Cav's Place

As you most probably know by now, another school shooting has taken place yesterday in the United States, claiming the lives of 20 children and 7 adults, including the shooter, who appears to have also killed his mother before driving to the school. The result of this is, as always, an emotional reaction demanding stricter gun control laws to be enacted while people are still in shock and unable to think properly because, you know, guns are the biggest threat to the lives of those living in developed countries, having a mind of their own with which they decide to kill people without being operated by anybody.
I wonder, did the people who demand such stricter controls ever take a moment to compare the number of deaths caused over there this year by such shooting sprees with the number of people who died during 2012 as a result of the food they ate, the air they breathed, the water they drank, the stress heaped upon them by society, the medical attention they needed but didn’t receive or the one they did receive but was flawed? Or what about the people who were killed, whether intentionally or by accident, with knives or other potential slashing weapons, ropes or other potential choking devices, baseball bats or other potential blunt weapons, bare hands or other body parts, or even those killed by firearms obtained illegally, the number of which will only increase if it becomes harder to obtain them legally? Or what about the deaths caused by traffic or other transportation-related accidents, workplace accidents, or even bathroom accidents or other accidents taking place at home? Or did any of those people even notice that, also yesterday, 22 children and an adult were injured in China by an attacker wielding nothing but a knife?

I have written about such issues before, both after Breivik’s attack and after the Virginia Tech massacre, so I won’t repeat myself here. In both of those posts you’ll find my opinion about gun control, and about more control in general, and also my view that the fact that some risks will continue to exist can’t and shouldn’t be changed. In addition, particularly in the second of those posts, you will also see my views regarding some of the potential causes for such tragedies and some solutions which should definitely be implemented before running off and demanding to take away the means of self-defense from perhaps millions of responsible individuals for the crimes of a handful who snapped.
What I do want to state here is that those of us who live in stable parts of the world, whether we’re talking about the United States, the countries that are members of the European Union, Japan, Australia or any other place not, or not yet, plagued by insurgents or violent criminal cartels, have enough serious problems to worry about without creating an additional one that doesn’t, in itself, exist. We should be focusing on the environment, on building a society that will readily welcome the tremendous majority of individuals exactly as they are, creating contentment and greatly reducing stress, on moving towards a resource-based economy, on making healthy food readily available for all, on providing good healthcare and education… We have enough things, good and meaningful things, to do to keep us busy for several lifetimes, yet we constantly seem set on finding reasons to keep our eyes focused in the wrong direction.

I’ll start from a summary I found on Realitatea of an article from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Actually, you can find both this summary in an article about international press reactions to the results and another article with some direct quotes from the original piece, so I’ll try to put the two together while still removing the parts that I believe are nothing more than overreacting at the moment:
The people have spoken, Romania has a new Parliament. But it is much worse than before. All the facts were known, yet four out of five Romanians decided to vote without hesitation for corrupt or criminal politicians and are therefore part of the problem. Six out of ten Romanians did not participate in the vote and therefore guaranteed this result. Sunday’s vote result is a catastrophe – for the country and for the EU. Over a third of those elected do not belong in a structure called “Rechtsstaat“. Like all sad votes in the history of Europe, the result in Romania can be explained, but not excused. The victory of USL, which is dominated by pro-Russian, anti-European and anti-Occidental groups, represents a significant risk in a region exposed to the growing influence of Moscow. The Romanian people have chosen on Sunday and they will have to live with the consequences of their choice.

As I said, I removed some other references to the international consequences of the result, because that sounded a little like propaganda and I doubt those from USL are stupid enough to get on the wrong side of the EU and USA twice. They did it once, earlier this year, when they tried to impeach the president and Crin Antonescu repeatedly showed open hostility aimed at the USA, the EU as a whole and Germany in particular, but Victor Ponta did make significant efforts to smooth things over and he seems to have learned a few things since then, including the fact that he needs to hold back his ally more. The fact that PSD is clearly pro-Russian does need to be noted, however, and that truly is a huge cause for concern. Hostility towards the EU and USA can be justified, but anything but an even greater hostility towards Russia, and also China, certainly can’t be.
Still on the topic of that summary, I’d like to make a little correction: Four fifths of those who voted gave their votes for corrupt and criminal politicians, but that only means about a third of the total, considering the turnout. Three fifths, as that article does correctly point out, just guaranteed the result by not voting. But I’ll also say that, while I assume that the four fifths included the votes for USL and ARD, and may or may not include those for UDMR as well, something must also be said about PP-DD. Perhaps they’re not so clearly corrupt and criminal, though they have some issues as well, starting from their leader, but what’s clear is that PP-DD is an extremely stupid choice and likely even more dangerous than either USL or ARD.

The truth is that there were basically no options worth supporting this time. The only ones to field candidates in all the electoral colleges were USL, ARD and UDMR, with PP-DD close but missing a few. PRM, who are also definitely not a valid choice, being right-wing extremists, had candidates in some 63% of the colleges, PER, who are largely ecologists in name only, in only some 39%, and other smaller parties, which I also fail to see as a real option even in theory, in only a handful. That’s because the hatred against PDL (ARD) is so great that USL was able to gather nearly everybody around them in an alliance with the sole purpose of “winning the war against their regime”. Projects, future plans, what’s that? Nobody knows and apparently nobody cares, so other parties, including the Green Party and the Greens’ Movement, accepted to join the alliance and have as little as a single candidate on USL’s lists in exchange for not fielding any on their own.
Personally, I voted for PER, being lucky enough to live somewhere where they had candidates for both chambers, but it was just to say that I did, because even a recent interview with their president proved once again that they have nothing to do with the Green doctrine. They’re very socially conservative, are set against the European Greens, support nuclear as the only option to move away from fossil fuels because “renewables are too expensive”, and are clearly right-wing economically, being mainly interested in economic growth, just done with some care for the environment, stating that they’re not “extremists” to think the other way around. Either way, they got all of 0.78% overall, so it doesn’t matter, even if this means that their candidates averaged around 2%, which would have clearly been the best score Greens or Ecologists would have ever obtained in Romania if they’d have managed to have people in all the colleges.

With the final results just announced, it appears that USL do have more than two thirds of the total seats, as well as more than two thirds of the seats in the Senate. In the Chamber of Deputies they are just shy of two thirds, but the minorities’ group is always allying with whoever governs, so they have well over two thirds there too, without any need for other alliances or negotiations, and therefore there’s nothing stopping them from changing the Constitution as they see fit, switching us to a parliamentary republic led by an unelected prime-minister and with a purely figurehead president. Some of them would want said president to be elected by the Parliament and others would actually prefer a return to monarchy, since they’re just talking figureheads anyway, but they were willing to “compromise” by allowing the people to continue electing the president, as long as the office will be stripped of any real powers, which will be handed over to a prime-minister appointed directly by the party that obtains the most seats.
They plan on some other changes as well, many of which equally worrying, including that of the electoral system. Granted that the current hybrid system is a very bad choice, and it also caused the number of seats to increase from 470 to a staggering 588 at the moment, which creates the somewhat amusing problem of not having enough seats for a joint session, literally, as the large chamber has 501 seats, but it’s still definitely less troubling than the first-past-the-post one they seem keen to implement. Not that they can be blamed for trying at the moment, since under such a system USL would have won 88% of the seats in the Chamber and some 93% in the Senate, but people sure are morons to encourage them towards it by voting for them in such numbers!

To conclude, while PP-DD was, as I said, probably the most dangerous and, to put it bluntly, idiotic choice, PDL (ARD) had created a lot of problems and would have continued to do so, therefore putting them back in control wasn’t an option, the most realistic estimate being that life would have continued to be difficult under their leadership, with little to no real hope of improvement, though the risk of having the situation spiral out of control would have at least been very low. USL, on the other hand, may manage to alleviate some issues in the near future and create a false sense of security for a year or two, but the price will most probably be the fact that things will take a dramatic turn for the worse afterwards, plus that the changes they want to make to fundamental laws and their pro-Russian attitude should be more than enough to completely disqualify them in the mind of anyone capable of thinking things through for at least a few seconds.
Yet options existed, certainly starting from not allowing USL to score such a clear victory, taking away their chance to make all those fundamental changes and making sure that a sufficiently powerful opposition will exist to keep them somewhat in check. In addition, the other parties certainly shouldn’t have joined them, instead choosing to remain independent and take their chances with their own doctrine, therefore giving people a reasonable number of options to choose from. But people are fucking morons and now, as stated in that article that I started from, we all have to pay the price.

Bottom line, as one of the 1.27% of eligible voters, 3.04% of participating voters and 3.15% of voters who cast valid votes who chose something else, voting for parties, or independents, that didn’t make it into the Parliament and therefore aren’t represented in any way, I don’t see why I should be forced to live with the consequences of others’ idiocy, thank you very much. And, while I normally frown at those who don’t vote, this time around I can certainly understand those who lived in areas where the only options were USL, ARD, UDMR, PP-DD and perhaps PRM and could honestly say that they had no options whatsoever, so I’d include them among those who shouldn’t suffer because of others’ choices as well.

After almost making it a rule for a long time, I ended up not writing personal posts on Sunday for the past three weeks. Unfortunately, the reason for that wasn’t that I managed to write two non-personal posts per week and therefore such updates became unnecessary, but quite the contrary, that I couldn’t get myself to write much of anything until most of the week was gone, so had to put a personal post in earlier and then somehow try to push myself into writing something else over the weekend. So, while this return to the usual pattern isn’t a good thing, it’s at least somewhat less bad than that.

But this will be short and to the point, because I plan to watch a lot of handball today, to see what our opponents are doing now that our girls defeated Spain to hold on to their chance of reaching the semifinals. On top of that, I seem to have somehow managed to get back to submitting ranks on MobyGames and have been doing a lot of that this week, so I may actually have a chance to reach the goal I had set for myself at the start of the year. It will require maintaining this rhythm almost all the way to the end of the month though, so it doesn’t look particularly likely, but that’s one more reason to push as hard as I can now that I seem to be set on it.
That actually means that I put the games I bought aside as well, even though I started both Divinity II and Beyond Divinity and decided to try to play the latter first, despite originally meaning to just ignore it, based on what I knew about it. There will be time for these, for Fate of the World and for any others I’ll decide to start or return to, but the year is ending, so there is no more time to lose if I am to still have a chance to get all those submissions in.

Last but not least, my new ISP seems to be doing well enough so far, despite being so much smaller than the one I had before. I expected them to crumble under the traffic generated by all the new customers at first, and there was one moment when it was very slow when most people would have been on-line and doing the same thing I was, but it managed to recover even then and I didn’t experience other issues, so let’s hope they won’t just hold, but also use all this additional income to improve their infrastructure and be able to offer even better services in the future.

The situation in Egypt had been boiling over for the past several days and today, being Friday, will probably mark another major episode. But, of course, this is nothing if not entirely expected, and not merely because of who won the elections there. That’s an important factor and it definitely shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, as no individuals or organizations that base their policies on religion should be allowed to make decisions regarding the daily lives of others who do not necessarily share their views, but that’s hardly the only factor to consider.
Over there, seeing as there was a revolution and a dictator has very recently been overthrown, such a turn of events would have unfortunately been more or less a given regardless of who would have won the elections, and obviously also if there wouldn’t have been any elections organized so quickly. The groups and individuals that unite against a common enemy will obviously turn against each other once again once the bigger threat is eliminated, with those who may in fact be worthy of the newly-vacated positions of authority being quickly pushed aside and the void of power being quickly filled, with the aid of the easily-manipulable masses, by those who should have never been allowed to get anywhere near those positions in the first place. It’s an inherent problem with any political system that currently is or has ever been used by humanity.

But that’s a topic for another time. Now I simply wanted to say that I experienced quite a déjà vu when I read about Mohammed Morsi’s latest speech, seeing as it seemed to have so many similarities with those we have seen from all the rulers from that area, including his predecessor. The difference now is that the protesters are much weaker, but those in power are also much less entrenched, so it remains to be seen how it will play out. What’s clear is that significant events should unfold today, so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on as the day progresses.

Since I mentioned my ISP issues and the fact that I want to stay with a LAN instead of being switched over to a major “proper” ISP, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain how this actually works here in Romania, starting from the beginning. Don’t treat this as an exhaustive or particularly detailed post, because it’ll largely come from personal experience and what few other bits of information I remember having gathered along the way, but I hope it’ll paint a reasonably accurate picture of the situation, both past and present.

Back in the ’90s, when Internet access first became available in Romania, Romtelecom had a monopoly on the fixed telephony services, so everything had to go through them. At first, being on-line was more or less reserved for some IT companies and a very small number of individuals, but the situation slowly changed after various ISPs started popping up and offering dial-up access and Romtelecom decided to charge only a tenth of the normal rate for using the phone line for Internet access during the night and on weekends.
Still, even at these greatly reduced rates, such access remained expensive and, due to sharing the phone line, also problematic, and so the first LANs were born. They could be created by individuals or start from companies which would then allow people to connect to their network, and typically involved a rented 56 kbps line, to ensure a permanent connection, which was then shared by all the users. That’s how I first got on-line, connecting to a firm’s network, which had some 40 computers sharing such a 56 kbps line which, as was the norm at the time, actually offered an average of 44 kbps.

Shortly after that, the demand for greater speeds and reliability prompted Romtelecom to start offering ISDN lines, with different channels for phone and Internet, so subscribers could have one 64 kbps line that didn’t interfere with the phone and a second one that was shared between the two services, for a maximum of 128 kbps when the phone was not otherwise used, though using both channels at the same time meant paying twice the rate. However, this service didn’t prove particularly popular and may in fact be largely seen as the agony of dial-up access in Romania, because soon afterwards enterprising people started offering broadband access through the first LANs that were actually meant to function as small, local ISPs.
In small or even medium-sized towns and cities, this may or may not have happened, depending on whether sufficiently enterprising people could be found at the right time for such an initiative. In some such places, such LANs were founded early enough and one or two of them ended up covering almost the entire area, while in others they weren’t and the only broadband options were those that started being offered by the large ISPs which were usually also cable TV operators. However, in larger cities, LANs that contracted broadband access from a major ISP and shared it among all users, splitting the costs, quickly became the norm and said major ISPs found very little room left for them on the residential customers market.

Personally, after that initial arrangement was no longer an option, I had to stay on dial-up for a couple of years, before moving in with Andra and ending up back in such a network. The first one was very small, with a total of four users and no plans to expand, because it was never meant as a commercial project. We had either 32 kbps or 64 kbps, can’t quite remember, out of a 256 kbps line, half of which was reserved for one person who also had the possibility to disconnect the others when he needed all the bandwidth. Right now it’d sound like a very bad deal, but at the time it meant that we could be connected almost permanently while paying an entirely reasonable monthly fee.
But other LANs, those that were actually commercial projects, like the one we eventually switched over to, while also starting with perhaps a similarly small number of users who lived in the same building, quickly expanded, creating a network of cables that stretched all over cities, dozens of them stretching in parallel on poles, between buildings or across facades. It was very bottom-up, with little planning but a lot of passion. The services could vary greatly, the quality of the infrastructure was anyone’s guess, but the competition was fierce, which had both positive and negative aspects, the latter taking the form of frequent sabotage, such as cutting cables or stealing or destroying rivals’ equipment.
Somehow, however, the good far outweighed the bad and thanks to these efforts Romania ended up having the fastest broadband speeds in Europe and being between second and fourth in the overall classification, the low prices stunned anyone living in more developed countries, and metered traffic was unheard of in these LANs and eventually, after initially being the norm in their offers, even the large ISPs were forced to abandon it. In addition, these networks created an entire “ecosystem” for the users, with peering agreements that offered stunning transfer speeds between the member networks, games servers, DC hubs, and in some cases, for a few years, even messaging services and, until enforced anti-piracy legislation put an end to that, public storage servers. And they did all of this while largely preserving the feel of a grassroots effort, offering more freedom, independence and a more direct relationship between the users and the management, which often allowed for more flexible agreements instead of clear and fixed contracts.

The problem was that all those cables offered an excuse, because there were an increasing number of complaints about them and the authorities could start operations supposedly meant to build a more robust Internet infrastructure that’ll also stop being an eyesore. Of course, the real motivation had to do with creating a single infrastructure, which could be monitored and controlled and which would earn money for the major players by requiring the LANs to use it and charging an arm and a leg for this. Under these circumstances, LANs trying to stay in business have to pay these major players absurd fees, and those that can’t do so anymore end up selling their infrastructure and their users, almost always to RDS, which has spent the better part of the past decade aggressively taking over as much of the market as they possibly could.
Obviously, being by far the largest city, Bucharest also has the most notable such project, named NetCity. The plan was advertised as an underground optical fiber infrastructure that all LANs could use, removing the unsightly cables while also improving reliability, greatly reducing the risk of damage, be it accidental or not, and allowing any network to reach clients anywhere in the city instead of being limited to the area they could stretch their own infrastructure to cover. However, the result was an underground optical fiber infrastructure partly built with public funds but controlled by a private company, which has the right to create its own network that’d obviously use this infrastructure free of charge, but which demands exorbitant fees from the LANs that are now required by law to use their services, network administrators saying that their costs as much as tripled as a result. In addition, the authorities demand that people take down all cables no more than a few days after the area they live in becomes accessible through NetCity, which also leads to situations such as no network being able to access a certain area anymore because it’s not covered by NetCity in itself but all the surrounding ones are, so there’s no way to get a cable to it.

Of course, as I said above, RDS is taking full advantage of this, and this started several years ago, with their purchase of C-Zone. This was well before NetCity, nobody saw it coming and it was made far worse by the fact that C-Zone was humongous by the standards of such networks, dwarfing the others by orders of magnitude. And yet one day their customers simply found that they had become RDS customers, being forced to choose a new subscription from their offer, and the entire C-Zone infrastructure, such as their extremely popular DC hub or games servers, was gone.
And this has been the rule ever since. Romtelecom has its own infrastructure, which it has upgraded over time, and largely stays out of this conflict, UPC generally doesn’t get involved in the areas where RDS has a clear presence, even openly stating that they’re afraid to do so, but RDS has no qualms in entering areas traditionally held by UPC according to the old agreement made between Astral and RCS, well before being purchased by UPC and merging with RDS, respectively. They’ll put in their cables in every building, have people knock on every door and shove contracts under people’s noses, pester them to switch over to them, for both TV and Internet, and when that fails they make extremely attractive offers for the LANs that cover the respective area. Worse, there’s never any warning until people realize that their IPs have changed and all of the network’s servers, whether they were used for multiplayer games, DC hubs or even e-mail, have been shut down, which always happens as soon as RDS takes over. As for complaints, their standard reply is that anyone who’s unhappy with their services is free to switch over to someone else… If they can still find someone else, I’d add!

So, between the authorities, projects like NetCity and RDS, the future looks bleak for these networks, and for Internet access here as a whole. We lost that leading position in speed, the independence is going down the drain, that entire “ecosystem” has been largely torn to shreds, and networks seem to be falling into RDS’ gaping maw one after the other. For example, before getting TitanNet, they had purchased iLink, which was the other large network covering this area, back in September, so it was a clear assault on this part of the city… And now the RDS employee who posted on a forum to practically gloat about it said that they just purchased three others, but the names won’t be made public until January, probably because some people managed to get away by finding other options and switching over now, as a few small networks operating in the area have stubbornly refused their offers, so they must be trying to make sure that they leave no stone unturned next time so nobody’ll be able to evade their grasp… Sickening!

Personally, I have been lucky enough to find one such network and switch to them, so I have been a forced RDS customer for less than two days. How much longer will they last, I don’t know, but at the moment they seem determined, and so do a few others I have exchanged some messages with these days. Most seem to have already accepted defeat, even if they’re still operational at the moment, but a few try to fight on, with the help of their customers as well. Unfortunately, many seem unwilling to create a united front, allying and organizing themselves in order to become a stronger opponent, and therefore they remain a bunch of small fish trying to hide or run from the big predator for a little while longer.
And that’s sad… They, in one form or another, have managed to create this infrastructure, this “ecosystem”, these services that were the envy of nearly every country in the world. The authorities had nothing to do with it, the companies such as the one behind NetCity had nothing to do with it, RDS had nothing to do with it… Yet now this “triumvirate” is rapidly destroying everything that these networks have created over the past 15 or so years, and most have either already accepted defeat or seem to think that they’ll make it on their own, hoping that they’ll be left alone and allowed to survive if they just withdraw back into their shell, stick to their small area and keep quiet. And unfortunately, by the time they’ll realize that this approach is wrong, that we need to form a united front and fight back, without letting anyone stand alone, it may well be too late for all of us.