Whip!

“Should we call it LockerBP now? ”

Blogetery

There’s been quite a bit of conjecture about this affair being “a test of the Internet kill switch“. Apparently, it wasn’t quite that, yet. The Fibbies found some Al Quada material on a Blogotery blog, and went to Blogotery’s server BurstNET, who cancelled the account as a TOS violation.

The Blogetery guy doesn’t sound as if English is his first language, and he doesn’t sound like a whiz on server law either. Should he realistically be expected to police 69K blogs? Is it reasonable for BurstNET to terminate 69K bloggers over the actions of one? What this tells me is that a “kill switch” isn’t needed: the government can pretty much shut down what it wants, under the guise of “fighting terrorism”.

A representative for Burst.net said the company had offered Blogetery’s operator his money back, but that “should be the least of his concerns.”

Personally, I think Burst has just as much to worry about as Blogetery. If I were a customer, I’d be looking for a new server.

Are there any Catholic Amish around?

Yeah, I know, oxymoron, but I don’t want to become a Damnable Heretic. It’s just that, this particular 5 minutes, I think they have the right idea about technology.

I’ve been struggling with Sprint, the folks who provide 3G wireless Internet to Black Water Farm. We’ve relied on their website to track our usage and keep it under 5G/mo. The one month we did not do so, I got hit with a $230 bill, so we learned to be careful.  Well, their website does not report any usage at all, and hasn’t for several weeks. Yes, the Sprint website thinks we have 0K usage; it says so right there in black and white. But I know better than to regard a website as a legal contract.  On the support forums, everyone is asking the question…and really not getting satisfactory answers. So I decided to call. This in itself was an involved process; “dial *3″ doesn’t work on a wireless modem. Finally I found an 888 number that took me to Bangalore. “Denise” (nee Lakshmi Battacharya, probably) certainly knew what my usage was, but really couldn’t answer the question about the web page; her improvisation involved roaming minutes, and made no sense at all. They good news is that we’re in good shape for the month, usage-wise. The bad news is that Sprint is starting to appear as gefickt as Verizon. Certainly this internet has not met expectations, not really a broadband speed at all. If the computer goes 6 seconds at a time with a 0 byte transfer rate, it doesn’t much matter how fast it is when it actually deigns to work.

Then my Verizon phone needed money. I make the minimum contribution every 2 months, and never use it all up. So now I have $48 sitting on account. It’s a painful process to get it in too, as I never remember my PIN. They’ll next want a refill on September 11…which seems grimly apt, somehow.