Posts by Conor Murray

OpIreland hackers spank gov sites as 'Irish SOPA' nears

Looks like Sherlock's own site has been SOPAd...

http://seansherlock.ie/ - "Host not configured to server web traffic"

Google has cached views from yesterday, so it DID work.

Senior Guardian hacks turn on Assange

Is the Swedish 'leak' possibly propaganda?

I'm not an Assange follower, but he is interviewed by David Frost on Al-Jazeera and has an interesting angle on the Swedish 'leaks'. He says that they are not leaks at all, but are carefully selected propaganda put out by someone connected to the Swedish prosecutor's offices. He also states that these 'leaks' were given to a journalist known to be unsympathetic to him.

The interview can be seen here: http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/frostovertheworld/2010/12/201012228384924314.html

Furthermore, John Pilger has come out in support of Wikileaks and Assange in his documentary "The War You Don't See", where he theorises that the western media has become little more than a propaganda machine serving the interests of the western military-industrial complex. If Pilger is correct then Wikileaks is a vital element in the battle to get the media back on track.

I gave up watching the propaganda-box many years ago, but I believe that ITV has shown Pilger's documentary, and it can also be found on: http://pkpolitics.com/2010/12/21/the-war-you-dont-see-on-free-media/ (part 6 of the documentary mentions Wikileaks and interviews Assange - but it's worth watching it all, to understand why Pilger is so squarely behind Wikileaks.)

Pilger looks in depth at the way the media has handled the war in Iraq, the similarities in media coverage of Iran to that preceding the war in Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Israeli propaganda machine, and the attacks on media organisations like Al-Jazeera (physical attacks with explosive ordinance) and Wikileaks (legal and financial attacks), which are not part of the propaganda machine. Consequently you will not see much mention of Pilger's documentary in the western media.

While Assange comes across as being a bit OTT, Pilger does not, and he gives huge kudos to Wikileaks. Whether he's correct to do so or not, the case that this documentary makes demands investigation and resolution. If he IS right then the Swedish legal 'case' (?) and 'leak' is exactly the type of attack one would expect on Wikileaks and its identifiable representative. Pilger's theorises that trial by media is a preliminary step that is often used to build public support for action that could otherwise be regarded as unjustifiable.

Whether Assange has really broken any laws or not, the Swedish 'case' is certainly an attack on Wikileaks. It may not be a deliberate attack, in the sense that Wikileaks is not ostensibly its target, but this does not alter the fact that it is likely to harm both Assange and Wikileaks. If I wanted to demonise some public figure, what better attack could I find than to accuse them of sexual crimes?

Colt Telecom cable cut mystery

Still ongoing, apparently

I've just been talking to COLT support, there was another short outage for about 5 minutes this morning, and while they're not very forthcoming about the root cause of what's been happening, they tell me that they still have some issues ongoing in continental Europe - but maybe this is their way of telling me how lucky I am to have connectivity right now?

Anyhow, this incident has not been laid to rest yet, and the message that I read into what was said (this was not stated clearly) is that there may be more 'glitches' to come. They did say that connectivity in Ireland has been fully restored, despite this morning's 'glitch' - but yet they are keeping my ticket open. Maybe I'm being unfair to them and they're doing this because they don't wish to be hasty, but my natural cynicism tells me otherwise!

Disastrous lack of information

I was affected by this from about 1am to about 4pm yesterday, in Dublin. There was never an absolute loss of connectivity, it was possible to get the odd UDP packet through - I could make DNS lookups if I was very persistent, so I'm going with the DDoS theory.

When I reported the fault originally, the lady I spoke to told me that only customers connected via certain types of routers were affected, and that the problem was Europe-wide. The information then got vaguer as the outage continued.

How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew

Yet another reason to avoid

AVG design choices never fail to amaze, this is the same scanner that used to (still does?), by default, start a virus scan as soon as you logged on to your computer - welcome to the world of slow (but safe?) computing, courtesy of AVG! Now you can have slow web servers too!

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

I had to upgrade twice to 'upgrade'

My old Pentium D Dell Precision 390 running XP was waltzing all over my new Precision 490 Xeon 2GB running Fister Ultimate x64, and I had to throw 2 x 3GHz Xeons and an additional 4GB of RAM at it to make my 'upgrade' feel like an upgrade - this was an EUR 2,000 + upgrade on a PC that had already cost almost EUR 3,000 to begin with!

So Fister can go fast.... but only if you run it on seriously turbo-charged hardware.