Gremtec is Online… Sorta…
Well, I've decided to setup my web hosting stuff again and I've now got the ordering system setup and all the prices set. So go ahead and take a look, pretty good prices and you can get 50% off your first payment for any hosting product just by entering the coupon code on the announcements page if you sign up by the end of March. So go ahead ppls, check it out now!
A response to a another filtering news article…
Hey all, and yer, it's yet another filtering blog post... But I just had to respond to this well written and surprisingly sensible article from Child Wise CEO, Bernadette McMenamin on the Australian IT website on the 5th of Feb. You'd expect, from the name of the group, it'd be yet another biased article spewing the usual nonsense that seems to be coming from Christian Lobbies and alike at the moment, but no, I was pleasantly surprised by a well written and sensible article that in fact finally admits that most child pornography is in fact circulated using non HTTP traffic (ie newsgroups, p2p, irc networks etc...) and that the filter would have no effect on these.
However it's not all good. Bernadette seems to be one of those people who still believes that such a filter will have no effect on the speed of our internet. Which is simply not true. It will cause some slowdown. It's impossible for it not to. Every time your computer sends a request for a website down the line to your ISP another step will be added to the process. There will be a computer that will check EVERY SINGLE url to see if it matches any on the blacklist, and the larger that blacklist the more the slowdown. That is a fact of life. It's like putting a filter on your water at home, if you get a dodgy one it's likely to reduce the flow of your water significantly, a better one can increase the flowthrough however it will still cause a decrease from when there was no filter.
The fact is that these people will continue to find this stuff if they want to look hard enough for it, and they do, so this is not the best way to do this. The best way is to give more money to the branches of the AFP tackling such crime so that they can infiltrate more of these newsgroups and p2p rings to bring down those involved... It really is that simple!
To Bernadette, you asked me for my motivations as a critic of this plan, so here they are:
- There will be a slowdown effect, why should we pay for the scum that traffic this stuff
- Once you install this system things could get added to the list which really shouldn't be, legit pornography sites, gambling sites, we've already seen lobby groups prematurely jump on that bandwagon!
- The system will open Australia's internet to a huge security risk, if the server's used to manage the blacklist get owned, and it's possible that they could (more than if you ask me), you suddenly have someone who can be man in the middle to every internet transaction over the HTTP protocol... This is disastrous, not to mention a simple DDOS attack and you can takedown the entire countries internet!
I agree, something MUST be done to protect these poor children. But lets not kid ourselves, this won't affect the trafficking of such images, and although it may protect children from stumbling upon them, there are far easier ways of doing this in the home (OpenDNS comes to mind!).
Anyway that's my spiel, hope everyone out there is ready for the hueg heat tommoz! I'm hiding inside!
Windows unveils 7 SKU
And it aint pretty people. Really... Not pretty at all... Why can't Microsoft just learn to keep it simple, like, oh, apple... I know I said it, but at least they don't have a billion different versions of their OS floating around... I know the SKU release isn't fresh off the press news, I noticed it on the Windows 7 Dev blog a while back (the article along with it's OBVIOUSLY filtered comments is around here) but EnGadget has a little more info than the rest of us it would seem. Here's the list of the choices lifted straight from the article:
- Windows 7 Starter (limited to three apps concurrently)
- Windows 7 Home Basic (for emerging markets)
- Windows 7 Home Premium (adds Aero, Touch, Media Center)
- Windows 7 Professional (Remote Desktop host, Mobility Center, Presentation mode)
- Windows 7 Enterprise (volume license only, boot from virtual drive, BitLocker)
- Windows 7 Ultimate (limited availability, includes everything)
Source - EnGadget
Why oh why did they have to make this so fucking complicated... Really, come on guys, here's a far simpler version for you to use, I won't even charge you for the time it took to type up!
- Windows 7 Starter (limited to three apps concurrently) Who the hell needs this bullshit, scrap it
- Windows 7 Home Basic (for emerging markets)
- Windows 7 Home Premium (adds Aero, Touch, Media Center) Who needs 2 different home versions...
- Windows 7 Professional (Remote Desktop host, Mobility Center, Presentation mode)
- Windows 7 Enterprise (volume license only, boot from virtual drive, BitLocker)
- Windows 7 Ultimate (limited availability, includes everything) Srsly, what the fuck, they can just get enterprise if they want those features
Wow, look at that, so much more simple, home and professional. The people that need/want ultimate features will either just pirate it or have access to an enterprise licence anyway so who gives a damn. My other problem is that suddenly only Pro and above will have the RDP Host, now that's fine for your average home user but I use it to admin my home pc's from uni so that I can fix the multitude of problems my family constantly runs into... Why the hell get rid of this anyway, seems a bit pointless to me, as for adding the mobility center and presentation mode to pro that just shows how out of touch Microsoft is, because you have to require the level of functionality that pro provides to have a laptop!! Of course that makes perfect sense. Goddam these guys are so bright...
There's some more details in the EnGadget article about a few other crazy features, and no, I didn't forget the starter version that only allows 3 apps to be open, I just thought it was obviously shit and maybe even a joke Microsoft was playing on us so I chose not to recognize it with a paragraph of it's own...
I mean it's not like I give a shit, I'm not paying for Windows 7 anyway, just like most of you people out there that know enough about this stuff to be annoyed about this, of course the average consumer won't really notice because they just buy straight from one of the big companies so they'll have to put up with whatever they throw at them!!
Anyway I've said what we're all thinking, looking forward to seeing that first torrent "Windows 7 Professional NO ACTIVATION REQUIRED" coming soon to a tracker near you... But of course piracy is bad so I'm not going to use Windows 7 at all!
I Support NoCleanFeed
Recent Posts
- Allow Non-Administrators to edit Power Settings in Windows XP
- An Open Letter to the Swinburne Student Union
- Why I See Little Point In Operation Unite…
- Twitter creator develops ridiculous insecure stupid device…
- Why I don’t like the new fire ratings…
Stubbers101 on Twitter
- stubbers101: Also "Internet jammer"... Where the hell did that come from... It jams GPS not the internet...
- stubbers101: Interesting... Read this http://zurl.ws/2T0 then this http://zurl.ws/2T1 and tell me how much News.com.au just fudged that headline...
- stubbers101: There is no Season 9 of Scrubs as far as I'm concerned...
- stubbers101: @aaron552 Liez... BFBC2 > FF* (prepares for flames...)