Rudd's 'Grocery Choice' website now showing price comparisons for NE NSW

The Rudd Government's new website Grocery Choice is up and running this morning.

The August 08 basic staples grocery basket comparison for the NSW North Coast shows that Coles/BiLo is the most expensive shopping experience out of the large retailers listed.

Small independent stores are naturally the most expensive generally.

Lucky Yamba. Not only does it get a poor range/quality of goods from Coles/BiLo at Yamba Fair - it also gets the most expensive supermarket basic staples basket of groceries at $77.31.

Basic Staples

This basket includes a selection of staple grocery products purchased by Australian households. It includes a variety of products from each of the other grocery baskets. This is the only basket that has an ALDI supermarket price.

Findings of the ACCC Inquiry into the competitiveness of retail prices for standard groceries here

If Conroy filters the Internet online banking may grow riskier

In Securify This! by Liam Tung at ZDNet Australia on Tuesday the spectre of Conroy's internet censorship weakening data security raised its ugly head.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has welcomed "improvements" in ISP filtering technologies, but will a broad-scale roll-out make ISPs a thief's favourite target?
The great success of the ISP filtering trial was that current technologies impose far less interference on an ISP's network than similar tests done five years ago.

Improvements like this give the impression that yes, the government has its collective head around the challenge of making the internet a safe place.

But after an interesting chat with Internode's core networks and infrastructure group team leader Mark Newton, I came to the conclusion that any concerns about network degradation are peanuts compared to security worries around what could happen if the technology is implemented — in particular to the protocol used to conduct secure Web sessions with your bank or the tax office — HTTPS.
Newton raised an interesting idea: for an ISP to filter HTTPS sessions it would have to engage in a Man in the Middle attack, where the attacker intercepts and changes information being transmitted between two parties...
Normally HTTPS means that data streams pass unfettered between your computer and the bank's servers, but ISP filtering would see that data unencrypted at the ISP, inspected, re-encrypted and then forwarded on to you and the bank.
Now, I don't use Dodo, Exetel or TPG, but these ISPs don't seem to be able to afford call centre staff, so can we rely on these ISPs to implement whatever technology the government approves?
And if the filtering products run on Windows operating systems, what happens if and when those systems become infected with a trojan or virus that siphon information to cybercrims?
Let's hope we find out a little more about the security and privacy implications in the "live" trials the government plans to run in the coming months.

Unfortunately for Liam and the blogosphere, it is highly unlikely that Senator Conroy or his staff have even given this issue a passing thought.
From where I am sitting, the progressing of this national ISP filtering scheme is principally about a narrow, faith-based, ideology ridden agenda.

I can't eat a web site, Mr. Rudd

Last night on the evening news I heard that the Rudd Government was to set up a web site as its answer to rising grocery prices.
"Grocery Choice" it's going to call it and this site will give us all a snapshot of the monthly cost of an average basket of groceries across 61 regions.
Fat lot of good that will do us on the Northern Rivers.
Where I live there is only one, that's right one, retail grocery store and it can charge what it likes and serve up whatever dubious quality of goods it likes.
The idea of encouraging competition and instituting unit pricing is a real laugh - since the beginning of the year this Coles store has offered at premium prices rotten potatoes, peanuts in the shell infested with insects, packaged tomatoes with splitting skins and mould, spoiled apples and cheese well beyond its shelf life.
"Grocery Choice"? Silly, silly, silly.
I can't see how Labor's Chris Bowen kept a straight face when he fronted the cameras over this one.

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