So, after the Phorm evilhood, and the weird brokenness detailed here, and the 30-odd hour no-notice outage they dropped on me just after I started working from home, literally driving me to drink (the nearest operational open WLAN I found was in a pub), now Virgin Media comes up with this. It’s not just the…
Read More You Say Virgin, We Say Die!He imagined that satellite broadcasting might help a hundred Indian villages save two cows a year and understood what an impact that might have. Says a commenter at PZ Myers’ place, on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke’s death. Two cows a year; now that’s genius. I can’t presume to say whether this came true;…
Read More Two cowsWhen Pakistan Telecom tried to kill the Internet in an effort to stop the public seeing evil things on YouTube the other week, there was instant media-reaction and a fairly swift fix by the organisations involved. Things are different when you’re a small Kenyan ISP, though; for about a day now, Africa Online (AS36915) has…
Read More On the African Internet, no-one can hear you screamOne of the many wonderful things about the Web is that its hypertext structure not only permits us to navigate it, and to invoke external resources (scripts, graphics, etc), but also to measure relevance and authority. Google’s killer insight was of course just this; to use links as votes for the relevance of a given…
Read More Anti-LinkAndrew Smulian’s arrest with Viktor Bout is interesting in a couple of ways; first, there was the investigation itself, as previously blogged. Then, there’s the fact that he was clearly well embedded in the system, as far back as 1997. Context; the accounts for Air Pass, a South African company Bout reversed Air Cess into…
Read More Smulian: On the Payroll Since 1997Much more is filtering out about the Bangkok Bout Bust; it seems fairly certain that his arrest was the result of a sting operation in which the DEA posed as buyers from the FARC. Bout booked a meeting room in the Bangkok Sofitel; he, and several others, were waiting for their guests to arrive when…
Read More Smulian In the Bag With Viktor BoutMy ISP just did something naughty. BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse have been caught in a scheme to sell details of all your Web activity to marketers (…and anyone else) without your knowledge or consent. And the full details are genuinely worrying. The Register has a major scoop, in that it’s got hold of…
Read More Who needs remote control?It looks like an attempt to censor rightwing arsewit Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam home movie has broken YouTube. Pakistani authorities issued a circular to ISPs in Pakistan demanding that they block access to YouTube; but this doesn’t explain why it’s unreachable from the UK. A traceroute to www.youtube.com goes into PCCW’s network and dies; the explanation…
Read More YouTube is Borked: Pakistani Censors SuspectedIt looks like an attempt to censor rightwing arsewit Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam home movie has broken YouTube. Pakistani authorities issued a circular to ISPs in Pakistan demanding that they block access to YouTube; but this doesn’t explain why it’s unreachable from the UK. A traceroute to www.youtube.com goes into PCCW’s network and dies; the explanation…
Read More YouTube is Borked: Pakistani Censors SuspectedBack from Barcelona, after a terribly intense 3GSM. This was my third, and the first in which I was actually participating rather than just reporting; I feel the need to decompress, my feet hurt, and I’m feeling the effects of eating breakfast at 5pm, covering every game in town, and finally dining (or rather lunching)…
Read More Back from 3GSM Mobile World Congress