Satire

A bit of satire here and there, with a technology twist. Hope you don’t mind the humour, sarcasm is a fine art.

NSW Bogan to benefit from NBN satellite launch

Kenneth Tsang Leave a comment

Bogan rejoices over 25/5Mbps speeds in 2016

Residents in the settlement of Bogan near Nyngan, NSW will soon benefit from the launch of the nbn’s first long term satellite called “Sky Muster”.  This is a big win for the community, whose broadband quality rating was determined to be “E” (the lowest band) by the Department of Communication’s MyBroadband analysis.

The satellite, expected to launch on the first day of October, will bring a massive network capacity boost over the current NBN Interim Satellite Service.  The company building the NBN says the satellites are expected to enter into commercial service some time in 2016 and will deliver speeds of up to 25 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload to rural communities – such as Bogan, NSW.

According to nbn’s rollout map, there are three premises in the Bogan township:

  • 2403 Bogan Road, Bogan
  • 2835 Bogan Road, Bogan
  • 3185 Cathundral Bogan Road, Bogan

However, the accuracy of addressing information especially in rural areas may be patchy due to incomplete or out of date data in the GNAF database (Australia’s authoritative Geocoded National Address File).

opinion/analysis

This really isn’t news. The writer of this piece is aware of how many satire pieces out there poke fun at Bogan, NSW.  He simply wanted to add to this – while featuring the National Broadband Network.

He also apologises in advance for the bad pun.

A-G’s department accidentally leaks all metadata

Kenneth Tsang Leave a comment

(satire) In another embarrassing gaffe, another Government department has admitted to accidentally unsolicited emails to unsuspecting football and soccer officials. The Attorney-General’s department put out a press release early this morning, revealing that they had sent all Australian citizen’s metadata to an organiser of the Asian Cup tournament. In the release, they blamed Microsoft for inadequacies in their Exchange Server and Outlook 2003 software for the fault.

A spokesperson for the Attorney-General’s department said:

“We just upgraded our systems from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP — and we didn’t realise that emails had autocomplete for electronic mailing address filling. We have notified Microsoft of the breach to prevent any other user terminals from facing the same computer fault.”

We have reached out to Microsoft this morning, who said:

“We no longer support Windows 3.0, XP or Microsoft Outlook 2003. We are in 2015 and our current Windows and Microsoft Office product line is Windows 8.0 and Office 2013.”

To resolve this issue, the Attorney-General’s department has pledge to use fax and telegrams to communicate for the meanwhile:

“Given the existence of unsafe features like autocomplete in Microsoft Office, we will revert to using Windows 3.0. For metadata transmissions, we will use fax and telegrams instead.”

This revelation comes after Parliament passed Australia’s first Mandatory Data Retention scheme forcing telecommunications providers to store its customer’s meta data for 2 years.

Latest ABS data not transparent enough

Kenneth Tsang Leave a comment

(satire) ABS revealed figures earlier today showing that an average household with an NBN internet connection downloads 61GB a month. Spokesperson for the ABS said:

That is roughly the same as 620 feature length films being watched on a TV, or 310 feature length films watched on two TVs.

However, the spokesperson was unable to confirm the nature of these films:

Because the ASIO powers that issues warrants to access the entire Internet only came into force after the results were collated, the ABS is unable to confirm which movies were downloaded.

When pressed if the movies were likely downloaded legally nor not, the ABS spokesperson denied to comment.

As individuals who made submissions to the Attorney-General department regarding online copyright infringement consultation would know, the Government is not interested in providing a balanced consumer view on these issues. You will have to wait several weeks for us to respond for a comment on these issues.

When asked about the implications of NBN’s multi-technology mix on these figures in the future, the ABS spokesperson said:

The data downloaded would fit in 44 million floppy disks. That would fill an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool. It is unlikely that there will be enough Olympic-sized swimming pools in an average consumer to fill to store these floppy disks over a year’s time.