James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Okay, Freeview (the group that represents all of the major Free to Air Networks, including commercial and government owned) has announced that it's going to be launching a new Electronic Programme Guide service in June, complete with new hardware and something they are calling an Online Catchup Service.

Apart from the Online Catchup Service (which I will be talking about shortly) the biggest selling point that Freeview seems to be pushing for this new service is the ability to record based not only on time blocks, but by genre and programme as well.

This is what 250 million dollars buys you these days?

From the article and the reading around that I've done, it appears that the Free To Air Television industry (somewhat bizzarley aided by the ABC, an organisation that has proven time and again that it knows where the future lies) has decided that the best way to tackle the threat of extinction is to re-arrange the deck chairs on the titanic. People have had the ability to record programmes based on genre and programme titles, episode titles and so on for a few years now. If they haven't been building their own PVR's via projects like MythTV (my personal favourite), they've been using off the shelf solutions such as TiVO. It's not new people, it's old and people have been doing it for a long time now.

Hell I was there when digital came to a certain regional television network, I helped setup their first EPG generator and I can tell you that the Standard of the day, derived from the European DVB-T EPG stuff required genre information to be sent out.

Today while out with the family, we decided to purchase a treat for the kids. So we headed for the nearby donut place to purchase the required sickeningly sweet treat.

Turns out they didn't have enough of the particular sweet my son wanted, so he picked what looked like an iced donut with chocolate flakes on it. Except it wasn't called a donut, rather it was called a Yeast Ring.

This naturally caught my eye as being a somewhat risky name to give a ring of dough, so after the kids had consumed their various sweets, I thought I would get a photo of the Yeasty Rings to follow up the tweet I had already made.

Not thinking much of it, I went up to the counter and used my camera to take a couple of what turned out to be uselessly blurred photos. Gave it up as a lost effort and then went off to complete the rest of the tasks we had at the time.

45 minutes later as we exited the shopping centre a security guard approached me and asked me if I had taken any photos around the donut place earlier on. Specifically he asked if I had taken photos of a young girl  who had apparently been standing close to the Yeast Rings display. Apparently the girls mother had registered a complaint, accusing me of taking photos of her girl. The guard didn't mention why this would be a problem, but the obvious implication is that I was taking photos for nefarious purposes.

It took me but a minute to explain to the guard that no, I hadn't taken photos of the girl, I hadn't even seen the girl standing there, focused as I was, on the Yeast Rings. The guard explained that they had to follow up the complaint both to calm the apparently distressed mother and for reasons of terrorism (my jaw dropped I'm sure at this one). However while I was finishing up with the guard, a police car pulled up in a nearby spot, and I was informed by the guard that I would need to talk to the officer.

Right.

Hey here's an idea to combat the rash of idiotic facebook page "hacks" (leaving your facebook page open to all is not a hack by the way). Let's set up an Online Content Ombudsman, who shall have the power to... umm... complain to overseas companies.

Um.

Originally suggested by South Australian independent Senator Nick Xenaphon, it's been picked up by the Government to show how "pro-active" they are when it comes to dealing "Teh Evil Interwebs".

Considering that companies like Facebook and MySpace have absolutely zero Australian presence, I don't see how any Ombudsman can have any affect on their operations, unless, and this is a very scary, scary thought. The Ombudsman has the power to attach web sites to the Filter. Anything less than threatening to ban the site within the country is going to have all the persuasive power of a damp tissue.

I would love to be able to sit down with Kevin Rudd and Senator Nick, away from the cameras and explain to them how the internet works. If not me, then please can someone else do it?

 We've both played Enemies of the State.

Seriously, according to this article the IIPA (International Intellectual Property Alliance) has requested that the US Trade Representative place countries that mandate, or (and here's the kicker) even suggest the use of Open Source software be placed on a special list of countries that have lax intellectual property regimes (read Pirate Havens).

Note that this is not just a case of sneaking in the Open Source thing amongst a number of other reasons, the IIPA is explicitly claiming that even thinking about using Open Source software in Government is tantamount to destroying the global software industry, letting the Goths into Rome and scheduling a 7 day, 24 hour run of Home and Away on every single channel.

So according to the IIPA, I as a purveyor of Open Source solutions am leading to the delinquency of governments world wide, using my awesome "Powahs! (tm)" to drive poor innocent multi-nationals to the wall.

Sigh.

I was pondering the supposed reason behind the recent fee rebate the Government is giving to the TV networks, that Australian Content needs to be developed and played on our air waves, when a question arose.

How much "Australian Content" is generated online? If you took the podcasts, blog posts, music and videos generated by Australians for online consumption, how would they stack up against the "Traditional Media"?

Does anyone know if any studies have been done on this?

Oh and I've added the spam module and turned off comment moderation, let's see how this goes.

You know something, there are a lot of us working to try and educate and inform our family, friends and communities about the dangers and inadequacies of the proposed mandatory ISP filtering scheme. We're actually talking to people, explaining the issues as they stand and answering questions.

We're also trying to get the media to move away from the over-simplistic "It's all about the Child Porn" angle to look at the real problems with the scheme.

All that work however is being hampered by the kind of activities conducted today by a group of people calling themselves Anonymous. In their wisdom, they decided that they needed to take more direct action. So, in the spirit of attacking censorship on the internet they declared they would be attempting a Denial of Service attack on a number of Government web sites, and at the same time conducting a "blackfax" campaign and other activities of a similar type against various Government offices.

In essence they were going to declare to the Australian government that any attempt to bring regulation  to the internet would be met with attacks on government infrastructure. 

This sort of short sighted ill thought out protest annoys me on a couple of levels. Firstly it cuts the ground out from under those of us who have been working for a long time to try and change this policy. By acting in such an irresponsible manner, Anonymous has given the media a sensational angle which has and will be used to counter the more cogent and reasoned arguments against the filter. Now, along side the infamous "If you're against the filter you must be for Child Porn" we'll have "Opponents against the filter are evil hackers only concerned with getting access to porn".

This time next week, I'll be 30,000 feet over the tasman sea, winging my way to New Zealand for this years linux.conf.au.

I'm going to be presenting two talks at the Google Wave miniconf:

• Building the Independent Wave
• Harnessing the Wave

On Tuesday I'm going to be flitting between the Open and the Public Sector (yay scheduling changes has removed that particular conflict) and the Multimedia miniconfs.

During the conference proper the first talk I'm going to definitely hit is going to be Bdales talk on Flying Rockets with Free Hardware and Software.

Thursdays stand out for me is Drupal - Under the hood. Mind you I'm then conflicted. Do I want to catch half of Silvia Pfeiffers HTML 5 Video talk and then switch over to Jon Oxers FOSS In Spaaaaaace presentation? Decisions, decisions.

Fridays fun project would have to be FOSS Fun with the Wiimote by Rusty Russell. Of course this occures at exactly the same time the Open Source Assistive Tech which is an area I've recently become interested in.

All in all it's going to be a great conference by the looks of things.

Okay here's a first draft of the letter I'm planning on sending to my local member:

I am writing to you concerning the proposed introduction of a mandatory ISP filtering scheme by the Australian Federal Government.

I have several concerns regarding this scheme, both as an adult and as a parent.

Firstly, while the report released by Senator Conroy on the effectiveness of the Live ISP Filtering trial indicates “!00% Accuracy” with little to no network impact, it also highlights several glaring problems with the Filtering scheme which to my mind render it essentially useless as a tool to prevent the consumption of RC material.

These range from simply changing which servers your computer uses to find out the addresses of web sites, to the utilisation of common technologies which are free and are used every day by hundreds of thousands of people in the course of their work. The report also points out that the filtering scheme cannot filter either chat rooms or peer to peer software.

This leads me to question the validity of spending the proposed $180 million dollars on a scheme which is so full of holes. Would education of parents not be the better option when it comes to protecting children from the dark side of the internet.

During last weeks Broadband Future event the focus was on the future, what changes would the NBN bring to this country, how would it change the delivery of medical services, media production and so on and so forth. People were excited and looking forward to the new challenges.

However during these discussions no one was really willing to tackle the elephant in the room. The Governments proposed mandatory ISP filtering programme. Perhaps we thought that a government that was forward thinking enough to develop the NBN would finally recognise the futility of what they were proposing.

Turns out we were wrong. Yesterday Senator Conroy finally released the report of the Live ISP filtering trial claiming that it proved the claim that it was possible to filter with "100% accuracy" while at the same time offering little to no impact on network performance. Based on this he declared that he was going to move forward with plans to submit legislation to the house to require ISP's to implement the mandatory filtering programme.

Sigh.

There are two problems with the programme that Conroy is proposing:

Suitability For Task:

The report is explicit in declaring that the filtering trial worked only when strict conditions were met.

• The content being filtered was being delivered by HTTP
• The site being filtered was not a high traffic site (apparantly sites such as Youtube will crash the filtering service)
• The user being filtered only uses their ISPs DNS servers

The report is also explicit in declaring that the filtering service cannot filter the following:

I know I haven't blogged for a little while, and I promise a fuller post later on, however for now there's a couple of conf things I want to promote:

OSDC:

The Open Source Developers Conference is going to be held in Brisbane at the Bardon Conference Centre from the 25th November to the 27th.

Early Bird prices are just about to close so if you want to get in early and book your place at one of the best developer Confs in the Southern Hemisphere, then register now

linux.conf.au (Yes I know the country domain is .nz but our constitution says they can be Australians so it doesn't matter ;))

Once again linux.conf.au is rolling around. The programme has been announced and early bird pricing is NOW. I wish I could go, the Wave miniconf and the Open Govt. miniconf are both reason enough for me (le sigh).

Anyhoo, will blog more later.