Well, the politicians have done it again. Officially, its called “The Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015” - which passed through the senate 37-13. Unofficially, its a flawed document that breaks on just about every technical level.

In a nutshell, what it allows is that the “Rights Holders” can go to the courts and say “ZOMG, THIS SITE PIRATES OUR SHIZNIT!”. If the judge is able to check all the tickboxes required, the order will come out to ALL Australian ISPs to block access to the IP address hosting the site(s) in question. The ISPs comply and black-hole that specific IP address.

Now, the problem here is that a single IP address is normally used to host multiple web sites - so if you happen to use the same service provider as the judge orders to be dropped, then sorry, your site disappears as well. This has happened before when ASIC ordered the blocking of a small address range and killed around 250,000 web sites.

When laws like this pass, it shows that the people making these decisions have no basic understanding on how the itnernet works - nor have they been given the correct advice on the drastic consequences that can occur from what seem to be simple changes.

So what do we do about it? Bring this up with your local Members of Parliament and make your views known.

I’ve been getting involved with the whole concept of Road Safety as of late - as I’ve noticed that more and more drivers have been completely ignoring the road rules with complete disregard of other road users. In a 20 minute drive, I saw:

1) A car split through the bus lane on Mickleham Rd to avoid waiting with other traffic at the roundabout on Mickleham and Broadmeadows Rds

2) A car turn right from the middle lane of Mickleham Rd into Greenvale Drive through a red turning arrow - cutting off oncoming traffic

3) A male driver in a 4WD drive over all curbs into a parking space at the old Woolworths at Craigieburn Shopping Centre so that he didn’t have to wait for the other three cars in front of him to park - and in the process cut of a car reversing into the same spot.

Sadly, there is no excuse for this kind of behaviour on our roads. It isn’t an accident. It isn’t bad planning. Its pure arrogance to ignore the road rules that are designed to keep everyone safe. As a community - I’m not sure we should tolerate this behaviour from individuals.

An example of this senseless loss of life was recently covered in the news:

Well, hasn’t it been a long time since I’ve posted here!

Just a quick announcement that I’ve posted kernel 3.18.14-1 in the el6-testing repo with the aim to replace the current 3.14.x based kernels with 3.18.x.

Current testing shows a seemless upgrade and as of right now, no issues have been reported. As always, feedback is welcome!

After a week of hard work, I’m happy to announce Xen 4.5.0 testing packages for both EL6 and EL7. These work on CentOS, Scientific Linux and RHEL.

Packages can be downloaded from:

So the openjdk in most linux distros has now been upgraded to v1.8. This has a good bug fix regarding the whole SSLv3 Poodle vulnerability.

This has one problem. The Dell DRAC remote management cards installed in a lot of Dell servers relies on SSLv3 to operate. Without this, you can get into the web interface - but when you get an error stating Error when reading from SSL socket connection and no further.

Thankfully, it is simple to re-enable SSLv3 to allow the connection to succeed.

Open up /usr/lib/jvm/*/jre/lib/security/java.security in your favourite editor as root, and change the following line:

1

jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3

to

1

jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=

This enables SSLv3 to all java applications - however it exposes yourself to the MITM attack as defined in CVE-2014-3566. I suggest having a read of the CVE to understand if you want to leave this setting as default on your system or disable it again afterwards.