Michael Wheeler

I know this has been written to death about, but surely another opinion won’t hurt. It seems a lot of IT blogs and tossing around false / misleading figures, making it easy to disprove that the filtering technique will slow the internet. Sure, a filter list of 1000 entries won’t be too bad on performance. A setup similar to the UK’s IWF where by there is a suspected IP list, followed by a URL list. This is fine, while I don’t like this setup for privacy and freedom, the method is technically viable (as seen with most UK ISPs). Of course URL checking fails with SSL.

I have two simple reasons why the ISP level filter should be abandoned before being forced upon Australia. My first reason is privacy and freedom. The list will be a secret, and is not published or checked by a third party. How does Australia know it’s not being lied to. I really don’t want something like the Great Firewall of China, where even Chinese citizens know that their Internet is different to ours. Not only the fact that we will have any control over the filter lists, data around Australia will enter several choke points. If these points ever become hacked, your data could be exposed. Passwords, cookies, e-mails, all of it.

Why bother blocking ten thousand RC sites, there is more than ten thousand RC sites on the internet. Not only that the proxy can be bypassed using several ready available proxy services (which are being used at schools around Australia every day). From what I’ve read so far, suggests that there will be no attempt to block anything but RC content, which means that the proxy systems will not be block proxy servers. These tools are well known by students, and people who view/download child porn using HTTP, will quickly learn how to access these tools, making the purpose of the filter useless.

In the end, the proxy will not make children safer at all. So Stephen Conroy, please stop using this as your slogan. I’d be very surprised that any child would actually end up at one of the 10,000 you can block, out of the billions of sites that they visit a day, when they search for My Little Pony and Ben 10. Save your/our money, and stop trying to force a useless filter down our throats, when the money could be better spent on health care, or what not. $100 million can go along towards a new hospital or research. Cut your losses (I won’t comment about the thousands of dollars already spent on this waste of money if you ditch the filter now).

Just my 2 cents for the blog-o-sphere.

Will route packets for food…

Call of Duty 6 : Modern Warfare 2 – TheSkorm

With all the talk about how awesome this game is I thought I would take it for a test drive. Purchased it through steam, and waited for hours while it downloaded the metric fuckton of required files (taking up to 11.1GB on disk after installed). Installing didn’t take too long and the game runs fine on my 4x 3.2GHz/6GB/nVidia 260+ beast.
I was actually a bit surprised with, as the game was reviewed as game that requires 2 super computers to get a decent resolution on max settings (eg Crysis), but my machine handled 1440×900 just fine with everything set to “Extra”. That said, the graphics are amazing/stunning most of the time. Yes, most of the time, not all. Sometimes you’ll come across a low resolution texture, or lighting that just isn’t right, and it really stands out.

The sound and audio aspect of the game is good, although I don’t have anything fancy like 8 speakers, I have just 2 speakers and a little Hi-Fi Stereo System acting as an amp. I didn’t have the volume set to loud, but I’m sure you’d get a realistic experience out of the audio.

Game play wise, the story line was very easy to understand, and this is one of those games where you actually enjoy watching the before hand videos/cinematic. The main story was a tad bit short though, and at some stages, the missions were very bland, although what more can you do in a FPS?

COD6 makes the experience as close to a real fight as possible. The AI doesn’t just run down the middle of a hallway, they have some smarts to them. I was however disappointed at two stages, where you have to chase a guy, at the same time as being shot by 100 or so armed militants, and after failing the mission 20 or so times, finally came close to capturing him, when another team busts out and grabs him before I do. This made me wonder why I was playing the game. A similar scenario happened when I had to make it to an extraction point without being blown up. After 5 goes, I make within 10m I was blown up and rescued by a team mate.

I’m still debating with myself if the Airport scene and the pulling of the knife out of your own chest part was to far, or not. But apart from that the game was quite enjoyable for single player.

Multi-player is great fun, and the system they use for finding games is well needed in my opinion, although it wouldn’t have hurt to have a setup for dedicated servers, just so people can have fun, mod or start clans. Multi-player reminds me much to America’s Army where if you are in anyway spotted, your dead (unless you have a riot shield which is epic fun). I also think it’s a bit to easy to get some of the weapons of mass destruction, and when your first starting out playing, it’s annoying as hell getting hit from the air as well as by other players. Oh and the death physics need to worked on.

All in all 7.2/10