It’s amazing what drunk South Australians can do.

An Eyre Peninsula man is the talk of the town after catching a bronze whaler shark in his hands and wrestling it up onto a jetty.

Phillip Kerkhof from Louth Bay was at the local jetty when the 1.3-metre shark began chasing squid lures.

He says he climbed down a ladder and began to follow the shark in shallow water.

“I just snuck up behind him and eventually I went for the big grab and I fluked it and got him,” he said.

“He’s just thrashing around in the water but then he was starting to turn around and try to bite me and I thought ‘well, it’s amazing what vodka does’.”

The only damage from the dangerous species was a bite mark to his jeans.

“It’s not something I’d recommend to do. When I sobered up I thought about it and I said, ‘I’m a bit of an idiot doing it’,” Mr Kerkhof said.

A bit of an idiot? No, really?

US Senator, Ted Stevens - the same person who made the phrase “The Internet is a series of tubes” famous last year - is at it again.

From the Neowin article:

Early in January, Stevens introduced Senate bill 49, which among other things, would require that any school or library that gets federal Internet subsidies would have to block access to interactive Web sites, including social networking sites, and possibly blogs as well. It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators. It would certainly ban MySpace.

Look, here’s a free bit of advice for all concerned, but technologically handicapped, parents, law makers, and bystanders:

Stop Shifting Responsibility

Parents, Guardians, and (when at school) Teachers/School Staff have a responsibility to monitor their child’s behavior. If you’re not doing that - you’re just plain irresponsible and possibly negligent. 

Would you subscribe to a pay-TV service that had open-access pornography or other particularly violent content, and just let your child have free reign over the TV? No, of course not - you’d keep an eye (and ear) on what they’re watching.

Would you let your child wander off alone through the streets, without ensuring that they have some sort of supervision? Again, no - of course not.

Internet access is really no different. It’s just like a city street running right to your computer, with all the disturbing behavior just around the corner.

As your child matures, you make judgement calls as to giving them greater freedom and responsibility: They can stay up later, watch more mature movies, and go meet with friends without direct supervision. You set boundaries (”be home before 5pm”, and “No MA-rated movies”), and see how it works.

The same judgement calls need to be made about Internet usage. Having their own email account, and IM accounts is a gradual trust thing.

Dictating that Schools should ban certain types of sites, and expect that it’ll be a cure-all, is just pure self delusion.

— On a side note, gotta love this spelling suggestion.

I was listening to the first backstage.bbc.co.uk podcast* today, they talk about Digital Rights Management, and it’s related subjects - specifically as it applies to the BBC’s situation as a public broadcaster in the UK and the changing methods of media consumption.  

There’s a wide range of viewpoints expressed, and it’s really a good listen. They don’t go into a lot of technical detail, but there is a lot of discussion of a very broad range of really new technologies - so you might need to have a web browser handy.

There’s two things I got out of this:
First of all, I’d really love to work for the BBC’s R&D Labs (either that, or Google). Michael Sparks (I think) mentions a number of very cool sounding things that they’ve been.. err… researching and developing, and it sounds like it could be a fantastic opportunity to put all those crazy ideas I’ve had to the test.

Secondly, the podcast reveals that there’s a very complex legal environment around digital distribution of BBC content, particularly as it relates to access control and things like that.

An example is given where The BBC tried to find just one piece of work in the massive BBC archives which they owned all the rights to.  It turns out that they had to actually examine the contracts and manner of employment for all the people involved in the production of that one musical recording - not just the musicians, but the conductor, sound engineers, editors, etc.

There is also discussion about how external content-creators are reluctant, or unwilling to set a specific price for online distribution in many cases.

Miles Metcalfe makes this wonderful comment towards the end (~49:29):

“What content creators are arguing - and I think it’s not a very nice thing to argue - and what they’re saying is: Look, our customers are bastards, they’re thieving monkeys, and we don’t like them. We want them to buy the stuff, and we won’t trust them not to be anything else.”

I think it fairly well sums up what the various media companies’ attitudes in regards to DVDs, Games and Music.

* Folks, you need a shorter name - y’know: “BBC Backstage Podcast”.

Edit: and, of course - I hit Publish in Live Writer, instead of Save Draft. 

I meant to add a bit more on how the BBC is setting an excellent example which our (Australia’s) own ABC would be well advised to emulate.  That discussion however, quickly leads to the sad state of broadband in Australia…  (Not so much speed and reach/coverage, so much as data costs). Which I’ll leave right alone (for now).

I don’t remember where I got this one from, but it came back to me today when someone at work was talking about how their father likes to “play” with settings (VCR, TV, Air Conditioning, etc) and cables, then deny all knowledge.

There’s these three people: One IT Helpdesk staff member, One Software Developer, and one User.

They’re each put in a separate room, each room has a table, chair, and a window. On the table is a glass ball.

24 hours later, when checked - the IT Helpdesk person is sitting there, waiting for someone to ask for help. Similarly, the Software Developer is waiting to be given a task.   The User, however is sitting in the corner - there’s no glass ball, and the window is broken. “What happened?”, they’re asked. “I don’t know, it just happened”

I got a question the other day: “Can we set up blogs for each of our staff, that only certain people in our area can read?”.

Well, I immediately thought of Wordpress MU, and possibly some sort of Active Directory (via LDAP) authentication or similar.

It turns out there’s an LDAP Authentication plugin already created. So, we’d need some sort of additional plugin to specify only certain AD groups should be permitted to read the blog.

Excellent, now we just need a server to host it on… Oh, damn, I knew there was a catch!

Others are already doing this (or something similar), and seem to be reasonably happy, despite a few problems (such as the 11-tables-per-user thing).

See: Top Gear, The Chaser.

Next? “We go into a muslim area in Iraq and say how much we love roast pork!”

John C. Dvorak rants has request demand: “Stop Using AutoReply!!!” (via Lifehacker).

I’m not sure what people John’s been communicating with, but where I work - it’s used pretty darned effectively.

When you use Auto-Reply (aka “Out of Office Assistant” in Exchange - commonly just “OOO”):

• When you’re not available to answer emails.

…yeah, that’s it.

Where I work (a multinational company with tens of thousands of employees), we use OOO replies to let colleagues know not to expect a response any time soon.

No, it’s not perfect - and yes, when you’re replying to an email where every-man-and-their-dog is CC’ed in, you get an OOO notification for those who’re out. But, you only get it once (again, it’s a setting, which is defaulted to “on”) for that person. Even if you send that person another email while that same OOO reply is no, you won’t get it again.

The OOO notifications are only sent to those who’re on the corporate address book too, so spam bots don’t get an email confirmation. The one drawback from that is that vendors and customers don’t get a response, and need to be set up on a whitelisted AutoReply.

It’s very helpful for situations where people go on leave for months (and maternity leave for up to 12 months), and someone on the other side of the country is trying to find out who can deal with something.

(Before you say “You should have let them know before you went on leave” I can think of a dozen situations where that won’t work all the time. Getting someone else to manage your email isn’t always an option either)

…long time no see!

That’s all folks.

(Yes, it’s a major event now-adays when we get rain predicted for four consecutive days. Even if it is only a few showers and a lot of wind)

Havard and MIT have released the results of a study into online security indicators.

As the New York Times reports, the study showed that 58 out of 60 BoA customers happily continued on through their banking tasks, despite the SiteKey image being missing.

“The idea is that if customers do not see their [personalised SiteKey] image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank’s, and should not enter their passwords.”

Although I havn’t read the paper, it is fairly obvious that more effort needs to go into user education. This is evident by the success of viruses and spyware - most of which now require the user to take some form of action (opening an attachment, or authorising an install) on modern up-to-date PCs.

Of course - social engineering comes into it, which is something so very difficult to teach people about. So many people also tend to “leave the brain at the door” when it comes to computers.

Perhaps some of the blame can be laid with the IT industry. In the end though, it really doesn’t matter how well you design a system. User education is the key.

On a side note:
It’s part of the reason why I’d love to implement Internet Licensing requirements. I’m only partly kidding by the way - some people should be banned from touching an internet connected computer.

(via Slashdot)