Internet

I finally received the documents to cancel my Scarlet telephone and internet subscription. Since they tricked me to become a customer end january, it has been quite a suffering to let them know I wasn't interested in staying their customer. Their internet services are based on NetNet, which is the former PlanetInternet, and which has a really bad name when it comes to availability. And I refuse to support a company which screws its customers right from the beginning.

Don't bother to send me any emails for the next couple of days : my internet connection has been shut down and will remain so for the next two weeks. The reason for this is a mob gang called Scarlet. One month ago, someone claiming to be a Belgacom salesman, visited my house to sell cheaper internet and phone prices. Stupid as I was, I signed the documents, but later that evening I noticed that this wasn't a Belgacom affiliation, and that I had been deceived. I immediately called Scarlet to annulate the contract, but apparently in vain.
According to the Belgacom customer department I called this morning, I was the third customer calling this day for the same trickery, and that there were even people whose signature had been forged. Belgacom will restore the ADSL connection, but the paperwork could take up to 2 weeks....
Anyway, if you encounter a salesperson at your door, claiming to be from Belgacom, but his papers mention Scarlet, kick the guy out of your house. And kick him once again in the groin, with my regards.
Update : And we're back online. Pffeew...

It has been a while, but here's another quiz :

I am a Defender-ship.

I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups.

(If I were not a Defender-ship I would be a Thrust-ship.)

What Video Game Character Are You?

The Opte project has some new colored graphs of the internet. If only they would release some code so we could generate our own maps of our own IP neighbourhood !

Via Karma :

[kristof@angband] $ whois belgique.be

Domain: belgique
Status: Registered
Registered: Tue Dec 12 2000
Last update: Mon Oct 27 2003 10:30
...
NameServers:
Name: kim.fgov.be
Name: justine.fgov.be

Now the winter season nears, it might be interesting to see which places are covered with a nice layer of snow. Feratel has the answer on questions like "Is it snowing in Wieserhendl, or does the sun shines in Oberstaufen ?"

Looks like XULchannels is definitely dead... A real shame. If I find some time, I would like to enhance DarkChannels a bit, so the functionality would attain the one of XULchannels...

As of a little while ago, VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was 'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'oemcompany.com' by mistake, they would get VeriSign's advertising.

This will have the immediate effect of making network trouble-shooting much more difficult. Before, a mis-typed domain name in an email address, web browser, or other network configuration item would result in an obvious error message. You might not have known what to do about it, but at least you knew something was wrong. Now, though, you will have to guess. Every time.

This will make important anti-spam checks impossible, as they check on the existance of the sender domain. I wonder how long it will take untill Verisign will add advertisement to the displayed page. Or sells this page for advertisement properties. Would you like to see an Microsoft ad-filled page every time you make a typo in an URL ?

However, you can disable this feature of Verisign : just add

127.0.0.1 sitefinder.verisign.com

to your host file. Replace the IP address with one you fancy (eg Google : 216.239.39.100)

It's way too hot to blog, so here are some quick links :

• Can you spot the difference between programmer and serial killer ?
• How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less. Duh. Just boot a Debian disk...
• Excellent (Dutch) description about how to change a video card.

After the new Cisco security flaw announced by Cisco, the Internet stability was quite disturbed while major backbone operators were busy to upgraded their routers. Someone developed a new model called Global Instability Index based on some BGP stats. Very nice to observe the impact of such events on a graph...