Technology

Just so that it is blindingly obvious how easy it will be to work around Australia's impending ISP-level internet filter (which, I might add, is expanding its blacklist ever further), I thought I would sum it up in three simple steps. It's not the cheapest way to bypass a filter - and the information below isn't going to be new to my blog's regular readers - but from where I stand (as someone who has access to an offshore Linux server), it certainly beats messing with Tor.

1. Obtain an account on a Linux or similar Unix-like system in a country outside Australia, preferably one without reactionary politicians who are trying to curry favour with a conservative religious party that shares the balance of power in parliament. If you can't get access to a server for free, then there are plenty of low-cost virtualized hosting sites such as Mythic Beasts (User Mode Linux) in the UK and Linode (Xen) in the US.



2. Use ssh's application-level port forwarding and log in to your new remote system. ssh will act as a SOCKS server on your local machine:
   
   

   ssh -N -D 1080 your.remote.host.co.uk

   
   
   Under Windows, you can do this with the ssh client provided in Cygwin. I would imagine that Putty provides a similar feature.



3. Configure your web-browser to talk to the ssh socks proxy on your local machine. For Firefox users, this would mean going to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings, choosing "Manual Proxy Configuration" and putting localhost and 1080 in the SOCKS fields, and then selecting SOCKS version 5. You can now browse as you would normally, and all HTTP requests will be sent from the remote host, and all Australia's internet filters will see is a stream of encrypted ssh traffic.

Of course, I am assuming that the Australian government doesn't plan to block ssh connections out of the country. It would be almost amusing to see the smouldering ruins of Australia's IT industry if they tried.

One of the few good acts of the previous government was the legislation and subsequent funding of the Do Not Call register, allowing those people who do not want to talk to telemarketers to opt out completely. I registered for it as soon as it went live, and I definitely noticed a reduction in the number of unsolicited calls that I received.

Unfortunately, the legislation simply did not go far enough; political organisations, polling companies and especially charities are exempt from the DNC register. The number of charities calling lately has risen considerably, and it's starting to drive me insane.

I have a rule: I will not give any money to a charity that asks me for it. That includes phone calls, doorknockers (the Consumer Action Law Centre has a good sticker that deals with them) and that incredibly annoying import from the UK - twenty-somethings with clipboards on city streets.

At this point, I will make a brief aside: if there's anyone from Amnesty International reading this, could you please screen your clipboarders better? I really don't appreciate your blow-ins asking me ridiculous questions, such as, "how long do you plan to live here?" as I exit the gates at a city railway station, and then abusing me when I tell them I don't have time to talk, because I'm rushing off to recover a server that's crashed in a large telco.

Back to the phone calls, however. Asterisk has a nice little command that will deal with telemarketers with autodialers - Zapateller. When invoked, it will play three tones that cause the telemarketer's autodialer to think that the number is not valid, and then hang up.

I put the Zapateller command into my dial plan yesterday, and today I've received three phone calls, all of which had disconnected by the time I answered them.

  ; Ring both phones
  exten => 2100,1,Answer()
  exten => 2100,n,Zapateller()
  exten => 2100,n,Dial(SIP/snom&SIP/sipura,20)
  exten => 2100,n,Voicemail(u2000)

I will eventually put a couple of seconds delay between the Zapateller command and the line that dials my two telephones, so that I don't hear any ringing at all.

Obviously, there's no way I can be sure the callers today were telemarketers, especially since I'm not paying for caller-ID, but given that I haven't received any personal calls on this line in weeks, I can be fairly confident that my phone system has only been playing tones to an autodialer...

For any Asterisk users out there using sipme as their Voice-over-IP provider who, like me, have been banging their heads against walls trying to figure out why it isn't working, it turns out that sometime in early February, they made a change to their SIP proxy setup and elected not to mention it on their website.

Their new equipment apparently doesn't like talking to Asterisk, so to make it work, it's necessary to mask the user agent string by putting the following in the [general] section of your sip.conf file:

useragent=portasipfriendly

...which I found out only after considerably websearching let me stumble upon this thread in Whirlpool.

Evidentally, I haven't made any non-Melbourne phone calls for almost two months, or I'd have discovered this earlier.

I often wonder who it was that thought it would be a good idea to embed streaming media players into web browser windows. I can't imagine that the public beat on the doors of software designers and told them, "You know, we like this internet radio thing, but hey - put it in a web browser!"

Back in the days when streaming audio on the internet was just starting to become a commercial proposition (and don't we all remember Xing), radio stations would put a link on their webpages, which, when clicked, would spawn a separate application to play it (based on the link's mime-type).

Somewhere, along the way, this changed. Stations started embedding their players into web pages - hiding the url, in most cases. These days, I'd estimate that probably 70% of online radio stations make their listeners use embedded media players, and those who want to listen to the station with a dedicated application have to go hunting through the javascript source code for a link.

Here's why I dislike them so much:

1. It's annoying for the user. Who wants a hulking great web-browser window on their screen, just to play music? The audio should be going on in the background, not sitting prominently on their screen, forcing the user to iconify it. Just let them run a separate application in the background, minimised.


2. Most web browsers are unstable. Browsers are big, complex applications. They tend to crash, or hang, a lot. When this happens, embedded media players - which are generally just a bunch of shared libraries, dynamically linked at runtime, will die in sympathy. There's nothing quite like having the White Stripes halt mid-chorus just as you accidentally click on some tweenie's all-singing, all-blinking Myspace page.


3. Most media players are unstable. They're not big and complex like web-browsers, but I've found media players to be, by and large, pretty bloody awful. A bit of network lag, a stream pumps out something the player didn't expect, and bang, that weblog entry you've been working on disappears with the player's plugin.


4. Not everyone uses a graphical browser. Good luck getting your javascript monstrosity in lynx - which probably rules out most visually handicapped users from accessing your stream. While most commercial radio organisations probably don't care about this (although they should), government-funded broadcasters - who need to provide equal access to all - certainly should be taking it into account.


5. Embedded players are often difficult to bookmark Want your listeners to return again and again? Well, they can't, if your web pages launch a javascript window without the browser's menubar on it. Let them bookmark the stream in their favourite media application instead.


6. People want to use an interface that they are familiar with. I don't care about that snazzy interface your web design team has dreamt up. My media player of choice is gxine. It's small, light, and with libxine behind it, it works for the vast majority of radio stations I want to listen to. I have no desire to use any other application to listen to audio, certainly not one with your radio station's logo plastered over it ... and people who aren't IT-minded will be confused with all the millions of different interfaces that these web-designers waste money putting together.


7. Hiding the url makes life difficult for people with streaming appliances. There's a bunch of products coming to the market that are effectively internet radios. It's probably not far off from the day when mobile internet rates are cheap enough that people start listening to internet streams in their car or while jogging as frequently as they'd listen to a normal radio; as it is, I tend to use my wireless PDA as a portable radio, around the house. If you're a radio station hiding your url behind a huge web of indecipherable javascript in an embedded player, you're going to be bleeding listeners. Just provide a damned link.
   
   

Furthermore, should any radio station managers or CTOs read this article, please use an open codec, such as Ogg Vorbis for your station's stream. There's no good reason to be using a proprietary player - it's as ridiculous as the sealed set scheme, which was used early in Australia's radio history, where radio sets that could only be tuned to one station were sold to listeners. Needless to say, it wasn't particularly successful. By using a codec that people are free to use without restrictions or patent fees, it will open the market to a wealth of new applications and devices, and allow your station to be accessed in ways you might not have considered. Consider how far radio would have gone if it had stuck with the sealed set model...

(And as an aside, there's just no excuse for publically funded organisations like the ABC, the BBC, CBC, Radio New Zealand and RTE to be using proprietary streaming systems. I really don't see why government money should be going to prop up one or two software vendors, thereby forcing the public to use proprietary products to listen to programs that their taxes have paid for).

I don't like mobile phones. It really hit home last weekend when I went for a long walk up Sydney Rd, and whilst standing at the Glenlyon Rd intersection, I had two people converge on me from different directions, both yammering away with their phones glued to their ears. Even the sound of the traffic was preferable to that of two inane phone conversations at once.

Unless I'm on-call, I generally have my phone on silent ... if I even have it with me at all. So, at the risk of turning the weblog into an online version of Grumpy Old Men, here is my guide to Mobile Phone Etiquette.

1. In a restaurant, your phone should be turned off, or if absolutely necessary, on silent with vibrate on, to alert you of messages. You should not take calls at the table, nor should you conduct SMS conversations with remote parties... it's really not that entertaining for other guests to be watching someone type on their phone.


2. Use an inoffensive ringtone, preferably one that actually sounds like a phone ringing. You might find it hard to believe, but that 10 second grab of Avril Levigne on a tinny phone speaker isn't doing anything for your musical cred.


3. Don't walk away from your desk and leave your phone behind. I've worked in an office where this, combined with an incredibly annoying ringtone, had one co-worker threatening to flush another's phone down the toilet.


4. Enter cinema, phone goes off. No excuses. If you're on-call, you shouldn't be in the cinema anyway.


5. Public transport: keep it quiet, and keep it short. The rest of us already know that you're on the train and that you'll be home in twenty minutes. I think the Chaser guys summed it up rather well.


6. Don't walk and talk, it results in you being oblivious to what is going on around you, and annoying people who are walking behind you. If your phone rings and you're on a thoroughfare, duck down a side street.


7. You don't have to answer it. I've never understood those people who are so desperate for any sort of communication that they'd climb a mountain in twenty seconds to answer a ringing phone. If it's important, then the caller will leave a message.


8. Voicemail: If it's important enough for you to leave a message, then say what you want. "Call me back" isn't enough information for me to determine whether it's worth adding to Telstra's profits.


9. Mobile phones are not a fashion accessory. You don't need to buy a new one every year, and the money you spend on them could go towards a deposit for the house that your generation is whinging they can't afford.


10. Bluetooth headsets: yes, they do make you look like an idiot.