PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA: Today Steven Conroy accepted the mounting criticism that his proposed “Great Firewall of China – Down Under” would be inept at achieving it’s stated goal of preventing distribution of refused-classification material due to only filtering web traffic.

Henceforth, he directed the engineering team to add the GOPHER, TELNET and LIBERAL.ORG.AU protocols to the filter.

When asked to quantify just how much porn was shared over GOPHER, he waved his hand and said “I am not the Communications Minister you are looking for” and promptly left the podium to stunned silence.

._.

Gigamom is clueless on the actual problem, confusing cellular and WiFi. The issue isn’t Jobs asking people to turn off their abusive MiFis,or AT&T’s problematic network. It’s that devices like the MiFi are an incredibly stupid replacement for a one-foot USB cable, which is all these audience members were using it for. 802.11 does not support AP densities of more than three per 100′ radius under the best conditions. The WWDC had more like 50 per 100′.

If the clueless MiFiers (and other cellular personal hotspot users) simply USB-tethered their hotspots the problem would have never occurred. It’s scary that so-called “developers” couldn’t predict this problem and sensibly head it off.

“MiFi Jamming” is a usability killer in many Starbucks now, where a dozen or more thoughtless users smear the room with unnecessary interfering 802.11 radiation, jamming access for everyone trying to use Starbucks’ wireless. All for want of a one-foot cable that ships with the cellular modem! Idiots all.

The thing is, the 802.11 standards committee predicted this problem FIVE YEARS ago. MiFi is just the first wave a self-defeating wireless decablers, wielded by clueless users that ignore spectrum realities, potentially destroying WiFi as a useful technology.

Packetguy on http://gigaom.com/2010/06/07/steve-jobs-survives-gizmodo-but-not-mifi/

Using Wifi to network a single device does seem like overkill.

It’s confirmed

My sentiments exactly.  There is no need for an internet filter to slow down the internet and remove our liberties, while not even satisfying the task it was put there for.

So I have an iPhone.  It’s always in my pocket.  It has a 3G connection.

I can share the 3G Connection to a laptop.

So why the hell can’t I share this connection to an iPad? Even a Jobs-derided “Net Book” can use the iPhone’s 3G connection.

What’s worse is that this is not only technically feasible, but it’s been done!  What a slap in the face.

So now we have to buy another data plan? Even if you’re willing to pay it’s not (currently) easy to find Micro-SIM 3G plans in all countries.

Thanks Apple, thanks AT&T :-/

or, the role of social media in today’s internet

Facebook – Useful way to keep in touch with (or keep tabs on) people you can’t really be arsed keeping in touch with (or stalking) for real.

Twitter – fun way to communicate with friends and receive news in a nicely abridged fashion, without all the other cruft.

StatusNet – an open source version of twitter, without all the users (follow them on Twitter)

Buzz – it’s integrated with GMail

LinkedIn – add your boss to your network, and get linked to all his pals, many of who are bosses of their own companies in the same industry – neato!

Email – useful way to keep in touch with Dave

Orkut – it’s kind of like Facebook, except Brazillians use it for hooking up

Microsoft LIVE profile – is to Facebook what Windows 98SE is to OS X Snow Lepoard

LiveJournel – like a private diary, except shared with the world

Flickr – cool photo sharing site with (slightly) less of a focus on pets, and (slightly) more of a focus on photography as an artform.  At least, it is if you want it to be…

World of Warcraft – get a satisfying feeling – one so desperately lacking in the rest of your life – of achieving something

Blogs – useful place for rants, and posting shit you may like to recall

Blogger – as with blogs, but banned in China

craigslist – like the personals section in a newspaper, but without the cryptic acronyms

del.icio.us – Ctrl+D on steroids

MySpace – some website with lots of static background images and underage kids

Wikipedia – you can change George W. Bush’s portrait to that of a monkey

Second Life – provides a valuable virtual space for people to get naked and have sex with strangers, stage protests with flying dildos

YouTube – upload Downfall parodies here, take them down here

I highly recommend checking out the GMail labs features, Settings -> Labs.  Got some useful ones in there.

Default ‘Reply to all’ – changes default reply action to ‘Reply All’

Title Tweaks – re-orders the title

Inserting images – embed images into a post (useful, but a little buggy)

Forgotten Attachment Detector – reminds you to attach files

Wake up Australia.  Internet censorship comparisons between China and Australia are no longer just interesting comparisons. Your communication minister is actually involking China’s policies to help try and get what he wants.

Read this Sydney Morning Herald article.

“Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government.”

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy’s comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not “helpful or relevant”.

Google continues:

“The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy.”

CORE weighs in on the fact that the filter doesn’t actually do what it’s meant to do anyway:

This week the Computer Research and Education Association (CORE) put out a statement on behalf of all Australasian computer science lecturers and professors opposing the government’s internet filtering policy.

They said the filters would only block a fraction of the unwanted material available on the internet, be inapplicable to many of the current methods of online content distribution and create a false sense of security for parents.

CORE said the blacklist could be used by current and future governments to restrict freedom of speech, while those determined to get around the filters and access nasty content could do so with ease.

I just donated some money to GetUp to help spread the word on this issue.  You can too.

So you’re storing user files in your PHP app, but you are worried about security (as you should). Two bad things you might encounter (amongst others): a filename with “../” so as to overwrite arbitrary files on your server, or a filename with .php in it (to run arbitrary code).

I read this idea, but his method didn’t cut it for me.

Here’s a better one:

$str = preg_replace(array('/[^A-Za-z0-9_\-.]/', '/.php/'), '_', $str);


This nukes anything that’s not Alphanumeric or -,.,_. It also nukes any .php sequences.

For this I think a whitelist is better than a blacklist. Should I block anything else out?

Test case:

$str = '../tryToOverWiteMyScriptNow.php';
$str = preg_replace(array('/[^A-Za-z0-9_\-.]/', '/.php/'), '_', $str);
echo $str;


OK so the iPhone doesn’t use your computers internet when connected via USB. Why? I dunno it’s one of the sadly lacking features on an otherwise awesome device.

Sharing the net however via ad-hoc wifi is easy. In System Preferences, go to “Sharing”, select Internet Sharing (don’t tick it yet), tick ‘Airport’ then tick ‘Internet Sharing’.

After you’re done – go into the Network Settings -> AirPort, and create a new network with a password (to stop those leechers). By default it is shared without a password which is dangerous (unless you’re in the desert or something). This new network should have the sharing on it if you did it right – but go back to the sharing tab and double check that it’s still enabled. Then on your iphone connect to your new ad-hoc network and enter the password.

Update: at least in Snow Leopard there is a button on the Internet Sharing settings named “AirPort Options” which allows you to setup the Wifi password in a better (more permanent) way than the one I described.

Update2: I have had some issues with sharing certain networks in Hotels – the iPhone can connect to my computer, but not the internet. One option is to install the proxy server Squid. This isn’t easy, and unless you are a developer with bash experiance I don’t recommend it (if you know what you are doing though it’s easy – just install the unix build tools, download squid, then ./configure, make and run it… default settings are fine – and just set the proxy IP in the iPhone to be that of your computer)

If you have no Wifi card (e.g. on a PC) then bad luck. If you’re on windows I’ll leave it up to you to figure out I’m sure there’s a way :-)