Picture of the day, from James Enck

Here's what happened after the bailout failed, but it doesn't include the 26% fall in Ireland and the guarantee for all their banks. At 400billion euro for 4 million people, that model would be a guarantee for 30,000,000,000euro for the US - or a cool $50trillion. Hope none of that defaults...

TPRC best papers

As a Prog Comm member I can't have favorites, but for sheer provocative quality every time, I always enjoy Dave Clark, Barb Cherry and Eli Noam. This year I somehow missed Johannes Bauer, Bill Lehr and Rob Freiden's talks - but then the event is so packed (5 parallel sessions) that its inevitable you miss some favorites.

Pakistan and YouTube explained by RIPE

Hijacked IP addresses and their solution on video. Tip from Brendan Kuerbis and Milton Mueller, who have an excellent paper on RIRs and their future role in allocating scarce IPv4 while protecting from such hacks - led to a spirited discussion with Scott Bradner and my co-conspirator Jonathan Cave.

Self-regulation and cost/benefit - plus some net neutral comments

My talk at the SCL Policy Forum which I chaired Monday-Tuesday.

Canadians demand Bell Canada pay for net neutrality dispute

Another nice consumer protection measure, if rarely used: CRTC, the Canadian regulator, can force the party opening a dispute to pay the costs of respondees - which in this case means everyone - even other throttlers!

Comcast states BitTorrent throttling began in May 2005-2006

Comcast deposition - interesting that El Reg focuses on the misleading nature of Comcast's claims not to have throttled and blocked traffic when exposed in May 2007 by Robb Topolski. Its certainly true that they were less forthcoming in the 2008 FCC Harvard and Stanford meetings. The class action lawsuits flowing from the allegations of consumer harm may see Comcast liable to its users, not a remedy we're likely to see in Europe unfortunately.

Topolski also states his opinion on the 250GB cap imposed by Comcast and alluded to by QWest - and rightly points out that at least its transparent whereas the previous 5 years of user management were not. That's the kind of transparency regulators should be demanding.

So happy to get away from CNN

Ironically for train-wreck television, it actually missed last Friday's train crash in LA because it was wall-to-wall Hurricane Ike instead. Only once no deaths could be caught on camera, did they rush to LA. It drove me to the Huffington Post, which actually covers the news. American TV is dying by suffocation up its own orifice.

Thank goodness for the BBC and CBC and other public broadcasters' news channels. There's a special place in hell for the Rick Sanchez/Larry King types, except that the moronic US Old Testament version of Christianity presumably places Democrats and liberals there...

Security trumps free speech and net neutrality

Decent and relatively unbiased Register story on how registrars, ISPs and others are infringing free speech principles in their "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to security breaches (or unsubstantitated rumours thereof), while others are spam-friendly.

What a tangled web we weave...

Vista user-unfriendly

I've been using Vista Business for a couple of months - its fine, fast on a good Sony Viao, and clean - but Windows Explorer does hang up if you add files to it while its running.

Those good people at Redmond have a fix straight from the 1980s in running some DOS code from the Start prompt: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833

Disgusting, isn't it? Beta-bloatware and not even a proper idiot (i.e. me)-proof fix. Damn their eyes!