Exetel Trials Filtering with No Ability to Opt-Out

28 April 2009

Around noon yesterday, Steve Waddington of Exetel announced that Exetel would run its own filtering trial, independently of the Government-run trial. The kicker? There is no ability to opt-out of the trial.

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Classification Board Website Finally Back Online

24 April 2009

On 26 March 2009, the Classification Board website was hacked, and the text on the homepage was replaced. Today, nearly a full month after the site was hacked, an overhauled version of the site is finally back online.

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Why ACMA Probably Won’t Fine You $11,000 a Day

20 April 2009

After ACMA threatened Whirlpool’s host with an $11,000 per day fine if it failed to remove a link to a blacklisted anti-abortion website, some people expressed concern that they’d receive surprise fines. To explain why this isn’t the case, I provide a detailed look at the regulation of Australian-hosted prohibited content.

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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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Lawyers Can Be Funny, Donate to Trees for Life

20 February 2009

One of the problems with the legal profession is the ingrained technophobia, and the inevitable result. To immerse us in the law practice experience, the first week’s reading for the GDLP course was provided in the form of a brick. A digital copy could have been provided for a fraction of the cost. At least the voluntary donation for casual Friday was for the benefit of Trees for Life.

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Legislative Spaghetti: Price Fixing under the TPA

11 February 2009

Sometimes you come across legislative drafting that is so bad that there’s no excuse for it. The Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) s 45A(1) deems price fixing to substantially lessen competition for the purposes of s 45. It does this in one 152-word sentence that scores 0.0 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test and has a Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level of 63.1.

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