North Coast Voices: blog visitor profile

Earlier this week North Coast Voices received a rather nice email via Boy the Wonder Cat's address:

Just a short note to say what a good job you do at independent news gathering. The site looks great. Too many great contributions to reply to all, so pass on my regards. I felt a bit intimidated that there are no comments for any posts. Do you get many hits locally? I hope so, it is a much better read than the Star or the Echo.

Now it is true that there are few comments made on North Coast Voices posts and, it is always fascinating to see the number of emails sent to our blogging cat or mention made of us in the local media in lieu of using the blog's comment section.

However, this is not something that troubles us as we are like half the blogosphere ourselves - mostly 'lurkers' nor comment makers.

The email did get me thinking though about giving readers a little feedback.

Yes, we are getting a growing number of local northern NSW visitors to the blog and North Coast Voices now appears in blog roll links on a number of other Australian websites for which we are grateful.

Current readership is roughly divided into 50 per cent Australian visitors to the blog and 50 per cent visitors from overseas. Some readers stay for a minute or so and a few stay for half an hour or more.

Readers can be as close as the Tweed and Coffs Harbour or as far away as Tunisia and Chile. Both Canberra and Washington DC frequently feature in any location breakdown by month.

Various government department and university computers across the country also have a peek at what our authors have to say. As of course does Monsanto and other multinational companies we mention from time to time.

North Coast Voices has been up and running for twenty-two months and has it's second birthday in early October.

A big thankyou to all who read this blog.

Sounds of Australia film and sound archive nominations for 2010

Media has been reporting the fact that this month the 1954 Vegemite advertisement jingle has made it into the national film and sound archive, along with recordings of the Newcastle Steelworks Band, TI's Georgia Lee singing the blues, Bidjigal man Vic Simms' protest songs, and six more examples of Australiana.

The National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia is a public registry of recordings that celebrates the unique and diverse recorded sound culture and history of Australia. It was launched in February 2007 with a foundation list of 10. Each year, public nominations are called and 10 recordings added to the Registry, selected from the nominations by a panel of experts from the recorded sound industry and cultural institutions.

Complete archive list.

Nominations for next year's inclusions on this list officially begin in January 2010.
How to nominate, including online form, here.

About Vegemite:

In 1922, Dr Cyril Callister, a young food chemist, created a distinctive 'pure vegetable extract' at the Fred Walker Cheese Factory and food processing plant in Dandenong, Victoria. A nation-wide competition in 1923 yielded the name Vegemite. In 1926 Walker sold their creation to Kraft Foods of Chicago and passed over the secret recipe.
The first radio jingle for Vegemite appeared in 1954. In this, three 'Happy Little Vegemites' sang their toe-tapping song almost ad nauseam. With the advent of television in 1956, the jingle became a television commercial. The Vegemite jingle has been used in advertising campaigns for Vegemite ever since.

NSW Nats caught namejacking in cyberspace. Labor not amused

ABC TV let the cat out of the bag last night and the NSW Nats are red faced and protesting that purchasing this domain name and setting it up with Melbourne Information Technologies Australia Pty Ltd was sooooo innocent - not namejacking the Premier at all, at all:

Whois Record

Domain Name: nathanrees.com.au
Registrar ID: Melbourne IT
Registrar Name: Melbourne I
Status: ok

Registrant: NATIONAL PARTY OF AUSTRALIA - NSW
Registrant ID: ABN 40538388169
Eligibility Type: Registered Business

Registrant Contact ID: 0322O988805
Registrant Contact Name: NATIONAL PARTY OF AUSTRALIA - NSW
Registrant Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

Tech Contact ID: 0323T988805
Tech Contact Name: Nathan Quigley
Tech Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

Name Server: rns1.melbourneit.com.au
Name Server IP: 203.27.227.123
Name Server: rns2.melbourneit.com.au
Name Server IP: 203.27.227.124

Update:

A Cameron Jackson of Rosebery, NSW has owned nathanrees.org since September 2008.
Ownership expires in September this year unless renewed.
The same person appears to own nathanrees.net.au
While Privacy Protect hides registration details for nathanrees.com, nathanrees.net and nathanrees.info since September 2008 and is probably a domain name reseller.
It seems Nathan is a popular boy.

What do they say? No press is bad press - just spell the name right

The hard working North Coast Labor MP for Page Janelle Saffin found herself picked out for a rather truncated mention in a bible-quoting Canadian market opinion blog post courtesy of Joel Bowman, reporting from Taipei, Taiwan on 17 August 2009.

This post was apparently echoing seven other blogs or media reports, mostly from earlier in the year, which commented on the fact that $900 2008-09 tax refunds sent out as part of the Australian Government stimulus package also went to the estates of taxpayers who had died in or after the last financial year.

Apparently the general sentiment was; when it comes to tax refund money you're not supposed to take it with you no matter how hard you worked when alive.

Never mind, Janelle - at least they all spelt your name correctly!

A case of the biter bit, but few are chortling over AFP intelligence fiasco

I was watching ABC Four Corners last Monday when this little comment came up:
"ANDREW FOWLER: The site was called root-you.org, and for the last two weeks the Australian Federal Police in cooperation with the South Australian Police have run the perfect sting.

TIM DAVIS, FEDERAL AGENT, HIGH TECH CRIME OPS. AFP: We've infiltrated that site and so now we've got control as well.

NEIL GAUGHAN: What we've done with that particular network is we've captured all the identities of all the people that've been using that network. We can operate in a covert activity here fairly seamlessly with no harm to our members with continual and actual significant penetration.....

ANDREW FOWLER: In the case of root-you.org, the Federal Police decided the best result was to effectively blow up the site by posting a notice that it was under law enforcement control.

TIM DAVIS, FEDERAL AGENT: Mate are you right to post that message on the forum.

MAN (on phone): Yep.

TIM DAVIS, FEDERAL AGENT: Well if you can do that now that'd be great."

I did idly wonder if there would be a cyber response and thought - "Naw, won't happen".
Then it well and truly did and F-Secure has links to this not so funny episode of counter-hacking, which was the almost inevitable result of all that televised bragging by the boys in blue (this also saw police computer files of actual bank, building society and corporate credit card details exposed to the view of at least one other hacker).

Some of the hacker chatter {A little **** covers words which offend those bluidy filters}:
"After the authorities FINALLY posted their little "ohhh, we have been monitoring this website", we finally said "Enough is enough, we are sick of these f**ks acting like they are hackers, lets see what they really know".
So After writing another FTP report yesterday.. I decided I would move on to getting control of r00t-y0u.org. See what the authorities know about server maintenance.. and how secure they can make stuff.
Lo and behold, their server was windows! I couldn't stop laughing at the sight of this, but I soon moved on. After visiting a 404 page, I instantly noticed that they were using Xampp. Those lazy f***s
can not even just install apache, and php themselves. So instead, they download some application to do it all for them.
Figures.
Now, of course.. they were just SO F***KING SMART, that they left the MYSQL password BLANK! After screwing around with their database, I dumped a vulnerable query into a php file, thus giving me full access to their servers.
After taking a look at the r00t-y0u database, lookie what we find.
User: "h1t3m" (Administrator)
Email: macrobber@gmail.com
These dipsh*ts are using an automatic digital forensics and incident response tool.
They can't do sh*t all themselves, because like I have said before, they have no skill. Anyways, after looking on their win32 machine for a while, I noticed some really awkward stuff. They have credit cards, and bank accounts all on a seperate drive (G:\)."

Four Corners transcript

Pic from Google Images

Obama and Newsmax online polling

There is a rather badly constructed Newsmax poll out there in cyberspace at the moment which is yielding these results concerning U.S. President Barack Obama:

Full 'Obama is the anti-christ' survey results here.

Twitter gets a mention in the House of Reps - does that count as "pointless babble" too?

The Twitterverse seems to be full of bods trying to get in their tongue-in-cheek 40% of babble for the day or commenting on a Pear Analytics critique of these digital conversations.

In the House of Reps yesterday the Aussie Prime Minister apparently hadn't heard that tweets were being dissed as mostly froth and bubble because during Question Time he quoted a David Speers tweet:

• Another messy Coalition partyroom. Much debate over tactics on Renewable Energy Target. Nats angry at Hunt flagging Coalition support.

Here are a couple of speerisms which didn't make our mate Kev's top of the hits list:

• turnbull could get done for enviro vandalism with that branch of wattle he's wearing for Vietnam Vets day
• watching PM give detailed powerpoint presentation at AIG Forum. Some of the best Rudd-speak i've heard