Sponsor's Message

First up, despite the world's authorities being on heightened alert and vigilance during this "war against terror", it seems that a bunch of men described only as being of "Pakistani-Indian-Arabic" appearance, simply walked in and stole two computers from Sydney Airport's intelligence centre.

No, we're not talking about a laptop or a terminal lifted covertly from the front desk while the receptionist was on her tea-break. These guys spent TWO HOURS in the centre's mainframe computer room, carefully disconnecting the large systems before wheeling them out the front door on trolleys.

It appears as if my earlier comments in respect to Australia's airline security was not too far off the mark eh?

What's more, I think this reinforces the claims I made on Friday about the folly of entrusting our private secrets to any government or department thereof.

And, in other dumb news, over in the USA, the RIAA and its members have rolled out a host of new initiatives designed to keep record execs in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Firstly, they've dropped the price of music CDs. This move is a smart one and they're to be commended, although I think I'll have to give them a "could have done better" score. Of course we won't see an accompanying price-drop here because, we're told, our prices are already some of the lowest in the world anyway -- however I believe this is due almost entirely to retailers such as The Warehouse who buy in bulk and resell at slim margins. I doubt they get much help from the industry itself in setting their lower-than-average retail prices.

Secondly, they're offering an amnesty to filetraders. Yes, if you send them a written, signed confession (including a photo-ID) and promise never to do it again, they'll forgive your past sins. The cynical amongst us might see this as just a way of having the really dumb file-traders incriminate themselves and/or give them a great "hit list" for later raids.

This is, of course, a carrot and stick situation because we're told that the RIAA is also preparing to sue the snot out of a very large number of private individuals who they claim have been caught engaging in acts of piracy.

And finally, the RIAA seems to be sure that making P2P software and networks declared illegal will solve its woes -- so that's just what they're trying to do.

How are they attempting to do this?

Well it seems that they're claiming that P2P networks are the lair of pornographers, especially child pornographers. They're telling us (and more importantly, the US government) that if we want to stamp out child (and other) porn on the Net, we must first stamp out P2P networks.

But if this is really the case, why do our Internal Affairs sleuths spend their time loitering in chat-rooms for offenders? And isn't it true that some of the biggest busts have related to people who exchanged this type of material via email or through websites?

Yes, this weekend's news really was a "believe it or not" bundle.

Oh, and just to finish off, here's a completely unrelated link that's rather interesting -- especially when you see who wrote it.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!