TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

As I previously anticipated, iiNet have won the case against them for copyright infringement, but there’s a very strong chance this case will end up in the High Court – there’s no question AFACT won’t accept this verdict.

So, there will be an appeal, what the grounds for that appeal have some options.

AFACTs counsel made a major screwup in the presentation of a case, I’m a big believer in the ability of a strong case to stand on it’s own merits, reading just the first 200 paragraphs of the verdict, the impression surrounding it was the case was never actually a strong case. This is determined by the below:
– Their needless credibility attacks on Mr Malone and Mr Dalby. Both of them presented what appeared to any objective viewer to be reasonably presented evidence.

– The letter they sent to iiNet tried to make inferences that AFACT were some kind of authority (they are not).

– The intent of trying to dismiss Dalby’s affidavit caused Justice Cowdroy to assess it closer than it would otherwise have been, in doing this, the discovery was made that he was actually the opposite to their claim, and in many of the credibility attacks, Justice Cowdroy’s assessment was no such dishonest or misleading items were present.

These credibility attacks did two things, it first suggests their case was too weak to present itself for what it is.

The issue was AFACTs counsel (well, their case) claimed copyright infringement, yet throughout the trial, they failed to in anyway demonstrate iiNet authorised their users to commit copyright infringement – they claimed iiNet were advised, and even knew it was occurring, however, iiNet’s ultimate defense is – it wasn’t their job to investigate AFACTs claims, AFACT remained to be Jo Blow making a report of copyright infringement, but the evidence was gathered using unknown means, and the courts were the best place for AFACT to assess that information.

And the process remains, for the actual copyright infringement to take place, and for it to be prosecuted, one must not need to prove full distribution, they need only prove such packets were made available for distribution.

So, they have the tools to gather evidence, DtecNet’s evidence appeared satisfactory to the expert witnesses called, and therefore satisfactory for the purposes of proving infringement.

The steps that they should have followed were – obtain a subpoena for the names, and addresses of account holders that they had conclusive evidence of infringement.

With these account holder details, they must determine if the copyright infringement activities are civil in nature, or criminal, or both. The criminal offence is the path they should take.

With the correct evidence, they should indeed file criminal proceedings against the account holder, which should cause an evidence gathering process to occur, a raid of the account holders premises should suffice.

With this evidence, they then need to gather the information relevant, and prosecute, and if successful, rinse and repeat.

There’s two immediately obvious reasons why they targetted iiNet and none of the 3 other ISPs:
– iiNet’s email trails, and specific written statement that they would not be taking any action regardless of evidence presented. AFACT saw this as an oppourtunity, they saw more value in it then was present.
– iiNet’s a big enough ISP to scare the others into submission, once a precedent is set, John Linton, Simon Hackett, would immediately cower to AFACTs demands.

In their pursuit of domination, they became blinded to reality. They still needed a strong case that would stand on it’s own merits, they did not have it.

To launch an appeal though, Justice Cowdroy’s dismissal of the calling of other technical staff would be one rightly considered, an argument used was the sending of the notices would be ‘too difficult’, this falls flat as they are in no way required by law to forward them on (AFACT have this strange perception that iiNet must) – but they could launch an appeal based on that – in the hope the lower staff of iiNet, would in some way make errors that could positively impact the judgement.

It’s one of a few avenues, I’ve only reached line 220, and there’s 400 odd to go. There’ll be other avenues in there of appeal.

It’s great that Justice Cowdroy had no issues in his findings, the technical details (protocols, BitTorrent, IP, etc) are where I initially thought this case could fall over (what Judge is distinctively competent in IT?). The explanations in his findings (the explanations) are very much satisfactory, but they do have some flaws (i.e. the verdict states iiNet DSLAM, but not mentioned is iiNet’s resale of Telstra, or iiNet’s backhaul agreements with PIPE). These are immaterial, but still – there were errors.

I know that’s nothing new, but I’ve noticed it much more lately.

I get the required daily tasks done, then I’m seeking out other things to do – this bit annoys me as I find the lower level stuff really boring, I don’t mind spending a bit of time on a case, and investigating the full details – I do mind if the answer to a simple question is mentioned 400 times on 35 pages of a website, and the user was too lazy to read. That bores me.

The complex cases are challenging, I like challenges. I enjoy them.

Another ‘downside’ of work that seems to be ‘everywhere’, no matter where you go, is incompetence. It’s just about everywhere in this world, and after being exposed to it from the various companies and organisations that dish it out in the plentiful, I have a very low tolerance for it. I don’t show up to work with my head in the sand, my brain turned off. One would hope others don’t either.

There’s a singular area I can think that most of the ‘poor’ actions come from, and the fact that it’s relied on for so much, yet makes so many errors in just a few short weeks of a year fails words. I really shouldn’t care, if they didn’t screw up so badly, so regularly, I’d probably miss that and be looking after even more elementary enquiries.

I’ve been pondering longer term career development. I like to create, that is, I like to put systems in place that work, I’ll happily build a DNS server, a radius server, a web server, a web site, mail server, make them all redundant. Configure a new router, setup a VoIP box / VoIP appliance. The angle there would likely be Systems Administration, Systems Development or Network Administration – each of those come by locally very rarely. The only way I’m likely to get such a position is push closer to Sydney, but that’s not going to happen. I refuse to live in Sydney, I refuse to commute daily to Sydney.

This causes me to reject possible avenues of study, i.e I would like to go get a CCNA, heavens knows I’m good for it, or go through Uni and graduate, but the direction largely depends on career moves. CCNA is valid for 3 years, before you have to renew it – if for the next 3 years, I’m still replying – “reboot”, then that would be 3 years and considerable $$ wasted.

I’m not exactly against a construction position either, it’s pretty similar to the above, I like to see things take shape, and building houses, renovations is something I would say appeals to me. Amazingly, one of my first positions at 14 years old was working in a sawmill, and then later moving onto a window factory, delivering windows to new constructions. And then, I went onto making frames for carparks.

I got away from that, the desire to gain a career in IT was too strong, and I wasn’t getting anywhere in construction (I had a really unstable life back then..)

Back to the only reason for work, the house – we are still waiting for quotes from builders for some of the work we want done, it’s been 3 weeks and we have just 1 quote. I consider myself patient, at times, but I think that largely has to do with ‘knowing what’s to come’. I am tired of waiting on dollar figures, so we know where we stand, and we can decide if we need to rob the bank, or ask them kindly instead.

Once you start looking at the most simplest of tasks, recladding the outside asbestos fibro, to allow for solar power, many other decisions come into play (and yet, there’s more to come):
– Any changes to the windows or doors (these need to be known before hand, so the necessary work is completed, instead of cladding being cut later).
– New windows can require resizing the window frames.
– Relocating walls / doors requires new frames, filling in the old.
– An outside deck requires removing the outdoor half wall.
etc.

So, we went further, the inside layout isn’t open plan, and we’ve spent countless hours, countless edits on getting the interior layout ‘done’. We want to do as little as possible, whilst maximising the overall impact, and today, that layout has found it’s way ‘mostly there’.

We’ll have to sit there and poke holes into it as we’ve done many times already, and once you can poke no more holes, the design is complete.

I’ve got a new Netbook coming from Hong Kong soon, the idea being that we could plug a HSPA modem into it when waiting in the car or whatever, on the train, etc. Plug a GPS receiver into it, and run any combination of navigator software, and plug a memory stick into it, etc.

My first plan is to strip it back and see if we can chuck a larger card into it, and put Ubuntu on instead of the Windows CE stuff it comes with – that’ll be the most interesting. I’d also want to find a way of mounting it into the car, which again should be fun.

And, I’m still currently trying to fit doors to two rooms, this was started approximately 1 month ago, just after Christmas, and is still going. The issue is the door frames are differing sizes, so you have to go over them again and again and again with the wood plane. Still, it beats work – which is just plain boring.

Some things can be complex and complicated, others simple and obvious.

Approaching the simple and obvious issues is easy, the solutions to them generally present themselves, or take very little consideration. Complex and complicated matters will always deserve careful thought and checking around every corner for what might be the ‘real’ solution, as opposed to a 30 second patch.

However, not everything simple and obvious is easily resolved, if you have your head closed to alternative solutions, and that appears to be the case in many situations all too often. It’s not always easy to hold an open mind to the issues faced, and some reactions to events can be ‘snap’ reactions – little thought goes to them, and the reaction can indeed be completely incorrect and wrong.

There are a few reasons I identify the above, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that the approach taken to resolve some of the issues faced, that an alternative approach could get very different results to the previous consistent approach that was taken in the 12 months prior.

Maybe it’s because when something works for a short time, it wears off and the approach then needs replacing, or maybe the original approach was wrong to begin with.

Either way, a change in approach has bought about positive results, and it’s opening the mind to the different method that’s bought about those positive (so far) results.

I’ll have to try and clear my head more often – I can see a correlation between the time spent on work, the time spent doing other activities. Time remains the resource of most desire.

Unfortunately, we can’t slow the planets rotation, so the only other way to gain time, would be to be more efficient… if that’s even possible.

I was doing the trip to Sydney a short while ago, and as I do, I was listening to the local radio station on hold with Telstra trying to reach someone to resolve an issue with his internet connection.

From his description, sounds like it was a bad username or the modem was faulty, however, he clearly didn’t know exactly what was wrong, and claims to have waited 20 minutes on hold for Telstra, and then again another 20 minutes.

This was OK, I thought, because I’ve seen 30, 40 minutes, and when I was a customer of Netspace, I was on hold for 45 minutes each time (they really were just that annoying). But the radio presenter went on to say, he’ll call them live and if Telstra didn’t answer in 5 minutes, he’d end his contract with them.

Sure enough, many songs later, 15 minutes, the Rep answered, and he advised he would be cancelling the account. The rep, probably in Telstra’s new Malaysia centre, clearly didn’t care  about the loss of a customer, he was more likely happy he didn’t have another idiot on the line to assist.

That lead me thinking, what exactly makes for good customer service? Then I began to think about a previous job, where I thought we provided excellent customer service, and the feedback from customers seemed to back this up. What is different?
– Getting through to a person, not a machine – people hate that, of course, in larger business it’s understood it’s there to route calls, so people might tolerate it.
– Hold times, when they call, they don’t want to be kept waiting, they want their enquiry sorted, so they can get back to whatever it is they do best.
– First point resolution. Not everything can be resolved ‘on the spot’, some things are complex, but for the predominant amount of enquiries, a resolution should be put forward, and acted upon.
– Escalation. Where something can’t be fixed on the spot, adequate escalation processes need to exist, so those who can fix it, will.

And, then I thought about how the company I work for currently does things, they’ve improved drastically over the last year, yet each time we get more staff in, old and new staff seem to lose all concept of how to solve an issue.

The process could be totally torn down, and revamped with the emphasis on first point resolution, issues are taken care of as soon as possible, where something is better dealt with via email, it is, and where something is simple for a phone call, or an issue where phone is the only option, it is.

Complaints are averted, you get the customer at the lower part of their anger, and so they are relaxed, ready to accept any resolution put forward that is reasonable, and where you avert the costly complaints, you generally have a better experience to offer the customer.

This week, I’ve been really successful at resolving some issues that seemed like they were going to result in the worst case scenarios. The suppliers are very helpful (except one), and the customers are ending up happy with the outcomes.

The problem remains though, how do we get the issue from the first point of contact (i.e. a phone call), escalated correctly to the right people, and resolved? The process just doesn’t seem quiet there..

I was lurking through “In The News” on whirlpool, which is what I normally do when I can’t find something fun or interesting to fill time, and aside from putting my 25c worth into the ‘poor is poorer’ thread, I found this little item of news from the distributor of all that isn’t newsworthy, news.com.au.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26097791-5007133,00.html

The article earnt Kevin 1/10th of a vote from me. If he keeps this up, then he very well could have better than no chance of a vote from me at the next election. All this just days after he ‘swears’ to never ignore violence against women – I guess verbal abuse isn’t included in that.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/11/2682608.htm?section=justin

I like his appearance here, telling fellow MP’s to go ‘f#$k themselves’ is exactly the kind of government we need.

It’d make Question Time more interesting to watch, because not only will “Mr Speaker” be replaced by “Get Fucked” as the most repeated words, but this government might actually get fucking somewhere.

I can see clearly where Kevin was coming from – print material is a waste of money and a severe impact on the environment, because they don’t print on tissue paper, meaning you can’t wipe your arse with their political bullshit, and therefore must place it in the recycle bin.

By reducing the budget for each by $25,000 this could cause an increase in the use of cheaper print papers, such as toilet paper, or the reduction in election and political garbage, a win either way.

So, Mr Prime Minister, keep up telling your fellow ministers to go fuck themselves, and asking if they fucking understand – clearly they don’t, otherwise the sentence enhancers wouldn’t need to be bought out.

And if they don’t fucking understand, fucking sack their fucking sorry arses.

I’m curious if the recent spike in sentence enhancement is costing Rudd some votes, the old farts probably won’t like it, but perhaps anyone under 40 won’t care?

I was reading a slashdot article ‘story’, and I am reminded that Stephen Conroy clearly shouldn’t be doing the job, as he has no idea what he is doing.

the government is said to be watching the case closely and along with attempts to introduce a three-strikes law in Australia, it appears the law will be changed if the government dislikes the outcome of the case.

This point from the slashdot story shows that if they need to wait the outcome of a court case to determine laws, they clearly are incapable of ‘governing for the people’.

No ISP in the world is capable of determining if a P2P transfer is copyrighted or not – names aren’t enough, because I can have Horton.Hears.A.Who.avi – and size of 90kB – that’s either some uber compression, or I like using bad filenames.

Why don’t they simply look at the circumstances and decide for themselves, is the current process in place suitable? If not – what needs to be changed? Why is the current process in place ‘not used’? Once they find answers to that, they can find suitable measures to resolve the issues surrounding this.

It is far from the job of the ISP to police the users, we pay law enforcement for that – should we pay ISPs to enforce law? Does the Management of such an ISP become the ‘judge’, the user is then the ‘defendant’ and the copyright holder is the claimant? What if Management of the ISP make a screwup or they simply don’t like the user?

It’s not the end of the world if they do start cutting connections on the say so of some third party copyright holder – but they can’t be trusted to be accurate all the time, too many screwups occur for a ‘disconnection’ decision to be made there.

iiNet in a way are correct with their argument – they can’t break Privacy laws to intercept traffic, and I sure as hell am not going to trust some third party claiming to represent MGM or Universal, yet cannot supply any clear evidence in writing of such.

If iiNet really wanted to be smart, they’d reply to each and every notice requesting written and signed statutory declarations of such copyright activity, because an email can easily be ‘faked’ – and being a judge in a court of law, I’d take their side in a heart beat.

To get that many statutory declarations sworn would be enough to make damned sure they had the right facts for each case (as the significant delays such a process would impose is enough of a disposition to ensure accuracy/ worthiness of claims).

Then, they could forward such a request to the user, who could in turn request documented technical evidence, such that it can be disputed, and this in turn creates a larger turnaround for the copyright allegations to be validated enough.

Then, the user can assess it, and if they are happy, reply stating the activity was discontinued 12 months ago, or if they disagree, they can dispute it – and see what happens then.

The point? The studios aren’t really that big on copyright infringement, fact is – they don’t give a rats arse. They just forward automated output from their detection systems to the ISP, who can action as they see fit.

They went after iiNet when they realised they weren’t forwarding them on – of course, the intent of the notice is to inject fear into the user, so iiNet’s reasoning for not sending the reports on is probably to ensure customers didn’t call up asking about a notice – or flooding them with crap about them.

The other point is, iiNet have no legal responsibility to send an email onto a user about a abuse report – copyright issues are for the copyright holder to persue through channels already present.

I imagine a copyright investigation requires first – a civil claim lodged, but to get the user details, they need to subpoena the ISP for those details, which could then be given out – and in turn, they can lodge a statement of claim against the user (after validating the details), and this results in a hearing setup for the allegation, and a court can decide the merits of the claim and amount claimed.

As you can see, the automated systems processing these copyright claims aren’t going to like such a system, it costs the copyright holder a LOT of money for what amounts to one user viewing some file from the internet, and uploading anywhere from 20 – 80% of the copy – something they couldn’t really prove anyway, unless the full file was uploaded to them (I doubt they’d download the same copy of the same file however many times to prove copyright infringement).

And so – they just want to intimidate users, by sending emails saying “we are on to you”.

And because it’s a lot of work going after the users, correctly, in the above scenario, they just go for iiNet, who are simply a carriage provider. Much like if I used Australia Post to ship 2KG of Mary Jane three suburbs over.

Or if I burnt a DVD of Horton Hears A Who and send it three suburbs over by Australia Post, and quoted a PO Box as a return address. This isn’t worth trying though, as they wouldn’t get detected, and Australia Post isn’t a key target for these copyright ’emails’.

The process in place can work well, if the copyright holders are indeed serious, they aren’t. Just like the current government, completely full of shit.

Recently, a provider I colo with had yet another outage, but this was an unusually long and very annoying outage.

They haven’t supplied any ‘reasonable’ explanation for it, so I’ll assume incompetence is the cause and they’ll insert whatever excuse for that will seem plausible.

Anyway, throughout the downtime, I was considering – how could I ensure high availability, the colo provider I am with is generally about 97% available. My home internet connection – no kidding, serves better speeds, and is 100% available.

So, at this time I started to think I can do a better job hosting the thing myself, the colo provider, whilst the prices are short of justified, they are cheap enough that what little value comes from the sites hosted, covers there cost. I can still do a better job hosting it over a connection that costs less.

I don’t plan to pull the server out, as I still have the invisible, and perhaps invalid perception that the colocation is going to be better. So, High Availability hosting crossed my mind. I can do that.

I now mirror the database from the live server to my connection, and due to the nature of the updates, the usage should not be significant. I also have MySQL replication back to that database, so that in the event the dedicated server is down, the database locally can be changed, and those changes will replicate back to the live server when it comes back.. In the event a future 8 hour or more ‘incompetence’ outage occurs.

The stumbling blocks that I have to jump over are:
– File management. How do I mirror those on both servers.. It’s likely only the server ones will change, but I still need to mirror those to the home server.

– DNS. I can manage this easily – by having multiple A records. Though, I would prefer to have something like the MX method, where you specify priorities, and the host is contacted in each order.

My thoughts on file management, at least for now, will involve some sort of check, to see when files are changed, and then mirror all changed files again. This way, we maintain sync of the files.

The DNS issue, it’s not a large issue, as I think I will just have two A records, and this will point at both IPs, then its just random as to which location is reached. Of course, during an outage, the down A records are removed, which would make only the ‘up’ site respond – high availability.

Mail is already OK for the sites concerned.

I’m not doing all the sites at the moment, I still have some PHP items to sort on the home server. Version checking could be a problem, if I wasn’t administering both servers – but I am, so that won’t be a problem.

Maybe I should setup the home server, see if its a success, and if it remains better than the newcastle box, the move to shut it down and remove it, and it’s associated expense could be natural. I can see latency might be an issue, but perhaps it won’t be.

I like a challenge – whatever form it comes.

I’ve got little to do lately, I work, I sit with the kids, I try and force the dollars owing on the house down further.

I try and make work a challenge by finding problems and looking for solutions to those problems, I try and find the more challenging work so that I can have something to think about and resolve. For me there is a ‘no dial tone’ issue, and a ‘intermittent speeds issue’ – I’m going for the speeds issue, I don’t care for the simple dial tone problem.

And I look at our banking, and try and find areas to reduce spending to force our home to be paid within the self imposed 8 year time frame – it’s looking good, but it’s needing some more force, which at the moment is going to need more input.

But, that’s all nothing – I have my own time, and it’s somewhat spare, I have little to do.

And networking, I’ve pretty well dried up what I want to know there for now. I can use Cisco routers for QoS, routing, Netflow via ntop, ACLs. And the other aspects of networking – DNS servers, web servers, VoIP.

And web development – I can’t say I’ve reached anywhere near a good level here, but I’ve made a lot of roads into it, I’m just lost for a new challenge. I could finish the OzVoIPStatus website design and features I have started, but .. interest in that site isn’t running high, both from me and users viewing the site – lack of updates, and the content there isn’t dynamic enough.

On one hand, I wanna tidy this place up a bit more – expand the granny flat, add another storey, landscape the gardens, paint the walls, make an underground car park.. But that’s conflicting with our 8 year pay off target, which will save us more long term..

On the other hand, I could lose a few kilos from the ‘stress’ of working at home, so that’s a ‘challenge’ that seems to require more pressure than I have clear motivation to throw at.

Maybe that’s where my efforts could be focused.. But then – I’m not willing to throw a lot of money into that either.

I’m bored.

I built this system approximately 20 months ago or so (around Nov 2007), and it’s performed great, under both Windows XP Pro, and since December 2008, as my Ubuntu workstation.

It’s performed great, and aside from the few minor issues, such as crashing in suspend (caused by the cx8800 TV tuner driver), and minor software configuration, has been troublefree.

Over the last few weeks however, the graphics card has developped an issue – most times, it’ll work OK for days on end, and others – I’ll go out for lunch, come back to bring it out of suspend.. And it won’t resume. OK. Hit Reset to reboot.

But, that’s where the problem starts – the Gigabyte BIOS boot screen is pixelated badly (as if 16 color mode was enabled), and the display won’t show the desktop after the text part of booting starts. The system boots still, I just can’t SEE anything.

After some testing this afternoon, I swapped the card with another card (VGA / DVI), and this didn’t have an issue. Put my card in the system I took the other card from, and the issue was there.

It works when I leave it off for around 10 – 15 minutes sometimes (it didn’t this afternoon, when I needed it most), and then continues to behave normally – until reboot.

After letting it cool this afternoon, I put it back in to try and get my dual screens working again, and Ubuntu didn’t like me for it – the Panel’s I had on the second screen were on the first, and the CPU on the panel application was at 100% – so I kill it, and the system freezes. Great.

I didn’t keep any logs of it to lodge a bug report unfortunately, because the circumstances won’t arise in normal use – only after the system has 2 monitors, and it reboots with only one video card.

Luckily, I had icewm handy, and logged into it and all was well, enough to get work done.

I tried different variations of X configuration (/etc/X11/xorg.conf), to get the display as expected – as one continuous long display, this way the mouse doesn’t break into two between each monitor – how I like it. I haven’t had any success getting that BACK, despite restoring configuration files, and rechecking each setting, and going through manual config.

It’s a waste of time now anyway, the graphics card clearly needs to be replaced soon, but I’ve always been amazed the rest of the system can run at around 40oC with minimal cooling, and the graphics card, which has it’s own fan (and is dust free), can’t stay below 57oC, it seems to run at high temps all the time.

Time to go have a look at what to replace it with.

When the government does implement the internet filter, which they claim they will use to filter sites containing pretty extraordinary content, you might find a site you wish to view blacklisted. Or not. I have trust in the government enough that they aren’t likely to blacklist any of my sites (or they are really suicidal).

Anyway, let’s get down to business – The government has blocked your favourite site, how do you avoid the waste of money, time and effort that is the Internet Filter?

Method 1: Proxy.
Because proxied traffic doesn’t appear like a normal connection to the blocked site, you can easily avoid the filter, and within seconds, show the nation the government is run by a bunch of incompetent morons.

To add a proxy, simply google for a open proxy, or visit proxy.org.

Open Internet Explorer, click Tools > Internet Options > Connections, LAN Settings, and specify the proxy settings.
Access your content.

Method 2: P2P
P2P transfers are pretty common on the internet today. They occur either using BitTorrent, or eMule, or other popular protocols for P2P transfers.

Whilst they can be intercepted – just like all traffic, they are notoriously difficult to filter the content, because of the numbers of packets they are broken into.
To use a P2P program to again, demonstrate just how retarded our government is, just drop over to utorrent.com, or any other popular P2P application, get your other buddies in crime and form a tracker., and start distributing your content. Free of censorship.

Method 3: IRC
Just when the government thought they could capture P2P, there’s yet another way to distribute your easy to distribute, difficult to filter content – IRC!

Internet Relay Chat allows users to join a channel, and read lines of text. It’s also possible to ‘base64 encode’ a file, and send those as lines of text in an IRC client, and have many users in the channel read those encoded lines, join them together, decode them, and transfer full files.

Filter, again easily bypassed with very little effort.

Method 4: Email
Our intelligent (yeh, right) government has still forgotten another distribution method- Distribution Email Lists. So easy, even a child porn addict could use!

Simply create a list of all your buddies that you wish to distribute such content to, and send them files, in multi part messages, and they can then view all til their hearts content.

Filter, again bypassed.

Method 5: Domain Changing
Yes, because the filter only works on a ‘black list’ of URLs, as a child porn distributor (or other banned content), you can easily change the domain name that has been blocked, and add a prefix to it. So, before you had mykidsrule.com, now you can have ‘kidsareawesome.com’ – any variation could work. Or just be lazy, ‘mykidsrule2.com’.

Filter, again bypassed.

Method 6: MSN / ICQ Transfers
You can also just open MSN, send the file to your partners in blacklist activity. Simple.

Method 7: DCC Chat (IRC Transfer)
You can always just jump on a private IRC server (hey, someone create one), and then join a channel, and PM the user to DCC transfer the file to you.. Easy.

Method 8: Setup a XML request receiver
Rather than go fetch the content, have it come to you. Setup an XML request receiver, which receives XML requests, each with parts of the file. Join the file together from all the requests. You don’t need to be there to receive the requests either.

That’s 8 VERY SIMPLE methods the filter should fail to filter through.

So, why again are they spending all that money on a filter that.. won’t actually filter the content anyway?

Why not piss it away on another Retail bonus? Or, better – get more police and education? Too much effort maybe?

I have no idea why they are still proceeding with such a disastrous waste of money on a trial of such an unworkable system. It’s insanity – but that’s our federal government, voted in by morons, run by idiots.

Whilst I still don’t fully comprehend the reasons why, I’m now a father to two children.

I love them both equally. One of the questions I could never figure an answer out was – why have two?

I can’t really consider the full details as to why one has a second child, or a third. The first child is great, he is growing up to be a smart, and active child.

I pondered why would anyone have a second child if the first is so great. I never found any real answers. Personally, I’m the 3rd of 4 (maybe more) children.

I found my eldest sister to be dumb and overly bossy, giving out directions even when they made no sense.

I found my oldest brother to also be dumb, but having wild dreams – like being an airforce pilot. I look at common sense in society regularly, and I would hope our defense forces do not put someone like him in the front seat of anything with wings, even a female hygeine product.

My younger brother was intelligent, which flies right in the face of his father’s intelligence. He had difficulty maintaining a job, and the last I saw of him many years ago – he barely had teeth in his head and hadn’t improved despite his escape from my mother’s prison like conditions.

Myself – I was the intelligent one, so I was continually reminded. I would be the one sorting through the tenancy legal disputes, dealing with owners who protested bond refunds, reading through my mother’s xray, ultrasound, and CT scan reports so she understood.

I would be the one making sure they weren’t ripping themselves off, and doing what I could to ensure they didn’t send us broke. My reward for all of that was regular poundings over the head with a rolling pin if ANYTHING ever went wrong, so long as my sister said ‘it was his fault’. I remember suffering nose bleeds for a while, probably unrelated, the doctors didn’t seem overly concerned at the time.

I managed to escape that environment many years ago, with police assistance when they were called in about a domestic disturbance – because the stupid bitch was trying to hold me off at knife point. The story behind that? Because I didn’t feel like going into the backyard and was happy enough where I was.

In that environment, I had no money, and was rarely given anything more than $5 growing up, money wasn’t plenty, but it certainly wasn’t poor either – 4 of them on disability (Older sister and brother straight on disability because they ‘didn’t feel like working’.

I’m not sure how I can manage to grow a family when the history I have to base ‘family’ off is the environment described above. I have scars and memories that I’ll never get rid of because of that environment.

But, I am somehow managed to navigate those adverse conditions and arrive to where I am today – a father of two children. Both are healthy, the older isn’t stupid, isn’t overweight, and is respectable.

They aren’t the best behaved – the girl’s excuse is OK – she’s a newborn, the boy’s excuse might as well be “I didn’t do it”.

I find myself looking towards his future, and what’s best for him. Ideally, he’ll have some of the best conditions on this planet ready for him to thrive in as he desires. In saying that – the ethics and morals injections need to continue to ensure that he doesn’t take anything that is given to him and destroy it. He isn’t old enough to understand much of that though.

One of the reasons I think we have two children is it’s in our nature to grow, and despite being happy with one child, we may find ourselves enjoying raising two children as opposed to one.

I never identified myself as having children as young as I am, but then I also figure it’s far more fun when you are younger – you get to enjoy them more, compared to someone who is older and due for hip replacement / prostethic legs 🙂

I’m enjoying my job, it’s become a little more challenging since a few of the staff have moved to other areas, but I don’t really mind it – I’m enjoying where things are right now. I’m nearly enjoying the support aspect again, it’s good to resolve issues, but I can’t see myself enjoying it when your working one after the other.

I’ve worked with some customers to resolve issues over extended periods, and also assisted a manufacturer to fix an issue with one of their products, the customer behind that story is very happy with the outcomes (despite months of issues).

I concluded at some point recently, that there will always be issues, be it with the website or the IT systems we are left with to support. I think that’s largely because those who should be paying attention to detail on these areas simply aren’t, the people who do the development work don’t bother checking it – simply do what is asked and leave it – if it breaks, too bad.

I have a different attitude towards development, in that something should be tested, and any website changes should be proof read prior to the issue being put to bed. And of course, if something seems out of place, it doesn’t go live without such ‘go live’ being directed by those who are ultimately responsible anyway.

I’m still very keen on networking and VoIP technologies – I’d rather be out of this realm with regard to my resume at some point, otherwise I’ll be 30- 40 and still be seen as someone who is good for client support, networking and VoIP. I want to diversify that some more – but – family also shouldn’t suffer at the expense of that expansion too much.

Still, time will tell where everything is heading – still keen on buying a house soon too.

Enjoy!