Here is a statement that I (Jon) received by e-mail from Mike Of Melb at 12:19 December 23, 2008 in response to my invitation to him to issue such a statement. The delay in publication was due to last minute Xmas shopping.
As Mike has agreed to adopt a professional manner when engaging in future debate, I would ask that those wishing to post comments here do likewise - I will not approve excessively vitriolic comments by any party. If you think other forms of response are required, you are entitled to publish these in forums of your own choosing, but I reserve the right not to publish them here.
Having seen some of the responses to my blog entries and considered those, I have to agree that many of my statements and the manner of their positioning was not suitable or fair.
I retract any statements that reference a person’s capabilities and apologise for these. That was not correct of me.
Any statements from my side were based on discussions and industry knowledge over a longer period. No deals that I have any knowledge of, in the manner suggested in some recent blogs, have been done between ACMA and any commercial entity that I either know of or have worked with in any capacity.
I am not an “insider” with more access to relevant people that anybody else has had, should they have been involved in this process and the security industry for as long as I have. Where I have apparently implied otherwise, then this was badly chosen expression on my behalf. Again I apologise for this.
I admit that I have been caught up in the rising rhetoric and have clearly been over the top with mine. That will cease.
I have now clearly seen that using inflammatory language does not help this discussion at all, and regret any offence that any of you have perceived.
As far as I can see from the EOI docs and any discussions I have ever had, these upcoming tests are ISP owned and driven, and no direct arrangements of any kind have been made by ACMA with any vendor. The ISP decides solely which technologies they will use.
On affiliations: I have been interacting with several players involved in this whole process for over a year, on an ad-hoc and unpaid basis (advisory on technologies and market developments), however I recently agreed to be contracted with a vendor of ISP-filtering solutions. Views and opinions expressed have thus been exclusively my personal entries, and involved no participation of any third party. And again, where I have given the impression that I was a conduit for a vendor’s or any third parties inputs, then this again was my error or mis-interpreted.
Bottom line: I appreciate the various blogs being available as forums for discussion, and will seek to engage with you all in a more professional manner in the future. The strong reactions I have seen have prompted me to revisit the issues at hand and have a good think about what would be an optimal outcome of this whole initiative.
Mike of Melb
[...] Fringe has read somewhat bemusedly the statement of Mike of Melb, who posted in hit and run fashion on this blog as The [...]
Thank you Mike.
It’s good to see that you are as capable of intelligent discourse as we had suspected.
It’s only because of this that I am willing to acknowledge your role in helping me refine my arguments. Your attacks at the low hanging fruit of my case were a useful evolutionary tool.
Regards,
Kieran