s9y testdrive - Land of the free

Soldaten sind Mörder

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:07:11 +0000

   -- Come on, let us shoot!

Danke, Wikileaks!

Leaked U.S. video shows Iraq deaths, including Reuters staff

Collateral Murder

fefe.de Linksammlung

one step forward, two steps back

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:06:19 +0000

It finally happened: Comcast has signed me up for their Data Usage Meter, as I don't belong to the "vast majority" of their customers:

Your Comcast High-Speed Internet service has a monthly data usage allowance
of 250 gigabytes (GB). If you are wondering whether you are at risk of exceeding
this 250GB threshold, you should know that the vast majority - around 99% - of
Comcast customers use significantly less than 250GB per month.

huh? I thought volume-based contracts are a thing of the past. It's all about flat-rates now, no? It's 2010 now and they're still maintaining this limitation. I've even throttled my RelayBandwidthRate to 90KB/s but I'm still exceeding their 250GB/month:

So, what's next? Their FAQ states:

If you exceed more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume
the most data on our high-speed Internet service, you may receive a call from the
Customer Security Assurance ("CSA") team to notify you of excessive use. At that
time, we will tell you exactly how much data per month you had used. When we call
you, we try to help you identify the source of excessive use and ask you to moderate
your usage, which the vast majority of our customers do voluntarily. If you are
contacted by the CSA team again for excessive use within six months of the first
contact your service will be subject to termination for one year. We know from
experience that most customers curb their usage after our first call. If your
account is terminated, after the one year period expires you may resume service
by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to you needs.

(yes, the spelling errors are really in the FAQ). I like the last senctence the best - as if anyone would subscribe to the ISP again who kicked them out before :-)

Well, let's see when that happens and hopefully I'm already moving out when they're about to terminate my contract - that way I'd save postage sending my cancellation letter :-)

Oh, the reason why they've set up this limit is customer feedback, of course.

Update: I've reduced AccountingMax again, now we're down to 3GB/day, which will be reached after ~15 hours, the remaining hours my Tor daemon will live in hibernation, oh well. I've updated the graph above. It's May 13th now and I just passed 100 GB. For the record, Comcast did not call yet....maybe they're busy sniffing exit nodes, hm?

select wife_id from marriages where divorce_date is not NULL;

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:35:23 +0000

A bit old, but wow - what a great article! And it's fun to read how table fields are added and removed as the thought process evolves.

Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:56:03 +0000

Wow. Only a few weeks after starting to run a Tor node, the first "Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement" made it to my inbox, sent by my beloved ISP. Well, it's a "notice of claim", so someone (they didn't tell me who) claims that my IP address was the "source of the infringing works", as they put it.

Of course I replied instantly, so let's see what happens next. Hopefully they'll put me in contact with the so called "copyright owner, or its authorized agent" and Comcast won't have to deal with this. Dealing with this kind of crap won't get them (or any ISP, for that matter) any revenue, so may be they'll just terminate my contract to be done with it. But maybe not, Comcast could use a few plus points on their net neutrality stance.

Oh, and for the record: "Harry Potter Audio Books", wtf? Not me, your honor - not me. Go get your LI tools straight.

Goodbye, hulu.com?

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:50:00 +0000

After starting to run a Tor node, the Hulu GeoFilter thinks I'm trying to access their content from outside the U.S. As their GeoFilter issues form was having difficulties finding out where I was connecting from, they advised to send an email to support@hulu.com, but I've haven't heard back from them ever since. That's a pity, now I can't watch their shows any more. Also, they've taken the Daily Show off their program, which is basically the only show I've watched over there. So, it's off to Bittorrent-World for me now; maybe we meet again when you fix your GeoFilter?

Tor needs you!

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:54:07 +0000

After finally setting up a Tor (exit-)node, this happened:

The spike at the end means that I've increased the daily limit again to 8 GB and await a message from my ISP every minute now :-)

Security theater has come to town!

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:27:24 +0000

I always wondered what the blogosphere was babbling about regarding the shiny new security measures recommended by the TSA. Well, now I know what Security theater feels like: half-assed "everything must be checked" searches for everyone boarding a plane to the US.

So there are two security checks at LHR now: the first one is the usual metal detector and hand-baggage scanning, with random individual checks which takes about a minute per person. The other one is *at the gate*, starts at boarding time (expect major delays!) and takes 3-5min per person. Yes, these are made-up numbers, since TSA's Wait Time Calculator is out of order at this time, probably due to unforseen security checks. And "half-assed", because the search drones are trying so hard to do as instructed in their classroom, that they're looking diligently at laptops and little baby-bottles, as if they could spot "dangerous looking items" with their bare eyes.

And even if they found something: will the security guys from the first checkpoint be fired then? Why not? FYI, neither of them found the matches in my hand luggage - and yes, I must've left them there by accident, I did not study their Airport Screening Manual that was leaked some time ago :-)

YEEHAW!

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:16:28 +0000

Am 27. Dezember 2009 hat die deutschsprachige Wikipedia die Eine-Million-Artikel-Marke überschritten. Na dann, Relevanzdiskussion my ass, wuerde ich meinen :-)

oh, FAIL, aber sowas von: der Artikel wurde zur Loeschung vorgeschlagen. Die Diskussion geht auch noch munter weiter, aus der Zeichenanzahl & der Zeit, die diese Diskussion bisher aufgetuermt hat, haette man bestimmt schon 3 weitere Artikel schreiben koennen :-)

Thanks, Wikipedia.

nospam@example.com (admin) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:01:05 +0000

Rainforest Schmainforest

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:56:21 +0000

After stumbling over yet another celebritiy to speak out about the (dying of our) precious rainforests, I just couldn't help myself and wanted to see if the numbers add up. I'm talking about the rate at which the rainforests are destroyed, as they rank from "the size of a football" field every second or every four seconds.

A standard football pitch is about 7000 sqm in size. The size of the rainforest was much harder to come by, the number I have now is 2.6 million square miles or 6.73*10^12 sqm. Well, by that rate we should be out of trees in 122 years resp. 30 years with the more scarier number. Still, wouldn't that be just enough time to plant new trees as they are cutting them down? Then again, I don't know jack about envrionmental issues, but this play on numbers got me curious :-\

The 912 Project

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:57:45 +0000

It's not often I get to politics in this blog, but sometimes I cannot avoid it. Today I was looking for the reference of the "Moment of Zen" at the end of this Monday's episode of The Daily Show. There was some Fox News dude mocking on Glenn Beck - hey I didn't even know Fox News can be fun to watch :-) Well, wtf is this Glenn Beck? Turns out it's another Fox News dude and the all knowing oracle was able to shed some light here: apparently this very same Glenn Beck is behind something called The 912 Project. Not that I care what random people do in their spare time, but this just proves to me one more time that Fox News is full of shit, having morons like this hosting a show on a news network. How retared does one have to be to need rules like It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion? Yes, 9 princliples and 12 values - good luck buddy, you'll receive the Nobel Peace Prize for sure.

Converting to Metric

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:27:56 +0000

They should hand out things like this in school:

Thanks, xkcd!

Dublin, CA

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:11:08 +0000

Somewhere in Dublin, CA

Sybase

Apart from the BSOD, have a look on the price displayed below: translated into the metric system this would be 0.46 USD for 1 litre, or 0.33 EUR. Guess it's time to buy this tank already.

censored is the new online

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:22:15 +0000

alice$ ifconfig en0 | awk '/inet / {print $2}' | xargs whois | grep NET  
Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. EASTERNSHORE-1 (NET-24-0-0-0-1)
Comcast Cable Communications BAYAREA-9 (NET-24-4-0-0-1)

Yes, it's true - I've signed with the one ISP I wanted to avoid in the first place. And no, getting an internet connection around here is no fun: it's awkward (a 30min. chat session with some hotline monkey just to get my order through?) and expensive: 42 USD for 6Mbps? Come on. "with scorching speeds up to 4 times faster than 1.5 Mbps DSL" - what? Oh, and for $ 66,95 one can order the Blast! package, with speeds "up to 16Mbps", with a magic "Powerboost" feature: "PowerBoost provides bursts of download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5 MB of a file, respectively". Dude, wtf? Unfortunately the competition is no better: you have to subscribe to an High Speed Internet Elite package to get 6Mbps, for 33 USD a month. However, DSL is not available at my place, so I have to stick to the one and only cable provider servicing this area. Welcome to the silicon valley. On the plusside: 5 days after I signed up, I was online - pretty impressive, compared the adventures one has to go through back home. Oh, and winter has finally arrived, I even had to scratch hoarfrost off the car tonight - brrr. So much for global warming. Good job, Greenpeace :-\ Oh, another thing: I was provided with a DOCSIS 2.0 certified cable modem, assigning the public IPv4 address to the connected device. Which is kinda neat: now we don't have a strange NAT blackbox in our way to do "stuff" :-) However, since configuration is done via DHCP, the hostname is modified too. With MacOS 10.4 and /etc/hostconfig still being used, we can avoid that by setting HOSTNAME="foo". So, it's basically dhclient's supersede option in Apple speak :)

Dinnertime

nospam@example.com (Christian) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:19:58 +0000