Brad Rushworth

I’m certain my readers will see past the FF laughable claim about The Greens supporting heroin “on every street corner” to be able to get the strong message here about the importance of voting for a minor party in the Senate:

Just commented on Wendy Francis’ blog page. She is running for the Senate for Family First. The article in question was:

The Family First candidate claims Australians are worried about the rise of Islamic influence and the erosion of the Australian identity, but that both major parties refuse to engage in legitimate debate about the issue.

I wrote:

Wendy, I am what Rod above calls a “white Australian male” and I disagree. Australia is multicultural and that is a great strength of our nation. We have been multicultural from white settlement, and have only continued that with Chinese, Muslim and many other influences. Diversity and freedom are great strengths.

“I don’t believe God would have called me to run in this seat if he didn’t expect me to win,” he said. Says it all, doesn’t it?

I doubt these comments will get past moderation, seeing Family First is a big supporter of increased censorship. So I’ll just posted it here.

On2 Technologies has developed a video codec called VP8 which, after the company was purchased by Google, has been released as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to existing video codecs.

Until now there has been no equivalent-quality open-source video codecs available to content distributors and developers. This is in contrast to images and audio, which have at least one alternative format such as PNG (Portable Network Graphics) or Ogg Vorbis.

One of the more common video codecs, H.264 does not currently charge royalties for its use, but owners MPEG-LA will begin to do so beginning 2015.

In order to make use of the codec, Google has developed WebM, a new container file format based on the open-source multimedia container Matroska. The WebM format (.webm files) would only support the VP8 video format and the Vorbis audio format.

While the VP8 codec could be incorporated into other container file formats, including Matroska itself, the WebM project team’s decision to limit codecs to VP8 and Vorbis ensures that no confusion exists as to what codecs are required to view a .webm file.

Android will receive support for WebM by the end of the year and Adobe has pledged support for the format in Flash. A number of high-profile companies are also collaborating on the WebM project such as hardware manufacturers Nvidia, Qualcomm and AMD. WebM will benefit from any hardware acceleration these manufacturers may implement as part of their support for the format.

Learn more about the importance of software freedom and open video standards on my company blog.

Thanks to Engineers Media for the information.

RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users, a German court ruled yesterday. The Dusseldorf Court of Appeals overturned the earlier decision of a local district court in a case brought by the movie outfit Capelight Pictures. Read more here.

I like the comment by duane the best:

Finally, a court ruling that makes sense!

It’s not Rapidshare that is infringing copyright, it’s not the Bittorrent protocol, it’s not rar files, it’s not Twitter or the search engines — it’s the users.

Yes, little people in the millions, who are disgruntled with the system and want to see it change.

They can keep suing random companies if they like, but the fact remains that the people are unhappy and tired of being oppressed and exploited. That won’t change until they give up, or until the world is turned into Orwell’s worst nightmare.

Sounds like we don’t have a choice but to keep fighting this fight.

This decision follows a similar decision in Australia in favour of ISP iiNet.

Interest in the responsibility of internet providers for preventing copyright infringement on their networks by third party persons was largely focused by the guilty finding in the Pirate Bay trial. The Pirate Bay trial was a joint criminal and civil prosecution in Sweden of four individuals charged for promoting the copyright infringement of others with the torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. In its verdict the court stated that “responsibility for assistance can strike someone who has only insignificantly assisted in the principal crime”, referring to a supreme court precedent where an accountant was sentenced for accessory to crime even though his actions were not criminal per se.

What do you think?

The so called “super tax” announced over the weekend, to apply to mining companies with huge profits, has been the subject of a well-orchestrated scare campaign already. I expect this retaliation from the mining industry has only just begun. I personally think its fair to demand these huge multi-national companies return a decent slice of profit back to the country of origin of the raw materials they are exporting. After all, these resources are Australia’s resources, not the shareholders’.

Aside: I’m not defending the Government’s otherwise fairly unimpressive tax “reform”. I think (and hope) there is still more to be seen on that front.

The main scare tactic used has been about the potential to lose investment in mining. I doubt that is going to happen as a result of this tax (and if you don’t believe me, ask Peter Switzer). But when you think about it, why would we want to increase investment in coal and oil production anyway? The entire world economy will eventually shift to more environmentally friendly energy sources (whether we have an international treaty or not), simply because climate change is real and will only get worse. Investment in renewable and nuclear options will become cheaper, and coal will become increasingly unpalatable and outdated.

A large part of our coal export demand comes from China. But China’s economy at present is unsustainable and will not persist at the current rate:

Historically, one is able to observe two phases of growth in a country’s development. The first phase is the early growth and command economies such as China have been very good at this – arguably better than western economies, simply because they are able to marshal resources perhaps using techniques that democracies are loath to employ. China’s employment of capital, its education and migration policies reflect this early phase growth. This early phase of growth is characterised by expansion of inputs. The next stage however only occurs when people start to work smarter and innovate, becoming more productive. Think Germany or Japan. This is growth fuelled by outputs and China has not yet reached this stage.

China’s economic growth is thus based on the expansion of inputs rather than the growth of outputs, and as Paul Krugman wrote in his 1994 essay The Myth of Asia’s Miracle, such growth is subject to diminishing returns.

So how sustainable is it? The short answer; it is not.

So given that the coal industry is unlikely to face increased demand beyond the next decade, there is little reason to spend huge amounts of money on coal mining infrastructure. I predict the recently commissioned billion dollar third Newcastle coal loader will probably be our last.

And from the perspective of oil drilling, I think there is merit in the assertion that we have already passed peak oil production, which by definition, means investment in more infrastructure is likely to give poor returns:

Dr Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide looks at how the bulk of the world’s oil production comes from a relatively small number of very large fields discovered decades ago. The rate of world oil production has been maintained at current levels only by finding and bringing on line an increasing number of smaller fields, but the financial cost and the energy required to find and develop these new fields is constantly increasing. According to Dr Lardelli the so-called peak of oil production was actually in 2008.

We can no longer afford to sit around discussing whether or not we have passed the peak of oil production. We cannot wait, complacently, for price signals to stimulate the development of alternative sources of energy since oil prices will fluctuate wildly. Every time the economy tries to grow, oil demand will exceed supply, causing the oil price to spike up. This will strangle the economy, reduce oil demand and cause the price to fall. Oil companies cannot invest in the face of these wild fluctuations in price. Most importantly, we must remember that to do anything at all requires energy. So, while oil is still relatively abundant, we must invest as much as we can to develop the energy sources of the future. Once the oil supply starts to decrease significantly, we will be too busy just trying to keep food production and essential services running to have any energy left over for building expensive high-tech alternative energy infrastructure.

The peak of oil production was two years ago. For the sake of my children, and your children, we need to just accept that fact and deal with it. When it comes to investing in energy alternatives, do it now, because it will not be possible later.

Thankfully, in the area of transport, we are able to appreciate the advantages of fuel efficiency in our cars and trucks. Cars are getting more and more fuel efficient, and brands are using this attribute as a major selling feature. The main-stream Toyota Camry of this year features a hybrid engine and it shouldn’t be too many years until this is more commonly seen. So hopefully we can survive long enough until we find a technology to replace oil before there isn’t any left.

But in conclusion, don’t fall for the predictable story from mining executives and shareholders, that a “resources rent” tax will prevent investment in jobs and harm our economy. It won’t. But it may affect shareholder dividends.

According to today’s news, the United States has raised concerns with Australia about the impact of the proposed Australian Internet filter.

The Federal Government wants to force internet service providers to block offensive material, including child pornography and instructions for criminal activity, from overseas websites. If you read that carefully, you will notice they are planning to block all offensive material, not just illegal material. An example is R18+ computer games that would all be blocked.

The Government is facing growing pressure from anti-censorship and internet groups to drop the idea.

Now the US government has added its voice to those expressing concern.

The concerns of Australia’s most important security ally further undermine the proposal, that would make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among the world’s democracies.

Internet giants Google and Yahoo have condemned the proposal as a heavy-handed measure that could restrict access to legal information.

You can read more about this here.

The original Old Spice ad:

The parody promoting Apple:

Thanks to makeuseof.com for the link.

I read an interesting article about filtering the Internet, more specifically, about distinguishing between network neutrality as a technical principle and network neutrality as a regulatory regime.

This is a particularly relevant topic here in Australia, as our government is trying to legislate a mandatory Internet filter.

If a significant fraction of users actively resist network discrimination by adopting circumvention tools, ISPs simply don’t have the manpower to keep up.

I like this quote, not just because it would probably work, but because it borrows from the very nature of the Internet itself. The Internet is all about collaboration and information sharing, so it isn’t surprising that the users look to the Internet to circumvent Internet censorship.

Monolithic, homogenous online services are relatively easy to filter or block. In contrast, open platforms—and especially free software—supports the development of a “long tail” of software and websites that’s much harder for a network owner to understand and control.

The Australian Internet Filter that is being proposed does nothing to address peer-to-peer file sharing. So any attempt to block Refused Classification (RC) media is totally pointless, since that is where most of it is distributed.

Further, RC content is not illegal to possess in New South Wales, where I live. It covers many controversial topics like euthanasia, some political movies/books, articles instructing in crime and computer games rated above MA-15+. We are allowed to watch and own it, but we aren’t allowed to sell it or publicly display it. While I’m OK with those restrictions, the Filter aims to ban accessing it. That is not acceptable to me.

It looks like Ubuntu will soon start releasing a user manual with each new release of the operating system:

To create and deploy a document that is suitable as first point of reference regarding the use of Ubuntu by beginner-level users.

In addition to the system software, it shall also discuss a few selected applications that are part of the default installation, as there is assumed to be a common interest among beginner-level users. It will also give detail on installation, hardware, security, a background on FOSS and Ubuntu and give an introduction to using the command line.

The document shall be ready for the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release and be updated for every following release (6 month cycle).

It will be free of charge (and free of advertising), detailed, targeted at beginners available in multiple formats including PDF.

That sounds like a worth-while pursuit. I’ll definitely be following this, because I know my clients will find it useful.

Interesting to note though, that my OS of choice for servers, FreeBSD, already has such a user manual, which they call the Handbook.