June 16, 2003
You Feel A Sense Of Loss
George Goble's web site is gone. Gone!
Curse you, people in charge!
But blessings be upon the Wayback Machine, for they have the true web site. Or most of it, anyway.
Don't do this at home. Unless you have someone filming you.
June 08, 2003
Postman Pat Vs. The Internet
Over at Gweilo Diaries, Conrad Something needs to be done and, in the end, the only solution may be an e-mail "postage fee".
This suggestion has been floated before, and has been largely ignored because, for a variety of reasons, it is completely impractical.
First off, the Internet is global. Unless every country in the world charges an email postage fee, any country that doesn't charge such a fee will become an instant spam-haven. So the spammers will relocate their servers at minimal cost, and spam will continue unabated.
Second, no-one runs the email system. Anyone can run an email server; I run three myself. Indeed, I've written an email server myself. How are you going to enforce this postage fee, when the way email actually works is one (privately owned) server passing the message to another, with no "post office" of any sort involved?
Third, even if you passed legislation that all SMTP (the Internet mail protocol) transactions on the public internet incur a fee, and enabled law-inforcement agencies to go after the free-email offenders, the immediate result would be that people stop using SMTP and start using something else. It's quite easy to send email over an SSL-encrypted HTTP connection so that it looks just like a web page. Tax that.
Fourth, there are many, many useful public mailing lists that send out thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of messages a day. An email tax would kill them instantly to no good end.
Finally, the technological solutions do work. I have 600 spam emails in my Junk folder, trapped there by Mozilla's Bayesian filtering. Christopher Caldwell's article shows a basic lack of understanding of how Bayesian filters work:
The primary tool that exists today is the "Bayesian" filter, which seeks out words like "Viagra" and phrases like "online gambling." Spammers have long been able to evade such filters with subtle misspellings (TURN HER ON WITH HERBAL VIARGA!).In fact, this is precisely the problem that existed before Bayesian filtering, and which Bayesian filtering is designed to solve.
The key here is that spam looks like spam. With Mozilla, there's a training period where you need to tell the program this is spam and this is not spam. It quickly learns to recognise the characteristics of spam; not just individual words, but all the patterns found in both the headers and the body of the message, the same things that let you tell at a glance that a message is spam.
Which is not to say that I don't favour anti-spam legislation. Even when it's filtered out automatically, I'm still paying to download the spam in the first place. The right legislation would let spammer's internet connections be blocked promptly, preventing the flood of messages going out in the first place... And leading us back to my first point. But at least we won't have some ghostly beaureacracy monitoring our emails and extracting a penny a piece.
Hooray for England
Steven den Beste points to an "opinion piece" by Tom Utley in The Telegraph (the English one, not Sydney's Daily Terror):
"You know, Tom," this sage said to me, glancing up from his well thumbed copy of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, "we really ought to make Prince William Governor-General of Australia."There are a number of problems with this ill-conceived attempt at humour, not least of which is that it's not funny. The one I choose to point out, though, is that the Brits can't make anyone our Governor-General. We send the Queen a list, and she approves one of our choices. I believe that the last list we sent only had one name on it - not a particularly good choice, in my opinion; in any case, it's rather strongly hinted which of the names is to be approved.
Oh, and as for Tom's lady friend who failed to find love in the Land Down Under: There certainly are heterosexual males even in Sydney, but most of them are already hooked up with beautiful Australian women. If you can't find a man in England, dear, you're not going to do any better down here.
May 08, 2003
Rationalisation Corner
So, who am I hurting when I download episodes of Futurama off the net?
Not the local broadcast networks, because they took it off the air after showing only four episodes (picked, as far as I can tell, at random).
Not the cable networks, because of the two available, one isn't in my street and the other won't connect me because I live in a townhouse. This despite the fact that it is already wired for their service and there are only two free-standing houses in the entire street. Bastards.
Not the DVD sales. I've already bought all the Futurama DVDs available locally. Maybe I could buy more from America, but wait! They're region coded so I can't play them!
Which leaves... Actually, it doesn't leave anybody. Except hypothetical future distributors. And I'll start caring about them when they finally get their butts into gear and become actual present distributors.
Mind you, the picture quality of the episodes I've downloaded so far has ranged from bad to terrible. (Anyone doing this stuff should take a look at some of the Anime available for download - the picture quality is far better.)
I would gladly pay to download these episodes from the source - though the quality would have to be better. Look! Money to be made! Over heeere!
April 26, 2003
The Dilemma Of Downloads
The problem with downloading stuff from a filesharing network is that you don't know what you'll get. The episode of Buffy that I downloaded using BitTorrent proved to be a dud - after I'd dragged all 433MB back to my PC over my sorry excuse for broadband. One episode of Jungle Guu was plagued with video glitches. One episode of Azumanga Daioh dropped out with a minute or so to go.
In case anyone is listening: I'd pay to be able to download these files directly from the source. That's pay as in actual money.
You'd have to get the price right, though. A DVD box set of Buffy runs about $120, or around $5 per episode (Australian prices). A download would have to be cheaper than that, and if quality is significantly below DVD standard, it would have to be significantly cheaper.
April 19, 2003
Euroweasel Status Report
Steven den Beste has an interesting analysis of just why the French are such weasels.
One thing that it fails to take into account is that the French have always been weasels - or at least for the past thousand years or so. Charlemagne doesn't seem to have been a weasel, but then again, he wasn't French.
Irregardless of which, you should read it, and this piece by Guy Milliere titled France is Almost Finished as well.
April 18, 2003
Net Imbalance
Australia is a nice place to live as long as you don't want to use the Net.
As I've mentioned, I have lately been watching quite a bit of Anime that I've downloaded using BitTorrent. The way I do it is this:
1. I log in to my web server in the U.S. (I pay about $80 per month for a server including 100GB of uploads and unlimited downloads.) I use the Linux BitTorrent client to download the file I want. And of course I leave the window open for others to download the file in turn - though I tend to limit the upload rate because otherwise I'd hit my monthly usage limit within a day or so.
If I exceed my monthly usage limit I have to pay an extra dollar or so per gigabyte.
2. I wait until 1 A.M., and then download the files from my web server to my home where I can actually watch them. Why do I have to wait until 1 A.M.? Because my ADSL connection, for which I pay $190 per month, only includes 2.5GB of "peak" downloads, where peak is 8 A.M. to 1 A.M. weekdays.
If I exceed my usage limit I have to pay an extra $150 per gigabyte.
No, I'm not kidding.
Off-peak, which applies on weekends and from 1 A.M. to 8 A.M. weekdays (and costs me an extra $30 per month) is free - but if I download more than 10GB in a month, my connection is throttled down to about one fifth of normal speed. It doesn't get reset each month, either - you don't get 10GB first before being throttled. If you download more than 10GB in a month, you start the next month pre-throttled.
Recently, a download I'd left to run overnight took longer than expected and ran into peak time, putting me 200MB over my monthly limit. That cost me $30 - about the price of a DVD here. If it wasn't for off-peak times, downloading a single episode would cost as much as a whole DVD.
Why don't I find a better ISP? Well, until very recently, there wasn't one. The deal I just described was about the best you could find in Australia. Now, though, a company called Comindico has started offering unlimited downloads on ADSL through a number of resellers. If they are any good (it's too early to tell yet) this is going to shake up the Australian broadband market big time.
Fingers crossed, because there a few industries that need a kick in the pants more than the ISPs in Australia.