Regular commenter Bob Bain has been adding lots of information about the availability of X18+ and other adult content to my previous post about Refused Classification material. Interesting stuff.
Internet hosting: the cost of support
[This is the first in a series of three articles to help people understand how internet hosting services work from a business perspective. They’re written for my small business clients over at Prussia.Net as part of a review of our own internet hosting service, but I’m hoping they’ll be of general interest. Enjoy.]
Internet hosting prices are usually explained in terms of the amount of storage space you get and the amount of data transfers (“bandwidth”) per month. However the real cost factor is paying the humans who provide support.
Some technical factors do affect the price of hosting, and I’ll address those tomorrow in Internet hosting: the cost of reliability. But with storage and bandwidth prices always dropping, particularly when set up on a large scale, hosting is now so cheap that Google, say, or WordPress.com and many others can provide free hosting in exchange for advertising. Or in Google’s case with Gmail, monitoring your email to build a profile so they can target advertising at you.
No, the humans are the expensive bit, and the cost can vary dramatically depending on how that support is provided. Here’s just a few of the factors.
Without civil liberties…
“The only difference between a Nation State and a Mafioso protection racket is the letterhead and the rituals — and the series of concessions, hard-won over eight centuries, that we call ‘civil liberties’.”
That’s the start of my guest post today for Electronic Frontiers Australia, entitled Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket.
It’s an essay that combines some thoughts about the constant battle for civil liberties with my reaction to the video posted by Wikileaks at Collateral Murder. It’s footage from 2007 showing a Reuters photojournalist and his driver and others being killed by US helicopter gunfire in Baghdad. It’s footage the US Department of Defence didn’t want you to see. It’s challenging to watch.
This is one of a series of guest posts for the EFA as part of their current fundraising campaign.
Patch Monday: Refused Classification means what, exactly?
Australia’s planned mandatory ISP-level internet filter will block Refused Classification (RC) material. Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy says that’s “child pornography, pro-bestiality sites, pro-rape websites and material like that”. But it’s actually more than that.
I covered this in the most recent episode of the Patch Monday podcast, back on 29 March, but I forgot to re-post it here. Consider that fixed.
My guest is Professor Catharine Lumby, one of the authors of Untangling the Net: The Scope of Content caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering.
You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.
Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
The 9pm Edict #10
The media totally misrepresents the real risks to our lives. Senator Conroy totally misrepresents the facts. Again. And the government literally makes my life more painful.
Here is episode 10 of The 9pm Edict.
You can listen to this episode below. But if you want them all, subscribe to the podcast feed, or even subscribe automatically in iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:00 — 7.2MB)
For more information about the topics covered in this episode, check out Australia’s Standard for the Uniform Scheduling of Drugs and Poisons, the National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee’s (NDPSC) decision on codeine, especially the NDPSC record of reasons, 56th meeting 16-17 June 2009, the ABC News story on same, and some background on codeine; the Marketplace story Big companies are hoarding cash; ABC News stories about the Pope’s Easter service being clouded by the sex abuse scandal and Jews upset that the Vatican compares criticism of the Pope to the Holocaust; and Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 3303.0 — Causes of Death, Australia.
If you’d like to comment on this episode, please add your comment below, or Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
[Credits: The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian, Edict fanfare by neonaeon, all from The Freesound Project, as were the other sound effects. Photograph of Stilgherrian taken 29 March 2009 by misswired, used by permission.]
50 to 50 #5: Dangerous play
[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, fifty posts in the lead-up to my 50th birthday in May. Originally intended to be one per day, with the final one on the birthday itself, it’s been disrupted by my work schedule. There will still be fifty posts, just not one per day.]
The great thing about growing up on a farm is that there’s about eleventy hundred ways of killing yourself and you get to try them all.
In the photo, there’s a pine tree on the right behind me and my brother. Yes, a brother. He was born in 1963, so there’s a three year gap. I’ll get to the pine tree in a moment.
On the left is the cement-brick milking shed. Immediately to its right, off in the distance so you might want to look on the embiggened photo, is the pumphouse. And then the truck, well, that’s just a truck — although my father built it like Dr Frankenstein from bits of other, dead, trucks.
Just behind the truck’s engine compartment is dad’s shed, a crumpled heap of corrugated iron that’s no longer there. It was poorly lit and full of tools and wood scraps and junk and half a dozen unfinished projects. I didn’t like going in there, it was creepy. Strange creatures lived in the dark corners and would kill small children, I know that for sure.
Even if they were good children.
Mum and dad were pretty busy most of the time. My brother and I were left to our own devices. The huge open spaces of the farm, the sheds, the random bits of equipment all meant I could invent my own imaginary world.
Every trip out with the dogs — and the dogs went everywhere with us and took care of us, so we couldn’t possibly get into any trouble — became some sort of combat patrol.
But watch out for the snakes!