Elias Bizannes talks about the community Silicon Beach Australia of which he set-up.
Image Source: (AFP: William West – ABC)
Yesterday Telstra, (Australia’s largest Telecommunications Company) told the Rudd Government to stop “dithering” according to The Australian over the upcoming National Broadband Network.
“By this continued delay and dithering about making a decision on the national broadband plan, we’re sacrificing $200 to $350 million a month,” Dr Burgess said.
“We ought to be out there digging holes, laying cable, connecting people.”
“There’s no excuse for that.
The Australian has told it’s readers that Dr Burgess has
“Commissioned a fresh study to examine the impact the network was likely to have on productivity, employment and GDP.”
To all of this I firstly say to Telstra stop bloody whinging.
Secondly, how the hell are Telstra managing to ’sacrifice’ “$200 to $350 million a month” by not having such a network in place, when they do not know the take up rate of what such a network would be for sure.
And thirdly: Telstra, you haven’t won the NBN, and the whole “We ought to be out there digging holes, laying cable, connecting people.” is not “we” yet.
Source:
- Ben
Image Source: Notes2Self
With the launch of the Australian version of Google Street View two days ago, a spokesman for the Office of Federal Privacy told Australian IT that they…
“…cautiously confirmed that the agency supported Google’s approach..”
Dr Svantesson, spokesmen for the Office of Federal Privacy also noted that:
“The steps Google had taken were inadequate. Individuals could be identified by features other than faces and number plates”
He also made it clear that:
“Google has consulted with us and that has been very positive but arguably the consultation could have gone wider”.
A number of other parties have also made their opinion clear, with some loving the service and others drilling it in to the ground.
Brisbane’s Courier mail is taking the one sided approach saying that the service offers ‘high resolution images’ when in fact they are not at all.
The Courier takes on a case scenario of a single mum of whom is worried that she can now easily be identified with Google’s Street View Service, and now she can, being photographed for the article with her children who are wearing their school uniform, in front of a real high resolution image of her house with her last name and suburb identified in the article.
Without all this extra information we would have never know who she was, or had the possibility of finding her.
Image Source: Courier Mail
Seriously, what a load of BS.
Sources:
- Ben
Once again Optus Australia’s network in Brisbane was a let down for users trying to use their mobile phones this morning.
“From between 6am and 7am there were intermittent issues with call set up, which means some customers would not have been able to make a call,” an Optus spokeswoman said.
According to the Brisbane Times She said engineers resolved the problem by 12pm.
This time the issue was said to have been a software malfunction.
This follows Friday afternoons congestion of which was blamed for the network becoming unreliable across Queensland and also causing some problems in NSW and Victoria, of which also follows a complete outage last month On July 15 to all of Queensland and Northern NSW.
Optus need to get their act together, and fast!
Updated:
According to Australian IT, the issue was due to:
“FLAWED software patches from Nokia Siemens Networks”
Sources:
- Ben
After the news that Australian iPod’s may be scanned for illegal music at airports, I thought us Australian’s had it bad in regards to Privacy.
I was wrong.
It looks like in America, Homeland security are now able to do the following:
“Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.”
- Source: Washington Post
What kind of world are we living in these days?
- Ben
After the Australian Government revealed that they would increases our Internet speeds with a National Broadband Network worth over 4.7 billion dollars, they have now revealed results of tests they have done in Tasmania regarding Internet filtering to block Child Porn from Australian Internet users.
The issue that many people have foreseen with such a system being put into place, including Brent and I, is that it would slow down our Internet speeds, as all Internet traffic would have to pass through a piece of filtering hardware or software, of which in turn would slow down traffic between you and your Internet Service Provider.
“Preliminary results from the ACMA study showed that five of the six filters tested degraded Internet throughput speeds by between 22 percent and 75 percent, or more.
Just introducing a filter to the test network — without actively filtering any content — resulted in up to 10 percent degradation.”
- Source: iTnews
Although such a filter would remove the risk of illegal child pornography being viewed within Australia, as you can see, it would also slow down out Internet connections, of which I’m sure doesn’t seem like something users of whom are doing the ‘right thing’ by not viewing such material, should have to deal with.
Is the Government going backwards yet again?
- Ben
With Twitter spam on the rise and spammers being locked away it looks as though Skype has begun to get the spammers seal of approval.
I’ve gotten a fair few messages like the one bellow though Skype as of late that I have just closed thinking It’ll never come back, but it has.
So if you have been receiving these messages from unauthorised people, do what I did and Allow chats from “Only people in my Contact List can start”.
Have you been receiving annoying conversations like the one I have?
Let Brent and I know in the comments below =)
In other Skype news, Skype is not commenting as to whether they encrypt our calls: How Secure is Skype, Really?
- Ben
The list of stuff we hate from the show that we do (and out of it). This’ll be a weekly updated thing, and if we find anything in between the shows that we just hate, we’ll add them here too.
1. Windows, Mac and Linux Fanboys. It’s a derogatory term, but seriously, people who post anonymously on forums that say for example “Linux iz the s#%^ d00dz, WinDOZE is a pile of c#$%”. No one likes you.
2. People who post on engadget posts that simply say “FIRST POST!!!”. Big deal, at least you get *lowest ranked*.
3. Dumb people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Seriously. Example: “I hate ‘macks’ cos they only got one mouse button”. It’s the 21st century. Apple isn’t dumb anymore.
4. Microsoft’s inability to make their OS experience enjoyable. Why do I cringe when I use I PC? Why is Vista the reason I cry at night?
5. Digg users. People say s*** they wouldn’t usually say, but they literally hyperventilate when their smarmy comment gets a +1. So much meaningless stuff gets thrown around on that comments page. Endless.
6. Bloggers. 95% of bloggers don’t have an audience. Why do you bother to write anything? I know that probably around four people will read this, and 3 of them are related to the podcast. The other one is my sister.
7. People who in comments pages say something completely derogatory or incorrect (mostly on Digg) and then say “Ooooh, fanboys Digg me down”, because they know in their tiny minds that the last thing people want to do is prove someone’s point, so the comment is left unharmed. Then, the people who agree Digg up. Clever.
8. Myspace pages. The amount of time I could have saved if Myspace didn’t exist. Everyone knows the story, you go to a page, the guy has an emo theme where all the writing is black. It starts blaring out Metallica, but you don’t like Metallica, now you look for the player, but the theme makes the page go 25,000 pixels wide. You find the player and stop the music, but 17 youtube videos start playing. You hit CommandQ (ALT F4). You cry.
9. Me too websites. Hmm? See this blog post? We don’t need another fraking list about the problems with the internet, huh! Doing it anyway, cos I feel like it. Do we need another tech podcast? No, but we wanted to do one, know what? I hate me.
10. American accents. I need to stop listening to podcasts, because everyone has an American accent. Bet you Americans don’t mind, but it affects the way I talk. I don’t want to say “a” like “aaah”, but “ahhh”. Minor point, yes, probably my own fault, but can you tone the accent down a touch.
11. lol. rofl. lmao. I know for a fact you are not laughing out loud, rolling on the floor laughing, or laughing your arse off.
12. Anything spelt wrong. In fact, I’m going insane. Firefox says spelt isn’t a word, then halfway through that sentence, it corrects itself, but by that time, it looks wrong to me. You know the feeling.
13. Imageshack. I have never actually seen an imageshack image that has not used more than its allowed bandwidth. They also need a new frog.
