Category: Politics

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Rudd hampers police child-protection efforts

If you really wanted to protect children from sexual abuse, why would you take money away from the very people who could best stop it? Better ask Kevin Rudd, because that’s exactly what he’s done.

$2.8 million, which the Howard government allocated to expand the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET), was instead used by Rudd to help create Conroy’s $44.5 million Rabbit-Proof Firewall.

That’s a shame, because OCSET’s entire annual budget in 2007 was only $7.5 million. Without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET. The rest…?

“Only half are likely to be investigated by child protection police,” reported the Daily Telegraph. “The rest will be farmed out to local commands or dropped”.

What a great way to “protect the children”, eh? Take money from the police, where it’d do some good, and burn it on a poorly-defined Internet filtering project. Anyone who knows anything about IT will tell you the same thing: without clearly-defined goals up front, you will go over budget, over schedule and in all likelihood, your project will never be completed.

[This article is based on material which first appeared in my subscriber-only Crikey piece Another nail in the coffin of Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall on 15 January 2008 2009, and would not have been possible without Irene Graham’s superb research at Libertus.net. Another part of it, with some fascinating discussion in the comments, is over here.]

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Sydney Airport passes the buck

Photograph of jet aircraft approaching Sydney Airport

Sydney Airport has responded to my email about interference with our Wi-Fi and Next G reception. In standard corporate style, they begin by reminding me that “aviation safety — both in the air and on the ground — is paramount”. It gives some useful information — but passes the buck firmly to Airservices Australia.

The full text is over the jump.

Yes, the email arrived a day later than their 3-day stated turnaround time, but that’s OK considering I did say this would all be published.

Airservices Australia runs stuff like air traffic control so, yes, this does perhaps belong in their court. As they’ve been suffering some problems themselves, it’ll be interesting to see their response.

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Another nail in the coffin of Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall

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Third Crikey story this week! Today I returned to that evergreen favourite, the idiocy of the Rudd government’s plans to install ISP-level filters on the Internet.

Alas, the story is currently behind Crikey‘s paywall, but it begins:

Is there anyone who reckons trying to filter bad stuff out of the Internet is the right way to go? Or even possible? Apart, that is, from sex-obsessed panic merchants and moral crusaders, politicians with Senate numbers to count on stubby little fingers, shiny-suited salesmen hawking boxes marked “Rooly-Trooly-Safe Internet Filter”, or cud-munching Luddites who just don’t understand anything about the Internet generally?

Those with a clue are getting sick of pointing out the same policy and technical flaws. But Minister for Denying the Bleeding Obvious Senator Stephen Conroy relentlessly continues his warped version of the trials program set up by Coalition predecessor Helen Coonan.

Filters won’t work because no shut up doesn’t matter let’s try again they don’t work no let’s try again they don’t work let’s try again don’t work try try try try … FFS!

The Rudd government says it’s all about evidence-based policy. Maybe this new report from the US Internet Safety Technical Task Force will help. This panel — a who’s who of Internet heavies — was set up by 49 state Attorneys General to tackle the problem of children being solicited for sex online. It discovered there’s actually no significant problem at all.

You can read the whole thing, if you’re a subscriber or take up the free trial offer, at Another nail in the coffin of Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall.

My writing must be starting to score some hits, because there’s been two comments today attacking the man and not the ball.

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Crikey: Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again.

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The story I wrote for Crikey today has ended up being their lead item, under the completely not provocative at all no Sir headline, Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. And it’s free to read.

Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3” and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.

The comments have started to come in, starting off with: “Can you please get someone with a real name to write the technology articles?” Poor thing.

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Where are your manners, Sydney Airport?

Photograph of jet aircraft on landing approach for Sydney Airport runway 16R

Our home in Enmore is under the approach path to Runway 16R at Sydney Airport. We can cope (just) with the noise, but the electronic interference annoys the shit out of us. Time to fix that. Here’s an email I just entered into their website contact form.

Dear Sydney Airport,

We live in Enmore. When you turn on your electronic stuff to help the heavy jets land on Runway 16R, it often knocks out our Wi-Fi network. (It also overloads the pre-amp of our digital TV receiver, but since we’ve pretty much given up on broadcast TV this is less of a concern.) We can even predict the imminent arrival of a heavy because the network goes down about 15 or 20 seconds before we hear the approaching aircraft.

This happens on two different 801.11g 802.11g frequencies, two different brand wireless access points, and on whichever computers we’re using. Your comms or navaids, or maybe the aircraft themselves, can also interrupt a Telstra Next G data connection, so even switching to our alternate data link is problematic.

I understand that, for obvious practical reasons, we can’t shut down the airport. So I assume you’ll be sending someone around to resolve this interference with our legitimate use of the radio spectrum?

The disruption has of course been more frequent since the work on the cross runway has increased the daytime traffic over our home. Again, I understand that this work needs to be done.

However, like someone doing noisy renovations or holding a noisy but perfectly legitimate party, the polite, neighbourly thing would be something a bit better than sending us generic corporate propaganda. The polite, neighbourly thing would be to make good somehow. Give us the keys to your holiday shack while work’s in progress. Invite us over to see the new family room once it’s done. Send around a slab of beer and some grilled chicken breast fillets.

Or, just fix the problems you’re causing.

I look forward to your response. Like this email, it’ll be posted at stilgherrian.com. If it’s a bunch of legal or PR jargon which fails to acknowledge that the problem even exists, we’ll laugh.

Regards,

Stilgherrian

I’ll keep you posted if and when they respond.

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Conroy attacks BitTorrent: Ruins Australia online

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[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday 5 January 2009, and the headline is theirs. Here it is for those folks too cheap-arsed to subscribe. I’ll re-post my other recent Crikey material soon.]

The biggest criticism of the Rudd government’s plan to centrally censor the internet — apart from it being ill-defined, secretive, a potential human rights abuse, a great way to screw up broadband speeds, poorly planned, way behind schedule and tackling the problem of child sexual abuse in completely the wrong way — is that it won’t work. As Crikey has reported several times before. None of the filters tested in the first half of 2008 could touch peer-to-peer (P2P) networks like BitTorrent, which is where The Bad Stuff lives.

Just before Christmas, Senator Conroy tackled that last bit by declaring in a single sentence on his new blog: “Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.” If so, it’s news to the ISPs who signed up. But then they haven’t been given official notification yet, and the trials were meant to start before Christmas. Ahem.

BitTorrent is easy to understand, provided you skip the brain-imploding technical details. Instead of everyone downloading the same big media file from a central server, causing congestion, the file is split up into lots of little pieces. As soon as you’ve download one random piece, your computer becomes a server, swapping the pieces you already have for the missing pieces downloaded by other users — your peers. Automatically. Eventually everyone gets all of the pieces, with the work shared amongst all the participants.

BitTorrent is incredibly efficient. As we reported in March, Norway’s national broadcaster NRK used BitTorrent to distribute a full HD TV program to 80,000 people for just US$350 in bandwidth and storage charges.

Yesterday [Sunday], Crikey showed NRK project manager Eirik Solheim reports of Conroy’s plan.

“Wow!” he said. “A minister that is actively working to limit your country’s ability to distribute information and compete globally… If he plans to block BitTorrent traffic in general that would be a serious limitation to people’s ability to distribute content, creativity, ideas and information.”

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