Month: May 2009

Yet another perpetuation of the vast mythological story that is mis-named Illegal downloads appeared today on the BBC News site. Were these the same advisers that said that the Y2K bug (another mythological creature) would bring universal disaster?

First of all I would like to know the evidence for this assertion. Under British law an act cannot be deemed illegal until it has been proven in a duly constituted court of law. Have there been seven million successful prosecutions for copyright violation using Internet downloads? I think not.

My second issue is the “cost to the economy”. How is this cost established. One wonders what vested interest these so called advisors have.

It is these silly assertions based on vague assumptions and flawed logic that results in a complete loss of credibility for these advisers.  But for the media to simply parrot these unsubstantiated assertions without question is a gross abrogation of their responsibility.

I am not saying that many people are acting in a way that is contrary to the law but these over exaggerations and generalisations are not at all helpful to the debate. If the music industry wants to address this issue then they have to stop treating every broadband user as a criminal, stop using pejorative language, stop these gross exaggerations and deal with the issue in a rational and sensible manner. No one is going to treat them with respect until they stop these school ground bully boy tactics and treat people with respect.

Is it just me or can other people see the flawed logic here? Pay rates industry wide are rising and one employer is saying he is going to be priced out of the market. Ignore the fact that cleaning conmtractors are akin to slave labour and that it is a cow of a job, how is the fact that all employers are going to be subject t0 this extra cost going to send just this one to the wall?

If his business is so poorly run that paying his employees a bit more (along with eveyone else in the industry) is going to send him broke then maybe he should look for another job.

It appeared at first as if Stephen Conroy, the Australian minister for communications, was being advised by the Chinese government. The plan was to censor the Internet (an oxymoron in and of itself) but he was not telling you what was being censored. When the proposed list of censored sites was leaked he became all high and mighty and threatened legal action. In the end it made him look like a fool and out of touch with the realities of the Internet, out of touch with his constituency and out of touch with the principles of open government.

Now it appears as if he has made a massive back-down. Coming off his pedestal of self righteousness, declaiming all who disagreed as pedophiles or anti-society he has stumbled and fallen (or is that crawled) into a hole of his own making. Not that he would see it as such, looking thorough his strongly tinted political spectacles.

His answers to the Senate estimates committee are the typical double speak and mass of contradictions of a politician who has been weighed and found wanting. The writing may not be on the wall for him but it appears as if it is for his mess of a censorship plan. Don’t get me wrong – unlike those liberals in the media who claim that they don’t believe in censorship (and on close analysis really do) I am open in my support of censorship. If there was a mechanism whereby a consistent, legal  and open method by which unacceptable sites could be regulated then I would be all for it. The Minister’s plan however was a complete and utter disaster before it even left the hangar. He is desperately trying to salvage some credibility, too late I think.

I am afraid that as far as the Internet goes  the horse has well and truly bolted and the dyke long since burst its banks.

The BBC recently did some research into the “advertised” speeds of Broad Band around the world. This is interesting because we often hear and read reports in our media that Australia is a “third world” contry with respect to our broadband speeds.

There is a nice  little site called Speedtest.net that fives a real world assessment of your actua broadband speeds. How this works is that people from around the world use the site to perform a number of operations which result in a record of the real world connection speed of your connection. The site then collates all of these results and gives each country/continent a figure for average speeds.

Now here is the interesting part. The BBC survey only covered OECD countries and Australia  was seventh. Once you remove Japan, Korea and France which have extremely high rates due tio huge government sponsored programs we sit around average ADSL 2+ speeds, which is what one would expect.

On the other hand using the Speedtest.net result, we are the third highest continent, sitting behind Europe and North America we are the 38th country. This has to be a far more accurate list since it uses real users doing real tests. Our average speed on Speedtest.net is 4.43 Mb which is way below the top six countries and way below average advertised rates. To be fair the BBC method of using advertised rates is looking pretty sick when you look at Speedtest.net’s results. The problem here is – as will all measurements of this type – interpreting the results so that we can understand what this means.

Looking at the continent rates we are really not much below Europe and North America, being 5.6 Mb and 5.54 Mb respectively. I would suggest that this is a more realistic figure than the country rates since Australia more resembles a continent than a country in demography and topography. With the vast sparsely inhabited regions and the divers and scattered population we have a number of significant issues in covering the population with high speed broadband. When you look at countries such as Japan Korea and France and look at how their government subsidised programs and high population densities skew the figures then Australia is really not that far behind.

What about the government’s plan to subsidise a new broadband roll-out? The problem here is that we do not have the high population densities that make it cost effective so it will always be problematic and never measure up to Korea. However the benefit will not be in the direct return on investment but will be in the overall technological advances over all technologies. This is impossible to quantify and will be a long term gain.

In terms of overall standing I don’t think that we are that far behind and considering our problems in maintaining a broadband network we are doing quite well.  In my opinion we do not “need” a government sponsored plan to enhance our network but the investment now will have major long term benefits and we should not be so short sighted as to measure its viability in terms of immediate return on investment.

There is a rash of articles in the British media at the moment on MP’s expenses. It seems to be a popular pass-time to whinge and complain about the amount of money our politicians are costing us. True – the odd politician does rort the system and the has to be a level of control and oversight but this witch hunt that is taking place in the UK at the moment is typical of the media inspired feeding frenzy that they so much love.

The reality is that these people work extremely hard and are worth every cent they cost. Most of them are in it for worthy motives and don’t forget it is us who placed them there. It actually costs a lot of money to do their job and many of them could get far more in private industry. If they were in it for the money then they are in the wrong job.

I think it would be better to focus on policy – not on petty cash expenses – but that is a lot harder and not quite as popular.