Stephen Gentle

I’ve seen some renewed interest in the Australian Government’s terrible idea to try and filter the internet, and there’s even a protest planned for people to black out their websites and profile images soon like what was done in New Zealand to protest against the ‘guilt upon accusation’ plan to block people’s internet if somebody just accused them of copyright infringement three times. The No Clean Feed group have some pretty good reasons as to why an attempt to filter the internet would have absolutely no beneficial effects and be a general disaster. Here’s my take:

There are too many protocols which can’t be filtered

The government plans to filter exactly one (1) protocol on the internet, which is HTTP. Think about that for a second – it’s essentially like banning particular subjects from bookstores, and expecting that now the public can’t access them, which is utter rubbish. In this situation, people could still mail the information to each other. They could share the books around. They could put the information up on noticeboards and other public places. The internet is exactly the same. The vast majority of the content that the program aims to filter out is not using the protocol they are going to filter. There’s FTP, bittorrent, email services, and many other peer to peer protocols that not only won’t be filtered, but really can’t. This first point essentially renders the whole scheme useless, but wait, there’s more!

There’s too much content to filter

Just on the HTTP protocol, which the government is going to attempt to filter, there are literally billions of pages of information. How can anybody really expect that they could even attempt to find all the illegal or adult content on it? There is just too much information to filter, and even if it was possible to find every illegal site on it, hundreds of new sites will inevitably pop up within weeks to replace those blocked ones. This is just the way the internet is – it’s not provided from just a few sources like most other forms of media. Anyone can create content on it, good or bad, and new content appears so quickly that any effort to filter it is quickly rendered futile. It’s not like trying to find a needle in a haystack – it’s like trying to find one in a field of millions of haystacks that’s rapidly expanding!

It’s too easy to bypass

There’s one other massive problem that renders the internet filtering plan completely ineffective, and that is encryption. It’s fairly simple to open up an encrypted connection to a network in another country, which gives anybody the ability to completely bypass the whole filtering system – because they can’t see the information that is passing through it. Now, in an environment like a school, the ports that are required to do this can be simply blocked, but in the real world any action like that would cripple many Australian businesses by removing the channels they use to do business with other countries, and cost billions to the economy.

But at least these virtual private networks are too complex for a child to set up, right? Surely we are still protecting them with the scheme? Turns out that the answer is a resounding no, given that there are thousands of (completely legal) websites that make bypassing the filtering even easier. They use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption, which is used to secure bank websites and credit card payments, to anonymously and securely view websites without having them filtered at all. It’s as simple as going to a website and typing a web address in the box. Seriously, this is like locking the front door but leaving all the windows open – there’s simply no way the internet filtering can be effective. Again, they could try to block these sites, but given that they’re legal and have a vast range of legitimate uses, this wouldn’t be possible at all.

There will be many sites incorrectly blocked

A report summing up the results of a trial undertaken by some ISPs showed that the internet filtering technology would incorrectly block 10,000 completely legal web sites out of every million sites blocked. Really, that error rate is unacceptable. Many of these incorrectly blocked sites may be reputable companies, for whom the internet is their only point of business. Is it fair that we eliminate all their Australian customers in the sake of a filtering scheme that is ineffective? And how will these people apply to get their sites unblocked? Given that the people creating the blocklist are going to be trying to search through billions of sites

It will slow down the internet

Let’s face it – here in Australia, our internet is already slow enough. Given that all the internet companies in the country have to use a telecommunications network (mis)managed by a single monopoly, we don’t have the luxury of fast, cheap internet that many other countries like Japan, Sweden and even South Korea have. So why is the government not only chasing after a plan that can’t possibly work, but one that also reduces the speed of our internet by up to 80 percent? This is exactly the kind of speed reduction that the report linked in the above predicts this filtering will cause.

Where’s the accountability?

Having a small, government controlled group deciding what information people should and shouldn’t be able to see is worrying, to say the least. Sure, the line right now is that they’re only going to block illegal material, but how can we know this is the case as time goes on? Perhaps now this is all about “protecting children and families”, but how do we know if eventually they start to increase the range of subjects being blocked? The “Great Firewall of China” has been widely criticised for essentially removing free speech on the internet by blocking thing like Google searches for ‘freedom’, information about subjects such as capitalism and blogs and websites that criticise their government. Given that our government refuses to release the blocklist proposed for this new filter in Australia, how can we be sure that they aren’t going to start doing the same thing and just pull the plug on websites they don’t agree with for us? At least with the review board that classifies films and so on, we know when something’s banned. With the new Internet filtering, the government can restrict access to any site they want, without the public having a clue. I’m sure that they’ll insist that it’s all in our best interest, and ask us to trust them, but with absolutely no accountability, I know I don’t.

It’s a waste of money

So the government wants to bring in a scheme that can’t possibly work. How much is this debacle going to cost? Turns out that they’ve budgeted more than $44 million dollars to this scheme. That kind of money could easily have gone into our hospital system, or creating jobs, or any other number of worthy causes. But instead they choose to burn it in this useless mess.

The only people who support it have no idea about the how the internet works

I think these points are pretty compelling as to why it’s a stupid idea to attempt the impossible task of filtering the internet. Really, the only people who want this filtering installed are the ones who have no idea how the internet works. Unfortunately it seems that these are exactly the same people who are making the legislation that we have to adhere to – which is about as effective as having somebody who’s never held a scalpel try to perform open heart surgery on you. It’s very important that everyone who understands the futility of the internet filtering plan to take action. The No Clean Feed group have some petitions you can sign and other suggestions for ways to speak out against this terrible plan.

In the end…

The government says that the scheme is all about protecting children from inappropriate content on the internet, but it is so horribly broken that it will be completely and utterly ineffective. All it really does is bring Australia down to China’s level (who censor search terms like ‘freedom’) in the eyes of the rest of the world. It won’t make a difference at all to internet safety, except perhaps by slowing the internet down so much that nobody can stand to use it.

I’m sure everyone has noticed that ‘the Cloud’ has suddenly become the flavour of the month, just like ‘Web 2.0’ did last year. But just like Web 2.0, the Cloud is a stupid, redundant buzzword that really means nothing. I mean, let’s just take a look at what Wikipedia says about Cloud computing –

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet

What’s that? You mean that ‘cloud storage’ is really just internet storage? Yes it is – it’s exactly the same as what I’ve been doing for several year with some web-space and an FTP client. The Cloud is the kind of buzzword that marketing departments come up with to make things that we’ve had for years sound new and interesting again, and it really annoys me that it has crept into the vernacular of many computer users as well. I’m all for having backups on the internet, and using web applications (of course, most of the applications I use won’t be able to be run over the internet for a very long time, but that’s a different story). But calling these ‘cloud services’ or ‘cloud computing’ is just stupid.

An interesting change in Mac OS X 10.6 is that Apple switched the representation of file and hard drive sizes to base-10 SI units instead of using binary prefixes. This means that a 60 GB hard drive which usually shows up as 55.8 GB will now appear within a few megabytes to the advertised 60 GB. I wasn’t really that happy with the idea at first, but when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Bits and bytes
Now, it seems logical that since a computer works in binary, file sizes need to be represented with binary prefixes too. But in reality, the number of bytes in a kilobyte is completely arbitrary – since the operating system and the applications that run on it only represent file sizes in bytes. We could decide that there were 2504.25 bytes in a kilobyte and the computer wouldn’t care at all. If we’re just shortening the sizes for our convenience, why make it so hard for ourselves? Doesn’t it make more sense that a 1500KB file is 1.5MB, and not 1.464MB?

But what about file transfers?
I’ve heard people say that changing file sizes to SI units will make working file transfer speeds confusing, but the opposite is actually true – bitrates are actually already represented in SI units, so changing how files are represented on disk would make it easier to work out how long files would take to transfer.

Ram and SSDs
Now, since hard drives are designed around SI units, it makes sense to use SI units to represent its capacity and file size in SI units. But what about solid state drives and RAM? Well, RAM should stay as binary sizing, but as for solid state drives, it doesn’t really matter. The only difference is that a SSD sold as 256 GB (which is actually 256 GiB using the correct prefix) would show up as being 274.9 GB instead. Does this really matter? We’ve put up with our hard drives showing up as being smaller for so many years (a 1TB drive appears to be 92.677GB smaller), so I don’t think it’d be too bad.

Really, all we need is standardisation. A good first step to this would be to show RAM, solid state drives and hard drive sizes using the correct prefixes (GB and MB for SI units and GiB and MiB for binary). Unfortunately ‘mebibyte’ and ‘gibbibyte’ sound pretty stupid compared to megabyte and gigabyte though… But that’s all the more reason to switch to SI units.

I came across an FAQ that outlines some of the features coming in the new C++ standard, C++0x, which should be finalised sometime this or next year. It really has some awesome features that, in my opinion, brings some of my favourite features of managed languages like C# to the much faster and more efficient C++. I’m already using some of the features in my applications, as a few are available as part of the Technical Report 1, in the std::tr1 namespace. A lot of the best features (like the concurrency features) are still to come in most compilers though.

Here are some of the new features that stand out to me:

Smart Pointers

One of the biggest complaints about C and C++ is that you have to manage your own memory, which means that allocating memory and then forgetting to free it can cause problems like memory leaks. The current version of C++ does have a smart pointer, called std::auto_ptr, that can help with this, but it’s not really very good, because you can only have one reference to the pointer it manages. C++0x now features the std::shared_ptr, which is far better.

Concurrency

C++ by itself has been a completely single threaded language in the past, but in C++0x, we will be able to use threading, locks, and other concurrency features without having to rely on third party libraries, which are usually quite platform specific.

Hash tables

C++ already has the std::map, which can map an object to a key, such as a string, but this has a log(n) lookup time – that is, retrieving a result will get slower as you put more items in it. C++0x now features the std::unordered_map, and three other hash tables which have a faster, constant lookup time. The tradeoff is that adding items to a hash table can be slower, because it has to dynamically resize the table.

The unordered_map should really be called something like hash_map, but there are some compilers and third party libraries that already use that name.

Range For

This is one of those things that is going to be a big timesaver in writing C++ code – whereas previously for iterating through a container like a map, you’d have to do something like this:
for(std::tr1::unordered_map::iterator it = m_Elements.begin();
it != m_Elements.end(); ++it)
{
// Draw the widget
it->second->Draw();
}

now you can use the range for statement, which lets you do this:
for(Element::Ptr x : m_Elements)
{
x->Draw();
}

This is a lot like the foreach statement in C#, which is really nice.

Tuples

Tuples are like arrays that can hold different types, and they are really handy if you want to return more than one value from a function. Instead of constructing a class or struct to hold the data, which would take a lot of extra code, you can just construct a tuple for it. Tuples are extensively used in Python, and are extremely handy.

There are a lot of other great changes coming to the language, and the FAQ has a lot of good examples. The only problem now is waiting for the compilers to support the new standard…

I just thought that I’d add to my last post on HDMI cables with an analogy I thought of. To put it simply, the notion that there will be any difference in picture quality between a $5 HDMI cable and a $400 Monster cable is exactly the same as saying that putting your videos on a more expensive USB drive will make them look and sound better, or that a more expensive memory card in your digital camera would make you photos higher resolution – that is, completely ridiculous, and completely wrong, for obvious reasons.

Simply put, all of these mediums are just moving a bunch of ones and zeros. Given that describing a one or a zero from a wave is far less prone to error than an analog signal (I’ll put up a diagram of this soon), you can be pretty much assured that your cable, USB drive or memory card will transfer the data exactly as transmitted.

So to sum up, Monster Cables are a downright scam, (as are any other company that sells pointlessly expensive digital cables to consumers), and essentially all the claims that they make on their packaging (like better quality picture, richer sound) are all false. Of course, if you ask the salesperson at the local department store, they’ll try to flog the most expensive cable to you, and make up implausible (and wrong) reasons about why you should buy the more expensive one. But remember that they are just out to get the commission, and most of them will tell lies to sell it to you – unless they are genuinely taken in by the scam.

I was quite appalled to go into Harvey Norman yesterday and to see that they are selling HDMI cables at anything from one hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars! The cables aren’t even that long – they had four metre ones for about $400, with a 10 metre one for a shocking $599. They are covered with the normal marketing stuff – how it guarantees a ‘better home theatre experience’ and general junk like that. The worst offender for outrageously (and needlessly) expensive HDMI cables is a brand called ‘Monster Cables’, but there are others like ‘Gecko’ and ‘PureAV’. Some of these companies even sell expensive optical cables with gold plated connectors! But why are these cables such a rip off? First, there’s the fundamental fact that they are digital cables.

An analogue signal, which is used to carry video and audio in the older Composite, S-Video and Component video standards, can be degraded with a low quality cable, long cable lengths, and possibly interference from other cables (like power cables). It is worth spending a little more on these cables, like the $60 component cable we bought with our DVD player. A digital signal that these HDMI cables carry, on the other hand, is not affected by cable quality. Generally, unless the cable is broken, it will deliver a perfect signal, which means a perfect picture. Basically, a $12 dollar cable from Monoprice, or even the $3 cable that came with my monitor will always give just as good a picture as the $500 Monster cable. Furthermore, all cables that carry the HDMI logo must be certified to deliver an essentially perfect picture (HDMI certification requires less than one in every million pixels be lost, or something like that. A human would have trouble picking up one in five hundred.).

Clearly these Monster Cables are very high quality – but the only thing that means is that they won’t break as easily. And it’s not even like HDMI cables are often in a position where damage would ever be a problem, and even if a cheap cable did break, you could still buy twenty or thirty new ones for the price of getting a single Monster cable!

Monster cables do not ever give you a better picture, sound quality, or any other benefits than the cheapest $5 bargain bin HDMI cables. If you don’t get a perfect picture with an HDMI cable, then it is broken – nothing to do with the quality of the cable. I would advise everyone to never buy Monster brand cables, or any HDMI cable over $100 – unless it’s 30 or 40 metres long or something.