How to shop!

Coming back to Australia after living in London for 7 years was an eye opener into tariffs and duties. Typically people tend to think of London as being very expensive, which it is, but what many people don’t realize is that Sydney is comparable, and for many things, even more expensive. The main reasons for the high cost of buying general retail goods in Australia are tariffs and duties, and it appears that people are generally ignorant about what they are and why they are in place, so I thought I'd write a quick post about it, not to explain all the economics behind it, but simply to point a few things out. This ignorance about tariffs was highlighted when I recently bought my Boxee box and read the outrage on their forums about the different costs of the unit all over the world. I’ll use the boxee box as an example for the confusion.

The boxee box was initially selling for $199 USD in the US, 199 pounds in the UK, and $300 AUD in Australia, to name just 3 of the discrepancies. The boxee forums were in an uproar, as very few people seemed to understand that you can’t just sell an item at the same price all over the world. I won’t go into the economics of it all, but basically every country has it’s own set of tariff’s, duties and taxes, for example the UK has VAT, Australia the GST, then you have the government trying to protect local industries in some cases incurring additional tariffs and the like to try and "level the playing field". Then you have shipping, which is relevant to a place like Australia and last but not least you have what the local market will bear, in the case of both the UK and Australia, they are both used to paying over the odds for the majority of “luxury” items bought, and thus distributors have learnt to take advantage of this and put an additional premium on top. This has reached a point where recently I was looking to buy some climbing gear from Wild Country. Wild Country is a welsh company, that manufactures locally. Amusingly the cost of their products at discounted stores in the UK, was still ~25% more expensive then going to online stores in the US. How’s that for duties and leveraging what the market will bear?

Ofcourse the solution to this is obvious to most people, buy it where it’s cheapest and then ship it to wherever you are! In most cases, for luxury goods, that means buy it in the US. Now interestingly, in Australia, unless something costs more then $1000AUD, you can bring it into the country without any additional taxes or duties, which in effect means that once you cross a threshold of cost where the savings from buying it in America plus the cost of shipping is less then buying it locally, you’re ahead. That mark is typically at around ~$130AUD, which ofcourse means that the majority of things that most people buy would be cheaper to buy from oversea’s. Now I’m hardly the first to note this, and thus enterprising individuals have started business models around this, for example check out www.myus.com, which gives members a US address (many US stores refuse to ship internationally, supposedly due to fraud issues, more commonly because they have agreements with their suppliers who want to ensure that their local distributors have the market cornered), will repackage all parcels, stripping unnecessary packaging, and then collate a number of parcels into one shipment all for express delivery leveraging their scale to get reduced rates from various couriers. All in all I’m absolutely astounded that more Australian’s don’t buy from oversea’s, I guess it’s just the relative lack of net savvy that pervades over here that is the cause, that and concerns around getting “support” for the product you buy in the event that there is a problem.

All of this has recently started to be brought to the attention of the public as local retailers are starting to complain about being unable to compete, and there is now a campaign underway to try and lower the threshold of where duties and tariffs are applied. My advice to anyone living outside of the US, buy what you're after sooner rather then later!

Is virus even the right term?

I just (belatedly I know for the rest of the security industry, but I tend not to read things daily, but rather I batch my news so I get it a bit later then everyone else!) read about Stuxnet. The malware I mentioned a couple of months ago is the same thing, but now I have a name! This is some seriously impressive software. For those of you that don't know this has been linked to all kinds of conspiracy theories, from the US government writing it to sabotage Iranian nuclear power plants, right through to Israeli's attacking their neighbours. The best technical explanation I've found is over at Symantec or for an overview check out Schneier's blog. Whichever way you cut it, if you don't understand the technical breakdown, or simply can't be bothered reading it, trust me when I say it's a whole new level of malware. It's quite literally malware done right, and every single component of this thing has had a LOT of thought put into it.

Succinctly put!

Just read a presentation that very succinctly put why I'm so pessimistic about security. Way too much press goes to the trivial, easy attacks with little to no sophistication. Ofcourse this by design as the professionals simply don't indulge in the type of behavior that makes script kiddies famous. About the only caveat I have to the presentation is that in most cases their success is predicated on one of two things, either having the talent in house to be able to break in, or access to specialized attack tool chains. It is possible, albeit not probable, that in some cases the in house talent might refuse (if they knew!) to break in on behalf of a nefarious entity. That's about the only hope you have against the real pro's.

Industrial Malware

I just read an article over at cnet about malware that is targeted at major industrial infrastructure. In summary there are now virii / malware that is automating attacks against specific things like Oil drilling platforms and the like. I wonder if governments (and major companies) will get to the state that the benefits of having major infrastructure on the net are outweighed by the negatives.

Train Announcements

Living in the UK for 8 years, specifically London, opened my eyes to train announcements. In fact Londoners take great pride in the nature of the quirky announcements that happen on the Underground ( Living in Ealing we had a particular announcer that loved the sound of his own voice and used to regularly entertain the entire station with his antics.) and there are many sites around that list some of the antics. For the sake of those with some interest here's a link that contain a few amusing ones.
Now I'm back in Australia and I'm wondering how Cityrail can have mismanaged the trains infrastructure such that it is impossible to even hear the announcements. I'm currently catching trains for ~2 hours a day and so each day I'm in a position to hear various announcements, some of them important (it seems fairly commonplace for trains in Sydney to have their destinations changed mid-route so that if you don't hear the announcement you can often be caught out!) and yet without fail, I've been unable to hear any announcements clearly. It seems that there are a few problems. Firstly the speaker volume on most of the trains is set so low that you'd need a bionic ear to hear a thing. Secondly, there aren't enough speakers around, and so unless you're near one of the few that is in working order, you're just SOL. Finally it would appear that Cityrail need to invest some money in public speaking classes for their train drivers as the majority of them seem to be intimidated by using the speaker and invariably mumble, rush and shorten what they are trying to say in an effort to have it done as quickly as possible. In 2010, surrounded by technology with technology playing an ever increasing role in our lives it's a little disconcerting to see that in some area's we still can't even get the ~60 year old technology implementation right.

New beginnings and old problems

So it's been a while (again) since I wrote anything, and I felt that it was time that I had a look around at some of the other blogging software rather then continue to use the horrid wordpress that I had been running up till now. I've always been against using services on the net to host anything personal (i've always insisted on running my own email servers for example) but I've changed my mind when it comes to blogging. The main reason in this case is security, as trying to keep up with the slew of wordpress vulnerabilities was proving to be a full time job and one that I didn't have an interest in. On top of that, I'm a fan of googles work in a variety of area's and thought I'd give this a try, so here I am at my new blogging home on blogger.com. Hopefully the transition will be relatively transparent to most of you as I'll do a few technical things in the background.

I've been inspired to start writing again for a few reasons. Firstly I've just had about a year off from regular work and I'm feeling rested and fired up to get stuck into problems and generally start working again, which means that I start to think about more challenging things then "When will I get up?" and thus some of it might be of interest to a wider audience. The other reason is that a few friends are also starting to blog a bit and ask some questions that I have some interest in trying to answer, so the combination means I think I might, finally, start writing a bit more regularly again :)

Something I read recently amused me and served as a good example of what I've been warning my non technical friends about for years. I'm referring to the well publicized attack on twitter. This was something that passed my by until now because for starters I've been on sabbatical from all things security while I've been "off", and secondly because everytime I see the word "twitter" my mind tends to shut down and ignore everything it see's for the following 5 seconds. You could say I'm not really a big fan of the concept ;) Still I couldn't think of a better example as to why reusing the same passwords and security credentials across multiple sites is a bad idea then the linked article. If you want to avoid re-using credentials with your web related applications but don't trust your memory then consider the following steps.

Firstly go and get a decent password safe application. Once you've installed that, each time you are prompted for a password for an account somewhere, use the random generate password function and put that into the requested field.  Now whenever you are prompted you can simply double click on the right entry in password save and it will then load the password into your copy and paste buffer for use.

Normally I wouldn't recommend the following, because it is a slight lessening of security, however, if you're using a lot of different accounts and you find it too onerous to use password safe to manage all of them, then try the following additional tip. Generally it's a bad idea to let your browser save passwords, however, if you have a mechanism of encrypting all of the passwords it saves, or it does it automatically for you like Firefox does, then configure a master password (using a random one from password safe) and let Firefox now save your password for each of the sites you go to. Now firefox will automatically fill in your username and password for any given site you go to, however, you will have some protection over the username and passwords being stored on your local computer (or where ever your firefox password repository resides).

Writing - the return!

So another full year has passed and I note my previous decision to start to blog more frequently. Ofcourse equally obviously there hasn't been a post in that time frame, so much for good intentions.

This time around I'm not going to make any bold claims, but I'd like to get in the habit of writing an essay a month so I'll see if I can keep up with it. Perhaps sitting down and having to formulate an article or chain of thought will spur me on to write smaller snippets more suitable to a blog, we'll have to see.

art

I stumbled across this article today. Definitely worth a read and it resonated very strongly with me. I can still remember arguing with my math teacher about the value of what we were being taught and how we were being taught. Actually I'd go so far as to say it sums up why I have a problem with our education system.

Upgrade path

As most technologist will tell you, the first thing to do when you get a new gadget is to upgrade it to the latest software and bios version. So this was in my mind when I recently upgraded my phone to a new Nokia 6500 classic. I promptly downloaded the software to manage the phone and at the same time downloaded the software to update the phone itself. I started off by transferring the phone numbers on my old phone to it's sim card, then i put the old sim card into the new phone and moved the numbers from the sim to the new phone. Then I put the new sim in my new phone and moved the numbers from the phone to the sim card. My idea being that I prefer the numbers on the sim card rather then the phone in case something happens to it (reasoning that it is more likely the phone would get broken then the sim card inside of it, besides I'd be able to put the sim card in another phone and still have access to my numbers). So there I was with my new sim card in my new phone with all my numbers on it. At this point I decided to back up my phone using the supplied software from nokia. That done, I decided to try and finally fix all the spelling mistakes in my address book and update some numbers. I was a bit annoyed to discover that while the software on my computer was able to manage other aspects of my new phone just fine, when it came to getting the numbers out of it and allowing me to edit them on the software on my computer, it just wasn't working. There appeared to be some bug, so before I started to try and solve that I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Big mistake.
I downloaded the new software for the new phone and updated it. I once again tried to manage the names and numbers in the phone with the software on my computer only to find that the bug had persisted and in fact got worse. Now instead of seeing maybe 25% of the numbers that were in the phone, I could see 2. I decided to try and create a new number and push it to the phone to see if that would help. I promptly added a number and asked it to synchronize. Just as promptly the phone deleted ALL numbers on the phone and synchronized the new number. Annoyed but not panicked, I thought I'd simply restore from backup all of my numbers, because I realized at this point that by moving the numbers off my old sim to the new phone I had ofcourse deleted them from the old sim. The only copy of my numbers now resided in my back up of the phones configuration. Well I'm sure you can guess what happened then. I restored from backup but the bug seemed to have taken residence in no uncertain fashion and ate all of the numbers. When it was done restoring I had 2 numbers in the phone. Thanks Nokia, thanks very much.

If you're reading this please drop me a line with your contact details because chances are I don't have them any longer.

Spot the techie!

Uncertain if the person in front of you is a techie masquerading as an investment banker or the real thing? Then I have the solution! Simply look at his cuffs. If he's got cuff links on, then he's not a techie but a real investment banker!

How do I know I hear you ask? Having just started at an investment bank and turned up fully suited for my first day, I was quite dismayed to find out how hard it is to type with cuff links on, they basically make it impossible to do any real computer work.

Economical media

I recently decided to grow my movie collection buy purchasing all the old classic movies that I've wanted to watch on and off over the years but had never bought. I was spurred to do this because while looking around for a few things I'd noticed that the cost of dvds had fallen to ~5 pounds. So I dutifully hopped on my computer and went to play.com to start putting in a big order for all the classic movies. It was only because earlier in the day I'd inadvertently wandered through a HMV store and seen some sale dvds for 4.99 that I thought I'd quickly check their website as well. Much to my surprise, pretty much EVERY movie I checked was cheaper on HMV then play! Now let me put that in perspective for those readers that don't really know the two companies involved. Play was a company setup in Jersey because of it's tax breaks when selling to the UK mainland. As a result they were able to offer incredibly cheap prices on cds / dvds that I don't think it's too far to say, probably led the charge in lowering prices on the high street. HMV on the other hand is the polar opposite, it's the largest dvd / cd selling in the UK with stores on all the high streets and, till recently, high street prices. It gives you an idea of how far things have changed when a company like Play can't beat HMV on price.

Keeping things cold

After almost 5 years living in England you'd think that I'd be used to all the little differences here from back in Australia, however, even after all this time there are some things that still have the ability to wind me up and cause me to shake my head. One I just ran into again was trying to buy a cold drink.

I accept that growing up in Australia my perspective is a bit borked, after all most Australians are taught at a young age that if you get something out of the fridge, you use it, then put it straight back as it's too hot to leave anything out for too long. That aside though europeans (it's not just the Brits that suffer from this) have real issues at the other extreme. For some reason, I'd guess it was initially to save on power or perhaps floor space, shopkeepers over here have traditionally decided to not buy refridgerators, but rather, to buy "cool shelves". This idea was questionable at it's inception but certainly after I'd guess 50 odd years of evolution has now reached a state of complete and utter uselessness. For those of you that don't know what a cooling shelf is, it is much like a fridge, but sawn in half and with the cooling element at the base rather then behind. The result is a completely open air contraption that tries to cool from the bottom. Now physics aside about hot air rising and all that, it's curious that the concept of keeping a static amount of air in place and cooling it to a set temperature seems to have escaped my european brethren, and not surprisingly the cooling shelves have a net effect of, IF you're lucky, lowering the temperature of items placed in them by about 1 degree. Unfortunately the state of most cooling shelves is fairly abysmal, most are broken and filthy, few actually work as they should at the best of times. What's the issue I hear many euro readers thinking, well the issue my friends is that it doesn't COOL the damn drinks!

The issue with temperature is not limited to drinks though. It was with initial surprise, followed by amusement and then outright incredulity that I met the assertion that Air Conditioning is bad and makes you sick. As every Australian knows, life without AC in Australia is unbearable, trying to work in stifling heat is just a nightmare, yes now and again if you're in the habit of walking in and out of AC'd buildings hundreds of times in a day, and you're run down, and you're stressed and the first 4 moons of gemini align, you might get sick from the temperature changes. Yes it's also possible that you can get outbreaks of legionaires disease and a few other air bourne nasties, but given that a large chunk of the worlds working population in the first world works in Air Conditioned buildings, it seems a little far fetched to think that they are a death trap, talk to the average european though and you'll get a completely different picture. Almost without exception every european I've met, when the subject of AC comes up, they cross themselves to ward off the devil and start swapping stories about how one of their friends got sick from it (almost how aussies swap stories about how close they've come to being attacked by a shark / croc). Try to point out that they might be exaggerating the risks or that AC is actually good, and you're immediately excommunicated from the conversation, but back to my drink.

Now again I can only assume that in the past europe was actually a REALLY cold place, so cold in fact that inside a store, on a cooling shelf without real refridgeration it was reasonable to expect things to be kept at 4 degrees. I'm dubious that this was ever the case but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt (I don't know too many shops that don't run a heater inside the store during Winter). That was the past, possibly, now though I can assure you that most of Europe and certainly not many parts of London actually even get that cold let alone consistently. Instead, like today, it was about 15 degree's and I was after a cold drink. I walk into the local store and low and behold all their drinks are actually HOTTER then room temperature as their cold shelves don't work and they've got a heater going in the store. It took me going to about 4 local shops before I found one that actually had a fridge and consequently was able to serve me a drink that was cold. Europeans are a worried lot, they are panicking about global warming more then most other groups of people, now I understand why, it's going to be damn hard to get a cold drink in this part of the world in the future.

Recruiters and the job hunt

The last two weeks since I've come back from Italy have seen me spending the majority of my time looking for a new job. This in turn has meant that I've spent the majority of my time each day chatting to recruiters. It's funny what proximity will do for perspective, normally recruiters are reviled by most people and while I have my issues with them, which I'll deal with later, on the whole I mostly feel sympathy for them right now, let me explain.
Currently most of my effort is going towards getting into the financial sector, in particular investment banks. Now investment banks typically have a fairly hefty dose of self importance at the best of times, but when it comes to recruiters I get the impression that they basically think of them as being scum. It's an unfortunately reality that most people, at least in IT, think of recruiters as scum and when you combine IT, with investment bank attitude you end up with no respect for the recruiter. What I've discovered is that it directly effects me. An example of this is where I'll get contacted about a role. The recruiter will go through it with me, come to the conclusion that I'm perfect for the role and put me forward. At this point the recruiter tells me that they normally hear back within 2 days whether the company will want an interview. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me, telling me that he's talked to the HR department of the company and they are busy, "you know still sub prime fallout", and that they'll review my CV in the next two days and get back to him. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me and tells me that HR are still busy and .... you see the pattern. The problem is that the poor recruiter has to deal with me calling him up asking what the status is, has he really put my CV forward, why haven't we heard anything back, is it really HR and not someone technical reviewing my CV etc. At the same time the recruiter is strung along by the bank giving him false information which they, unbeknowingly, pass on to me causing me in turn to get frustrated. All in all it's hard not to have some sympathy for the recruiters, they cop it from both sides and generally don't get much respect. Of course there is the flip side as well.
I understand that recruiters are not technical people, and that HR at the company you're applying to is equally not technical, but you'd think if it was your job to assess people with a certain skillset that you might learn how to do it with some level of accuracy, after all it helps everyone involved. You can imagine my surprise then when time after time I have to sit there and explain that I do know how to install linux right after I've explained that I'm a linux developer. You can view my resume here and see if it comes across as someone who has little to no knowledge about unix or security. In the last 2 weeks I've had to create 5 versions of my CV to "emphasize" different aspects of CV so that it will get past the recruiter / HR filters before going to someone that will actually understand it. Emphasizing sounds reasonable enough, until you realize what this actually entails is not rewriting it with a particular focus, nothing so complex! No, emphasizing simply means replace all occurances of "implement" with "build" because the client wants to know that you can build a linux box. Another tip for recruiters or HR is to google your candidates. If you're going for a serious IT role, by serious I mean any role that involves you having years of experience or a senior level of understanding, then googling their name will turn up hits on them, from emails they've written to mailling lists through to articles that they've published on different topics. If there isn't any hits, then you should be concerned, of course on the flip side if there is then it's a good indication that they are the real deal and not making up their skillset. Finally something that I understand but that annoys me is the insistance of people asking "so what was your package in your last job?". Frankly what relevance does this have if the recruiter / HR department is doing their job properly? What they use it for is to get a base from which to judge what kind of salary they should offer you for the role you are going for. Funnily enough it was my understanding that HRs point in life was to assess peoples suitability for a role, on the assumption that they are suitable then they are worth what the budget for the role is worth.

Cats

For a while now I've wanted a pet, but given the fact that I'm living on a visa in a "foreign" country, it never seemed to be a good time. Well I finally got sick of it never being a good time and decided to just deal with the issues as they arose and bought a cat. To be precise I bought an absolutely gorgeous Russian Blue female 14 weeks old kitten. Mysha (or Myshka still trying to decide), is absolutely amazing, in all my life I've never seen a cat like her. She is so affectionate it's crazy, doesn't bite or scratch, eats well, uses the litter tray, has no "accidents", doesn't keep me up too much and is all around just great. After chatting to a number of breeders I've decided that I will get another kitten as 2 cats are no harder to look after then just 1 and will keep each other company. For the second cat I've decided on an Egyptan Mau. Some good pictures of them can be found at this link. I've decided on a silver spotted male and have one lined up for the end of the month. I guess I won't be getting much sleep for a while!

In other news Kasia and I have decided to move in together and have just made an offer on a new place in Ealing. Hopefully we'll get that and move around the end of this month. Finally less noise and a nicer place!

Spam

Lots of people I know get really worked up about spam. For a long time I have to admit that I didn't get much spam, which was a bit odd really, given that for a very long time various email addresses of mine have been all over the net, still I guess I used to be a lot more careful about joining lists or the like. Now for the last 5 years or so I've been getting a lot of spam, the funny thing is though that it doesn't really bother me. Like anyone I do resent the time lost having to scan my emails, check the senders address and the subject (that's about all it takes for me to classify something as spam, since most of the mails I get are either tagged by a list or by a sender known to me) and delete the spam, but I can't help but feel that is just the way things are and in a funny kind of way, as it should be. I think the heart of my view on spam is quite simple and I feel logical. The Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, it means that anyone has the right to use it. If you run a service on a public network, that implies that the public are allowed to use that service. So when I put it in those terms to myself I see no problem with people sending me email, as after all it's a service running on a public network, if I didn't want random public people to try and use it then I shouldn't be running it should I? Interestingly this ties into another argument that I've had over the years with various government agency types about different computer crime laws that was best summarized by me stating that if the law required you to have prior consent to making any changes to a system, then email would break that law and the smiling government agency person saying "I know, thus I can pull you in any time I want Ben for breaking the law". I finally realized then WHY they left the wording like they had. Still this is just one half of my thoughts on spam, the other half is the side of me thats job it is to stop such things.
When you work in security as long as I have you come to realise that there are very few ways, if not none, to stop someone determined enough doing something in the virtual world. I always put myself in the shoes of the spammers and thought "how would I bypass any anti-spam mechanism?" and in almost every case I could think of a way past it. Thus this article resonated with me quite strongly and made me smile. I'd like to think that there is at least a part of me that doesn't like beating my head against a brick wall.

It's all about HOW you think!

I remember when I first started to play chess seriously I spent many hours reading all kind of books on every aspect of the game. One of the things that struck me when I read it was a study about Grand Masters (people that have achieved a coveted title for their prowess in the professional chess world) and other players. The common thought before this study was that GM's somehow just "saw" a lot further then anyone else did in the same position. That is that there were able to evaluate say 50 positions in a second rather then 3 or 5 that a normal player could. What the study proved through a variety of methods was that in fact that is completely untrue, a GM can see or evaluate slightly more positions then a rank amateur per second, but an identical amount to that of any semi serious club chess player or above. So what was the difference? It turned out it was simply HOW they evaluated the positions. A GM will simply only consider lines (lines is a synonym for "possibilities" in chess lingo) that are strong, whereas a normal club player will often consider moves that are quite simply much weaker. In other words the GM is able to achieve more with an identical amount of processing power because of HOW they think. I never thought of this being relevant in IT until I read this comment.

Survival

Today there was a lucky american tourist with a camera on safari, he managed to catch this amazing footage, showing survival at it's best. Check it out here.

Porn

I read a very interesting blog recently about the observations of a female clerk in a video store that had a porn section. It was really quite an interesting read on a number of levels, firstly it was an insight into the female perspective of porn, something that I don't often get much of an insight into. The author has quite a humorous style which helps with such a topic, but also some very interesting insights into porn, it's role and it's downsides in society. Unfortunately I can link directly to the section in question, but if you click on this link and scroll to the entry labelled "Men and Women and Porn" you'll see what I consider to be one of the better explanations of porn and it's usage and the differences of perspective between sexes.

On an unrelated note but still in the realm of things you don't talk about in polite company here is a list of swear words as sorted by the British publics impression of how offensive they are and what's more they have the same swear words ranked over time! Check it out here.

a giant leap for mankind

Well I just finished watching 2001: A space odyssey again and as usual it left me thinking. One part of my thought process I'll sit down to write soon, was about the paucity of decent movies coming from Hollywood (everywhere?) in recent times, but the other was about the future and our achievements.

When I look back at the last 100 years or so, I can almost mark every 15 years by something completely revolutionary coming along. Machine guns, Airplanes, Atomic bombs, space flight, television and so on it goes, and then I look at what my generation has contributed and I'm starting to run out of contributions. It seems that what my generation is particularly good at is refining everything else, we take something and we just refine it, so much so that in some fields you could even argue that it is refined so far past it's original inception as to almost be a massive jump, but still, it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's just my ignorance on matters, but it really does seem that we, as a generation have stopped taking giant leaps, or even looking in many cases. Is it really the case that we have taken all the large steps that can be taken? Is there really no more massive leaps that can be found, are all the advances that are to be made in our society from here on in to be made incrementally? It's feasible I suppose, but it doesn't sound likely to me. So I wonder what am I missing, where have we been making the giant steps? Or have we, as I suspect, not been making any for some time? What causes such a gap in our technological (or otherwise) evolution? When we will once again be driven forwards in all the disciplines of our society by visionaries who look beyond our current limitations. People that aren't afraid to challenge Einstein's theories because they're Einsteins (ok yes it's not that simple, his theories stand because either they are correct, or we simply can't disprove the hypothesis, but I often feel people don't even TRY). I'm looking forward to our next giant leap for mankind.

Privacy and darknets

Today I've spent most of the day researching darknets and the technologies that enable them. Long since gone is the environment in which the original napster was created and now, in these days where the RIAA and it's ilk are constantly suing people the geeks have been brought out in force to combat them. The plethora of available technologies is fairly intimidating, even for a geek like myself it took a number of hours to read up on all the different protocol specs and get to the hard facts about various implementations and the real pro's and con's of each. The question I imagine most of the non geeks ask, is why bother? Bruce Schneier wrote this essay which I think fairly well elucidates why privacy is important to me. I often find myself holding views that are fairly unconventional and in many situations that can actually be a serious hazard to my health, but most importantly it impacts HOW I think. If we are all concerned about how our own thoughts, words or expression could be misused or interpreted then the very fabric of freedom is torn asunder. So I'm going to build myself a darknet, if you're interested you can see my thoughts on what i've read here.