James Galvin

I spent some time today setting up a new TV the old fashioned way, scanning through the frequencies with the remote control. I confess that I was gripped by an eager anticipation as RTE 1 materialised on the screen - a residue of the excitment from the old days when one guy would be up on the roof adjusting the aerial, while the fella in the living room shouted up the chimney whenever the blob of dots on the screen began to resemble Gay Byrne. Somehow its still a surprise when TV3 and TG4 pop up on the box.

If you had asked me in 2001, I would not have predicted that six years later we would still be fiddling with bunny ears and coat hangers in Ireland, trying to tune in Network 2 without losing RTE 1. In the rising tide of media centre PCs and wifi enabled gaming consoles, surely this next six years will see major changes in the way we watch the television. TV over the internet has been a long time coming, but at last, it is safe to say that we’re nearly there.

The first step is modernising is increasing the definition, and just about everyone I know bought a HD-ready LCD TV this year, but none of them have actually gone so far as to watch anything in high def. Extra hardware requirements and monthly subscription costs for a couple of HD channels on Sky renders that service impractical. And with BlueRay still volatile in its infancy, I expect that only those of us rich enough to own a Playstation 3 will be experiencing that in the short term. This is why I see Zudeo Vuse, from Azureus, as being a great service. “A radically new way to discover and watch popular TV shows and hard-to-find videos - Hi-def and full screen” is exactly what the doctor ordered, and with BBC having pledged tons of content, this is a resource that is destined for very big things.

There has been plenty of news lately about Babelgum - a next generation TV provider with a Long Tail philosophy who recently set up shop in Dublin. Babelgum sounds promising, but it has been overshadowed a bit by Joost who are that bit closer to launch. I was pleased to receive my Joost invitation today, apparently they have been very busy fine-tuning it for me. They’ve even given me this here image which makes me so proud:

There’s no Linux version just yet, but they have released a client to run on my new Macbook Pro. I had a very quick tour of the software earlier, and it is impressive to say the least. The problem with beta software is that it doesn’t always work, and this is exactly what is stopping me from examining the service further. The Joost support forums are hopping at the moment with people unable to connect, and unfortunately one of them is me. First impressions - it looks great, but in a country where our ISPs think 128k upload is standard for broadband, do we have the bandwidth for it? I’ll come back to that…

“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.�

Announcing the blogger code of conduct, courtesy of Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media (those computer books with an animal on the cover). The media has latched onto this story like never before - it made the front page of the NY Times yesterday, and I’ve seen it springing up in a bunch of newspapers this side of the Atlantic, including on BBC news. I have been struggling all evening, tormented by the claims that the man behind this is from Cork - but now I see the wealth of publicity resulting from this attention-seeking gimmick, and the limitless potential for spin-offs and follow-ups exploiting the willingness of clueless journalists to spout a few internet buzzwords, and I am convinced that this can only be the work of a Kerryman with a dodgy birth cert.

On the internet, bad publicity does not exist. The bottomless well of negativity reacting to this beacon of stupidity must surely be overflowing by now, but as it spreads like an incredulous fungus, each backlink will only serve to feed the absurd monstrosity at the source. What worries me is that, against the tide of common sense, Tim O’Reilly is building up a legion of followers supporting the new measures. It reminds me of a Derren Brown act where where he told a bunch of people to walk to one end of the room. Those that did, stayed, those that didn’t, were sent home. This was his first step in filtering the most malleable of the group who would be susceptible to his tricks. One might suspect that Tim O’Reilly is assembling his own private army, a horde of enthusiastic do-gooders still trying to figure out whether two legs are good or baaad, as they proudly display their eye-catching “Civility Enforced” insignia that somebody found in the Microsoft’s ClipArt archives from 1997.

I don’t think there’s any need to delve into the details as to what exactly is wrong with the code of conduct, since I’d probably be preaching to the converted. Damien has a good summary of the response around the place, and it is refreshing to see that there aren’t so many people kitting out in their camouflage and sheriff’s badge just yet. I particularly like this guy’s response.

I’m always cautious using the word ‘blog’ in describing this site, and cringe outright at the mention of a ‘blogosphere’. The internet is so full of people trying to make their own definitions - I just want to update my website with cool stuff. Does this mean I go back to having a homepage again?

I’ll never forgive Jack for introducing me to Salad Fingers, by David Firth. It has been around for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. If you haven’t already seen these then I must warn you that it could leave you leave you scarred for life.

Another one that passed me by was the equally horrifying Basshunter, a Swedish band who topped the charts in several European countries with their song about an IRC bot. They also had a top 10 single about the Warcraft III game, DOTA. This is what happens when the internet and online gaming culture becomes mainstream. I have to admit, I laughed out loud on a few occasions.

Breaking news on Silicon Republic -

08.03.2007 - Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has become the first university in Europe to introduce Google’s email service Gmail for its students. While the email will retain the TCD.ie domain, the mail system will use Gmail’s technology such as anti-spam and search features.
TCD’s conversion to Gmail will occur over the next few months and the transition is expected to be completed by October.

“We are very excited to be partnering with an august and progressive college such as Trinity on this project,� said Google’s European director of online sales and operations John Herlihy.
…
“Through this innovative alliance with a technology leader such as Google, Trinity College will be able to provide technology and service of a very high quality to all its students and future graduates,� commented TCD provost Dr John Hegarty.

“As the first Irish university and European university in this domain, Trinity College aims to meet the growing technological needs of all our students with the advanced communication tools which Google can provide in this unique collaboration.

“It’s refreshing to think that a 400-year old institution such as Trinity can engage as a successful early technology adopter,� Dr Hegarty mused.

Perhaps TCD provost Dr. Hegarty should muse about the fact that we set this up in Griffith College 8 months ago. While the service was in beta at the time, with a max of 5,000 accounts, it was enough to cover our first year students who have been using it happily all this time. But as the old adage says, never let the facts get in the way of a good back-patting!

I’m happy with my new Eircom Broadband connection, but it’s not the reliable service that it used to be. Tonight I was knocked offline for a few minutes, as my router lost its connection for no apparent reason. I don’t have a particularly weak signal to noise ratio, and I’m not far from the exchange, but this is not the first time I have been randomly disconnected. I’ve had a couple of search referrals to this site from users who are clearly experiencing similar issues, e.g. “why is my eircom broadband connection always failing”. I know Paddy is having a terrible time in the past two weeks, being disconnected most evenings and sometimes unable to connect for hours. Eircom send out engineers and replace routers, but nothing gets fixed.

This thread on boards.ie blames the new batch of Netopia routers that Eircom provide - the silver ones with two aerials and ‘eircom’ written on top. I’ll track down my trusty old Solwise SAR110 router and see if that makes an improvement, but I’m wondering if Eircom’s network is sick at the moment. Is anyone else having problems?

No offence to my Irish Broadband 1meg which has done the web browsing job nicely, but I’m delighted to say that I have got my Eircom DSL installed - and it was relatively painless. Slightly disappointed that I’m only getting 128k upload on the 2meg/256k package, which means that I can’t use cl_maxpackets 125. Vincent, from Ballymore Eustace, just upgraded to this package specifically to avail of the greater upload speeds, but he is also stuck on 128k up. I’m sure they’ll blame the line atten, but I have a feeling that this is part of a sinister conspiracy by Eircom.

Still, this is the first time I’ve used DSL in Ireland since they reduced the interleaving on the residential packages. Latency is slightly higher than other people I checked with in Dublin - I’m getting 19ms to Irish servers, while others will be around the 11ms mark, but the main thing is that its consistent. I will never leave the house again.

At last I have escaped from the chaos of Dublin’s south inner city. No more will I be lulled to sleep by the constant sound of rockets being fired at some guy’s head. I knew the place was a zoo from day one, but, with Halloween approaching, the area really lives up to its local nickname: “Beirut”.

I will miss my Cork Street pals - the insane security guard, the heroin dealer on the corner, and most of all - the toothless old man. The toothless old man walks into the Centra of Death with his bicycle. The insane security guard stops him and says no bicycles are allowed in the shop. The toothless guy replies: “But I have no teeth!”

I have to say though, there are plenty of characters this side of the canal. So far I have encountered an Elvisman, complete with 99 Micra plastered with stickers and slogans of the King. On the same road, I came across a middle-aged man driving along in traffic eating a kinder egg. Next thing he finished the chocolate, and started assembling the toy while booting along at 30mph.

At the moment I’m savouring the tranquility and enjoying my free wireless broadband, Irish Broadband 1meg it seems. Given their reputation, my expectations were very low, but I am pleased to see that not only is this connection working, it is working well. Certainly head and shoulders above Clearwire, who do things the American way - patriotically blocking your bittorrent. I’m not a downloader - I have neither the patience nor the inclination to download movies or anything but the odd mp3, but I have come to rely on bittorrent for legitimate uses; for example - the World of Warcraft updater, installers for programs like cygwin, and access to the occasional legal file which is only distributed via bittorrent.

This isn’t a major issue for me though, and having seen in the past how bittorrent can kill a network, I wouldn’t complain… assuming they made up for it in the other areas. Not the case - you get low bandwidth (1024/256 in theory, much less in practice), Clearwire is expensive (€40 per month), a long minimum contract of 12 months, and a low download cap (10gb). It is handy that it is not dependent on line of sight, but this just leads to high latency and packet loss making the product unsuitable for gaming or VOIP, even with a full signal. I have seen other Clearwire users in different areas with reasonably low and stable ping, but in my own experience, I could only barely manage World of Warcraft, which is playable even on 56k modem or with 800ms lag. I realise that it’s unfair to compare UnClearwire with fixed wireless… the only similar product in Ireland would be Irish Broadband’s disastrous RipoffWave, which I have had the displeasure of using in the past.

This Irish Broadband connection, on the other hand, is cheap and fast with low latency:
PING games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=6.85 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=96.9 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=13.6 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=10.2 ms
64 bytes from games1.iol.ie (193.120.123.136): icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=70.1 ms

A bit of jitter there, but you’ll get that on most wireless connections. I realise that when things go wrong with IBB, they go very wrong, and I have dealt with their lack of support in the past… but for now I’m not complaining. Despite the apparently solid performance, FPS games are still unplayable, so I have ordered a phoneline to get DSL in too. With a bit (lot) of luck, I won’t have to battle with Eircom every inch of the way, and I might even be connected in time for the Quake 3 TDM Nations Cup, where Ireland has been drawn in a group with:

	Poland
	Czech Republic
	Italy
	United Kingdom
	Hungary

Situated halfway between Blarney and Mallow, on the back road, the little Cork village of Bweeng doesn’t have much to offer. Its still a few years off meriting a Wikipedia entry, and currently its claim to fame is a comical name, and the close proximity to Stuake (pronounced Stwick). If you haven’t heard of Bweeng (pronounced Bwing, as in “stwick bwing”) its because theres nothing there to attract your attention. Unless, like me, you live in Donoughmore.

Damien has raised the curtain on Eircom’s Schrödinger’s Cat - their elusive fixed wireless service which names Bweeng as one of its alleged high sites. I spent the past two years in Donoughmore (north of Blarney) up on top of my roof, plotting line of sight to every mast in the greater Cork area. 18 minutes outside of Cork City, at a height of 180m, a 15 foot pole gave me clear line of sight to just about everywhere. I defied physics by associating with access points as far west as Bandon, and south at Farmer’s Cross, but I was just too far out for any ISP to cover me. My plight led to encounters with other technology refugees seeking any form of terrestrial broadband in Donoughmore, willing to pay whatever it took. And now we are told that somewhere just a few miles away, on a hill in Bweeng, Eircom looked down upon us, silently sniggering as we scurried about with ladders and binoculars and ordinance survey maps and 20 foot poles and 30 foot poles, meeting with ISPs, and group broadband schemes, and amateur initiatives to no avail.

Eircom FWA is, of course, a scam. I see several locations on their list of wireless base stations that are known as black spots, with no broadband available which isn’t backhauled via satellite. But it must be a valid product, it is listed on broadband.gov.ie… although when searching by location it does not appear to be on offer anywhere. The installation cost of €605 must put it up among the most expensive in the world. Just to compare it with a few other fixed wireless providers who operate in the Cork area:

The Insanely High Installation Fee
How can Eircom justify charging 500% of the average installation cost? The customer premise equipment for fixed wireless broadband is often very expensive, and each unit could be worth a few hundred euro. Combined with the manual installation costs, fixed wireless installation is not trivial. So what does every other wireless ISP in the world do? They claw back any loss on the install by specifying a minimum contract period (6 or 12 months in Ireland), and they reclaim their gear off your chimney when you quit the service. There is NO justification for the astronomical install fee that Eircom proposes, especially when coupled with the high monthly rental.

The Ridiculously Low Upload Rate
64k - on par with ISDN, and in practice not so much better than dial-up. There are 340 different Irish broadband products listed on broadband.gov.ie, with costs ranging as low as.. er.. free. Out of these 340 products, excluding a couple of low-end satellite services, Eircom FWA is the only one that insults us with an upload speed as low as 64k. I remember a few years ago there was a Croatian ISP which offered 64k upload on their broadband. These days, the very idea is a joke. Even your local group broadband schemes and small local operators can muster more bandwidth than that, at a far lower monthly cost.

The Scam
In general, fixed wireless has some major advantages over satellite. For starters, is far cheaper to install, and the low latency facilitates VOIP and gaming. But the tiny upload in Eircom FWA is a bottleneck which prevents both VOIP and gaming, and the crazy installation fee speaks for itself. Eircom only want this product to exist on paper. They have deliberately made it so unreasonable that nobody would be mad enough to apply, even if it was on offer. Milo Minderbinder would be proud. Damien says they are squatting the spectrum - this makes sense to me, although I would love to know more about this - what frequencies they’re sitting on, who (aside from the customer) is losing out, what Eircom hope to gain in the long run. Whatever the case, it is very wrong if they use this phantom product to gain kudos off the government for extended rural coverage. My guess is that Bweeng national school is sitting on an expensive, bulky, slow, limiting satellite connection, just like every other school in the area, while the locals continue to spend a fortune on slow ISDN.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this… with all the pressure that has been put on the government lately, this is a great opportunity to highlight dodgy dealings and a rip-off of the highest order. The funny thing is, believe it or not, I would consider signing up for it… anything is better than ISDN

As a stressed-out narrowbander I have always used Aertel on a daily basis due to the lack of images and bloat. Now they hog your bandwidth and embarrass you at work with these stupid loud video ads of old men singing that take up half the screen. Entirely defeats the purpose of using Aertel online.

I was examining the junk mails that made it through the spam filter yesterday, wondering about the lengths that spammers have to go to in order to dodge Spam Assassin, and how many people actually respond to advertisements for V!agr$Aa. One of the more common characteristics of spam emails is a variety of colours in the text - a blue header, red sub-heading, green text, etc. I was amazed to learn from a colleague that, statistically, spam emails with multi-coloured text receive a much higher response than plain text. So, many of the internet users who do sign up for Fr€e un1vrs+y d1pl.o/\/\as are lured partially by the colourful text. It made me wonder about the type of people who click on these links. Surely there are no Irish people among them, right?

Phishing is a very different story, and unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of Irish among the victims of the latest Banking 365 scams.

BANK of Ireland issued a warning to its customers yesterday on online fraud as it emerged that seven customers of the bank have now lost a total of €113,000 to an internet swindle.

So who are the suckers who handed over their bank details? According to the Independent they are:

• A golf professional in North Dublin lost €16,900
• An environmental consultant in Dublin lost €5,000
• A small farmer in Galway lost €6,700
• A receptionist from the capital lost €7,600
• A midlands-based sales manager who was defrauded of €49,100
• A Kilkenny businesswoman who lost €12,000
• A university professor who lost €15,500

I have great sympathy for these people - some of these phishing attacks are very well crafted, and an inexperienced internet user can easily be fooled. But if you’re stupid/ignorant enough to fall for a scam, it is a costly lesson but you can only blame yourself. This group of people are taking on Bank of Ireland, demanding compensation. The receptionist goes so far as to say that it is was not her fault that she fell for this extremely common and basic scam:

The Dublin receptionist said yesterday her account had been used to lodge stolen cheques by the fraudsters. They had later withdrawn the money and Bank of Ireland was now insisting that the woman was liable for a deficit of €7,600 in her current account.

“I have no intention of paying one penny. It was not my fault fraudsters used my account to launder money,” she said.

While I hate banks, and 95% of the time I love to see them have to fork out in lawsuits, this time around I have to side with the BoI. The internet can be a dangerous place, I’m sure even the Galway farmer knew that when he got his Eircom 25 dialup account. There is no shortage of warnings, and a responsible internet user will surely take the time to inform himself about the potential dangers of online banking, and e-commerce. If anything, public tends to exaggerate the actual danger on the internet in my experience. I know there have been some horror stories on Bebo and Myspace and ICQ, but if you have a bit of sense and your eyes open then you would have to be extremely unlucky to fall into some internet pothole… it is certainly a lot safer than crossing the road.

To the receptionist from Dublin, let me tell you about a character from Skibbereen called Paddy Banana. I’m not sure how he got his name… I have been told that it was something to do with a banana-eating contest in Schull, but that is not relevant to my story. Paddy Banana was an old man with a shiny bald head and a waddly gait, well known in West Cork and often feared by the tourists because of his tendency to remove his false teeth and chase people down the street, clattering them in his hand. Paddy Banana made a few bob selling used lottery tickets. On a sunny day, he might take a trip to a neighbouring town, or more often than not he would just hang out in Skibb. Covering the date with his thumb, he would sell expired tickets of any description to whomever was willing to part with a few pounds. Occasionally, a self-righteous victim would demand money back, which would usually result in a very short conversation with Paddy’s false teeth. Now, receptionist, do you think that those aggrieved tourists have the right to claim compensation from the National Lottery?

The bank gave you a key. If somebody had broken into your account using brute force or an exploit, then I would be backing you fully. But you handed over your key to a Nigerian in a fake BoI uniform. By all means, press the bank for compensation. Demand that they launch an awareness campaign and increase the security of their online banking. But remember that on the internet there is nobody holding your hand, and there are always scammers ready to lure you away with their shiny multi-coloured text.