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Taking Care of Business – Lawyers, Legislators and Civil Servants.

By Tom Koltai

Sometimes when you are being serviced by a professional, you have to say “No, I don’t like what you are doing for me. I don’t like your charging regime and I certainly don’t like the lack of results that you are managing to achieve.” Most members of the public consider lawyers are Gods. They understand [...]

The Theory of Relativity concerning Pawns, Lily and Rupert.

By Tom Koltai

The Game of chess has more pawns than any other piece. This is so that pawns can be used as both the initial onslaught and the defensive line.   Which, depends on the player, who’s role of course is to increase his military capacity and strategic advantage whilst at the same time attempting to decimate [...]

Koltai Becomes a Wowser?

By Tom Koltai

In the last decade I owned and managed various ISP’s and Co-Lo businesses; I used to get a buzz out of sitting in front of the monitors and watching the MRTG graphs never peaking.   (MRTG Graph “borrowed” from Wikipedia) Peaking was bad; peaking meant that customers were not getting what they were paying for, [...]

P2P – Kill It And You Kill The Whole Economy

By Chris Gilbey

For as long as the Internet has been with us there has been a view that porn is what drives growth. Now that concept has actually been with us since the time of the invention of the printing press. Back then of course, there were essentially two business models for content, or three depending on [...]

Follow the Money or How Hollywood Hides its Billions

By Tom Koltai

It will come as a suprise to many readers, but there are those that still watch, free to air television. Those that do, tend to watch the programming on TV and use the advertising segments as convenient toilet or coffee breaks. But those of us that think that advertising is an inconvenient distraction from observing [...]

Australian Government Protects its Toilet Database against Terrorist P2P Attack.

By Tom Koltai

One of the presenters on today’s Public Sphere #1 talked about the Governments Toilet Database – which had no API for open access by other information developers – in fact the Copyrtight page deliberately prevents any reuse of the work except by pointing to it with a url.   F***** Me. What is so special [...]

P2P Users Lead the World in Enhancing the Hedonic Value of Broadcast Media

By Tom Koltai

No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go against him or send against him, unless by legal judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land.   What Law of the land says that you [...]

Solving The Problems Of NSW

By Chris Gilbey

I am a big proponent of looking for the non-obvious solution to problems. In fact I would go so far as to say that in the era of digital disruption pretty much every time the obvious solution is used it goes belly up after a short period of time. Look at New South Wales. The [...]

Security, Movie Plots, Terrorism….

By Chris Gilbey

Bruce Schneier is one of the worlds top experts on cryptology. He has run a newsletter for some years that, among other things, identifies bad ideas in government and business that relate to or are supposed to address security…. He asks difficult questions…… In his most recent newsletter, he suggests that the fear mongering taking [...]