internet

A Trailblazer?

Posted on by Bigglesan

I’ve been using the internet for some time now. In fact I’m not ashamed to say that my first experiences were with Lynx! So I think I have a pretty good handle on finding my way about, and finding what I need.

So when I read a post today on Gizmodo that talked of a competition, where, with no keyboard, no google or bookmarks allowed, participants where challenged to get from one site, to another totally unrelated site my interest was peaked.

At lunchtime when I had a few minutes spare I took up the challenge for myself. The starting site was amazon.com and the destination piratebay.org I imagined a convoluted journey through a bizarre assortment of sites, but instead found myself at my destination in only a few clicks. I suspect posting that path here may be a bit of a spoiler for anyone wanting to try it out, so why not give it a go yourself before reading on (and then post your results in the comments!)….

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Spoiler Below!

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Here’s how I did it, each bullet point represents a click.

  1. At Amazon I realised they had a blog, this seemed the most likely source of external links.
  2. The very first article today mentioned an LA Times article, and a newspaper is likely to have a lot of links!
  3. At the LA Times website I quickly headed for the Technology section of the paper.
  4. A handy tag cloud on the site had ‘piracy‘ as a keyword
  5. Here it was just too easy, the final link click that took me directly to thepiratebay.org was in an article titled “Even Pirate Bay can be downloaded on Pirate Bay. Dated August 17, 2009″

So that’s it, 5 clicks, about 2 minutes of my time. Anyone got another challenge for me?

Mandatory Internet Censorship

Posted on by Bigglesan

It’s important that you make your voice heard on the subject of Mandatory Internet Censorship. However, in this modern age our government is yet to introduce guidelines or facilities for the lodging of electronic petitions, even though a house committee has been looking at it for at least 4 years now.

So if you want your voice to be heard read on, and this is true for all petitions to the federal government! Whether it’s about No Clean Feed, R18+ Gaming or any other subject.

Why signing the official paper petition against internet censorship is the only sure way to make your signature count!

The House of Representatives is the house in Australian Parliament that will be passing the legislation to filter the internet, This House can only be petitioned on paper and each signature must be in the persons own signature, online petitions are not valid, when petitioning parliament you must petition the appropriate house on an issue in which they have the power to act, and only the House of Representatives have the power to act on this bill that imposes mandatory filtering of the internet.

Please take 5 minutes to print out this pre-approved official petition, that is going to be tabled in Parliament in 6 weeks, it’s great if you have already signed a digital one, however it does not take the place of the official paper petition.

Official Paper Petition against internet censorship at any of the below addresses:

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;www.thecrowhouse.com/savethenet.html

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;loveforlife.com.au/node/7113

http://www.facebook.com/l/ce01a;stream.adamdodson.org/items/view/1610

Please share this information around, so we can show parliament how serious we are about opposing censorship.

Global Updates – Not Quite.

Posted on by Bigglesan

Why is it so hard do do such a simle thing?

I’m about to head of to France, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to take advantage of all the modern gadgets and tools at my disposal. My plan seemed simple, use my mobile to quickly update my blog with images and movies of my travels.I spent a bit of time the other night setting it up, my Flickr account accepts uploads via email and now automatically posts those updates on my Blog, which in turn updates my Twitter status.

The next step was to get a cost estimate on the data usage. Well in theory, I should be able to check my data usage with Telstra, and with a cost per Mb calculate just how much a video or image upload would cost me. 2 hours on hold and being transferred around the Telstra help centers, and I’m giving up. For some reason, telstra have no records of any data usage on my phone since the 20th of last month. Of course, they’re happy to tell me I’ll get billed for it, when they find it. but those test emails have been to no avail. They can’t tell me how big they were.

In the end it’s academic. I found out how much the data rates for International roaming are. 1.5c/Kb. yes, that’s right, over $15/Mb !! A single image upload could cost me $40+ from my 5MP phone. Even sending compressed ones would be ridiculous. Let alone uploading short movie clips.

With this relevation, I went looking around for other oprions. Surely there must be some plans with the dta centric traveller in mind. But no. Other carriers like Three, Optus and Virgin are even more expensive at 2c/Kb. No-ones data plans cover international roaming, so your paying for every byte! Three actually have what ‘looks’ lie a good deal, until you realise that it covers only a few counties, none of which are France!

In the USA, AT&T have a couple of plans that would almost suit. Even then you’re looking at at least US$100 / month for about 20Mb of international data.

So, no instant blog updates from me. I’ll have to wait until I’m in airports with free wireless on my laptop, or actually at my mum’s place and using her internet.

The age of global communications, wireless internet and all these other fantastic things is upon us, but it’s not ready for the masses yet. It’s still a tool for the well funded business traveller.

oh, and if anyone can offer suggestions, find a way for me to accomplish what I seek to do, I’d love to hear from you.