Cheap Therapy

That would be Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network, who as the Australian Federaction Against Copyright Theft have filed suit against iiNet, at the same time as distributing “Nothing beats the real thing” DVDs to high schools (I guess they’re suggesting reading books instead of watching tv :). Amusingly these “educational” packs include the claim:

The resource is not a propaganda exercise. It does make clear to students that there are harmful consequences from film piracy, but it does so through educationally valid processes. It is an educational approach that allows students to face a significant civics and citizenship issue: their role in a society where many of them and their peers are breaking the law.

Check out Tama’s blog or the Electronic Frontiers Australia response to the suit (and make sure you join the EFA, you may need their help someday. Maybe sooner than you think!)

Reposted from Slashdot:

If you are an Australian, please take action:

1) Call Senator Conroy’s office on 03 9650 1188. Do not be rude, do not swear, just in a very reasoned and rational voice, express your disapproval, and in a few short sentences, say why you disagree. It matters a lot.

2) Write a letter to Senator Conroy, make sure it’s between half a page to one page (no more than 400 words). Again, in a polite tone (that doesn’t have to be formal, and doesn’t have to have letterhead, etc., just your name and address) let him know why you disagree with him. His address is:
Senator Stephen Conroy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

3) Write a letter to your local MP. It doesn’t matter what party he/she is from, Liberals will use your letter to back up their claims in Question Time, which gives publicity to the whole issue and will bring it to mainstream media’s attention. Labor members will also express their criticism, privately, to him. This specially matters if your local MP is a Minister and serves in the Cabinet. To find out who your local MP is click here

4) Write a letter to Prime Minister Rudd. Let him know that when the Australian people voted him in office last year, they didn’t know “Education Revolution” means censorship. Rudd’s address is:
PO Box 6022
House of Representatives
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

5) Donate or become a member of Electronic Frontiers Australia . Right now the EFA is the sole organisation fighting this. They need all the help they can get.

6) Write a letter to your ISP. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Evil Telstra; on this, we’re all together. They are fighting the battle for us right now, but it would help them to know that what they are doing is a good business practice, that you expect them to fight this to the end.

Don’t just sit around and do nothing and then complain about how evil governments are. We, the citizens are the ones who allow governments to become evil, by our political apathy. Move! Take Action! Now!

An interesting analysis of US National Debt by President.

George W. Bush has signed the Pro-IP act into law, providing for harsher penalties for people who copy movies and music. How soon before Australia follows down that path? It’s hard to know, given that our government won’t publicly provide the text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

If you’d like to make any submissions to the Australian tax system review, the submissions period closes on the 17th October. Perhaps mentioning that requiring salary packaged cars to drive a certain number of kilometres for greater discounts isn’t the most climate friendly idea.

Over the last week I’ve ploughed through Michael Pollan’s book about the rise of Nutritionism, and why, despite so much dietary research, people eating the “Western diet” are less healthy than ever.

The book is “In Defense of Food”, where ‘food’ is actual stuff that is grown, rather than produced in a factory.

Perhaps the major revelations for me were

• how lobbying allowed manufacturers to avoid having to put the word ‘imitation’ on their product labels. And how lobbying lead to Nutritionism. Because it’s not something produced by cattle ranchers (who vote) that’s bad, it’s saturated fat, or other non-industry-specific components
• that optimising a food for a long shelf life means removing nutrients from it, which means that people need to eat more of it to get the same nutritional effect
• roller milling of flour (as opposed to grinding between a traditional mill’s grindstones) results in the nice white flour that doesn’t go rancid. Of course the problem with this is that it also removes the nutrients! Thus there was a sudden outbreak of dietary deficiency related illnesses and they had to fortify the flour. But have have food scientists missed out anything that has long term effects. Who knows?
• you are what what you eat eats - intensive agricultural methods using synthetic fertilizers are reducing the micronutrients in the soil, and thus in the food

Pollan’s a journalist, and his style is very approachable. Definitely worth a read if you are the sort of person who eats!

It seems I haven’t posted a redux-ion in some time. Since last:

• Went postal (voting, that is).
• Greeted the new arrival
• Fathers’ Day
• Discovered a rust spot under the weather seal on the door of the new car. Missed by the RAC. Not mentioned by the dealer (if they noticed it). Bugger.
• Visited a few car shops to get anti-rust stuff.
• Therapeutic shopping at NetPlus (need more storage), OfficeWorks (noticed they now have magnetic print-yourself car signage) and Zytech.
• Want one of the new iPod Touches with a speaker!
• Was not destroyed by Large Hadron Collider. Nor was world. At least not that I could tell.
• Made a lot of some assortment of toast, boiled eggs, baked beans and Weet-Bix every morning.
• Many stories were read.
• Drove the battlewagon some more.
• Attended surprise birthday for MikeyOb.
• Showed Puggle how to solder. Badly. But at least good enough to fix the cordless phones. Discovered you can answer the landline while the voip line is still ringing. Then pick up the voip line and get a dialtone even though the landline is in use
• …darling, names, names names…
• Walked to the shops with the kids. Had coffee. Waitron brought water with plastic cups for the kids unbidden, and my cappuccino plus two ‘cups of froth’ for the kids totalled $3.65 (cheaper than I pay for just a coffee many places). Hats off to Bada Bing.
• Discovered the evil credit card company (ANZ) will ring you to tell you you’re overlimit, but not before they’ve charged you $35 for the privilege. It also seems easier to cancel and apply for a new card than to get a limit increase (even if it’s to a lower limit than you were on before!). Getting a decrease is much easier. They did at least have a callback number when I didn’t believe they were the bank and resisted my social engineering attempt when I hadn’t identified myself.
• Helped the kids make vege kebabs with pesto. Yummy!
• Took the opportunity to indulge in pate, soft, hard and (soon) blue cheeses.
• Roasted a chook.

A reminder that on Saturday a vote for Elizabeth Re is a vote for a monorail to Scarborough!

For some time I’ve wondered why government can’t just be replaced by a black box running the appropriate software to handle everything local, state and federal governments do (after all, if they let you do everything online…).

It seems that the Metagovernment project endeavours to write some of that software.

In case there’s anyone not a member of the UCC who’d like to be a cyber-spook with Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate.

We are looking for passionate technical people who are interested in:
* Programming in high and low level languages
* Responding to incidents on critical networks
* Computer forensics to help find the really bad guys
* System administration to support our specialist networks
* Penetration testing, including tool and exploit development
* Software reverse engineering for malware analysis
* Computer and network vulnerability analysis and discovery
* Secure system and network architecture design and risk management

The campaign will run from July to September, with electronic
applications closing on 17 August 2008. During September, DSD will host
a fully-paid 2 day assessment centre in Canberra for those applicants
found suitable during the first phase. This will also give applicants an
opportunity to meet our staff and see the exciting range of work
available at DSD.

More information and details of how to apply can be found at
http://www.dsd.gov.au/cyberoperations

If you have any queries, please email cyber-ops@dsd.gov.au

Kind Regards,
David Lane
CNO Branch
DSD

I’m guessing you’d probably wind up working in sunny Canberra