David Marr: Don't use the Lindt Cafe seige to justify new laws

David Marr in The Sydney siege should not be used to justify draconian new anti-terrorism laws expresses the opinion we don't need new laws to deal with the likes of Man Haron Monis.

Australia was not changed in the early hours of this morning. But it may be changed if these terrible events in Sydney are used to drive another agenda altogether: the criminalisation of the press and the needless extension of surveillance into the lives of all of us all in the name of fighting terrorism.

Berlin, the city of "surveillance refuseniks"

In Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA Carole Cadwalladr documents how Berlin is become the city of choice for many people concerned about government surveillance.

"Because they used a 'short' integer, only 64 kilobytes worth of secrets are exposed."

Please Put OpenSSL Out of Its Misery pleads Poul-Henning Kamp: "OpenSSL must die, for it will never get any better".

Government regulation of the Internet

A couple of interesting articles:

In You use a computer, you think you're safe... Peter Martin explains how violating the terms and conditions of a web site may be a criminal offence in the USA.

In For Our Information: Politicians Need To Let Go Suelette Dreyfus looks at why Governments want to control and regulate the Internet.

Why Australia needs fibre and the NBN

Nick Ross looks at a report from Cisco in NBN stats: Australia's broadband future and why the Coalition's alternative 'won't work':

The world's foremost internet traffic study and growth forecast, which historically has been proven very accurate, describes a further explosion of internet traffic around the world and in Australia. The findings illustrate a requirement for fibre optic cable "deep deep into the infrastructure" both for wired and wireless broadband connections.

Ross also writes:

Speaking at a recent VNI announcement was Dr Robert Pepper, Cisco's Vice President of Global Technology Policy. He has sat on the board of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA and currently sits on the UK's equivalent, Ofcom. In these roles he briefs governments and network operators from around the world on infrastructure, what to expect from future data requirements and modes of broadband usage based upon traffic stats and growth curves. He is an American based in the USA and has no dealings with Australian politics. Some of the key points he made were:-

• That all roads point to the requirement of optic fibre being implemented deep into both wired and wireless networks.
• The future is indeed wireless, but it's mostly WiFi and not 4G.
• Wireless technologies need to be primarily methods of connecting to nearby fibre networks.
• That Australian mobile networks will soon have to join the US and UK in offloading data onto local WiFi networks in order to avoid congestion.
• That a 4G mobile user uses 28x more data than a 3G user.
• That new wireless spectrum needs to be opened up as quickly as possible to cope with growth.
• That as much wireless traffic as possible needs to be seamlessly offloaded onto the wired networks to avoid congestion.
• There is a huge increasing requirement for low-latency data transfer and high upload speeds.
• That a fibre to the node infrastructure which relies on a 'last mile' premises connection using Australia's current copper infrastructure, current HFC networks or fixed 4G-like wireless won't have the symmetry, contention ratio, bandwidth or latency to keep up with demand by 2016.
• That fibre needs to be very nearby every internet connection whether wired or wireless.

Misogynists on the Internet

In Dear The Internet, This Is Why You Can't Have Anything Nice Helen Lewis has written an interesting article about the abuse and harassment of Anita Sarkeesian after she wanted to investigate the depiction of women in video games:

A Californian blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, launched a Kickstarter project to make a web video series about "tropes vs women in videogames". Following on from her similar series on films, it aimed to look at women as background decoration, Damsels in Distress, the Sexy Sidekick and so on. Her pitch is here:

Sarkeesian was after $6,000 to cover the cost of researching the topic, playing all kinds of awful games, and producing the videos. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? Even if you don't like the idea - or don't believe that women are poorly represented in games (in which case, you would be wrong) - then isn't it fine for other people to give money to something they believe in?

Except some kind of Bastard Klaxon went off somewhere in the dank, moist depths of the internet. An angry misogynist Bat Signal, if you will. (It looks like those charming chaps at 4Chan might have had something to do it.)

Lewis then goes on to document some of the harassment, including defacing Lewis' Wikipedia page and abuse comments on her Youtube video.

Will the Internet create the perfect market?

Ross Gittins in Internet commerce will foster price competition looks at how the Internet is making markets behave more like economic theory assumes they do. This should lead to more informed consumers and cheaper prices.

Bernard Keane on the Internet changing media and politics

Bernard Keene, in How the internet messes with the game of media and party politics has written a thought provoking essay on the traditional media, politics and the Internet. Bernard puts forward the proposition that TV leads to isolation whilst the Internet, through avenues such as social media, leads to greater interconnection. He concludes with:

The problem isn’t so much whether the major political parties and the media will work out a response to the challenge of the internet, it’s whether they’ll do so before someone else does. The short history of the internet says they won’t, that they’ll be left behind by smarter, more innovative digital natives who grow organically on the internet, rather than trying to make the internet fit the demands of the analog era or bolt it on to analog models. The politicians and the press probably have more time than other industries to understand their plight and react to it. But society is being rewired once more, and not in a way that benefits them.

I think it's worth a read.