No naked for you

Australia is such a backwards country technologically. If this chart is to be believed; in terms of Internet speed Australia is fifth from the right. Sooooooo slow.

As well as the lack of infrastructure, the current federal government is planning to introduce a National Broadband Network that is going to get shot in the thigh, or, some other major organ by the proposed mandatory filter that our nanny state wants to put over us. What the frell is the point of giving us 100Mbit/sec speeds if the filter becomes the bottleneck. Despite the rhetoric my local MP mailed me back when I wrote to him condemning this atrocity; all the experts I've read and spoke to seem to agree that it's going to be a gigantic farce and waste of tax payers money.

I don't want to reiterate all the objections to the idea, but technically speaking I use a combination of VPNs and SSH tunnels at work. If I know how to do this in a legal capacity for my job, what's to stop me doing it illegally. As I pointed out to a friend (who's an arts student) if you have SSL to protect online financial transactions (for example), what's to stop me using that technology and using it to encrypt and exchange material of an illegal or questionable nature. I'm ALL for stopping child porn, but this isn't going to work Mr Conroy.

And to top it all off - my primary rant for this article is that by moving house 20 kms I have to dumb down my Internet connection. I currently live in Fairfield, and am moving to Mitcham. At my current residence I use what's termed as Naked ASDL2. The best bit of being naked as it were is no line rental fee. I pay an extra $20 to my ISP (which also gains me an extra 15GB of quota) and save between $30 - $50 by not renting my line from Telstra. I love it. I don't call people much anyway these days. Even my mum's on MSN and Facebook. I don't need the phone.

But alas because we're such a backward country over here, 20 kms means dumbing down to ADSL, and a phone connection. I might dig out my old modem in case dial up is required. If you look at the linked map, I'm not exactly moving to the middle of nowhere. Melbourne is so behind the times in every aspect of it's infrastructure (don't get me started on public transport).

I hear New Zealand's nice this time of year.