Anyway, I had –as a friend described it– nuked my Facebook account a month and a bit ago, after having to dive into several quite hidden pages, fill in two captchas, re-enter my password and promise I really, really, really, REALLY wanted to delete the account.

And I find it quite liberating. Although I don’t believe they have deleted anything at all (instead they have simply set the ‘deleted’ flag to true), it’s great to feel totally disconnected. I’m not an active node in their potential advertising targets database. I won’t have nasty surprises every year, when they decide to open a little bit more of data so that it’s crawled by Google and they get more advertising revenue thanks to my actions.

Also, it’s fantastic when you meet someone, physically, face to face. People filter everything irrelevant and only talk to you about interesting stuff that they did or that happened to them; they won’t detail to me how many videos they have posted and how many news they have linked to and how many status messages they have liked in the last three hours. Truth is, I don’t need to know that. Those things are actually irrelevant to me. And since I’m an average person, it’s quite possible that they are irrelevant to you as well. Think about it.

Besides, I don’t want to be held accomplice of the ‘friend’ and ‘like’ terms depreciation. I can’t have one hundred or more friends. No one can have so many friends, actually. Plus this total alienation of the ‘dislike’ term seems like an attempt to implement Newspeak amongst web users, and my love for words can’t repudiate that tactic more vehemently.

But ‘deleting’ the account is not enough: there are now thousands of web sites that are following the ‘Facebook like’ buttons trend, and will show one of those annoying buttons at the bottom of each article they post, so that you can ‘like’ the article (never dislike it). Those buttons are served directly from Facebook’s servers and as such are a great tracking device: if you’re logged in and visit those sites, Facebook can take note and add it to your profile, so that advertisers know that you also visit websites X, Y and Z.

Since I didn’t want to get redirected to any Facebook page while the designated 14 days for ‘deleting’ an account lasted (which would therefore reactivate my account and force me to start again), I added the following rules to my /etc/hosts file:

… and it redirects every request to my computer.

The requested paths don’t actually exist in my computer, so it’s easy to spot where the ‘like’ buttons and Facebook widgets would have been: I get ugly “Not found” messages instead. But this is reassuring: it proves that the rule works and it’s yet another futile tracking attempt truncated by the mighty power of /etc/hosts!

Don’t feel terrified by the ‘Facebook void’. You know, before it existed and sucked everyone up into their massive data-centers, people did communicate. There’s e-mail, IM, SMS, phones, snail mail, or if you’re into that sort of thing, you could even use a fax or a telex!

There’s also the diaspora project which is meant to be an alternative to Facebook, but although it looks like a good idea, I’m not sure how it is going to work when some non-tech-savvy people want their own server, not a public wordpress.com-like server. Still, it’s a step in the right direction: to take back our data.

As you may easily deduct, there haven’t been any changes at all to my router’s configuration, so with all other factors remaining the same, why should it stop working?

Searching for answers to that question unveils a crazy painting spattered everywhere with mystifying cargo-cult affirmations. First comes the number one mac-advice:  repairing permissions, which seems to be the magic fix-it-all for all mac-pains (although it doesn’t seem to be related to anything else than applications which are not properly installed). There’s also the classic it’s not me, it’s you argument, also known as it’s probably a fault in your router’s configuration, and that, as expected when trying to give subjective explanations to an objective fact, can be translated to a myriad of reasons:

• you’re using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 } but you should be using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 }
• you need to update your router’s firmware
• you need to select a different wifi channel
• your router is incompatible with your computer
• you need to reset your router’s and computer’s configuration and start anew

Obviously all of them are useless, since the fault is not in the router but in the computer itself, miserably unable to rejoin the very same network it was using before going to sleep.

However, since cargo cult is so tempting, solutions multiply, like loaves and fishes. No one seems rational, and worse of all, you feel like there’s nothing else you can do but surrender and try them all, or at least consider them for a second — such is the absurdity of the Mac world:

• You can’t have Bluetooth activated at the same time than an Airport card. “Then I will need to sacrifice my wireless mighty mouse”, argues another person whose mac doesn’t behave as expected. But Jobs sayeth: “in life, thou shalt need to make choices, painful as they are”.
• You need to archive and reinstall
• Or even worse: you need to start from scratch, and reinstall Leopard in an empty disk
• You need to create a new user, log in with that account and then try to connect to the wireless network, to discard it’s not a problem with the former user account (like if the router had developed a certain animadversion to that user)
• You need to activate and deactivate Airport (probably inherited from Windows)
• You need to open Keychain Utility, delete every appearance of your Network passwords, log out and try again
• Same but restart and try again (very Windows style)
• You need to remove some arcane com.apple.* property lists from the /Library/Preferences folder. Oh wait, or was it in ~/Library/Preferences? Never mind, log out, or restart, and try again.
• You need to make sure that System Preferences.app is in the /Applications folder (I would have thought that the main point of bundles was to be able to have apps wherever one wanted to place them, but if this one is true, it would prove another of their magic features false)
• Then there’s the most bizarre solution of all: open Safari and type in your favourite address. Since the computer is not connected to any network, it will suggest you to run the Network diagnostics utility. Then select Airport, and choose your favourite network name, and it might connect. In fact, I tried this one, and it “worked”, but just once, and I think it was just a coincidence, because the next time I tried, following the very same sequence of steps, it didn’t work again.

And it’s not like my computer’s hardware is new  and the drivers aren’t totally fine tuned yet (Apple is well known by the unreliability of the first versions of each computer model). It is a 2005 PowerBook, which is one of the last models in that family of products, before they got replaced with the MacBookPro. I would expect Apple to know an awful lot about their own hardware — after all, that’s their whole selling point: since we are the ones that build and program it, It Just Works™.

But they don’t seem to know that much (maybe their China assemblers are keeping some juicy bits to themselves), and it just doesn’t work.

My copy of XP is registered; I payed for it simply to avoid getting all those annoying warnings and various disgusting issues one can run into when using a pirated version of XP.

But still I get this idiotic update from time to time:

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

Do they mean that this already genuine copy is going to turn into non genuine, just like that? Ta-daaaaaaaaaa! today I’m genuine, tomorrow I’m not? surprise! And that’s why they need to check every month? Didn’t they check the first time I entered my serial number?

Most probably they fear someone buying a license and then installing it in several other computers, but this way of fighting their fear is stupid. Just leave alone the nice chaps that installed and registered this weapon of mass destruction and go annoy people who haven’t completed your verification process or however it is called at this time.

Whenever someone asks me why I don’t want to use Windows again unless it’s caged on a (virtual) box, I’m so going to refer them to this!

When we moved to our first flat, we signed up for a DSL connection with Bulldog. It was really good: reliable connection, the corporate image was quite decent, and the online clients area (the lounge, as they called it) was usable.

Since then, several disastrous things happened with Bulldog. It was first sold by Cable and Wireless (its parent company) to Pipex, a company whose business was internet hosting. They then began to apply throttling to secure (encrypted) connections like https, scp, ssh, etc, and speed capping if you used a certain amount of bandwidth. But it could get even worse: pipex’s broadband division was then acquired by Tiscali, which is close to saying that our broadband service was provided by one of those crappy y2k web 1.0 portal companies.

We hadn’t sign up for anything like that, so we decided we would change to a new provider.

November 2008: the month of emails

So I sent an email to pipex customer care, asking them for information in order to migrate from pipex to a different phone and broadband company. We had a long exchange of e-mails which led me to believe that pipex’s internals were way worse that anything I could ever think of. Each e-mail was replied by a different person, at horrible hours in the night like 3 or 4 AM, and apparently didn’t bother to read or understand the full history of the ticket, so I had to repeat myself several times. Probably the customer care service was located somewhere where our 3 AM is their office hours.

At the end of that useless thread they said they would send me my MAC by post. Now for the non UK residents, it’s not that they had kidnapped my powerbook, but they were going to send me a number which I would give to my next broadband provider so that they could complete the migration.

I then went on holidays and when I came back at the end of December, there was no sign whatsoever of the MAC code.

It’s 2009 and I’m fed up

So I replied to their last e-mail, saying it had been more than one month since they promised to send me my MAC number but I failed to see it. This time they finally gave up on trying to keep me as a customer with lies, and admitted they could never send me a MAC because I was on a Pipex enabled exchange. I would need to cancel my account with Pipex in order to migrate to a different phone and broadband provider.

Instead of dialling the cancellations number they provided me, I looked for an alternative one in saynoto0870. I found a local one, dialled it and had to wait for 15 minutes because they had a high calls volume, although I’m pretty sure there was only a person in the call center, and she was having lunch.

After I expressed my desire to cancel their service, she tried to scare me, saying that if I left pipex, BT could charge me with a pricey connection fee. Since I knew that didn’t apply to working phone lines, I ignored her menace and rejected her offer to stay in pipex even if they offered me an special price.

She said I needed to call BT and ask them to do something called Return to donor, which I guessed meant something like BT disconnecting the wire which goes to my house from Pipex’s sytems and reconnecting it to their equipment at my local exchange.

Fasten your seatbelts!

I called BT and explained my situation. Everything was dealt with rather quickly (and without menaces). The guy on the phone let me know what my new phone number would be and when could we expect BT to activate their service. We still had to wait around 15 days but that was an unavoidable minimum.

Two days later, to my surprise, I got a letter from BT confirming again my phone number, the account plan details I had signed up for, when would my service be activated and several more data. This was great, considering I had had to call myself to my mobile to find out what my pipex phone number was, because they never sent us a letter like BT’s one.

The big day arrived and effectively at around 11 AM the broadband service stopped working. I called myself again to confirm it and yes, we had the new number. We could order Be already!

Faster, faster!

Be is a company which offers broadband at fantastic speeds, up to 24 Meg for £17.50/month (VAT included). Ironically the owner of Be is O2, which is owned by Telefonica, or the equivalent of BT in Spain, and they don’t seem to have a problem with charging €44.90/month for up to a ridiculous 10 Meg in Spain. That, to me, is outrageously stealing. But I’m digressing…

We ordered the Be service on a Wednesday evening. They said the maximum speed we could reach, taking into account our distance to the phone exchange, was 23 Meg, which wasn’t bad at all! They also said we had to wait 2 to 4 weeks to get connected.

Since I had signed up for SMS alerts, on Thursday morning I got an SMS confirming my order had been placed and the maximum speed we could reach again. The rest of the day was very exciting. A mere 20 minutes later I got another text saying my payment method had been properly configured, and 2 minutes later they said they expected the service to be active by Monday. I was really impressed with this speed!

Three hours later they sent me another message which confirmed that the “welcome pack” (i.e. the modem) was in its way, and another message which said something like: your welcome pack will be delivered on Friday, but if it does not suit you, reply this message with 1 for Monday, 2 for Tuesday or 3 for Wednesday. Now that’s what I call efficiency and living in the 21st century! I was delighted.

Friday arrived and I received the pack as expected, but since the service wasn’t going to be activated until Monday, I didn’t bother too much. Ha, but I wasn’t aware that Be meant FAST… ten minutes later they sent me another SMS saying our line was now activated and we could use the modem already. WOH! So their 2 – 4 weeks in fact means 2 days.

The BeBox is disappointing

Obviously, I had to try the modem – christened the BeBox by their marketing department. It looks a lot like a mac mini, only with several leds with labels that can only be read if you skew the box at a very particular angle and look at it from a certain distance. In short: it provides close to zero information from the outside.

The inside is not better. Internally it is a Thomson speedtouch router, and I can understand now the pain of Thomson owners in order to configure simple stuff. My first attempt at changing the internal ip range to something more sensible than the default (192.168.254.x) just got me kicked out of the network and totally unable to access it again. It’s the first time I have ever had to reset a modem to restore its factory settings. Not nice.

At the end, I gave up on the internal ip since mrdoob said he had dealt with a similar router at work and I didn’t want to keep fighting with that absurd, out of this world, interface.

I then tried to configure some firewall rules, but they had been rebranded as something like Gaming and applications sharing. Eeew. Editing those was also a pain: if you wanted to edit a rule which was in use, you had to deassign the rule, edit it, and then assign it again. Also, you couldn’t apply the same rule to more than one computer: you had to create another one, even if the settings were the same.

All very silly, and I guess that box is suitable only for people who connect only one computer to watch HD youtube videos, and never ever try to configure anything. I was already missing the interface of our old Netgear DG834G.

Trying with the DG834G

Then I thought that maybe a firmware update could help our DG834G to work with ADSL2+ (which is what Be uses). So I downloaded the latest update, applied it, and changed the connection settings in the old good Netgear to use Be’s. I also told it to use the same MAC address that the BeBox used, so that the DHCP lease would not need to expire. It is wonderful how easy it is to spoof devices!

It then connected and synched to the line but it couldn’t synch at more than 7800kbps downstream. I tried several times, even turning the router off for a whole night, and it never exceeded that limit. Trying with DGTeam’s custom firware didn’t help to get higher speeds either. Since its firmware version is v2, it has a Texas Instrument chipset, whereas newer versions of that router (v3 and v4) incorporated Broadcom chipsets, which are the ones which are able to connect at full ADSL2+ speed. A real pity, because I thought I liked its admin interface, but I realised that I LOVED IT TO BITS after using the BeBox’s one.

What also annoyed me about the BeBox is the fact that it had telnet enabled so that Be technical support could log in and solve problems for their customers. Right, but it could also help them to do something else if there’s an immoral employee wanting to have a peek at customer’s internal stuff. No thanks, if I want to have open ports in my router it’s going to be me who decides what is open and why is it so.

DG834N

So I ordered a Netgear DG834N, which is an advanced version of our very reliable DG834G. There were several forums suggesting to get one second hand from ebay, since it seems Sky had been giving them for free to their broadband subscribers, but I preferred to get one brand new.

The installation was as simple as it can get, and I was getting a good downstream speed immediately (as testified by this status update).

As expected, it has been working without having to be reset since then. We have been using both the wireless and the wired networks without any of those odd manoeuvres we had to perform with the BeBox, and I’m pretty sure it is going to do such a great work as its older brother, which has been doing its job more or less continuously for four years.

No one can dislike stories with happy endings! :-)

What it doesn’t tell is that it won’t connect by itself automatically when that ghostly compromising menace disappears, even if the network password is stored in the keychain. So if you were doing something which depended on the wireless connection, it will never finish unless you’re there and make sure you manually connect again to the network.

There are lots of speculative solutions such as changing the encryption method in the router from WPA to WPA2 and whatever… but why should I change anything only because Leopard’s wifi support is defective and can’t distinguish between failure and attack?

So far, these are Leopard’s good points:

• better VNC support
• tabbed terminal
• some tools are preinstalled (svn, ruby… although it’s nothing one couldn’t get done dedicating a few hours)
• nicer XCode

And these are its annoyances/weaknesses/useless features, plus some more that I can’t remember right now or have been fixed in system updates (such as file uploading in the flash plug-in, which was broken from day 0):

• “Your wireless network has been compromised” – and it has just happened again while I wrote this! OH YEAH!
• continuous errors with firewire disks such as my ipod mini
• intrusively inquiring about what do I want to do with what I download
• absurd behaviour after returning from stand-by: on my mac mini left click acts as a right click until I do a control+tab and switch to a different application, on my powerbook the trackpad works like at a 0.00001% of the normal speed and accelerates progressively until it reaches normal speed – even after a completely clean reinstall
• horrible wireless performance. How come the signal strength is only 20% when another computer, side by side, has 100%?
• no more decent mp3 preview – if you switch to a different application while previewing it will stop. It sometimes does not work at all, instead. And there’s no way of going back to the previous interface.
• amazingly it still hasn’t a decent image viewer which can operate fullscreen
• super ugly folder icons

I wonder if this can be considered a defective product… by all standards it looks like that: these errors are recurrent and I’m experiencing them every single day.

I’m tempted of going back to Tiger but I’m just not willing to spend a single minute of my life re-installing software for the n-th time.

Instead, I hereby demand an immediate fix for these bugs!! I wonder if there’s an open case in petitiononline for this…