technology

Can I trust MtGox with my passport?

12 June 2013

In March 2013, the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCen”) published a statement saying that companies which facilitate buying and selling of “virtual” currencies like Bitcoin constitute “money service businesses” and are subject to reporting obligations designed to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes. A couple of months later, the seizure by US authorities of Liberty Reserve has shaken money service [...]

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BitTorrent Sync

8 June 2013

I have been a long-time user of Dropbox. It synchronises important files across computers, provides offsite backup and remote access to these files. But it does have its limitations. A free Dropbox accounts gets you 2 gigabytes of storage (although persuading friends to sign up can earn you an an increase in this limit). If [...]

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Image searches

12 July 2012

This week’s edition of Media Watch, “Pixelating protects identity? Think again“, examines the threat image search engines pose to anonymity. Drop a disguised photo into Google images and the chances are you will find the original in the search results. Intrigued, I thought I would try it out. The pixellated the photo of Tom Waits [...]

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Unblock Us

18 September 2011

A few months ago, I complained that more and more online music sites have blocked access from Australia. Of course, the arcane licensing of intellectual property has also led to many other sites being blocked for Australians. Anyone living down under trying to access BBC TV via their iPlayer, or trying to stream US TV [...]

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Off the rails: mag-lev personal rapid transit

21 August 2011

I have not been thinking about blog posts much over the last week and a half: on the 11 August my closest friend died and his memorial service was a week later. However, I have received a guest post from a new contributor to the Stubborn Mule: Norwegian academic Trond Andresen from the Norwegian University of [...]

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Irony

9 March 2011

Last year I wrote about one of the more amusingly ridiculous attempted spam comments intercepted by my blog’s spam filter. It may be genius, stupidity or just an excellent coincidence, but a comment spammer has now attempted to add the following comment to that post: There are actually loads of details like that to take [...]

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Mobile coverage

12 February 2011

A friend and regular Stubborn Mule reader drew my attention to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald this week about the Australian telco Telstra. Much of the recent commentary has focused on the implications of the national broadband network (NBN) for Telstra. While the NBN certainly gets a mention here too, for me the [...]

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A gentle introduction to R

31 January 2011

Whenever a post on this blog requires some data analysis and perhaps a chart or two, my tool of choice is the versatile statistical programming package R. Developed as an open-source implementation of an engine for the S programming language, R is therefore free. Since commercial mathematical packages can costs thousands of dollars, this alone [...]

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NBN in more than 140 characters

27 September 2010
Colourful Optic Fibres

migNow that Labor has scraped their way back into power, it looks very likely that the National Broadband Network will go ahead in some form or another. Debates on the merits of the scheme continue apace, not least on Twitter, conveniently labelled with the #nbn hashtag. One frequent twitter on this topic, @pfh007, is also [...]

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How old is the Mule?

12 September 2010

According to one automated blog analyser, I am rather older than I thought I was: stubbornmule.net is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time The gender is correct and academic writing style I can accept, but I am not so sure [...]

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