If you actually care about this stuff though, you basically have to vote Greens - they (thanks to Senator Ludlam) have a good track record in fighting this sort of thing. The two main parties have shown not only that they're on board, but there's basically no room for compromise.

I've bought a bunch of books from Baen - Baen are the only place I've found that I can access easily from Australia that simply will just sell me a .epub file that I download and put wherever I want.

I would love to buy more, but they simply don't have the range.

The BBC are reporting that "Bolivia accused France, Italy, Spain and Portugal", and that the French foreign ministry has now issued a statement.

Surely that's what legislation like this provides - a useful indicator that your state is prepared to preserve the status quo to protect businesses at the expense of the citizens, so that ultimately cars will just end up costing more in your state because of the extra layer of overhead?

I'd just fly to another state, buy a car and drive it back home. Well, once they finish rolling out their charger station network, anyway :)

Yep. Let's rein in their stupid actions first - then we can go after their stupid beliefs.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here's some open source alternatives that also offer encryption (YMMV on how robust the encryption is).

- Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) is an audio/video and chat communicator that supports protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber as well as a bunch of other protocols. Set up an XMPP server wherever you want and you're done. (I tried to set up Jabber to use with it on a Linux box on the weekend though and hit a few roadblocks, but more tech savvy people can probably power through them.)

- Mumble - voice communications, intended primarily for gaming but will work with anything. Run your own voice servers and clients connect in, a la TeamSpeak/Ventrilo.

- RetroShare - decentralised p2p file sharing and messaging system.

Fortunately for them (if Canada is anything like Australia and the US), the utter stranglehold control the cable companies seem to have on all the content will ensure that they can continue to peddle their crappy wares and not have to deal with competition.

Our main cable provider here in Australia recently was able to stop iTunes from carrying Season 4 of Game of Thrones. They have some exclusive license to HBO content and are leveraging their weight (I assume by throwing giant bags of money at HBO) to stop anyone getting it unless they sign up for an expensive cable service.

Needless to say, not many people are interested in paying $60-90 a month (the first package I can see with GoT included is $75/mo, but there might be slightly cheaper options) for a bunch of channels that they're not really interested in just to get access to one show. And Australia has the highest rate of GoT piracy in the world.

The difference though (at least from my point of view) is that the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy brigade never had any actual real evidence to justify their complaints that the government was listening in on everything.

Snowden has flipped that around. It's no longer a suspected conspiracy theory, because it has been proven to exist (... assuming his evidence pans out to be real, which I have no reason to doubt at the moment).

You can do the exact same thing in Gmail (select email, More, "Filter messages like these). The label thing is sort of annoying, but I mentally have mapped them to 'folders' and it doesn't bug me any more (at least 50% of my Gmail interaction is via IMAP with Thunderbird so I only see folders there anyway).

On rare occasions the labeling has even been useful - you can have an email labeled with multiple labels, allowing more complex filtering. (I assume they end up copied between folders, but I've never actually checked.)

Making new products and trying new things is the only way you can find out if they're going to succeed or fail though.

To me this whole campaign doesn't seem like a flailing around, clutching at straws affair (...like almost everything Blackberry does). I can't imagine HTC or Facebook are in that much strife - it looks more like a toe in the water to gauge reaction. So far from what (little) I've seen reaction hasn't been great, so winding it back gracefully and trying something else is probably their next step.

I like seeing companies try new things, even when they fail or go nowhere. That is innovation. Some of the ideas will be terrible, some merely bad - learning from those and shaping products lines will help them develop something good.

I was intrigued by this because every time I've looked at the Kobo store it just says " Download options: Adobe DRM EPUB ".

The Harry Potter books don't have that at all - it looks like I have to go off-site (i.e., away from the actual Kobo store) to Pottermore to buy them?

I've sent a couple of inquiries to the Kobo store about when they're going to have DRM free epub options directly but no response.

At the moment I seem to only be able to buy epubs from places like Baen - but happily able to put them on my Kobo and read them. Would love there to be a proper division between DRM-free epubs in the Kobo store - until then I won't be spending any money in there.

That is what I do with my Kobo Touch. I mostly use Calibre to manage it but have also copied epubs over with no problems. What device do you have?

I ended up making some tiny changes to my WP install that basically causes requests to /wp-admin to die immediately, unless you're accessing it via a specific HTTP port that I've opened in Apache specifically for this purpose.

I've got disk permissions set up so that the regular Apache user cannot write at all to the disk - a common source of WP problems seems to be exploits writing new files to disk, so stopping that seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately it also bones a lot of WP functionality like being able to automatically install skins/plugins.

Using some Apache module (can't remember which one) I've set it up so that requests made to /wp-admin under the correct Apache port operate under a different user - one that /does/ have write access to the disk. So it means I can do any administrative stuff and take advantage of the full WP functionality without having to leave write access in there for normal use.

Conceptually this seems like a much more default setup for WP - certainly I haven't had any security problems. As a side benefit it means I don't need to worry about random attacks like this.

There's a few minor problems I haven't resolved (most notably when adding new posts, the URL it stores for them includes the administrative port in them and publicly displays them in things like the RSS feed :) but I'm hoping to find time one day to resolve those.

...if your email is not in at least two physically separate places, you are at risk of losing all of it, forever.

It's weird Shaw can't restore from a backup - the article is a bit weird on the exact details about what happened and just ends with "the emails were not backed up".

If your online mail provider does not allow you to access or export your data to your own PC (via IMAP, POP, or whatever) then you should switch to one that does - and start backing up your own email if you want to be more confident that it's going to survive catastrophes.