Blag

And now, put your hands together for everyone’s favourite ISP!

Dodo, Dodo, Internet that flies,

For nine-ninety cheap a month,

Connect yourself with Dodo!

And they’re back! Not content with being one of the most complained about ISPs in Australia, or offering the most ridiculous plans and outrageous terms & conditions, comes Dodo Electricity & Gas!

Dodo Electricity & Gas

For when your electricity and gas supplies just ‘aint unreliable enough. Do you want:

• Minimum 4 outages per fortnight?
• Brownouts if you consume excessive electricity?
• Low gas pressure?
• Restrictive on-peak and off-peak hours?
• Patented FairConsumption* policy?
• Blackouts when your grandma on life support comes over to visit?

Well you’re in luck, as here comes Dodo to the rescue.

Ok, well not really. They haven’t started offering those plans yet, but it’s a scary thought. And yes I am aware they have a PDF available listing the supplies and rates in Victoria. But it IS fun to pile shit on Dodo – not like it’s undeserved anyway.

*Excessive use of Dodo gas and electricity resources is a breach of the FairConsumption policy. Dodo is a reseller of AGL (natural gas) and Energy Australia (electricity). Excessive use is defined as 1. Electricity or Gas consumption of more than 5kWh or 150kJ per day 2. Use of more than 750W of electricity between the hours of 1 am and 6:30am 3. Using Dodo gas for barbecues or hot water boilers. Dodo Electricity & Gas is for residential use only. Customers who use Dodo Electricity & Gas for business purposes may be asked to purchase a private generator and LPG tank at the customers expense. Dodo will try to meet a 65% availability for electricity and natural gas services, but blackouts and supply loss are not guaranteed.

Copied verbatim from their blog post:

As always, check back at http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/ and Torrent Freak for the latest news.

Today is a sad day for Internet users, torrent trackers, ISPs and network operators worldwide.

The Pirate Bay 4 – Guilty.

1 Year jail term, and $905000 fines each.

The Pirate Bay will stay running of course – the trial was never about the tracker, just the 4 admins who ran the website behind the scenes. They do have 2 courts (or opportunities) to appeal their sentences though, the first of which must be lodge by the 9th of May 2009. It may be years before an outcome is reached though.

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/ is the most accurate and constantly updated source. (Torrent Freak is the de facto site when it comes to file sharing news.) Check back constantly.

The outcome will be very interesting though as this is a landmark case, and it could mean that ISPs may become responsible for policing their users download habits. The outcome of this case LITERALLY could halt the development of broadband worldwide. Let’s face it, with P2P file sharing accounting for 2/3 (and growing) of the data transmitted over the Internet, the ripple effect from these legal proceedings could make 4 companies VERY rich, many companies very broke and land millions of citizens in jail (or at least considerably lighten their wallets anyway).

Speaking of which, iinet vs. AFACT isn’t going too well either… I’m sure Senator Cuntroy is happy, but every Australian ISP is on the edge of their seat watching the drama unfold.

This story is from a few days ago, as I waited to see if anything else would unfold. As it turns out, nothing did, probably as all the journalists got threatened with anal penetration if they reported anything unfavorable about the FBI. (No, I do not like the FBI if that isn’t already apparent.)

The FBI went nuts over in America. In their scramble to kiss Hollywood’s arse (and find the perpetrators of the leaked copy of the movie Wolverine), their search led to a datacenter in Dallas. Apparently the company who had leaked the movie was a client of Core IP Networks, several years ago, but that didn’t stop the FBI from walking in unwarranted, telling all the security guards to piss off, and ripping out indiscriminately every server they could find over 2 floors.

Problem – the servers belonged to many major corporate businesses, ISPs, telcos, web hosting providers and telephone network operators.

Result – several hundred thousand websites offline, people without Internet, e911 calls failing to connect, businesses losing millions by the day and telephone and cable TV services cut to the suburbs in the surrounding 10km radius.

Corporate clients heading to the datacenter to find why all their hardware had gone offline got told by the FBI to literally “fuck off, or you’ll be arrested”. The owner of Core IP Networks (one of the businesses in the  datacenter) got served with an arrest warrant, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. In his words (truncated):

Today at 6:00am, the FBI conducted an unwarranted early morning raid of our 2323 Bryan Street Datacenters, on the 7th and 24th floors.

I received a phone call at 6:05am from our NOC that the entire network was powered off. I called Capstar Commercial and TELX, our landlord, and was told that the FBI was in the datacenter with a search and seizure warrant. I asked that the agent in charge call me immediately.

I received a call 15 minutes later from FBI Agent Allyn Lynd. Mr. Lynd would not tell me why he raided our datacenter or what he was looking for. He also accused me of hiding inside my house in Ovilla, Texas. I was actually in Phoenix, Arizona when this happened. I told him that, and he told me that he was “getting the dogs” after me, and hung up on me. I found out from an employee that there were 15 police cars and a SWAT team at my home in Ovilla.

The FBI has seized all equipment belonging to our customers. Many customers went to the data center to try and retrieve their equipment, but were threatened with arrest.

If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason.

In conclusion, the FBI are idiots, Allyn Lynd needs to stop watching B grade action films at 3 am and all the affected businesses and citizens should sue the FBI for damages. There probably is some obscure clause in the US Patriot Act that makes claiming compensation from government entities a threat to humanity.

Edit: The morons are now going through server by server, looking through several petabytes of data for the non-existent traces of a movie.

Heh, call me a fanboi, but Internode now has the 2nd largest ADSL/ADSL2+ network coverage in Australia.

Yep, almost as large as hellstra (telstra).

They have access to Agile (their sister company), Optus and Telstra DSLAMS, which achieves near full coverage of Australia. It’s also a godsend to those on unprofitable exchanges where Telstra is the only ISP to have DSLAMS installed, or those on RIM/CMUX’s who could previously only achieve 3mbps, if they didn’t sign up to Bigpond – Internode’s pricing undercuts both Optus’s and Telstra’s own internet plans.