to build a competitor to the NBN, and what's more do so only in the most profitable, densely populated areas (ie, cherry pick). The _only_ restriction is you must be a wholesaler who sells access to every retailer on the same terms. So, you think wireless is going to kill fibre - well then go for it. Maybe put fixed wireless into apartment blocks were you can get 100's of customers per antenna, and undercut the NBN. No one is stopping you.

So unlike the Telstra monopoly of old, competition is allowed. I expect in the back haul business there will be more competition, because unlike Telstra the NBN is banned from providing back haul. Telstra on the the other hand gave itself very preferential access to its own exchanges. If the NBN succeeds, it will be because it can wholesale the sort of local loop product people want cheaper than anyone else can. Most people would call that open slather competition.

It's almost a 180 difference from the picture Turnbull is trying to spin. Yet articles like this one just repeat his claims without question. Maybe your could actually try doing some journalism for a change, putting the claims of our pollies in context rather than just allowing yourself to be treated as a copy & paste megaphone.

Richard Chirgwin - you're my hero

I get more objective reporting from the daily articles by Richard here then I do from the rest of the internet combined. I know, I know, Richard is just presenting boring facts rather and honest assessment rather than searching for the most titillating angle and speculating about it endlessly. He even has the temerity to include to include links to back up his claims. Since when has any serious money making journalist even done that?

It can't possibly last. I am making a point of enjoying it while it is around.

What am I missing here?

I am having trouble reconciling:

> would be tasked with getting a minimum 12 Mbps to as many Australians as possible, “ideally within twelve months”. This would be followed by a rapid upgrade to 24 Mbps “within forty-eight months”.

with:

> a model which would leave high-density, economically-viable locations served by market competition, unsupported by government

Most people in these economically-viable areas do not have 24 Mbps. Most don't have 12 Mbps. So how are these people going to be upgraded to those speed without support from the government? Presumably if it was economically-viable, it would already have been done.

And how do you propose to force the split up a private company like Telstra? Turnbull blandly asserts that "more valuable to shareholders in the long term". Surely if the shareholders actually believed that it would have been done by now.

There is also the minor issue of this approach of paying the local oligopoly to upgrade the copper why leaving the open having been tried, and failed. I guess its possible that since we have said adois to Saul and Phil, attitudes have changed.

All in all, this seems like putting up something different form what the government is doing that will survive the cursory inspection it will get at election time. Ahh well. I guess it is better than the hopeless plan they floated at the last election, although I am lending it more dignity than it deserves by calling it a plan.

And this is the bit that makes no sense

> Because of this, each wireless user can use “the full data rate of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users”, and therefore, “Shannon’s law does not apply”.

Either the spectrum isn't literally shared, or Shannon-Hartley theorem does indeed apply. There are a whole pile of tricks you can use to avoid sharing spectrum: create small cells that don't overlap, use highly directional antenna's, use phase array antenna's to create a virtual directional antenna, bump up the signal strength to raise the signal to noise ration, figure out a way to reduce the noise by say running your signal through very thin glass wave guides. If Steve Perlman hasn't invented a new one of these it is snake oil. Given the way the paper is written, I'm betting on snake oil.

Notice that Shannon-Hartley is called a theorem, not a law. That is because isn't one of physics model's validated through repeated observation. It is actually something stronger - a mathematical fact. Saying it is wrong is like saying 1+1=3.

LiFePO4?

All well and good, but LiFePO4 last a minimum of 2000 cycles, and a decade, and are shipping now.

To justify their enormous cost batteries have to last decades. The means somewhere around to 10,000 cycle mark. 1,000 just doesn't cut it.

Oh, so now we have a ...

From the article: So how do you process, transport, and store this much data?

Finally, a justification for the NBN.

And what's wrong with the utilitarian argument?

I came to pretty much the same conclusions as the article when we have the mandatory filtering debate here in Australia. (We are currently going through the "optional filtering" debate, which roughly translates to the ISP's voluntarily implementing filtering on all their customers (who don't have a choice), because the government is beating them over the head. The government announced during the last couple of weeks when the largest ISP's verbally agreed to come on board. The only problem being now that push has come to shove and the media heat is increasing, the ISP's seem to be realising this move may not popular with their customers and are wavering. We will see.)

Returning to the topic. I see we have one here saying the fact that the publishing of the abuse of child saves several is not sufficient justification for allowing the publishing. I guess they must be one of those anti-vaccination nutters as well. The argument is the same. Vaccination does undeniably kill some kids, in return for saving many more. The anti utilitarian's argue the greater good is no justification if one kid dies.

The interesting thing about pedo photo's is there a 1/2 way house. There aren't many crimes where the perpetrator willingly sells photo's of them committing the deed, for the obvious reason they are creating a picture and money trail that leads straight back to them. But this creates an opportunity, for those who are truly interested in the kids welfare, as opposed to just forcing everybody to conform to their own idea of utopia. Rather than crack down so hard on picture trading you force it to become well neigh invisible, you semi-tolerate it - rather in the same manner music piracy is now semi tolerated. It's still a crime, but if you get caught the primary interest is in having legal access to all your records, so you can follow the money trail to a child abuser.

Now the amazing thing to me was the people in Australia pushing the internet filter, dumb as thick planks they might be, seemed to get this. Towards the twilight of the proposal its primary political proponent actually said rather than begin filtering new child porn sites immediately, they would leave them open for a while so the police could track who was accessing them. It was a tiny, tiny blow for common sense, and a wholly unexpected one.

Thanks

Thanks for the article Richard. It's nice to have something counterbalancing the spin from Abbott's side, although spin is probably a generous description of probably should be called outright lies. It's disappointing to see them coming from Turnbull.