Australian FTTN and metadata surveillance
InternetNico 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!
