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There’s a new ad for Australia out, which is about to be shown in foreign markets like the U.S., trying to convince people to come and visit this fine country. The ads were specifically designed to convince people already wanting to come here, that now is the best time to do so. The ad is funny, not because it is a comedy piece, but because it is so stereotypically ocker, a parody or caricature of Aussie life, an image of regional Australia which 80% of our population have never seen, and which most tourists who only do our capital cities, will never see.
The ad’s caused a bit of controversy here, because the tag line at the end is a girl on a beach saying “so where the bloody hell are you?”, the “bloody” supposedly being offensive language. But I find it offensive because Australians wouldn’t actually say that. Any Australian using “bloody” would surely say “where the bloody hell are ya?”. And anyway, this is all just a watered down version of that more traditional Aussie “where the fuck are ya?”. That’s the funny part, its a parody of us, and the joke is on the rest of the world who think it may not be.
So I decided to rip the ad and do my own audio track for it, doing a more realistic version. But guess what, the version posted on the Sydney Morning Herald site is a wmv streaming file. Safari on the Mac downloads it and pops it into Windows Media Player, but as we all know, there’s no way to save a stream in WMP. So I open it in Windows IE and of course the same thing, there’s no way to save it. Its streamed, so you won’t find it in the temp files directory either. I tried a few freeware apps to rip the stream, but I think they’re using some referer checking to protect the URL. The file is actually an ASX, which is a WMP playlist file, containing the URL for the media, but in this case, the URL is actually for a WMP reference file, which in turn points to another URL. Here’s the .asx URL: http://media.smh.com.au//player/playlist.mpl/18150_4.asx?pl=18150.4
Surely someone else has a copy online. Maybe the web site they’re promoting has it? That would make sense right? So I went to www.australia.com, which is embarrasingly user unfriendly. When you actually find the video, it redirects you to a branded site by a company called Vividas Europe Limited, which not only forces you to download special player software, with a file suffix of .tmp commonly used by viruses, but under XP at least, it prompts you for a security warning. This is from the company whose mission statement, from their yearly report, is to:
deliver the power of full screen, broadcast quality, video to the computer without software installation
They could have saved themselves setting up an entire company, if they just released the video as straight QuickTime or Windows Media Video.
Which begs the question: the ad is supposed to promote Australia to the rest of the world, so wouldn’t you want the video to be distributed as much as possible? Wouldn’t it make sense to make the thing fucking downloadable?!!! And why does the video have to be all alone on a separately branded page? Those days are over, its all just media, embed it right in the page for fucks sake. The design is an embarrasment to Australia.
So, if you know how to rip the file, please let me know, because I still want to dub the audio. Only now I have quite a few more ideas of what to add…
Privacy is dead, so get over it.
I came to this point in January 2005, and had written a scripted fictional video to drive the point home, but I never got around to producing it. No matter, its now October 2005, so I figured I better get the idea out there.
The way technology is heading, we will soon all be carrying around multipurpose handheld devices for phone, organising and audio/visual playback and recording. These devices will all be directly IP addressable on the Internet, meaning we will soon have the ability to broadcast 24 hour a day footage of our or other peoples’ lives. I could connect to your camera in real time, record, remix and make it available to someone else in real time.
With the digital age, electronic recording of personal details, and the countless surveillance cameras that film us every day of our lives, many of which are also now available on the Internet, governments started to put privacy legislation in place several years ago.
However the interesting thing is that governments realise that prevention isn’t the answer. These laws don’t hide and protect our personal information, they mostly only allow us to find out what people have already recorded about us.
Like was the case with DRM, the flexibility of the technology will eventually outweigh the right to privacy. Like region coding on DVDs, manufacturers will open up their device capability, because we want them to. There’s a market for small unrestricted cameras and audio recorders, and the market will certainly supply them.
So let us assume that privacy will inevitably be massively breached, and that we have no control over it. What happens next?
Well, because so much footage will be available on the Internet, people will begin to get used to it, and eventually not actually care that their lives are being recorded and made available to the public. With billions upon billions of personal videos available online, who will really care any more? And if that’s the case, then privacy is effectively dead.
The only reason we are precious about our privacy, is because we’ve always had it that way, and we’ve been brought up to think that way.
When I raised this at the Melbourne videoblogger meetup earlier this year, the response was that the public would eventually self regulate and stop privacy breaches. But as a pretty moral person myself, I have no qualms including other people in my videos without their permission, and I’m sure most videobloggers are the same. What happens when the immoral people start videoing? As video recorders become ubiquitous, the self regulating moral few will have no effect at all.
While current opinion is that a person’s privacy needs to be respected and protected, in the long run it won’t be, and we’ll just get over the preciousness of privacy. In the circles I’m in, I constantly meet people who no longer care about privacy and being filmed. When will you?
Privacy is dead. So get over it.
I’ve finally changed my domain name from my ISP URL to a real URL. Please change any URL you have pointing to my old site (www.zipworld.com.au/~kashum), to my new www.kashum.com site.
Or for reference:
Site/blog/vlog: http://www.kashum.com
RSS (2.0) feed: http://www.kashum.com/rss2.xml
I’ll leave the old domain around for two weeks, so please change them as soon as possible in your reader or whatever client you’re using.
Changing URLs is annoying for you and me, and I realise its easier to just delete me than change me, but please stick with it, I promise I’ll be good (or bad, whatever you’d usually expect).
Special thanks to Nathan, who kindly donated the domain a few months back. I’ve only just had time to do make it all happen.