James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

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".

 Well, here's my first Android App. Essentially it's a recreation of my Google Wave Robot - OpenAusBot, well at least the House of Reps member search.

Right now, it just does basic member searches based on Federal Seat, returning name, party and date elected. Still working on the ImageView.

Further plans are to build postcode search and geo-search.

What I don't have (yet) is a real android phone, so if anyone wants to download the apk attached to this post and make sure it works (it uses the Android 2.0 SDK), that would be great, thanks.

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:

*** Edit the information contained here is out of date. To find more up to date information please visit here: http://wavingtheshiny.collaborynth.com.au/books/fedone-book/fedone-book ***

Okay so I've worked out how to install the WRS on Linux (well Debian and Redhat based Distros anyway). So now I'm planning How Tos for the following Operating Systems:

• Windows
• OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD

The main focus of this How To is going to be on actually getting and installing the various packages that you will need to complete the installation process under Windows.

Requirements:

Building the WRS under Windows is going to take a little bit more downloading and configuring than under Linux. Whereas Linux has tools such as Synaptic and Yum to manage software installation, Windows is sadly lacking in this. So this means lots of manual downloading.

Suns Java SDK

You will need Suns Java SDK to build the WRS on Windows. To get this visit the following page:

http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

And select the most up to date version of the Java SE Development Kit. At the time of writing, this is JDK Update 14. Go through the process of downloading and installing the SDK.

Ant

While the SDK is vital it does not include a vital tool required in the building of the WRS, the Apache Ant Build Tool. There are a number of ways to get Ant for Windows, however I found the following project the easiest to use:

http://code.google.com/p/winant

OpenSSL For Windows

*** Edit the information contained here is out of date. To find more up to date information please visit here: http://wavingtheshiny.collaborynth.com.au/books/fedone-book/fedone-book ***

Now that you've setup your Wave Reference Server, you're probably going to want to test out one of THE big features. Federation. This post will take you through setting it up.

What Is Federation?

Federation is the thing that moves Wave out from JAGB (Just Another Google Beta) to being something more. It is the server to server communication protocol. This is what allows you to run your own Wave server and communicate with any other Wave server.

Okay, Cool, So How Do I Set It Up?

We actually did most of the work for setting up Federation in the last tutorial. To finish the job we simply need to do the following:

Ports: If you're running the server behind a firewall or NAT, then you'll need to setup port forwarding for port 5269 on your device to your Server.

DNS: For the moment there isn't an "Official" port for the Wave Federation Protocol. This means that the WRS relies on SRV records to indicate which port it should be communicating with the remote server on. Below is an example of an SRV record for your Wave Server.

_xmpp-server._tcp.blah.com. 3600 IN SRV 10 0 5269 wave.blah.com.

Also if this is a new subdomain for your domain don't forget to add an A record.

wave.blah.com  IN A [IPADDRESS]

A while ago i registered the domain planetgov20.com so I could have a place to put any Gov20 projects I was working on. It started out as a simple blogroll of Gov20 blogs from around the country and then languished there awaiting new inspiration.

Inspiration came while I was doing some work on openausbot. As I was searching through the OpenAustralia member entries I started to wonder how many Politicians actually blog. So using "Da Powah!" of Drupal I decided to put together Politico Bloggers (also known as #polliebloggers on twitter).

The idea is to create a list of those politicians who run legitimate blogs (that is blogs that aren't blatant PR feeds, have rss feeds and allow commenting). The list would be divided by nation as well as Government level. For the moment it's going to be elected reps rather than Public Service types, however I can see that coming as well.

There's a lot that needs to be done still, but one thing I've learnt already is that there a large number of Federal members who don't actually seem to have a web site, let alone a blog, and that rss feeds are in short supply on those "blogs" that are run.

So if you know of a Pollie Blogger and s/he isn't on the list already then please let us know. At the moment, we're looking at Australia and New Zealand but will soon be expanding out to other nations (possibly the UK, US and Canada and then further afield).

I've been watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth that has greeted Googles announcement of ChromeOS with bemusement. From people angry that Google has decided to build their own Distro to those who are claiming that it's a deliberate slight against Ubuntu and will fracture the Linux world, some say fataly!

Take a breath people.

Let's deal with the biggest claim first shall we?

"ChromeOS Will Fracture The Linux Community!!11!"

I'm sorry people but get a grip please? The Linux "Community" was never something that could be fractured. It was born fractured and its strength lies both in the differences and the similarities. Adding another distro like ChromeOS will add to the common store rather than detract from it. Especially if as promised they release it under a broad Open Source license like the GPL(2 or 3).

Face it, there are already something like 150 different distro's out there, adding one more will not break the FOSS world.

"They should have Used Ubuntu!1!1!"

As I understand it, Google already uses Ubuntu internally, at least their own version of it. This is a desktop version specifically tailored to Googles own requirements. The fact they're not using it for ChromeOS isn't anything special. Hell the ASUS EEEPC's didn't use Ubuntu either, rather getting Xandros to build a custom distro for their netbooks.

Ubuntu is a great distro sure, but it's not the be all and end all of the Linux world.

Speaking for myself, I'll be looking at what Google has to offer, but I don't think that the world is going to end.

So before I start on the Grand Adventure that is PlonieBot, I thought I would start with something smaller, with a much more limited API that I could practice against. I've also been wanting to play around with the OpenAustralia API and so openausbot was born.

The idea is to create a participant that can be used to search the Open Australia database and return the information to the wave for dicussion or further dissection by the participants. If you want to play with it, the id is openausbot@appspot.com. Just keep in mind it's pretty damn Alpha :)

I know people are starting to get annoyed with the very limited access that has been given out so far and I can understand why.

On the one hand I can see why the Google Wave people have limited access. Wave is still very much Alpha tech. It's not yet at the Beta stage that GMail has only just escaped, and as such, there could much breakage as it evolves rapidly. On the other hand the Wave could benefit from "Real World" usage. That is usage not only by people like me and other hackers, but by people who would use Wave as simply another communications tool. That's when the boundry pushing will really begin.

If you've been watching my twitter/identi.ca stream lately you'll notice that I've managed to get access to the Google Wave developers preview.

Apart from "teh coolness" of being involved with something like this, the main reason I signed up was I really wanted to see if it was possible to bring Wave functionality to the Plone CMS.

One of the big things about Wave is the fact that Google is not envisioning it as a vendor lockin system. Instead they are open sourcing and open standarding (yeah I know it's not a real word), "the lions share" of what they have. This includes their very rough "Federation Protocol". This is the bit that allows different wave servers to talk to each other much like SMTP servers do now. My plan, once I've gotten my head around how wave works in real life, is to see if it's possible to create a Product for Plone that allows it to interact with different Wave servers, much the way other products allow it to interact with existing mail servers.

The most exciting news however is a hint that there might be a code release soon. Nothing concrete but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how they handle the Federation Protocol in "Real Life(tm)".