xbox 360 - first thoughts

Now I have an xbox360, and a few games thanks to the promotional deals on at the moment.

Interesting product. Great out of the box experience so far.

The signing up for xbox live is a bit of a long winded task with the xbox controller. Perhaps it's easier to do on a computer and then simply log in using the xbox.

3 software updates downloaded and installed on the first day. I expect this is pretty standard.

I'm pretty impressed at how quickly game results appear on xbox.com - albeit the xbox.com website is terribly slow (must be running on microsoft software... tehehe)

Nice to see that the network support is easy to use. Pity that they only have media sharing software for microsoft windows based pcs.... but... that is microsoft.

I'll be sure to try out some of the Mac and Linux based media sharing apps soon, and will post how it goes.

No Clean Feed

Say no to internet censorship in Australia! Read here for more information from Electronic Frontiers Australia!

I believe that internet censorship should not be allowed because of two primary reasons:

Firstly, I consider this to be an invasion of civil liberties. Whilst I no way condone the use of the internet for criminal or illegal activities, I believe that the law must be enforced without the hinderance of our civil liberties, specifically including the freedom to access information.

Secondly, I believe that a filter to the internet would be a great negative for the performance of data communications in the country. The infrastructure required to filter a nations content would be extremely expensive, and would slow down the rate of data transfers whilst performing filtering activities. This would ultimately lead to decreased performance of the internet, and increased cost of internet services for consumers.

Additionally, I do not believe that an internet filter would be very effective. It is already very easy to establish a secure encrypted communications channel over the internet between two computers. Banks have this security. The same encryption technologies can also be used to set up secure encrypted gateways between machines. This is virtually impossible to filter.

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