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!)

A very cool Mythbusters demonstration of doing tasks in parallel versus serially. Make sure you stay for the slo-mo at the end.

via Make

After a mention on Slashdot I was checking out Map/Reduce (again) which mentioned Yahoo’s use of hadoop. There was a list of Map/Reduce based applications using Hadoop and I happened to notice that ablegrape is a search engine seemingly devoted to wine.

Now, I must see if I can find some vintage ‘bastardo’

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

WordPress 2.6 was a painless subversion update for me. Probably the nicest features for me are word count (although I’m not actually sure when it does the count, definitely on manual saves) and tracking of revisions to posts.

• Home Based Learning Network trade fair. I won the first door prize
• Touring the frozen eastern states. Qantas cancels two of my flights due to maintenance issues, and books me on the earlier flight. Fortunately I am able to make it to the airport on time in both cases, although one of them involves eating my dinner in the car… One flight is on a plane flown up from Melbourne to replace the original aircraft. The new plane has a loose interior panel next to my seat, which the hostie kicks into place And the reading lights don’t work. Hopefully nothing else is wrong with it!
• I’m going to try a cut for those who like such things. Apologies if this doesn’t work on the syndicated feed.

(more…)

• A relaxing weekend in Mandurah
• Planning an interstate trip
• Wrangling FileMaker, MySQL, PHP, qpopper and postfix.
• Bilby getting much more talkative. Many more words and signs (miming juicing an orange to indicate she wanted OJ!) Long involved soliloquies, if only I could understand what she was actually saying…
• Colds all round Mounds of tissues
• Car serviced.
• Got a call from my ISP claiming I was DoSing someone. Oops (No, it was not a virus)
• Most excellent engagement party with many good friends.
• Baked a Jaffa Marble Cake and a vegan Apple and Almond cake (I was out of walnuts).
• Got a ladder for my birthday. Used it to clean the gutters.
• Got many birthday wishes from people, thankyou, it meant a lot.
• Had a close friend ring up on my birthday to ask me how to send a break from telnet. This was good for the amusement value of him forgetting my birthday at least.
• Watered trace elements into the plants.
• Saw Da Vinci’s machines. Had forgotten how much of it was weapons research.
• Indian buffet.
• Saw Dr. Jones.
• Read Moondust.

It seems there’s a new housing subdivision called Bletchley Park. Obviously catering to the cypherpunk market?

So, word on the street is that Facebook is having growing pains, seeing as pretty much everyone who knows anyone is using it, they’re having problems getting their server infrastructure to cope with the load. Plus, the vulture capitalists want some payoff, at the same time as more capital’s needed to buy the farm (server farm, that is :). Blog articles such as this one, for example. I guess that’s why Google started out with the invite-only idea for Gmail and Orkut.