First post in a while, been a bit busy and haven’t actually been watching the blog or paying much attention to whirlpool in favour of following the efficiency post even further (and developing tools to make for much more efficient work).

Anyway, what’s happened in the broadband world? I’ve been able to keep a good pulse on that.

The federal government decided to can the OPEL project. Great, screw regional australians even further and become a lapdog to Telstra. One might wonder what the value of the kickbacks received by Conroy totals, he did seem to spend a lot of time finding an exit strategy. Perhaps the cheque might have just been clearing. Maybe not.

The Internet Filtering proposed by the idiot is still proposed to continue, despite recent news that the governments own departments have been subject to filtering and some are actually complaining about it being too strict. But, obviously not strict enough to remove it completely from the agenda.

I did read the news at whirlpool and came across a link to a protest site, which suggested an email, brilliant idea, they even included a template, reading the template, it didn’t seem to describe the hypocritical nature of the plan, so I rewrote it, ensuring I made very clear the hypocrisy of rolling out an FTTN network, only to slow it back down by filtering it - why not maintain the current situation and simply encourage private investment in FTTN and private investment in internet filtering technologies - if a company wants to filter the internet experience for their customers, then the parents who are too stupid or insane to monitor their children using such a violent, sexual, disturbing, informative, and educational medium such as the Internet, or are too cheap to cough up for a filter and some accurate computer security, can then sign with that company. The taxpayer isn’t a bloody babysitter.

My email to Silly Stephen suggested that as well. There’s no room in everyone elses budget to babysit someone elses internet experience. At all. There’s no room in everyone elses budget to pay more for internet access to facilitate that crap as well. You want your kids protected? You pay for it. Not me, not Sydney Lawrence, not Telstra, not Optus, or any other taxpaying Australian. Nope. You pay for it.

A recent comment suggested the TomTom might have lead me astray, actually, that comment isn’t far from the truth, the TomTom did at one point actually try to send me up a wrong road in the local area.

I’ve taken time recently experimenting with Cisco devices, and VPN. I actually took that and tried to make that work on Linksys equipment, and it took a few long weekends, but I did actually manage to make it work. It only works in a specific configuration on Linksys devices. R