Skip to main content

Stephen Conroy is not Satan

That statement is probably getting two types of reactions.

a) Who is Stephen Conroy? Well if you live in Australia then all your internets belong to him. But otherwise you may as well stop reading.

b) He is too! Okay you're the ones I want to talk to. You're wrong and you're wasting your time getting upset about Internet censorship.

Let me lay out the facts as I see them (read: opinion and opinion cannot be wrong no matter how much you disagree).

He's not evil he's just stupid
There's nothing really wrong with that. Lots of politicians are stupid. Some of the best have been morons! I'm very fond of the saying "Never assume malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" so I'm applying it here. He thinks he's doing a great service to Australia. Finally we'll be protected from all that nasty stuff that we were not supposed to be seeing anyway. Finally the internet has reached maturity where such things are possible. Or at least that's his thinking. But there's no point making personal attacks while the other side are no better.

The plan is doomed anyway
So you may as well let it play out. If it gets implemented several things will happen:
  1. Telstra will increase charges by $2 a month
  2. Important people will find their favourite porn site blocked
  3. Some insignificant but controversial (euthanasia? people smuggling?) site will be blocked and cause an uproar in the papers
  4. Polling will show great disapproval with the plan (now that the public knows what it really means to them)
All this may happen within days of the filter being put in place. And like other things the government of the day will pull out the system before the opposition can make it a policy and win some votes.

So don't worry about it. It'll all fall apart like every other attempt to "control" the internet. Australian governments don't have the conviction of China or Iran.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up Fitnesse on Ubuntu in 7 steps

Some pretty basic steps but just to make sure it's here for everyone to see. Setting up fitnesse and running the jar is easy enough. Just go to http://fitnesse.org/ and get started and do it on your desktop just to see it in action. But for me that wasn't good enough I wanted it to run as service on ubuntu. I stole a few tricks from how ubuntu runs jenkins and setup fitnesse a similar way. 1. Create a user and group for fitnesse (optional) I didn't do this because I wanted tomcat, jenkins and fitnesse all running as the same user. Call it laziness to avoid any permissions classing but it doesn't change the process that you need to create or choose what user you're going to make it run as. Don't make it run as your user or root! 2. Download the jar file and place it in /usr/share/fitnesse Make the folder too of course. It can belong to root as long as the fitnesse user has read access 3. Create the folder to run in at /var/lib/fitnesse Fitnesse user needs...

RestFixture

So most of the tests I'm writing now in Fitnesse are using RestFixture . Being able to do all this black box style testing has helped me get a lot of tests up and running without having to change the existing code base. Now I've taken a step future with my own little fork  so I can use scenarios and build nice BDD style scripts. But first I want to give me own quick guide to using RestFixture Step 1: Installing You can dive straight in by grabbing the latest jar files for RestFixture here  https://github.com/smartrics/RestFixture/downloads If you know what you're doing can get the nodep version to work nicely along side other libraries you may be including in Fitnesse. But I grabbed the 'full' version and unzipped it into a RestFixture folder alongside my FitNesseRoot folder. Step 2: Write your first test I took advantage of the built in Fitnesse api as a basic test and wrote a page called RestFixture with the following contents !define TEST_SYSTEM {slim} !...

Are mocks/fakes reusuable?

Programming 101 states: Don't copy and paste code. If you find yourself doing something repetitive then do it right so you can reuse the same code. Functions, classes and even separate files all serve this end. Now that I'm writing tests all the time I often find myself creating Mocks. Mocks are where you tell code to use a pretend version of some functionality instead of the real one. It could be because the real one does something you don't want in your tests (writes files, reads a database) or it could be that you've got some messy legacy code you can't to pull into your tests (yet). There's other reasons too but you get the idea. So if I make a Mock version of a class it makes sense to try and share that with everyone else that might be trying to test with that same class. Or does it? That assumption has some serious flaws that I'm only now starting to understand. And here's a few: Behaviour you need to test may be completely different to the next gu...