Posts Tagged ‘israel’

14
Jan
07:30

Pew Pew Air Strikes

In the past few days I’ve been asked several times what my opinion was on the air strikes in Gaza. Yeah, since then they’ve sent actual forces in, which I’m not sure whether I’m too happy about either.

It’s not really that easy, is it? It looks like something an Israeli right wing party would have done, but then again, the purpose looked – to me – akin to what the average left wing politician would have had in mind. Usually I’d be thinking somebody’s finally making sense up there, but the truth is more like… that they just can’t decide what the hell they want to accomplish and how.

Say they bombed 95% of Hamas’ military facilities. That’s all great except that in reality all it takes is just one Hamas official alive to get up and say “by the way, I’m still around” and rebuild that whole damn thing up again. Simply because there are enough Palestinians who are absolutely sure that this is the right thing to do.

Alright then, let’s say some “genius” down in Jerusalem had this bright idea one morning: we can nuke the shit out of them. So long story short, nuke gaza area, everyone’s dead. Let’s assume we’re in a universe where something like that will just kill anyone who identifies themselves as a Palestinian and will leave minimal mess to clean up (nukes aren’t exactly safe).

I do believe that’s called genocide.

So bomb anything you like, as long as not everything there is dead, finished, done – you still have the Palestinians to deal with.

So before I get angry emails, please read all the way to the end. Look, people, what I’m saying is that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent a Palestinian state and Israel’s future interaction with it. Meanwhile, I don’t think there’s much that can be done to prevent the continued existence of Israel in the future. Though I hope it will finally change its own definition of itself as a nation from “a Jewish nation” to something that actually allows for (gasp!) a multitude of religious and ethnic groups being in the same country and not necessarily kicking the shit out of each other just because.

So learn to deal with each other, is all I’m saying and will say about it.

(;_; I can’t believe I posted about this bullshit.)

09
Aug
21:15

“No traffic shaping” my ass

Yes, they do it. They shape my traffic. They cap my connections, my non port 80 connections mind you, at a crawl.

Sure, this is a 2 Mb/s connection, but that shouldn’t mean my shit should be capped at 5 KB/s. Yes, 5.

My ISP is by the way, 012 “Kavey Zahav”. A tech support rep officially told me that they don’t cap connections. However, they do. The way she wanted to me to check it was (strangely enough) to point me to their own help site which contains a test file. Over HTTP. Over port 80. On their server. Sorry, what? I told her it makes no sense. Her response: “must be the hardware.”

I got sick of tech support’s stupidity at that point, but they haven’t heard the last of me.

Here’s what I checked so far:

  • SSH to a certain remote machine on default port. Uploads at ~20 KB/s, downloads at about 10 KB/s.
  • Uploaded a file to dushkin.org. Downloaded via HTTP yields reasonable speeds. FTP however is capped at about 15-20 KB/s or so.
  • BitTorrent is crawling, enough said.

Exhibit 1:

4 KB/s

4 KB/s

6 KB/s

6 KB/s

I’ll be talking to tech support tomorrow yet again.

And another thing. Non-israeli websites seem to run significantly slower. For instance, a comparison between the download speed of downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server:

Downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server

Downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server

As opposed to the exact same file being downloaded from an Israeli server

:

Clearly no issues

Clearly no issues

05
Aug
17:10

Making AZTECH 600E do what Bezeq doesn’t want you to do

So I got me this router, AZTECH 600E provided by my new ISP in Israel. The idiots however figured out that nobody really wants to use anything other than Window$ and put a “dialer” on a CD, which you were supposed to install.

Needless to say, it came only as an EXE.

I spoke to a tech support rep on the phone who said he doesn’t support Mac and that my router is apparently not a router but a modem even though the interwebs disagrees. It’s time for some RL haxx.

And so I casually ask, “by the way, what’s the password for 10.0.0.138?”

“Just type in Admin password Admin.”

Yes, it’s that easy. Admin/Admin is the default password for the Aztech.

The next tech support rep said something along the lines of “I’M SORRY YOU HAVE A MODEM NOT A ROUTER I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW TO MAKE IT INTO A ROUTER BECAUSE THIS CALL IS RECORDED AND IT’S AGAINST THE POLICIES YOU WILL HAVE TO COMMIT TO US FOR 2 YEARS TO GET IT”. I hung up, though I should have just shot him in the face with my laser vision because he was an asshole. That laser vision sure is useful.

The next tech rep I called when I wanted to find out what my password was and also figure out the VPI/VCI values. He told me “kk sry i don’t speak mac lol go talk to these guys” and gave me another phone number. It had nothing to do with Mac, but sure, have it your way, silly tech support.

Tech support went something like “how do i shot web”. The values themselves I found on Bezeq’s website (!!) in another guide for a different router with an incredibly similar GUI. These are the settings I’ve used as they appear in the device’s interface after you click Quick Start:

TL;DR: 10.0.0.138. Username Admin, password Admin, click Quick Start, put above info spare the username and password which are meant to be your own.

Enjoy.