Entries Tagged 'Online' ↓

Less than 24 hours after Google App Engine went live, an application has been written that allows you to use your Google Account to log into any site via OpenID. Uncreatively called OpenID Provider, it also presents you with a nice log of recent OpenID requests.

This is a fantastic example of how opening your infrastructure can provide benefit to the entire community.

An article in The Age today, titled “Lightning internet on way“, makes the dubious claim that the Australian Goverment’s subsidy of a fiber-to-the-node network will allow connections of 100 times faster than what is currently available.

Sounds good, right?

Not so much when they consider “what is currently available” to be 256 kbits.

But by deploying VDSL, (also known as Very High Speed DSL) technology, Senator Conroy said the new network would be able to carry up to 25 megabits per second.

Most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second — 100 times less capacity than 25 megabits — using ADSL technology.

Seeing as ADSL2+ has a theoretical maximum of 24 megabits, I think what they meant to say is “no faster than what is currently available.”

A friend of mine, Daniel Sangermani, has his photography work online at Red Eclipse Photography. The work on site ranges from the more conventional through to fetish and bondage.

If this is your cup of tea, the blog Sex in Art links daily to art, in all it’s forms, portraying and exploring sex.

Moblock is a fantastic alternative to PeerGuardian for Linux systems. Running some form of blocking software is important to protect your privacy when using P2P applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella; if you’re not using anything, you should be.

Unfortunately, in it’s default configuration the filtering can be a little aggressive. There is nothing whitelisted (explictly allowed), so any IP address caught in the filter is blocked. This list of filtered IP address ranges includes addresses belonging to Microsoft and Google, meaning that all traffic to those companies is blocked - including HTTP traffic and instant messaging.

To enable both MSN and Google Talk, find the following line in the file /etc/moblock/moblock.conf:

#WHITE_TCP_OUT="http https"

Now, remove the ‘#’ from the start and add the ports as follows:

WHITE_TCP_OUT="http https 1863 5222"

Presto!

The numbers 1863 and 5222 are the port numbers for the MSN protocol and XMPP protocol that Google Talk uses. If you have another application that is being blocked by Moblock, you should be able to find what port it uses here.

For installation instructions on Ubuntu, check out this Ubuntu Forums thread.

This photo has been short listed for inclusion in the latest Shmap New York travel guide.

“Delmonico’s Restaurant, in a cool triangle shaped building on the corner of Beaver St and William St, in Lower Manhattan. It’s been open since 1827, apparently!”

It’s a photo I’ve had up on Flickr for a while, I hope it makes it into the final guide!

Update 2007/07/06: The photo has been included in the online guide on the page for Delmonico’s. I actually got the email a couple of weeks ago, but forgot to update this post.

What is it with Fairfax Media and porn (*cough* adult entertainment) this week? There’s no less than three articles and two blogs on the topic this week alone!

Articles
May 26: “How porn is wrecking relationships” (link)
May 28: “Ethics of porn are in the eye of the beholder” (link)
May 29: “The obscenity of porn: X-rated and exploitive” (link)

Blogs
Samantha Brett (aka “Sam in the City”): “Are we over sex?” (link)
Katherine Feeney (aka “CityKat” aka “I wish I was Samantha Brett but I live in Brisbane”): “How your passion for porn is ruining your relationship” (link)

Looks like someone pulling the purse strings doesn’t like porn too much!

Edit: Missed one!
May 26: “Record numbers visiting porn sites” (link)

The Village Voice has a beautiful (parody) dissertation on why the number one song in the US, “This Is Why I’m Hot” by Mims, is actually hot - complete with Venn diagrams and flowcharts.

Hot Hot Heat: A graphical dissertation on the number one song in America

This is the big news of the morning. Apple and EMI have announced that they will be dropping D.R.M. (Copy Protection) on music from it’s catalogue in the Apple iTunes Music Store. The unprotected songs will come at a price premium of roughly 30%, however they will also be encoded as 256 kbps AAC instead of 128 kpbs.

This is long overdue. Apple are in trouble in the EU for the iPod - iTunes lock in, and consumers have been long frustrated by the limits copy protection places on their legitimate purposes. Using the carrot of higher quality is also the right move, I think - entice people to move away from DRM without it being the only reason, as most people won’t care and probably take the cheaper option.

It will be interesting to see if they files are “tagged” or watermarked somehow, so that there is still some accountability if the files end up on the P2P networks. I really hope this is the case, I would hate for piracy to be used as an excuse to stop a bold move such as this.

I wonder how long until this shows up in the Australian iTMS…

Coverage: NY Times, Ars Technica

The sinking feeling when you crash your car is never pleasant, even less so when the car isn’t your own. I’d imagine the feeling would be almost unbearable if the car you crashed wasn’t a Falcon or a Commodore, but a Bugatti or a Ferrari.

There’s been two such crashes lately, both of which involved very rare cars and weren’t owned by the driver.

Bugatti Veyron [Pics]

Ferrari Enzo

A little piece of me dies inside when I think about such beautiful cars being wrecked…

Continuing on with the Fairfax news, according to an SMH article Fairfax Chief Executive David Kirk doesn’t seem to like Telstra very much. After labeling Australian broadband as “fraudband”, the article goes on to quote:

“All around the world you do see where there is a very incumbent telecommunications provider and not a lot of competition … that broadband take-up is slow, broadband pricing is high,” Mr Kirk said.

“I think it’s usually about market structure and regulation rather than technology or government policy.”

In other words: “Telstra, you’re the incumbent here - stop whinging about regulation and get the job done.”

His metric for if broadband is fast enough is if you can download a movie in less than 24 hours. Sounds like a good “ballpark” metric - x kilobits per second doesn’t really mean much to the average user, but telling someone that this week’s episode of Lost would take 12 hours to download and use a quarter of their monthly downloads on their “broadband” connection might get the message across.