The Lost Realm

Sometimes I find things on the web that are best left without comment. I'll let you explore this on on your own and come to your own conclusions.

Although most of the world understands what a weblog is, many people don't. It's not a word that you'll find in your dictionary, and you'll probably get a different response from every person that you ask. That said, I quite like The Brunching Shuttlecocks' description of a weblog.

Yes, I do know what they mean about those Spiderman photos; no, I don't want to post a link to them. Spiderman is extremely cool, Naked Spiderman Guy is most certainly not… *shudder*

Unless something is done to stop the new “anti-terrorism” bill here in Australia, we'll all be saying goodbye to our privacy. This bill would change the existing laws to allow any government agency to access any stored communications. Due to their implimentation, this would include email, voice-messages and SMS messages.

Currently, these communications can only be intercepted with an interception warrant, which is available only to criminal enforcement agencies and ASIO. Under the proposed changes, only a search warrant would be required; something easily accessible to any government agency. Some interpretations of the changes would allow communication interception without even a search warrant, although the goverment is denying this.

Why do we need these changes? That's right, “terrorists”. However, it's quite obvious that this new bill isn't going to make the world any safer; telephone and fax communication would still remain as they are now, leaving “terrorists” able to communicate as long as they're not leaving messages for each other. The purpose of terrorism is to make the victim change their behaviour, and here we are, happily complying. It would appear that the “terrorists” are doing a fine job.

Although so far, it would appear that the only “terrorists” here in Australia are the politicians.

There comes a time in every newspaper's life when it discovers that it really should check out stories before just ripping them from somewhere on the web. Unfortunately for The Beijing Evening News, that time came when they ripped off a story from The Onion. That's right, they ripped off a story from the Interwebnet's most popular satire site.

I wonder how many Chinese people now think that US Congress is really going to add a retractable dome to the Capitol building.

For those that haven't heard, the first “officially stable” version of Mozilla (1.0.0) was released yesterday. I've been using the prerelease versions for some time now, and I'm still mighty impressed. It's fast, it's standards compliant and it doesn't fall over every five minutes.

Go on, download Mozilla; do it for the children.

If you've ever wanted to know what you might look like in the world of South Park, now's your chance to find out.

For those who might be interested in what I look like, now you know:

Somehow I don't think I'll be joining the regular cast any time soon.