Correction. After reading the presentation, it's clear that this is not a smartcard system, it's a magentic strip system. That means it isn't Western Australia's SmartRider, and WA's old MultiRider magnetic strip system has been retired for 5 years so it's not going to be MultiRider.

The transit system in question is 5-7 years old - or less depending on which one they refer to. The crypto is old, but the smartcard transit system isn't. Fail. How do I know? Because there are no older transit tag systems in Australia.

Sadly, much of the problem is the plastic granules, powder and fragments that UV-degraded plastics (like those lawn chairs) break down into.

Big chunks are a problem, but a huge part of the issue in the great pacific midden is tiny particles and fragments that've been eroded by agitation and broken down by UV until - for many animals - they're indistinguishable from food. They get into little filter feeding critters, they collect in the guts of larger creatures, and they just don't go away.

Becoming too small for us to see and deal with doesn't make that waste go away, it just makes it even harder to deal with.

In 20 years, we'll be looking for dolphin-safe plastic items, and lamenting the number of seabirds that're killed as by-catch from the oceanic plastics harvesting industry. Concern will be raised about the waste disposal practices of on-board plastics recycling, but nobody will do anything about it because it happens in international waters.

Sometimes you just can't win.

I'm starting to want to do this at work, and need to look into whether I can do it with Squid.

Why? Drive-by downloads, fake antivirus scams, and other malware delivered via the web. I already transparently proxy HTTP, blocking all executable downloads. I suspect it makes a big difference. If nothing else, the proxy was down for a week at one point and *two* machines got infected by malware during that week. Co-incidence? Possibly, but I'm not betting on it, especially since examination showed that both were drive-by attacks the proxy would've prevented.

The user base is pretty computer illiterate ("why yes, please do clean that nasty virus off my system. You need admin rights to do so? Of course, no problem.") and somewhat resistant to education/training, so technical protection measures are needed.

I'm concerned that that drive-by attacks, fake antivirus scams, etc will soon use HTTPs in an attempt to bypass filtering proxies and transparent proxying - if they don't already. I can knock these out fairly effectively if I can examine data being downloaded for things like PE headers, but I can't do that with HTTPs. I can still do URL-based filtering for "file extensions", which works surprisingly well and only requires the very occasional site to be whitelisted for using "blah.dll?query-string" or "myapp.exe?dosomething" URLs. Nothing forces the attacker to put a Windows file extension in the URL, though, and I can't discover the MIME type or the type of data being downloaded without inspecting the stream.

The challenge is to do this without any risk of compromising netbanking data, etc. If our proxy gets cracked... ow.

First, sandpaper: ogodogodogod. What a way to make your point.

Good luck. I'm quite happy with the healthcare over the bandwidth myself, for what it's worth. Australia is working hard to destroy our social health care at the moment, though :-(

USians who whine about this appear to be heavy users of HD video streaming (!!) via Netflix and other mostly USA-only services. The US just has a whole bunch of bandwidth hungry services the rest of us poor peons aren't allowed to use.

That was commonplace in Australia for some time, and worked really well.

WAIXMule was a modified eMule client that only used peers reachable via the Western Australian Internet Exchange (WAIX), which most WA ISPs didn't meter.

It worked too well; the ISPs started limiting traffic through peering points because of the congestion. Honestly, they weren't actually just whining, they had major trunk links being saturated. Upgrades would've been immensely more expensive because they were already the fastest economical links available, and had no benefit whatsoever for most users, so they started limiting peering point traffic. Fair enough, honestly.

While this is currently true, in Australia we had both data caps and speed caps for a LONG time. It's only once Telstra's monopoly was broken by the advent of 3rd party DSLAMs in exchanges that this changed.

We're likely to see charges for both speed and data return with the NBN, at least according to the current pricing plans.

I thought you were serious until the third and final sentence. Heh. A carrier thinking about long term network investment. Right. (OK, so the US has seen some of that actually happening, what with the Verizon fibre stuff, but it's pretty unusual).

For what it's worth, here in Australia a 100GB cap was considered very big until a year or so ago. Most people never knew or cared. Most plans were capped at 20GB or so, and people didn't know or care about that either. Of course, Australia doesn't have any useful streaming services; the existing ones are all geo-locked and nobody here seems to have the power to break through all the stupid media licensing to set up a local one. Unless you're a mad torrent freak, heavy gamer, or use a VPN to work heavily, even 20GB is usually overkill.

I want to laugh at people complaining about their constricting and horrible 300GB caps, but I'm aware the US market has tons of bandwidth-hungry services available that we just don't have equivalents of in AU, so it's not that comparable. Alas.

Do Lenovo still follow IBM's tradition of having the BIOS check for unauthorized 3G and WiFi cards and refusing to boot? I'm seeing mixed reports and Lenovo themselves don't seem to have a clue.

While I'm a huge fan of portrait work and use a 1200x1920 portrait 24" display at home, I'll still take 1920x1200 over 1366x768 any day, and that's the choice I currently have.

Alas, Dell's Latitude models are one of the few laptops that have non-crap resolutions and decent touchpads instead of that horrible Alps crap everyone's using now. Pity Dell are marginally more evil than the other vendors at the moment (see, eg, the Optiplex affair).

Plane crash tests - in so far as they are done - are thus more about making borderline situations more survivable. Not flying a perfectly good Airbus into the water at speed in a sustained stall, but ditching an airliner in the Hudson after ingesting geese and losing all power. Bringing one down on an abandoned runway turned speedway in a successful unpowered glide. Crash landing without main and/or nose gear without the aircraft breaking up or tumbling. Getting passengers off alive and quickly when an aircraft catches fire on the ground. Those sorts of situations DO matter; surviving a mid-air collision, break-up or controlled flight into terrain not so much.

Unfortunately they're so expensive to do that we tend to rely on investigation reports from the real thing to inform future design choices and suggest revisions. Important and great, but a lot could be learned especially about making aircraft water-ditchable and field-crash-landable by doing remote control crash tests. I suspect it isn't considered worth the cost.

Crashes give you one important thing - things you never thought to test. This is true of both staged and real crashes. Controlled tests find out how much a plane can take; crashes help you find things to check for in controlled tests and new things to add to design guidelines.

Pity it is so expensive to crash airliners for testing.