A neat video on hacking a police license plate scanner (purchased off ebay). Try guessing what the password is before it is revealed, write down your top 3 guesses: It'll probably be one of those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvINGzIa2fg

In 2008, when Senator Conroy was trying to fuck over the Internet, Geordie wanted to show the absurdity of the “Refused Classification” category.

It was already illegal to publish RC material in Australia, but hardly anyone knew what what it meant. So he illustrated it. Literally.

One of the criteria for RC is “publications which are intended to instruct in the commission of a crime against the Commonwealth.” Obviously intended by wowsers to censor information about how to cook meth or whatever, but people who wrote the rules weren’t very precise and they cast an absolutist net.

In his various travels, Geordie had discovered that it’s a Commonwealth crime to graze livestock on the Parliament House lawns in Canberra.

So he commissioned an artist to draw a cartoon which provided step by step instructions to teach the reader how to transport a herd of giraffe to the ACT, tether them on the roof of APH, and induce them to eat.

He published the giraffe cartoon on one of his blogs and publicly dared ACMA to issue a takedown notice, which they declined to do, proving that ACMA was arbitrarily and selectively enforcing a very clear cut online content regulation, perhaps making them poor custodians of the power to determine whether the Christian lobby could successfully ban abortion information.

He LOVED finding weird loopholes like this. We’d spend ages on the phone cackling about how to exploit the most absurdly obscure regs to humiliate the regulator. Top shelf.

I don't know how to say this. This is terribly hard.

I'm devastated to have heard that @geordie passed away last night in his sleep.

My thoughts are with his family of course, and with all of us who knew him in the physical world as well.

Please hug who you need to extra well tonight

I'd forgotten about this until just now. In the mans own words:

https://geordieguy.au/logging-off.html