Rubenerd

Skip to content
By Ruben Schade in s/Singapore/Sydney/. 🌻

Home About Archives Podcast RSS Omake

Australian FTTN and metadata surveillance

Wednesday 12 February 2020 Internet

Nico Arboleda reported for CRN Australia:

According to the ACCC’s latest Measuring Broadband Australia report (pdf), FTTN only reaches 81.9 percent of the promised maximum download speeds and 78.4 percent of the promised upload speeds. … FTTN also recorded the longest outages of the three … the ACCC said that many FTTN connections “still don’t come close to performing as promised”.

I can confirm. My 100 Mbps NBN FTTN connection, aside from being an unpaletable alphabet soup of legacy networking abbreviations, barely gets above 62. I’d be sorely tempted to save $15 a month and go for a 50 Mbps plan if it also didn’t bring my uploads in line with what we had in Singapore two decades ago.

And Stilgherrian reported for ZDNet Australia:

The Commonwealth Ombudsman, Michael Manthorpe, has revealed that law enforcement agencies are being given the full URLs of web pages visited by people under investigation. Australia’s mandatory telecommunications data retention scheme was meant to deliver only so-called “metadata” to the cops and spooks. Under the scheme, a warrant is not required. But according to Manthorpe, the “ambiguity around the definition of content” means that agencies might effectively be receiving the content of communications.

There is so much context in a URL, especially if you have an encoded GET request.

Filing both of these under we all told you so!


Author bio and support

Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and IaaS engineer in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person in bios. Wait, not BIOS… my brain should be EFI by now.

The site is powered by Hugo, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS on OrionVM, everyone’s favourite cloud infrastructure provider.

If you found this post helpful or entertaining, you can shout me a coffee or buy some silly merch. Thanks!


Newer post ← Processing text
Older post → Both sides to saving money on cafés