The irish Governments plan on getting ISPs to monitor, filter and block subscribers from downloading illegal content

I rarely get political. First of all, I'm a non-national in Ireland, which means I can't vote on anything bar local stuff anyhow. But when it comes to the point, where they interfere with my bread and butter, to the point, where they actually could bankrupt me, I get furious. Especially, when they clearly don't have a clue of the industry they are affecting nor do proper consulting as usual.

The latest item on the agenda is getting ISPs to block internet users/subscribers from downloading illegal content / piracy.

What they don't realize though, is that if they force ISPs to filter/log content to the extend that they are looking into, they will most likely ruin most of the smaller regional ISPs financially in a split second on the cost for doing this alone. Especially because every good ISP doesn't have one single point where he terminates his internet traffic, nor one single point within the network where all traffic would be processed. Just for the sake of fail over. That means filters will have to be placed in several locations or a single point of failure will have to be created. Never mind the cost for putting the technology in place, another problem is the man power needed to update these filters on an ongoing basis as the ways the internet is used changes on a daily basis. Even for the ISPs that actually want to limit things like P2P, it's very hard to do so today. That's without having to try to log the data.

The impact on privacy is another problem, which has been given no thought at all. Implementing this type of filtering will literally give the Copyright agencies the right to tap your phone line. You think not ? Are you aware, how many phone calls are processed and routed across the Internet nowadays ? Even when you don't know it, IP data networks are used to route your phone call.

Also, no thought has been given to the problems, that already exists. Just look what happened to the way Eircom (and the Copyright holders) handled the three strikes scenario: http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/massive-blow-to-music-industry-as-eircom-anti-piracy-measures-rejected-307584-Dec2011/

Or do we want a scenario where the Music Industry tries to abuse law to earn more money: http://torrentfreak.com/music-rights-group-bills-internet-providers-for-piracy-licence-11110/

Better yet, the Music Industry doesn't even ensure, that they pay the copyright holders nor keep to their contracts: http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-corruption-scandal-surrounds-anti-piracy-campaign-111201/

In the US, it's going as far, that the Music Industry now collects royalties for the event, that you might be playing copyrighted music: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003815486_royalty01.html Before you ever violated any copyright law in the first place. Just in case, you know !

Another recent show, how the Industry just hits before even asking is the MegaUpload case: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/18263517094/umg-megaupload-case-gets-even-stranger-william-says-he-didnt-authorize-takedown.shtml

So, if or when the government makes a law, that should limit pirating copyrighted material, they should be VERY careful, about where they tackle the issue and on what grounds. Placing the burden at the ISPs is shooting pigeons with a heat-seaking rocket-launcher. The collateral damage will be fairly insane and kick our broadband infrastructure a good decade back to where it came from.

Get a grip. Act responsible and solve the issue at the source. There is plenty of ways to tackle this. When you spill a bowl of rice, you don't go and get somebody else to pick up each and every one of them by hand. You get a brush and brush them up in one go. Or get a vacuum cleaner and fix the mess. You especially don't rip the carpet up at the same time to pin it back down again afterwards.

Matter of fact, this is as bad as the law about knifes in Denmark, that made every builder and even every person that owned a Volkswagen Tuareg a criminal, just because a Stanley knife is part of their toolkit. It basically handed such a person an automatic jail term. At the least the recent government change there meant, that the law got adjusted so that it doesn't hit innocent people anymore ... hopefully.

No shit Sherlock !!!

Ubuntu Karmic

After having looked at Ubuntu 2 years ago and finding it wasn't flexible enough back then (old habbits don't die) recent problems with the Debian kernel made me have a look at it again.

The Debian problems I'm facing:
* fingerprint scanner on my Thinkpad X60 tablet didn't work anymore.
* laptop wouldn't boot randomly, but getting stuck during boot process.
* fluxbox randomly hangs in combination with wine.
* upgrade of X.org screwed the tablet screen rotation.
* Neither NetworkManager or wicd in Debian support 3G dial-up without configuring it manually and then it's half arsed.
* New atheros drivers are acting up very badly.

and many many more.

So I installed Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) and I'm certainly impressed.

* Touchscreen and tablet-pen work out of the box (had to be configured manually in Debian).
* Fingerprint scanner works flawlessly after installing the applications. After a few manual changes, even for gnome-screensaver
* NetworkManager works right out of the box, including internal 3G datacard.
* Atheros card works right out of the box.
* Suspend works flawlessly right out of the box.
* The boot time is amazing. It only takes a few seconds to boot the laptop.

All in all, I'm impressed. We'll see how long it'll survive on the laptop.

Cogent on IPv6

Cogent finally set our IPv6 BGP session up today. This brings us to the point where all our 4 of our carriers supply IPv6 to us.

Cogent only has 781 routes at the moment, but I'd say that'll improve over time, seeing that they only get full-feeds from GBLX and NTT, some feeds over Swipnet.

KPN in / GBLX out

The GBLX saga ends. With plenty off issues over the last year, we've shut the BGP down now and replaced it with IP transit from KPN.

Bringing the session with KPN (both v4/v6) online was comparable painless and so far, it's been flawless.

Google over IPv6

Google has whitelisted our nameservers for IPv6, which means that Google will answer with AAAA records, if requested, and sites like Google, GMail, Google Maps etc. will be served over native IPv6 to our customers.

Blogger.com doesn't seem to be IPv6 enabled by Google yet.

Callcenter trial

We're trialing a callcenter in Mayo as of today. Initially they are going to take our sales calls for the next month and we'll see how we get on.

With the growth of the business over the last 3 years, we're simply not able to take the calls at times anymore. At times there are just too many and at other times ... none.

The biggest issue is, that people have the attitude, that they either are impatient or don't want to leave a voicemail. So instead, they start calling like 20, 30, 40 times without leaving a voicemail, when they don't get anybody.

Or they leave a voicemail every time, still call 20, 30, 40 times, not waiting for the callback.

The upside is, if this works out for us, we'll be bringing the call volume down, because we hope to take every call. We should also be able to extend the support hours then.

e-Net Fiber being pulled in

We decided to move the fiber from Dangan across town to Mervue and also, we're going to light our own dark fiber in Galway. It'll also more than double our bandwidth to Dublin.

The drop connection for that is finally being pulled today, pictures will follow.

The beauty of it all is, that no civils are needed, because we can pull it through existing ducting in the cable-riser of the neighbor building (owned by the same landlord). That way we're ensured, that we've got entirely different paths.

Obviously, this fiber trunk is also on a completely different fiber ring and connection to Dublin from the BT fiber, that already is in Mervue.