Slashdot Mirror

I was banned almost a year ago and AFAIK that ban hasn't been lifted. We are banned couse my ISP use transparent proxies. And slashdot thinks that it get a lot of connections from the same IP.

There are places like whatIsMyIP that detect both, my proxy IP and my own IP. I think that's should check for my real IP, no my proxy's.

Telefónica, biggest phone operator and ex-state company, had been offering it for some months in Spain in some cities. They had a restriction to not do so for a couple of years, to allow cable operators to grow, otherwise they would have tried sooner. In the meanwhile they tested and got all ready to smash the other companies as soon as they could (competition here sucks, Telefónica had the plus of keeping all from systems when it was a state monopoly, becoming a de facto monopoly now). The service is named Imagenio.

Spain's most popular DSL provider (or at least with the majority of users), Telefonica holds us behind a transparent proxy.

Thanks to the proxy, we are being banned from a plethora of sites, including slashdot, and now google.

If a whole country cannot access google, it is missing one of the most important services of the Internet today.

Asking slashdot or google to remove the bans seems useless. Asking the ISP is even more painful.

The only alternative seems to let the international community know about our problem. Since the very precise moment Telefonica stock value begins to sink, maybe they will rethink using these techniques.

FYI, the user agreement talks about complete internet access, and nowhere states it is behind a proxy.

Anyway, if you are interested you can get more information by using google. We can't.

From the Press release...

(Note from BB - I've been getting mails from users indicating that TDE is now privately owned, I will be attempting to confirm this ASAP)

Well we're dealing with some real worldly types here, aren't we? It's not exactly difficult to find out, you switch their home page to English if you can't read Spanish and you get all the investor information you need. See the options there at the top-right?

I'm sure all the Spanish businesses trading internationally that you've just knocked off the Internet will thank you for your tactful approach to the problem. As will people trying to stay in touch with friends and relatives in Spain, especially so soon after the terrorist bombing in Madrid. Taking a leaf out of the Rumsfield book of diplomacy or something are we?

The first thing you get if you go to your About Us page followed by the link under "People Who Dislike the SOSDG And The AHBL" is "Power Without Accountability". Do you think they might actually have a point? Or do you labour under the delusion that if people (not spammers, but legitimate businesses and private individuals) don't like you're doing then you must be doing it right?

Of course you will argue that you only provide the list, it is up to others how to use it. Unfortunately your lists are implemented by scripts and there were very few scripting languages that came with a conscience last time I looked. However at least it means you've neatly absolved yourself of any responsibility so you can block an entire country of 40 million people without bothering about the repercussions in your US-centric blacklist (which basically amounts to regarding anything from outside North America as suspicious).

Feel free to answer my points all you want.

It should be noted that, ultimately, HotWired belong to Terra-Lycos, a Spanish company closely tied to the old monopoly Telefonica.

I am currently in Spain and prices for DSL are around 40Euro/month. I am using Telefonica DSL which costs me 39Euro/month which is 256k down & 128k up (as well as 24hour access). Also I don't need a contract or anything, this includes a USB modem. You can get a router/dsl modem as well as wireless stuff for about 30-100Euro more (one time charge). There is an option for 512k as well but I am not sure of the price.

There are other companies out there, Ya.com, Wanadoo which you might be able to get a better price. Keep in mind though that in Spain, Telefonica is the traditional government backed company and I am pretty sure they own most of the lines. I think that is why most of the companies have the same price for their DSL.

One final note you can find a few prices a little bit lower but they actually limit the service so you don't have 24hour access. So you can use it at night or offpeak times...I have never seen that before in the US, those were around 30Euro/month...to me the extra 10Euro was worth being able to be online all day. I hope this helps and if there ever is a website that would be awesome...it was such a pain to try and read Spanish and then call people and try and ask questions...so painful.

...only we call it TelefÃnica

So what happens if I, a resident in Spain, wish to send email via a British mailserver to an American recipient? This is somethign I actually do regularly, as well as recieve email stored on a UK POP account. Where do I pay the tax? Could spammers just get around it by using offshore mailservers in countries that won't bother to put in a tax?

Hell, thinking about it, how would you define the sendign of email? A quick traceroute to my ISP's SMTP server shows that the packets from my machine get to that server via france, the UK, The netherlands, and belgium. This is *before* I even start esending the email. Would I end up having to pay 1 Eurocent to each of these jurisdictions just because my ISP doesn't have a local peering agreement with its ADSL provider?

The internet is a global phenomenon. Stop thinking in terms of US only.

I'm a Telecommunications Engineer from Spain. Last week I conversated with an important directive of Telefónica and he explained the biggest problems telcos are having now:

• A single optical fiber has a very big capacity: 2.5 Gbps if you don't use WDM, but up to 320 Gbps using DWDM. The fibers telcos are using now use WDM and have a capacity of 40 Gbps. The problem is that very few fibers use more than 10% or 20% of its capacity.
• There are lots of carriers, and also there are a lot of "carriers of carriers" (i. e. Global Crossing). Carrier of carriers are a hazard for the survival of telcos, because they depend too much on each client, so they are selling the bandwith at a ridiculous price.
• Bandwidth in a fiber is really cheap, but what you are paying is maintenance. Out there, in the international market, 1 Mbps costs your carrier $1100 US, and most of those 1100$ are spent in maintenance.

Just an example: last year a client wanted a 2 Mbps link from London to Cadiz (in the South coast of Spain). It was cheaper for the client to directly contract a 622 Mbps link with a carrier than to contract a 2 Mbps link with a telco. Why? Because there are too many carriers competing, so they sell under price (expecting not to fail) and the result of this is they are bringing bankrupcy to themselves and to the rest of carriers and telcos.

This is why KPNQwest is filing for bankrupcy: too much competence, too much carriers (including KPNQwest) selling bandwidth under price (just trying to survive).

In a few years, there'll be very few telcos and carriers in Europe (and USA), but they'll be very big companys. Good or bad? I don't know, we'll see.

I'm a Telecommunications Engineer from Spain. Last week I conversated with an important directive of Telefónica and he explained the biggest problems telcos are having now:

• A single optical fiber has a very big capacity: 2.5 Gbps if you don't use WDM, but up to 320 Gbps using DWDM. The fibers telcos are using now use WDM and have a capacity of 40 Gbps. The problem is that very few fibers use more than 10% or 20% of its capacity.
• There are lots of carriers, and also there are a lot of "carriers of carriers" (i. e. Global Crossing). Carrier of carriers are a hazard for the survival of telcos, because they depend too much on each client, so they are selling the bandwith at a ridiculous price.
• Bandwidth in a fiber is really cheap, but what you are paying is maintenance. Out there, in the international market, 1 Mbps costs your carrier $1100 US, and most of those 1100$ are spent in maintenance.

Only an example: last year a client wanted a 2 Mbps link from London to Cadiz (in the South coast of Spain). It was cheaper for the client to directly contract a 622 Mbps link with a carrier than to contract a 2 Mbps link with a telco. Why? Because there are too many carriers competing, so they sell under price (expecting not to fail) and the result of this is they are bringing bankrupcy to themselves and to the rest of carriers and telcos.

This is why KPNQwest is filing for bankrupcy: too much competence, too much carriers selling bandwidth under price (just trying to survive).

In a few years, there'll be very few telcos and carriers in Europe (and USA), but they'll be very big companys. Good or bad? I don't know, we'll see.

There are thousands of views on art, including death as art as in "performance art". There's a movie named frozen. Or there's Guillermo Gómez-Peña who is well known in the performance art world. I'll stop there. Lego art :)