Kyle Brady: A Blog

I wrote something about the state of the Olympics in Beijing, China, and the IOC a week ago, and a followup, but since then there have been some answers to my questions, which I wanted to publicly note.

1. The IOC has apparently had enough of the public (aka “free world journalist”) criticism about ignoring certain *ahem* details about China, and they’re now fully investigating the age of the Chinese women’s gymnasts.  Not just doing a quick China-provided passport check, but the real deal.
2. Journalists inside the Beijing Olympic compound city are getting frustrated.  The daily press conferences, when they happen, are full of over-smiling Chinese government officials and oddly obsequious IOC representatives.  Not to mention that their questions are largely ignored, and used as “you’re not being very nice guests!” fodder.
3. If you want an inside voice on the Olympics and it’s very obvious problems that has a cynical and “take no prisoners” attitude, check out Marina Hyde of The Guardian.  She sounds alot like if I were writing full inside coverage of the events… which is awesome.

posted on August 23rd, 2008 at 3:22 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: 2008 Olympics, Beijing, China, Human Rights, Lies

Take a look at these screenshots.

Screen 1:  downloading a torrent for tonight’s Scrubs.  The source doesn’t matter, since there are both legal and illegal sources for this kind of content.  Download speed, via test, is 661Kbps, and the torrent is at a crawl.  Web pages and uploading things via SSH to a server take forever.

Screen 2:  all torrents now paused.  Download speed, via test is 2.2Mbps.  Everything is fast and quick.

This has been happening over the last week, maybe week and a half.  Never a problem before, but if I have a torrent active, even a simple thing like using SSH via command line becomes difficult and very “laggy”.

What the hell?  I left Comcast because they sucked at life (bad customer service, traffic shaping, lies, etc.), and now AT&T is starting to do something that’s highly decried as a “major no-no” in the public eye?

Great.  Thanks, assholes.

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Edit: just for the record, I’m on “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Pro”.  It’s a DSL dryloop plan.

Update (4/24/08 1AM PST): I called AT&T, got forwarded to a nonsense number, and then called back.  There was no record of me calling, no trouble tickets.  Because that’s not suspicious.

Update (4/24/08 1:40AM PST): “Call back tomorrow when our Line Department is open, it’s probably an issue with your line.”  Got a ticket number this time, but the SOB Manager wouldn’t give me his full name (”Chris” was definitely not part of it, that’s for sure) or a direct number to that department.  We’ll see what happens in a few hours.

Update (4/30/08 2:00PM PST): I sent off a few emails to different departments at AT&T, linking to this with a “this is bullshit, fix it or I’m leaving your service immediately” message.  In every case, I either got “this isn’t our department’s problem” or “we have determined this not to be an issue” in response.  I haven’t called back yet, because I wanted to see what would happen… the results?  My bandwidth is not being capped as much as before, since I now get about 60% of the promised speed if a torrent is involved.

This obviously didn’t just happen on it’s own, but I find it interesting nonetheless.  However, it’s not completely fixed yet, so I’m not giving up on this issue… I wonder what department fixed this, and why they did if it wasn’t “an issue” or their “problem”…

Update (9/23/08 7:30pm PST): I stopped downloading things for the last two months or so, in the hope that whatever they’ve flagged my account with disappears.  It didn’t.

I’m still dealing with bandwidth caps when torrents are connected, and getting the run-around from anyone who bothers to talk with me about it from on high.  And yet, they claim to be “down” with P2P.

I’m calling “shenanigans” on this one.

posted on April 24th, 2008 at 11:31 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: AT&T, Bandwidth, Deceit, Lies, Torrents, Traffic Shaping