What happens if and when the newly introduced metadata retention scheme in Australia encounters its first leak?
Effective today October 13th, 2015 the scheme is active. Although, comically there supposedly are a lot of companies still awaiting for approval on their data retention implementations. You can rest assured telcos like Telstra and Optus are already compliant and ready to store your calls and internet details.
The sheer amount of data that will be logged per second (probably tens of gigs) is also going to undoubtedly show some stress fractures in the infrastructure. Australian telcos can barely keep their networks congestion free and stable, I don’t know how a retention scheme is going to fare any better for them.
Over the last year or so there have been a lot of articles all decrying the use of the hamburger icon for navigation. The icon itself isn’t a hamburger, it’s just three horizontal lines that resemble one.
In the early days of the iPhone and rise of mobile sites, the hamburger icon was a popular choice for showing a menu. And depending on which sites and applications you use, it might still be.
When it comes to music streaming, Spotify is the leader with over 60 million listeners, 15 million of which are paid listeners.
Over the last year or so, some artists have been VERY vocal about the small amount of revenue that Spotify actually pays out per X amount of listens. It got to the point where Taylor Swift pulled her music down, refusing to put her new album 1989 up for streaming because she felt that Spotify was undervaluing music and underpaying artists, before striking up an undoubtedly profitable deal for herself with Apple for their fledgling music offering.
Recently the makers of Webstorm, Jetbrains announced something called Jetbrains Toolbox. The site describes it as a “new licencing model” marketing speak aside, it is a subscription based model which means users will now rent their software instead of owning it.
If you’re a polyglot developer, then this might appeal to you. If you’re working with C# and love ReSharper and also working with the front-end and using WebStorm, a subscription based all-you-can-eat-as-long-as-you-keep-paying model might make sense to you.
How many of your friends and family come over and want to use your wifi? For me, It would take me a while to count all of the people who I have given access to my wifi connection. Usually I just give them the password when they come over or type it in for them without thinking twice.
Of all of the people who have used my wifi connection, they all have the details saved so they can connect later without asking for the password again. This is why I like the Wifi Sense feature in Windows 10 because it mitigates the need to share my wifi password with anyone.
You might know there is a bit of a conflict happening in the South China Sea. China are currently (and some would say aggressively) reclaiming parts of the reef to build man-made islands supposedly part of which will be for military purposes.
The US government have been quite vocal about their disdain for China’s activities and up until recently Australia was quiet on the subject. Until recently when Australian defence minister Kevin Andrews tactfully and carefully voiced his concerns over China’s activities at the Shangri-La Dialogue talks taking place in Singapore.
Update 28/1/2016: This post was about Angular 1, it was published well before Angular 2 was even near ready for beta release. A bit has changed since then, but my thoughts on Angular in this post have not.
For quite a long time developers have been using AngularJS. Coming at a time when the alternatives were the likes of Backbone.js (while powerful in its own right), which just didn’t tick all of the boxes a modern web application needs ticked, we thought we had reached developer nirvana.
As Australian’s most of us are pretty lucky. We are often dubbed the “lucky country” by ourselves, even though we are lagging behind other countries in many areas.
SBS’s newest TV program called Struggle Street details residents of Western Sydney in an area called Mt. Druitt, which has a pretty notorious reputation for being a rough area because of the public housing it contains.
The show before it even aired its first episode drummed up a heap of controversy, all solely based on the limited glimpse we had through the promos. After watching the first episode I have come to the conclusion that the media and those opposing the program were overreacting.
Let me prefix this article with the fact I have no allegiance to any brand. I have a Samsung phone, I own a MacBook Pro, I have an iPad, I own a PC and I own a PS4. I use whatever works for me and what I like: I like.
I am a pretty big watch nerd. While I do not currently own a watch, I have my eyes set on a few watch beauties (non digital). I like reading about watches, I like looking at them and occasionally trying them on. When Apple first announced the Apple Watch I was immediately skeptical, but also intrigued.
Unless you’re reading this far into the future or a jail cell because you downloaded Dallas Buyers Club, then you would know that metadata retention laws have just been passed in the Australian senate.
Australian Parliament (with cooperation from the Coalition and ALP) passed amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 requiring telecommunication service providers to retain for two years certain telecommunications metadata prescribed by regulations.
What is metadata? The analogy being thrown around is metadata is not the contents of the envelope, but rather what is on the outside of the envelope. It is pieces of descriptive information that describe or give one or more pieces of data additional context and meaning.