Confusing

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

I noticed today that NICTA (a research institute here in Australia) uses some interesting terminology to specify how its research should be categorised. NICTA is following a model proposed by Donald Stokes where the term used is 'used-inspired basic research'. The analogy is 4 quadrants where in one dimension there is scientific advancement and in the other application or usefulness. The 4 quadranta then have a yes or no along the two columns or rows. In one quadrant there is yes-advancing knowledge and no-no practical application called the Bohr quadrant, in another there is no, does not advance knowledge and yes-practical application called the Edison quadrant. In the third useful quadrant (the no,no is not particularly interesting but can often be seen in grant applications) we find Louis Pasteur who made foundational contributions as well as gave us nice and bacteria free milk. The Pasteur quadrant represents the 'use-inspired basic research', fair enough.

However, stumbling across the NICTA entry on wikipedia, I find that the organisation is muddying the waters a bit. They talk about 'pure basic research' and 'pure applied research' as well. OK so now we have what the rest of the world uses, 'pure, basic or foundational research' and 'applied research' as well as the Stokes' 'use-inspired pure research' as well as the NICTA 'pure basic research' and 'pure applied research'. I believe seeking to prove that it is possible to prove P=NP if indeed it holds true should be regarded as 'applied basic pure research' because it is useful to know that a proof can be found if indeed it holds true that it is so and that is applied, but the proof itself (if it indeed is true) is to be regarded as F***ing pure basic for most people.

It should also be made known that proving that it is possible to construct a pair of shoes that will not wear out for at least 10.000 km of normal walk so that it is possible to investigate the effects on human psyche having to walk for that long, should be regarded as 'pure applied use-inspired basic research'.

Now back to that 'no,no' grant application..

Public lecure video

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

Last Friday I gave a public seminar on the proposed filtering of the Internet by the Australian government. A video of the talk is now available on the school of IT web site. The current version is mp4 encoded, flash video will come later.

Update, an embedded flash version is now available here.

Interesting NBN news

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

The government should be congratulated on the courageous plan to build a government/industry funded broadband network as announced earlier today. Coming from outside Australia and seeing the close to monopoly position Telstra currently have one may wonder why this has not happened before. Perhaps now we can get SIP pops and IPTV plus video on demand like civilised countries. This will inevitably open up opportunities for innovation and service roll out in Australia. If the government combine the one laptop per child, NBN and a building policy that each home should have at least one networked computer as minimum standard as is the case in countries such as Sweden, perhaps Australia will be able to embrace this crazy thing called the Internet and start to take advantage of its enabling powers and information distribution capabilities.

One worry though; if the government owns the national backbone, wouldn't that be the perfect place for content filters? This way the government fully control the Internet and will not have to deal with irritating and questioning ISPs. THey don't even need to tell the general public they are doing it, shhhhhhh.

Public lecture

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

I will be giving a public lecture next Friday April 3, on the topic of the Australian Internet content filtering affair. The point is to provide an academic researchers view on the matter and to highlight some fundamental issues that makes it difficult to implement the proposed scheme, all welcome.

The lecture will be held at University of Sydney, the Peter Nicoll Russel (PNR) building in the Engineering precinct, 4-5 pm.

Councils getting rid of scuba diving in Sydney

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

One aspect of scuba diving is that you carry heavy equipment around, and it is important to be able to get close to the entry/exit point when changing and putting the gear on. Another important issue is to have safe entry/exit, shielded from waves and swell.

Pat Morin just forwarded an email by Michael McFadyen about Randwick council wanting to change parking conditions at Bare Island, so that the number of spaces is kept constant but the ones close to the island are removed or largely removed. For scuba divers this is of course an absolute disaster. Bare Island is the most popular Sydney dive site because diving is really good and there is convenient parking close to the dive sites. Already, divers cannot use Clovelly pool at Shark point for much of the year and getting out at the point is close to deadly (forcing people to try can really cause accidents). The parking at North Bondi was removed last year so that can't be dived anymore.

Why can't councils see that scuba is a recreation that has real advantage for the environment (divers care and help cleaning up etc.) and a great way to get eco tourism into the council, selling coffees, sustaining scuba shops etc. I don't think it wouldbe very costly to put in small wave breakers here and there and create good entry/exit points for us to enable access and minimise accidents. Look at Voodoo (shore version) for example. A small breaker running out 10-15 m with steps down could make that a premier dive site in Sydney at low cost. Let's lobby to make it happen.

Second black list made available

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

Wikileaks made a second list available on the 20th of March. The second list is a cleaned up version of the first list that now contains some 1170 entries.

Since the government threatened to prosecute any Australian involved in leaking the list, Wikileaks responded by threatening the Australian government with legal action since the action is firmly protected by Swedish law and Wikileaks operates within that jurisdiction. Interesting, is there an international diplomatic conflict about to happen as well over this? Perhaps I (as a Swede and Aussie) will have to chose sides, and which army to join after all :).

It is extremely stupid to distribute a list in cleartext in the first place. I have no idea who at ACMA decided to hand out clear text ASCII files with all the banned sites but it was not a struck of genius to do so. Why did ACMA not simply hash the sites and distributed a file with hashed values? Any filter implementation can still hash each destination URL and compare with the list without the destination address ever being exposed. It is true that there would still be people within the ACMA who would have acces to the original clear text list but the risk of spreading of the list would be much lower.

Wikileaks apparently also published a simple way of extracting the list from a down loadable software package from the netalert scheme era. Apparently, it is possible to extract a file with the conspicuous name "Websites_ACMA.txt". Well designed security software!! I wonder if the developers had dumbed down 3-year Australian university degrees......

Swedish newspaper names Australia as the country that exercices most control of the Internet

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

Australia is getting quite a reputation among the international community as the country most controlling and censoring the Internet together with Turkey. Dagens Nyheter (DN), Sweden's largest daily newspaper reports on studies carried out by Oxford Internet Institute, Harward, Toronto Uni and Cambridge in a project called ”Open net initiative”.

It doesn't feel good to be put in the same category as Turkey when it comes down to freedom of speech and human rights issues in any form

The authors of the report are concerned with the prospect of censorship and what different regimes will use it for in the future. It is clear that content filtering will lead to segregation in the Internet user community and that well educated and computer savvy segments in society will be able to get around censorship much easier but the less educated masses will become much more limited in the information they will have access to.

Having seen the blacklists leaked in Norway, Denmark, Thailand and Australia lately (which the respective governments did not want) is a sign that current government's intentions may not be future governments intentions and since we know scope creep is a reality, there is definitely reason to ask what such a move might lead to.

It is not reassuring to read Access Denied from MIT press, which has an overview of the filtering activities going on globally. The state of Australia has not been updated since 2007 and the report still maintains that Australia is not seeking to implement ISP level filtering. Even though, when the report was written, Australia got hardly flattering reviews. From the report:

"Overall, though, Australia’s Internet censorship regime is strikingly severe relative to both its neighbor and similar Western states. It is not, however, at the level of the most repressive regimes that ONI has studied".

The most oppressive regimes here are China and Iran.

This is rhetoric used by our strongest allies, the US and UK.

It is also worth noting that Senator Conroy claims that we are joining other countries such as Sweden in our filtering efforts but Sweden seems to think we are an oppressive nation in this regard since there is no talk of mandatory, only voluntary filtering in Sweden (plus stronger freedom of speech and freedom of information legislation).