James Galvin

RTE mentions that Bertie is embarrassed by the fact that we, “the laughing stock of europe”, don’t yet use electronic voting, while France get their election results in two hours, electronically. Two hours is very impressive, and that’s also how long the French voters were left queuing. This is before we even consider the usability and security concerns of the French system:

“protesters sued to ban the machines outright a week before the election, noting that some models don’t comply with a dual-key requirement for safety from fraud, and others, such as the iVotronic machines, have new software, but haven’t been re-verified since 2005.”

While our own e-Voting machines gather dust in a very expensive warehouse, the Taoiseach chooses to blame the opposition, accusing them of “playing politics”. Am I to assume that Bertie knows more than the Commission on Electronic Voting, who explicitly stated that our system is not ready?

• The security of the hardened PC that is proposed for use in preparing elections and in aggregating and counting the votes afterwards is inadequate and needs to be improved.
• Improvements are also required to the security of the methods by which sensitive election data, including votes, are stored, transported and accessed on ballot modules and CDs.

Bertie is happy to pile on regardless and deploy an insecure voting system, simply because his buddies abroad are doing it. Perhaps if he were less concerned in keeping up appearences, and more interested in the integrity of our elections, then he would acknowledge that the millions wasted on our unused voting system can only be blamed on the government who forked out on a product that does not work.

Slashdot links to these survey results which show a 24.1% usage rate of Firefox in Europe. I’m happy to see that Ireland emerges slightly above average, with a rate of 24.9%, and experiencing a hefty increase. Slovenia grabs gold, with a score of 44.5%, followed by Finland on 41.3%. For some perspective - the UK came in at 18.0%, while North America has 15.1%.

When you consider that other browsers like Opera and Safari must surely rack up at least another 5% between them, there is no justification in this day and age for Internet Explorer Only websites and login systems, which unfortunately are all too common. I don’t have a copy of Windows, and lately I have had to borrow somebody else’s PC to get access to some sites which choose to exclude half of Slovenia and a quarter of the rest of the world. Hopefully these developers will wake up to the fact that Firefox is no longer just a thorn in the side like their old pal 640×480, and restricting to IE only is simply unforgivable. In the meantime, does anyone know a quick fix for emulating Internet Explorer 7 in Linux?

Tonight saw a momentus occasion in the history of Waterford soccer, as they were stripped of the title “worst team ever to play against Manchester United in a European fixture”, which they have held since 1968. Thanks to BBC News for that interesting tidbit.

I mentioned in my last post that very few people these days take the time to give their views on how things are shaping up in the world of online gaming. In the days of Geocities and Gibworld, the internet was hopping in time with its myriad of animated ‘mail me’ gifs. Dozens of clan sites and tinet homepages in Ireland were poised to strike at the slightest bit of news in the gaming scene. When the boat rocked, ripples would spread giddily through the network of fluorescent static HTML pages, lovingly tended by faithful enthusiasts.

Last week, the boat rocked. When I say it rocked, I mean it crashed into an iceberg and flipped over three times before landing upside-down in the Bermuda triangle. The thundering mother of all cheating scandals emerged in a haze of furious drama. eSReality has an account of the saga involving a English gamer called Fusen and netCoders.be - a group who make aimbots, wallhacks, etc., for games such as Quake 3, Enemy Territory, CoD 2, and SOF, and sell them for up to $200. This is story of the hacker who hacked the hackers and gained access to their database via a vBulletin exploit, exposing the details of all of their customers to the public. The wild-west response, where netCoders offer a $1,000 reward for information on their attacker. The irony of the moral high ground held by the victims and their alleged legal follow-up. The hackers’ threats to hack the hacker who hacked the hackers.

The plot thickened and boiled and simmered as professional players were busted, and respected Clanbase admins ruined. But it didn’t interest me until I noticed that several members of team Ireland were caught with aimbots and wallhacks.

I have followed Ireland in the Enemy Territory nations cups a few times, and despite our small playerbase, Ireland has always had a very strong squad which was able to compete at the highest level. More recently, a new generation of players has risen to eradicate the respect that Irish national teams have accumulated over the years. If this had happened 5 years ago, there would be riots.

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.

It was an eventful week in beautiful Cork St., Dublin. On Monday, an elderly neighbour of mine was found murdered in his apartment. Sounds like theres more to the story - “the retired traffic warden was convicted in 1998 of stalking and terrorising the parents of a four-year-old child”. The “parents of a four-year-old child” is this bad journalism or am I supposed to read between the lines?

Minor incidents and arrests provided intermittent entertainment outside my window for the rest of the week - a drunk guy causing hassle throwing his pint glass at a passing car, he got arrested. Later, an on-street row between “Jimmy” and his sister’s scumbag boyfriend. The boyfriend had allegedly hit Jimmy’s sister, and the psychotic and wired Jimmy was not happy. The violence increased as the drama unfurled.. turns out the boyfriend had hit Jimmy’s sister in the past - in fact once he had even held a knife to her. Jimmy was going to end it now, and the death threats emerged. Thats when Jimmy’s sister arrived on the street and things got confusing. No resulting arrest on this occasion.

Friday night takes the biscuit though, because I made the stupid mistake of not having enough money for a taxi after the pub. This meant I had to run the gauntlet and traverse the Flats of Dodginess all by myself late at night. I made it through unscathed, but the same cannot be said two other guys who got shot 15 minutes later in the same place that I had just been, just off Cork Street. One of them died in hospital, but the other was only shot in the leg and survived. Taxis from now on I think…

This will make no sense to any of you who don’t know what a “shock rifle” is. The staff behind Ireland’s UT2K4 gaming community has let the stress get to them. A new system has been introduced, claiming to “a benevolent dictatorship similar to the very effective situation at Boards.ie”.

For some people, mainly those who tend to speak their mind a bit too often, the Boards.ie model is not one to admire. However, on a site which has seen over 1500 users online at one time, it is effective. The balance is always delicate between the “cynical power-tripping mod” and the “opressed minority”, but they’ve managed to pull it off (thanks to the general good sense of DeVore et al) to become one of the top 5(?) busiest websites in Ireland. On the other hand, in a smaller tight-knit community where passions boil and bubble and grudges slowly fester, a more diplomatic approach is advisable… particularly when the forum in question is an informal hub for a bunch of gamers. It is not difficult to moderate a board and still treat the users with a basic degree of respect.

It is unfortunate for Irish FPS gaming that our last remaining community has laid down the flagstone for their new culture with an unfriendly, inflammatory and disrespectful declaration by the admins. As a (respectfully) argumentative person (i.e., can’t keep mouth shut), I cannot subscribe to the idealogy expressed in the tactless missive which, incidentally, is not open to debate. The only option for me is to sign out for good, goaded by the message that “any individual who disagrees, or feels they cannot live, with the above restrictions may vote with their feet”.

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.