Joe Szilagyi

Banned in China: what the regime doesn’t want its people to see – Telegraph Blogs

In case you had no idea what China bans it’s one billion people from seeing:

1. Photos of of the Tiananmen Square massacre of civilians.
2. Photos of tortured Falun Gong members.
3. Searches related to Tibet, Tiananmen, democracy, rights, and privacy.
4. Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Friendster. Many online games or game-like systems.
5. iTunes store and similar stores. Many iTunes apps are filtered out by China.
6. Western news sources (most).
7. Wiki-type open editing sites (such as Wikipedia).

More details here, and that’s just the stuff we know about. Even more:

Above: Mayan calendar. Below: Egyptian technology. Consider:

In regards to this blog post from four days ago, I just found this in my inbox tonight:

Back in 2007, King County initiated discussions with the federal government’s Department of General Services Administration (GSA), who administers the DOTGOV domains on the Internet, regarding King County’s web address. King County wanted to register the user-friendly address “kingcounty.gov”. Simultaneously, the GSA wanted King County to relinquish the address “metrokc.gov” in order to comply with their web address policies and also due to possible confusion with the city of Kansas City, Missouri. After negotiations, it was agreed that both would occur–King County would receive use of the domain name “kingcounty.gov” and King County would relinquish control of the domain name “metrokc.gov” effective January 31, 2009.

…

We share your concern for effective and consistent service to our citizens. King County’s web site is critical to those services. It was for that reason that King County pursued the “kingcounty.gov” name. In fact, as you can see from the GSA’s policies regarding naming conventions (http://www.dotgov.gov/dnc.aspx#county), GSA policy requires us to have the web address “kingcounty.wa.gov” or “kingcounty-wa.gov”, however, in our negotiations with the GSA, we sought a very simple name to ensure that our citizens receive the benefit of the most logical and easy to remember address possible. It was for the reason of compliance with GSA policy that we surrender the legacy name, and with the impending shut-down of that old address, King County is now in compliance with that federal directive.

There’s a bit more and a tiny bit of interesting metrics on usage of the old name, but that’s the gist of the situation I mentioned.

Absolutely reasonable and absolutely understandable given the situation, but almost completely (near as I can see) unexplained until I fired off a “what is this?” e-mail that also CC’d the King County Executive’s office. From some searching around just now, I can’t easily find any reference to nor mention of the specifics behind this online. That’s the sort of stuff that should be, you know, mentioned to your users and stake holders. King County has a blog–it takes only one quick blog post or alternately a press release to communicate this out.

If they already did message this out back in 2007 or 2008, they didn’t apparently do so again almost a year later (a scale of years, in Internet Standard Time) when they finally flipped the magic switch before the old domain name goes dark for our regional government. An IT department’s job is to over-communicate. It doesn’t take much to do this. Lack of communications from IT is one of my biggest pet peeves professionally. Good on them to explaining it to me in e-mail, but now I wonder if they’ll actually post the reason behind this. At the least, it’s rather interesting for nerds. For everyone else around here, it will give people another reason to grumble about Kansas City and the Midwest. They steal our basketball team, now they steal one of our domain names…

The group that manages the official King County web sites has apparently retired it’s longstanding metrokc.gov domain to replace it with kingcounty.gov, which is all well and good. It’s a better name, anyway. But what they’ve done is redirect ALL requests for the old host names to a useless dumping ground instead of just aliasing the old names over the new ones. This is what they have done:

Why is this incredibly stupid and improperly done? Say you have any number of bookmarks or embedded tools (say, mobile applications–iPhone or other) that aim at http://tripplanner.metrokc.gov. That now arbitrarily dumps you on http://www.kingcounty.gov/About/metrokc.aspx rather than forward you to the matching URL on the new host on http://tripplanner.kingcounty.gov/. This applies to all of these in the chart above. Who on Earth approved this way to do it? No one just “retires” and kills off a major domain name, let alone one so old and embedded all over who knows where. All you’ve done is now break all prior internet connectivity to various parts of the county’s web infrastructure.

You also did no favors to search engine optimization and Google searches for the county, either.

If you’re in King County please e-mail them at:

http://info.kingcounty.gov/about/contact/default.aspx

To let them know what a bone head move this is.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that the KC “old” domain name previously forwarded to the new one, on a 1:1 URL basis, but that was discontinued as a practice last week. Why would you stop doing that? It makes perfectly logical sense that you do that indefinitely. Unless you wanted to actually repurpose metrokc.gov for some completely separate purpose, which would be odd and pointless, the actual stopping of the forwarding is… odd, pointless, and disruptive to all users of the web site. It needs to be fixed.

I was thinking about what happened to our Comcast service when we first moved to Seattle, after our recent slight mix ups with their digital conversion. We moved into our new apartment, and mysteriously, Comcast on every channel is just one thing: hard core, and I mean REALLY hard core porn. Specifically, the audio is nothing but flesh slapping flesh for minutes on end combined with screaming. I have no idea what channel it was, and while it was fun for a few jokes and “Wow, is this for real?” moments, we wanted regular TV in the end.

The field lady that come out to investigate–the Comcast dispatcher thought we were kidding–took one look at it, handed me a replacement box to hold a moment while she bent over to undo the old one from Connecticut–and said:

“I don’t see a problem with that,” and couldn’t stop laughing, but neither could we. It was the first time I ever had fun with someone coming out to fix something. Win! The local Seattle staff for them has always been awesome. National, definitely not so much, but with 100,000 employees I suppose it has to be a dice roll there. But local Seattle staff? Always fantastic.

Update: It turns out our recent problem was also caused by the fact that our older Series 2 Tivo apparently doesn’t play nice with the Comcast digital conversions and most “standard” Tivo setups with Comcast converter boxes. That’s now a 3rd or 4th very nice Comcast trip out to our place in as many years. Sadly, no incredibly cute/hot repair lady to chuckle over porn, but this last guy totally looked like Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly).

Mainly, this is since S2 Tivos have only internal analog converter cards. We use the infrared controller, that Tivo supplies, so this lets us control the Comcast channel changing via our Tivo remote. We can still control and run the operation, but had lost most of our basic cable because of this. Reformatting the Tivo into old school single tuner mode (AKA, “The Fancy VCR”) let us get the channels back. The problem is that a lot of the magic firepower of Tivo is with the dual tuner, to let you record two things and watch a third, and that is now gone on the S2 models. We ended up biting the bullet and ordering a Series 3 Tivo because of this, and because Tivo had a conveniently priced (and timed!) upgrade offer for old-timer customers like us. All digital, three signals again, and we can stream Netflix directly into the new one.

This is more for the networking geeks out there, rather than your average iPhone user. Brough Turner, a veteran telecom guru and several-time CTO has got a theory. The short version is that AT&T has enough capacity to handle the massive amounts of traffic that the iPhone users consume, contrary to a lot of the news reports out there. The real problem is that AT&T has screwed up the configuration of their wireless network, he says.

The bottleneck link is the over-the-air link, i.e. the connection from radio access network or UTRAN to the Mobile Statation (MS) in the above diagram, therefore the critical buffers are those at the UTRAN. In practice the UTRAN includes both the basestations (called Node-Bs) and the Radio Network Controllers (RNCs) which coordinate handovers between basestations (among other things). Because of hand-overs, the amount of data buffered at the Node-B is relatively small. It’s the buffers at the RNC that must be large enough to deal with the delay variations in the radio network and yet small enough to induce packet loss when the network gets congested.

I have no idea if he’s right, but it makes sense. Good read, if you know networking.

Read this article…

The company’s product managers and engineers were laid off, leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers — which speaks to a website to be left on life support. Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, is also believed to be gone.

Brian Krebs, who does a tech blog here for the Washington Post, apparently got word that McColo, a big hosting provider/ISP in San Jose, California, was responsible for “75% of all spam” in the United States. This guy tracked down all of the information, and then brought all that info to the backbone carriers for McColo (a backbone, or carrier, in simple terms is the ISP that gives your ISP connectivity. What happened? McColo is history–they’ve been shut down by everyone and as far as the Internet today goes, no longer exists. Since spam is such big business, I wonder how long until Krebs gets targetted for some kind of retaliation? That was an act of balls of brass–read that article.

The Mars Rover has died, and the mission has been terminated. NASA denied reports of a giant robot’s involvement and sounds of “transforming metal” playing any role.

Read this lovely gem:

A Shenendehowa student who alerted his principal that he could steal private employee information now is facing felony charges.

The 15-year-old sophomore allegedly breached the district’s system while in computer simulation class and gained access to 250 names of past and present Shen transportation employees. He used his student password to view their Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and more, Shenendehowa officials said.

Then he allegedly sent an e-mail at 1 p.m. Tuesday to High School Principal Donald Flynt, saying he had the database.

The student informs the school of the security hole he found, and in turn is arrested. Well done–that’ll encourage him to be helpful in the future.

From Digg; these are the sorts of “simple” methods and tutorials that people need to push, to get Linux into common home usage. “This tutorial explains how to turn an old PC with additional hard disks into a simple home file server. The file server is intended for home use. The home file server is accessible by Windows and Linux computers in the home network.”

read more | digg story

Via Digg, I am filled with dirty lust and wish to buy two of these. Can I justify this without the wife bonking me on the head? “1920×1200 24-inch Wide Screen LCD displays like the Soyo 24-inch LCD below the $300 mark and even below $250 on Black Friday.”

read more | digg story

In response to being sued and humiliated on the internet over their “secret website,” Best Buy has added a disclaimer that warns customers that the in-store kiosk doesn’t display the same prices as the public website. Best Buy was caught using a duplicate website to fool customers who tried to compare internet prices with in-store prices.

read more | digg story

Good bye, and good riddance.

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Long time faithful readers may recall that back in October 2005, Andi’s old Emachines computer (dubbed “Bessie”) went tits up hard-core when Windows ate itself. Even our friend Rob, an engineer incredibly savvy in the Deeper Mysteries of Windows, wasn’t able to fix it. That was reformatted with a wonderful donation of a Windows XP Pro disk from our friend Tobey, and became Bessie 2.0. Two months later, it began convulsing and frothing at the CD-ROM drive, and promptly became an ex-PC (it was merely resting). It had turned out to be, at the time, the mother board dying. It was certainly out of warranty and extended coverage, and was laid to rest. A quick and annoyed trip to Best Buy later, we had a new Hewlitt Packard, and Bessie 3.0 rode off into the sunset of November, 2005.

This morning, after checking e-mail, she shut down her Bessie 3.0, and after work today, it wouldn’t display video. Odd. Reboot. The fan whirred astonishingly loudly, compared to usual. Odd. No keyboard lights. New keyboard? Nada. New monitor? Nada. Rebooting? Sure, by pulling the power cord out or using the manual switch in back–power cycle by the button in front? Nada–no response. Being judicious computer and gadget shoppers, we always get at least the middle-tier service package. Wasteful? Perhaps, but you’re only paranoid if the technology gremlins aren’t out to get you. We took it back to Best Buy/Geek Squad. Extended service!

Er, nope. We somehow forgot to buy it, this time. Confirmed. Oops. Another mobo bites the dust, and Bessie 3.0 joins her sisters. I need to order a new one from Dell…

Bessie 4.0 will be an XPS 410, bypassing my XPS 400 from October 2005 by bounds, for only $90 more. Dagnabbit.

If Andi is late in e-mail replies or whatnot, that’s why. She can do everything on my PC, or our laptop, but she dislikes working long on the laptop or on my funky ergonomic keyboard.

Oh, splendid! I love Gmail, but I’m one of the weird minority apparently which completely hates their web interface: “A report from India’s Hindustan Times indicates that Google is prepping an offline version of Gmail.”

Here’s to hoping the off-line client is better. Or, you know, they’d just allow IMAP access via my Thunderbird and be ultra-awesome.

read more | digg story

This is just awesome.

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Via Digg: “Adblock Plus, the Firefox browser plug-in that erases advertisements from web pages, is a killer of a killer app … or it could be if it became really popular.The widespread adoption of ad-blocking software could totally atomize online advertising. But, the numbers still aren’t high enough YET to spur a counterattack by the big guns, like Google.”

If this ever does take off and reached critical mass, I wonder what sort of outcry we’d see, from it, on the part of e-business. Personally, I don’t see any harm in web advertising, or targeted web advertising: bandwidth is NOT free, up or down the Internets, and ultimately someone needs to pay for it. The vast majority of websites, even high quality ones, are done by hobbyists–they don’t make a profit. They need a way to recoup bandwidth and hostings costs at the least.

read more | digg story

A method to update your wordpress blog, using a plugin that will upgrade your blog automatically to the latest version.

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Swedish grannies are connecting to the net at 40 gigabits per second.

read more | digg story