From the category archives:

Technology

Why It’s Legal to View Prohibited Content

2 April 2009

‘Prohibited content’ suggests content that is illegal to view or possess. In fact, it is a legislative term that includes all content classified RC or X 18+ and some content classified R 18+ and MA 15+. I have a detailed look at the regulation by ACMA of overseas-hosted prohibited content.

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Force CommSec to Use HTTPS with NoScript

2 April 2009

I previously wrote about how CommSec uses a non-SSL frameset to deliver sensitive financial data. It turns out that you can use the NoScript add-on for Firefox to force CommSec to use HTTPS.

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Classification Board Website Hacked

26 March 2009

Three versions of the ACMA blacklist have leaked to Wikileaks. Then it was revealed that anyone could extract the blacklist from the Integard filter in a 30-second hack. Now the Classification Board website has been hacked. Wouldn’t it have been ironic had the hackers elected to post the leaked ACMA blacklist on the site and then report the site to ACMA?

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Commonwealth Insecurity: Banking over HTTP

20 March 2009

CommSec uses a non-SSL frameset to deliver sensitive financial data. You never know (without some serious digging) whether the content frame is at the www.comsec.com.au domain and whether it’s using SSL, so you’ll never know whether it’s safe to enter your details there.

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iTunes 8.1 Takes 8.1 Seconds to Load

14 March 2009

Apple released iTunes 8.1. ‘iTunes gets a speed boost.’ I suppose ‘speed boost’ means that it’s faster, not fast. It takes 7–8 seconds to load, compared to one second for each of Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Firefox 3.0.7. It’s about time apple wrote a native Windows iTunes interface that just works.

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BigPond Cable: 80 min for $140, Excess $1.88/sec

12 March 2009

Telstra recently announced that it will upgrade its BigPond cable service in Melbourne to 100 Mbps by Christmas 2009. Big deal. You won’t see those speeds during real world usage. But if you did, at $139.95 for 60 GB of usage, you’d be paying $139.95 for 80 minutes with excess charged at $1.88 per second.

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Australians Scared of the Internet, Need Protection

28 February 2009

Senator Stephen Conroy recently confirmed that a bureaucrat will decide what online material offends you and it will be blocked. When only 2% of Labour voters support its filtering policy and 90% of Internet users indicate they would opt out of filtering of adult material, why is the Government pushing forward with this plan?

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Application vs Document Focus in the Taskbar

10 February 2009

Microsoft has redesigned the Taskbar in a way that closely mimics the Mac OS X Dock, but in doing so Microsoft has ported some of the worst aspects of Mac OS X to Windows. With the default configuration on Windows 7, whenever I want to switch to what I want to do, I have an extra click. And, while rearranging items on the Taskbar is finally supported, there’s no way to rearrange individual documents.

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Another WMP 12 Large Tag Bug

6 February 2009

When adding my collection of MP3s to the WMP 12 library, I found that some files were added without any of the metadata ordinarily read from the tags, like title, artist, and album. Further investigation showed that WMP 12 has a massive memory leak when reading tags from MP3s, causing it to chew up all available memory.

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OpenType Ligatures Coming to Word 14?

5 February 2009

While writing a long and interesting paper on Australia’s Telecommunications Access Regime, I found that Microsoft Office Word 12 has half-baked support for OpenType ligatures when running on the Windows 7 Beta. It appears Microsoft has been working on implementing OpenType ligatures in Word, and we may finally see support for them in Word 14.

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