Will the iPhone 3G blend?

The only reason that I can stomach this is because I haven't upgraded my iPhones to 3Gs:



(found through TUAW)







God Bless The Internet.

Your registrar is ripping you off? Ditch him!

Some asshat that works at GoDaddy got caught shilling on their domain auctions. This is the kind of crap that gets you kicked out of eBay if you try to pull it off. What the miscreant was doing was bidding on their auctions to raise prices artificially.

And that's not the only complaint. Almost everyone I know has had at one time a domain taken hostage by GoDaddy. For example, they'll keep you from transferring the domain out of GoDaddy. Or they will advertise their prices without some of the mandatory fees, to make it seem lower than their competition. In some cases they will tell you the domain is free if you buy some other service, but then it is almost impossible to transfer out.

Network Solutions was notorious because it was extremely hard to recover login information to manage a domain. I remember a few times when my employer would have to send a stupid fax just to prove that he owned the domain, which was stupid, there was no way that they could prove that the fax was legitimate.

To that add the Domain Registry of America, they harvest addresses off WHOIS, then send you a letter that looks like it is your domain renewal bill, when in reality they are asking you to transfer your domain to their registry.

If you only have one or two domains, you probably couldn't give a shit. But what happens when you are the designated geek that has to maintain custody of dozens, sometimes hundreds of domains? Do you really have time to deal with even two hosed domain names at the same time, and with a registrar that is not exactly cooperative?

Maybe it is time to you to become your own registrar. I have been my own registrar for the past four years, and I couldn't be happier.

How to become your own registrar

1. Find a registrar that is accredited by ICANN and has a reseller service.

2. Setup your front end, which should take you no more than an hour or so.

3. Buy one or two domain names from yourself, so you are familiar with how the process works.

4. Make sure that you have either a Pay Pal account setup for business, or a credit card merchant account. Again, email me if you need to know how I deal with credit cards outside of Pay Pal. For my personal needs, Pay Pal has been more convenient, most of the time my credit card merchant account sits idle.

5. Setup your prices, and don't be greedy. What you want here is to make about $1 over whatever it costs for the domain wholesale, plus any Pay Pal fees. If it costs you $8, sell your domains for $9, not $15.

6. Show your friends that you are now running your own micro registrar company, show them the WHOIS for your two test domains to prove that it isn't a scam.

7. Every time somebody bitches about getting raped by Network Solutions or GoDaddy, tell them that you have your own micro registrar and that you can beat their prices.

With a little bit of common sense, these domains will sell themselves. All it takes is for you to give a decent deal to a few people that have been mistreated by other registrars. You will be surprised of how many people that you know have more than two or three domain names that you just don't hear about.

The next time your boss throws a fit at having to renew a dozen Network Solutions domains in one shot, show him your price list. He'll probably move a couple to you even if out of curiosity. My first big customer was the owner of my previous company. He still renews his domains with me because not only am I much cheaper, but I have never screwed him or had any delay dealing with technical issues.

A friend of mine, a literary agent, decided to get domain names and vanity web pages for his top 15 writers. That's over 30 domain names from just two people.

Next thing you know, word of mouth will take care of it. Friends of friends will come out of the woodwork asking for your services. Since it is going to be small enough, it does not take a lot of effort to manage it, yet it pays itself no matter your volume of business.

Another thing, every now and then your wholesaler will throw in a discount for a few weeks. What you want to do here is try to use that as a hook for more business down the road, so lower your prices accordingly. My wholesaler has slashed the .info domain registrations so much that I can sell them for $2.99 and still make a buck on each domain. Those domains renew a year from now at their regular price, and most people will either pay for them or let them expire, most people won't transfer a domain if they can help it.

If you would like to know about my domains wholesaler just send me an email and I'll gladly show you their site. Their system allows you to resell both domains and web hosting.

Verizon doesn't want my hard-earned money

(picture related)

Like Dolores Claiborne used to say: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you."

I guess since this is fool me thrice, it's the part when Dolores pushed her husband down the dry well.

They did it again: one more time they scheduled to come here and finally pull down the fiber into mine and the three condo units above.

Once again, they didn't show up.

This time I let myself believe they would do it, so I ordered FIOS again. My order was put on hold by the website, and was asked to call them directly.

This is a straight report of the calls I made to Verizon yesterday without any kind of success:

The report is missing a 40 minute call I made in the afternoon, where basically I had to redo my order.

Most of the time spent on the phone in the morning was either on hold or being bounced from office to office. My record for staying on hold was one hour.

So, what happened? Simple, their web ordering system allowed me to request my current landline number to be transferred to Verizon, something that they claim it shouldn't do.

Fine, I said, give me a TV-Internet bundle.

"No, I can't. Bundles must include phone service. You'll have to pay for both of them at regular price." Ouch. The idea was to drop the phone part of the order until the FIOS equipment was installed, then order an upgrade to the triple bundle. Still not the end of the world.

The problem is that my install date is next Tuesday, and the wiring guys did not show up on Friday, so I already know I won't be getting FIOS on Tuesday. Fuckers.

It really makes you wonder what is the point of competing against a company that is so big that they can afford to push around people that are gladly trying to commit to $150 worth of monthly services over 24 months. I wonder how many people are having the same problem?

By the way, here is the mystery of the wiring: I own a condo, and I am on the lowest floor. Our wiring goes top down, starting at the attic and running down each unit's HVAC closet. In order for them to give me FIOS, the fiber runs through my three neighbor's HVAC closet. This means that the condo association management company sends out a memo so all four owners know that a service person will enter their unit on some date for the specific purpose of pulling that cable. If they miss a date, they have to send another memo with enough notice so people can make arrangements in case they can't be around.

This of course could had been avoided when Verizon contracted to have all of our 300 units setup for FIOS. They paid for the work and did not bother to send somebody to make sure that the work was done.

Is MagicJack the new Sunrocket?

For those of you that missed that mess, Sunrocket was a VoIP service that promised unlimited domestic and long distance calls in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico for $200/year or less, depending on the promotion. Sometimes you even got a $50 cordless phone just for signing up. The service was provided through a black box, you could either plug it into your home network router, or you could plug your broadband connection into it and use it as a one-port router. I was one of the lucky ones: the day I signed up I was given two years of full service for $200.

The service was great, but it did not seem to take advantage of QoS, so I had to make sure that I was not doing a big download before I reached for the phone to make a work call. Once the connection was using more than 200K or so, it did not really like it and started sounding noisy (one of the basic reasons why my current boss hated that line so much).

Sunrocket crashed and burned. I got about 14 months of service out of my $200, still an exceptional value. I did not want to try another of those outfits, so I simply upgraded my Comcast account to a triple play, which got me a new cable modem with built-in VoIP and proper QoS. It is still a bit noisy, but only when the connection is about to get saturated. What I don't like about the Comcast phone service is that their ancillary services are actually inferior to what I had with Sunrocket. Their voice mail management sucks, and the call history is not always available.

During one of my many insomniac episodes, I was channel surfing when I noticed that there was an infomercial for MagicJack. The beauty of the infomercial is that it was designed to sell the product without really explaining how it works, they just showed you to plug it into your PC, plug a phone into it and use it.

Pure genius.

The other thing is that the MagicJack is much smaller than the Sunrocket device, it is just a little box with an USB plug. People understand when you try to sell them a little box and very basic instructions.

You don't have to be a nerd, just take this box, plug it in, and you are done.

Now I am starting to see reports that they are actually making a killing selling the damn things. Broadband reports started a thread today about the subject, and you can see some more activity at Google News. The funny thing is how very few news outlets are questioning their momentum and if the company can actually make money. I guess we'll see.

I would have been tempted, but my employer just handed me a Cisco IP phone and a Cisco 851 router, so as long as that works without disrupting my home network it will probably leave the Comcast phone to be used for personal calls only.

The Faraday Cage Revised

Back in March I wrote an article on the challenges of maintaining a reliable wireless network when your building seems to follow the properties of a Faraday Cage. The basic problem was really crappy wireless performance at short ranges indoors. The problem was compounded by having two AppleTVs in the non-Wireless N network, both in streaming mode.

The fix was to run Cat5e cables so everything in the house (except the two iPhones) would run on 100baseT. Only the iMac and the Mac Book Pro had Gigabit ethernet, and 100MB should be more than enough.

It worked. With both AppleTVs running at the same time, both Xbox 360s on XBL up and running, and with bit torrent and the Comcrap phone, the network was completely usable.

This week I started phase two:

1. Replace all wiring with Cat6 wire. Cat5e is fine for up to 1GB, but Cat6 is built to lower crosstalk even more, which will should result in speeds closer to spec than just Cat5e. I replaced every patch cord, regardless of device, this way I will only have Cat6 cables in the house and won't have to bother checking to see if I have the right cable.

2. Replace the current 100MB switch in PJs room with a Gigabit ethernet switch. Since I am the one that rips videos for PJ, I am always moving 2GB or so files between the Mac Book Pro and the iMac, so this makes sure that the iMac has the best possible network connection that it can use.

3. Add an identical Gigabit ethernet switch to the office. This is the bridge between my office and PJs room (2).

4. Every device that was connected to the router is now on the Gigabit ethernet switch.

5. Retire the current wireless G router. It will stay in the network but only as a dedicated wireless access point, it will not be acting as a router. This router is a piece of shit, but it is enough to handle two iPhones that do nothing but check email and an occasional web page.

6. Add a Cisco 851 router. Lucky me, the company paid for it because it is needed for our new Cisco IP phones. Obviously this router should be able to do a much better job handling two Macs, two AppleTVs and two Xbox 360s than my piece of shit Belkin router. Supposedly the Cisco IP phone is not going to be an issue.

Once the Cisco IP phone is operational, I'll move the Comcrap VoIP line somewhere else, maybe the kitchen since I don't need two landlines on my desk. The Cisco 851 is not configured yet, and I am still waiting for my cables, but so far the two Gigabit switches and the Mac Book Pro are doing fine on the current Cat5e, the iMac's patch cord is not as good as I thought it was.

I am sure that the current Belkin router is a bigger bottleneck than the wiring. Funny thing, with everything with wireless disabled, the reception still sucks, my iPhones lose WiFi very easily.

This is what the network should look like in less than a week:

UPDATE (6/23/2008) : Cat 6 cables arrived today. The shipment included a Thank You card and a bag of Skittles. Everything but the Cisco 851 is configured exactly as I designed it.

Firefox 3 Arrives

With both a bang (from a gazillion people hitting reload and/or check for updates) and a whimper (from the Mozilla servers trying to survive the onslaught).

Fun times.

What most people did not understand is that if they were already running RC3, there was not going to be a real difference between that and 3.0. It would be OK to wait an hour or three before downloading the damn thing. I got tired of using check for updates, so after the first two hours I went to the download page.

And there it was. Basically identical to RC3 as I expected it.

(as I type this I realized that I forgot to upgrade it on Windows, duh!)

I just checked CPU usage, less than 30%, not exactly terrible. The killer feature for me is the awesome bar:



As you type into the address bar, it searches your history. I really love it because sometimes I have to hit three versions of the same URL while working on something (I may be looking at a project's production server, while looking at the maintenance and staging copies at the same time) and it is really sweet to type three arbitrary parts of the url and have the one you want scroll up to the top of the list. I have no idea about who came up with this concept but it is pure genius.

Funny, I checked my Windows version again, it is showing as 3.0, not as a beta. I have no clue how and when it was updated since I haven't run the damned thing in days.

I tried to use Foxmarks for centralized bookmarks, but it is a worse solution than Google Bookmarks (which requires the Google Toolbar to be of any real use). I actually managed to export my Google Bookmarks into Safari, then into Firefox and finally into Foxmarks. Firefox 3 choked bad simply by dragging more than a dozen bookmark folders. After an hour of fighting it, I deleted the extension, cleaned the bookmarks and resumed using Google Bookmarks and the Toolbar.

As for performance, it is hard to gauge since this is a dual core CPU, but at least I can tell it isn't choking the machine or eating up all of the memory. With 5 tabs open it is hovering at 30% or less.

Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8

Although Beta 2 of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 isn’t due out until some time in August, Microsoft is cautioning Web site owners now that they need to be prepping now for possible problems the new, more standards-compliant browser may cause.

As part of this week’s IE June Security Update for IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft introduced a new tag, “IE+EmulateIE7″ — which it is counting on to head off some of the incompatibilities the company is anticipating could occur, based on feedback it received from IE 8 Beta 1 testers.

[From Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8 | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com]

Big trouble ahead for all of us whose livelihoods depend on writing web applications that will render properly in the worst browser used by the biggest amount of our users: Internet Explorer 7. Somewhere out there a miserable bastard still has a user breakdown with a majority of IE6, I don't feel sorry for him: better him than me.

It's funny because this whole standards compliance switching is not much appreciated outside of the circle of people that have to make the damn websites look OK. There are even morons suggesting that there is no point on upgrading. They don't understand that there are millions of people that don't even know what a web browser is, to them the internet/web is the blue IE icon on their quick launch bar and desktop.

They have no clue about Firefox, and of course they can't tell the difference between IE6 and IE7 because either they don't know or they don't care.

Us, on the other hand, are in trouble. Every time we see something render right in IE and wrong in Firefox, we say fuck it, this is a corporate app, they are locked into IE. But what happens when everyone gets migrated over the weekend to IE8 and suddenly (thanks to the strict standards compliance mode) everyone sees the app look as crappy in IE as it did in Firefox.

Suddenly it looks like Firefox was right all along.

Right now I can tell I am going to have serious issues with two things:

1. The menu controls that ship with ASP.net 2.0.

2. The way fieldsets render in non-IE browsers.

I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com

I see that the mainstream press has picked up the "blogging" condemnation of the Time Warner experiment with tiered pricing, and usage caps. My own view on this probably counts for little but since dslreports.com is a "blog" as well perhaps I should set out "our view" for the record: Caps and tiered prices are overdue. The backlash against them at best misrepresents technical issues, and at worst is self-serving.

Clean fast bandwidth is not an inexhaustible resource. I want my ISP to deliver maximum speed without any perceptible congestion, and with minimal latency. I want them to invest heavily in their infrastructure to ensure they can meet the speed and latency targets morning noon and night. When an ISP engineer says that metering and caps are necessary for quality service, I believe them. Any customer of a data center understands the equation: they understand that BOTH speed and monthly usage are key factors in pricing. US ISPs, due to inheriting dial-up pricing plans (effectively included caps due to very low speeds) have been missing one pricing factor, to the detriment of the majority of users and the benefit to a minority.

[From Editorial: Caps are welcome - They just need to be structured to meet needs - dslreports.com]

This editorial is a great piece of work from a source that has a hell of a lot more clout than what they are willing to acknowledge. And it is right on the money: not only are caps the way to go, but we are going to hear a lot of noise from the same kind of abusers that these caps are designed to discourage.

I am with Comcast right now, and have been for about eight years. For a long time we heard of people getting their service mysteriously cancelled by Comcrap without the company ever disclosing what the cap actually was, except that it was excessive usage. People don't understand that broadband costs money, if a few saturate the service then it makes everyone else see Comcast as slow.

Of course, the whining is going to rage, but hopefully the end result will prove them right. You would have to pull a lot of video in order to hit the proposed 250GB limit with Comcast. If you are the kind of guy that is pulling above that, and Comcast offers you a $10 hit for every extra 10GB above the cap, you should be happy.

What about legal downloads? A full DVD is 4.7GB, so if you had a legal service that let you pull DVD video at full resolution, you would be able to watch 53 full DVDs in a month before hitting the cap. Comcast and others will probably make arrangements with the legitimate sources, like Netflix's instant play and the Apple iTMS so this content is cached within their network so it would not count against the cap.

What about software and other legitimate sources? The Australians have successfully proved that you can cache these at a local level, so you should be able to grab your Linux ISOs without problems.

Who is left? P2P. P2P is going to be left hanging out to dry, especially since the major broadband providers are already moving on with a newer generation, P4P, that will allow them to lock out the undesirables like The Pirate Bay, etc.

What we won't see is a price drop. What is their motivation to lower prices when even with competition present they simply nod to each other and keep the prices artificially high? We have FIOS available now, but the pricing is almost identical to cable. One would think that a new service would have to offer a lower price point to compete, since the feature set is almost identical.

Read the editorial, it is good stuff and you will be hearing a lot of bitching and moaning about it over the next week.

Firefox 3, Beta 4

I have been running Firefox 3 since beta 2 (OS X 10.4), this is the first time that (from what I can see), the add-ons are starting to fall behind. I don't give a shit about the Google toolbar and the minor stuff, but I really need Flash Block back. The only reason I ever have Firefox 3b4 crashing is because of Flash, otherwise it runs pretty damn nice.

Also, would somebody please get on with the god damn program and figure out how to write a bookmarks add-on for Google Bookmarks? If you don't take into account the Google toolbar, support for Google bookmarks is literally nonexistent. Everyone has a plugin for frickin del.icio.us, so how come there is nothing usable for Google bookmarks?

Except for those two basic nags, I like it a lot. It is faster and runs even better. So please, with sugar on top, Flash Block and Google Bookmarks.

Photo Credit: Photo by pigstyave, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com), a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

[From AOL to Acquire Global Social Media Network Bebo]

You gotta be shittin' me. First some morons want to add $5 to everyone's internet bill to pay for piracy, even if the user can't spell "P2P." Now AOL, a company that was the symbol of the Web 2.0 sinking ship until Microsoft decided to buy Yahoo out of existence, are blowing $850 million on a god damn website?



WTF is Bebo anyway? I spend pretty much my whole day online, so I expect to have a slightly higher exposure to new sites than say a guy that works at a counter for 8 hours then goes home and surfs for one hour. And I have no clue wtf that site is, except that from reading the press release it is obvious it is some kind of Facebook competitor.



Is it a full moon by any chance and all the dumbasses are coming out of the woods, howling for dumb deals? What's next?



BTW, AOL: I have another site, it is called Veraperez.com. I am willing to sell it to you for 1/1000th of what you paid for Bebo.com. I'll even give you a free USB wireless adapter for the Xbox 360 and an Airport Extreme wireless card if you send me your purchase proposal by COB 4/15.

Photo Credit: Photo by Grant Neufeld, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs

Having failed to stop piracy by suing internet users, the music industry is for the first time seriously considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users.

In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea's chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.

[From Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs]

This is the stupidest idea in the still short history of stupid ideas in regards to online piracy. For starters, why is everyone getting taxed? What would happen if the feds said "you know what? Let's make everyone with a driver's license pay $5 a year to pay for people that don't get caught speeding..."?





There would be riots.



Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia we went up in arms simply because they asked us to pay more money as the moving violation got worse.



Also, wouldn't this legalize all online piracy? After all, if we are paying the $5, it means that the owner of the copyright is not suffering damages, right? Not so fast, because this piracy surcharge would only affect music piracy, they are not collecting the $5 to pay Microsoft for all of the Vista licenses being pirated, or Vivid for all of the porn sales that they lose to piracy.

Nope, it is all about the music.



How much do you want to bet that somewhere in a dusty desk drawer there is a music sales market research study that says that, with zero piracy, the average US household would consume $5 in music CDs every month?



Dumbasses.

Photo Credit: Photo by ndh, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

TiVo, YouTube to deliver videos to TVs - Internet- msnbc.com

SAN FRANCISCO - TiVo users will be able to watch YouTube clips on their televisions by year's end, TiVo Inc. said Wednesday.

That's the latest move by YouTube to reach beyond the Web's regular boundaries. Fans of the popular online video provider can view its videos on their cell phones and Apple TV, a box that streams movies from people's computers to their TV.

[From TiVo, YouTube to deliver videos to TVs - Internet- msnbc.com]

When I setup our AppleTV's I thought that the Youtube feature would just sit there unused. Next thing I knew, PJ was spending as much time browsing Youtube from his AppleTV than from his iMac (which is great, it means less bickering between PJ and Ivette about who gets to use the iMac). I also like it a lot, after spending just a half hour browsing videos on a 37" HDTV, you don't want to go back to your computer.

Of course, the feature needs work, but it is most an issue with searching and browsing. The videos look pretty damn nice.

The Faraday Cage

A real Faraday Cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic radiation. Over the past few years I have been struggling with my condo because sometimes it feels like I am living inside of a Faraday Cage: my cell reception always sucks and I never get enough signal strength from my wireless access point.

Once we got the two AppleTVs, it got worse. Two AppleTVs streaming off two separate Macs, both on 802.11g is too much of a pain in the ass, and this is assuming the network is running normally. Mine wasn't, so performance for PJs AppleTV was always subpar when used in streaming mode. Because of that, his is setup to pull the actual content instead of streaming it.

Here's more or less what the network was like:

Red: 100MB ethernet.

Blue: 54MB wireless.

Green: Mac / AppleTV pair

I decided to hell with it, why bother with wireless when the condo is just 1000 square feet? I asked my friends around, and they all recommended the same: wire it yourself.

One of my coworkers lent me his crimping tool and his line testing gizmo, plus a bag of RJ45 connectors. I spent about $40 in cable, plus some really neat cable staples and a $10 5-port 100MB ethernet switch.

Last night was patch cord training, since I had not put together an ethernet cord since sometime in 1998. After two hours I had three completed patch cords that could actually pass the gizmo tests.

Today I wired my office, ran a line to PJ's room and made more patch cords. This is what the network looks like right now:





Red: VoIP line (off the Comcast Arris MTA)

Green: 100MB ethernet in my office

Blue: 100MB line to PJs room

Orange: 100MB ethernet in PJs room

There was virtually no benefit to the Mac Book Pro (which was never more than 10 feet away from the wireless access point), but my AppleTV is a little bit more responsive. The real benefit is that now there are no more networking issues with the stuff in PJs bedroom.

Netscape finally put to the sword - Internet - iTnews Australia

AOL has released its last ever update for Netscape Navigator and is encouraging its remaining users to switch to Flock or Firefox..

"Users will see the following major upgrade notice, released as Netscape 9.0.0.6," said Tom Drapeau, director of AOL's Netscape brand, in a company blog.

"When the Netscape 9.0.0.6 upgrade is accepted and run, the following notice will appear, denoting the end of support date and the recommendations of Flock and Firefox."

The pop-up offers users download links to a choice of the Flock or Mozilla's Firefox browser.

[From Netscape finally put to the sword - Internet - iTnews Australia]

Goodbye, funny guy. No surprise here, except why it took so damn long.

Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

Are underseas telecom cable cuts the new IEDs?

After two underwater cable cuts in the Middle East last week severely impacted countries from Dubai to India, alert netizens voiced suspicions that someone -- most likely Al Qaeda -- intentionally severed the cables for their own nefarious purposes, or that the U.S. cut them as a lead-in to an attack on Iran.

[From Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web | Threat Level from Wired.com]

Well, yeah! What's the web without some good, old fashioned paranoia?

They go on to claim that on average a cable is cut every 3 days, and that there are 25 ships (in the world?) that do nothing but fix cables. What I find the most amazing is the lack of people asking why the hell we still use cables instead of satellite signals.

Fifth Undersea Cable Cut

[From Fifth Undersea Cable Cut - Underwater bogeyman continues secret mission... - dslreports.com]

Can you spell tinfoil hat? I can. So can Slashdot.



The funny thing is how hard it is to find two news sources reporting a consistent breakdown of what is broken and which countries are affected. Or even make a distinction between cables that were actually cut and cables that are suffering outages due to the traffic rerouting.

5 AM, wtf?

Woke up half an hour ago, a bit too lucid so I said wtf, I'll check my email.

The iPhone couldn't connect, but wireless was up. Checked the laptop, again, wireless was up. The cable modem and router looked OK.

It took another half hour to get the cable modem to pick up a lease, and now I am fully awake.

The funny part? I did not have email, something I already knew since I checked it thru EDGE.

And so the Microsoft/Yahoo soap opera starts

Image by judland, used under the Creative Commons license.

Earlier today, we were set us up the bomb: Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, badly. They are willing to pay $44.6 billion for it. That figure kept most of the people busy until sometime this afternoon some genius figured out that, horror of horrors, Yahoo owns Flickr!

Oh boy, we got us a rebellion.

This is the kind of thing that I was referring too a while ago, when I decided to bail out of Flickr into the less sexier Picasa. While Picasa is nothing more than a simple photo dump (with really handy hooks to online printing, thank you), Flickr is a full fledged community. And what is an integral part of every community? Douche bags that think that they own the site and that its mere existence is a constitutionally protected right. $25/year buys them the right to dictate to stock holders how the company should be run.

Where were they when Flickr was sold to Yahoo? Yahoo is a big faceless monster, no different than Microsoft. Why these people did not go up in arms?

Suddenly Picasa looks extremely attractive, don't you think?