Absolutely. The only way any authority should ever be able to wiretap or get phone / internet records is with a warrant signed by a judge because there is a reasonable suspicion that the individual has committed a crime.
Even then this should only be available for law enforcement, not local fucking councils!
The article is really unclear, but to me it sounds like they were doing reverse phone lookups.
Illegal advertising - get the details of the number on the poster.
Unregistered pets - maybe they have an 'if found please call ...' tag on the pet, but no pet registration.
People dumping stuff illegally - if you were dumping general household/office waste, you'd probably have letters or bills with your address on it already, but I can think of scenarios where they might only have your email address to go on.
The reasons why they're seeking the numbers are law enforcement reasons. Dumping rubbish and having unregistered pets violate by-laws.
Wiretaps (ie: obtaining content) do require a warrant, and in the state of Victoria, where this is, half of all such applications for warrants are rejected by the magistrate. Getting the name and address of the owner of a phone number is a humdrum law enforcement issue, and really councils should have that power. Getting the list of calls made or where emails have been sent is a more serious violation of privacy (instead of "who owns this?" it's "what do they do with it?"), and I imagine that there's simply a legal loophole there.
The article has an amazing lack of detail and follow-through.
Whilst I fully support local councils generally - I've seen how ruinous centralized decision-making can be for small/remote communities - there are indeed far too many local councils which seem overrun either by incompetents who are easily exploited, or worse: petty, corrupt, back-stabbing psychopaths who abuse process against people and small businesses with competing interests.
Even if we pretend for 10ms that surveillance is even remotely justifiable and is the only option to deal with pet ownership and littering (!), I am immediately concerned about what accountability and oversight measures are or aren't in place. Local councils are already notoriously rife with corruption, incompetence and abuse of process - that it's so easy for that sort of culture to breed indicates fundamental problems which desperately need addressing before this kind of power could possibly be entertained for such weak institutions...
My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears out. That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps minimum service level forward by a few years.
There's no doubt that FTTP is the ultimate long term solution. But that doesn't mean it has to happen first.
> My understanding is that copper will be replaced with FTTP when it wears out. That spreads the cost over time while bringing forward the 25Mbps minimum service level forward by a few years.
Much of it is wearing out. Users who already have issues with noise, interference and/or slow speeds on ADSL will be similarly disadvantaged by VDSL under the Coalition's FTTN plan. You also still need to worry about flooded pits, leaking conduit and so on. Having worked at a number of ISPs and watched all the faults roll in after even moderate storms, I know that these are real problems.
Further, how does the Government decide when your copper is "worn out", and what incentive do they have to spend more money (over their original plan) to upgrade you? How many people in your area need to suffer the same problem before they need to both a) completely replace your FTTN VDSL equipment with GPON gear, and b) pull fibre, replace conduit and wire small groups of homes on an ad-hoc basis?
I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My understanding is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced immediately and the rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.
The main difference between the coalition plan and the business-as-usual plan is that old copper will be replaced with fibre, not with new copper. It's easy to forget that waaaay back when, this is what Telstra and the government were negotiating to do anyhow.
In Turnbull's position I wouldn't have promised anything except to review once in government. For one thing, a lot of work will already be contracted and it's not plausible to renege on the contracts. So there'll be an uneven distribution of fibre/copper which will lead to some distortion in the housing market. Not huge, but it'd be nice if it wasn't there.
> I agree, lots of of the existing infrastructure is worn down. My understanding is that Turnbull proposes that some of it will be replaced immediately and the rest would continue to be replaced on a rolling basis.
The problem is that these costs are most certainly not encapsulated in Turnbull's $20B costing.
The problem is that neither the government nor the opposition have ever produced their original costings nor any audit of those costs. In the government's case we're promised that audits were done. But we can't see what was audited and we can't see what the instructions are.
My understanding is that the major cost is to pay people to do the physical work of drilling holes and digging trenches, so the cost of upgrading to FTTH in future (adjusted for inflation) would be about the same as creating a FTTH network now.
Hah, I knew I should've pulled the trigger on buying MonoTouch last week!
Oh well, at least I can do some testing on a real device without buying anything for the moment.
From looking at the comparison chart on https://store.xamarin.com/ , the LLVM optimising compiler only seems to be available for Business or above. What does this mean in practice?
It looks like this issue was caused by Apple mistakenly marking the centre of Local Government Areas as 'cities', in Australia at least. See example at http://imgur.com/qlciM for an example from Perth; Cambridge and Vincent aren't suburbs, and the others are in the wrong spot (Joondalup CBD is on the wrong side of the freeway)
A more glaring issue with Apple's map of Perth to my mind is that Fremantle Harbour has been completely filled in. See the bottom left of this Google map for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/GsmxQ.jpg
From my iiNet DSL2+ connection in Perth, Australia to tokyo1.linode.com, I get 204ms ping and 14 hops, and from a Telstra fibre connection, I get 174ms and 15 hops.
That compares to about 250ms and 12 hops on iiNet, and 210ms and 14 hops on Telstra to fremont1.linode.com.
Yes, it's faster than Fremont. I moved to Dallas a few weeks ago after the third Fremont outage; now I wish I'd known this was coming down the pipeline.
"since Android was built for multitasking, inactive applications remain in a saved state for a particular amount of time." -- uhh, this is exactly how it works on iOS.
"This doesn’t need to be strictly implemented by the developer, it’s a core part of the OS" and "is also means that multitasking will only work for an app if the developer specifically implements it" -- completely wrong. Compile the app with the iOS 4 SDK and you get it all for free. Background services like audio and VoIP require developer work though.
"iOS still missed the mark. On the iPad, the notification bar is super awkward and doesn’t scale well." -- citation needed. I actually prefer the iOS 5 notifications, as when they come in they are more conspicuous than the Android system.
"And the backwards compatible version of iOS4 for iPhone 3G slowed down the phone so much that users wanted to throw their phones out" -- 4.0 was a bit pants, but that was fixed pretty quickly, and worked reasonably well. And at least Apple actually provide updates to their older phones, unlike most Android OEM's.
"Even things like voice-chat were available on Android devices before the iPhone 4 was even announced" -- pretty sure the iPhone 1 could make voice calls.
