Cav's Place

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.

This will have to be a short one, because I’m in quite a state here and have things to do, so I’ll just quickly go through the recent events.

Dad asked me to look for Black Friday sales on Friday, so I did and found Divinity Anthology for less than it’d have been if ordered directly from the developer, and since I couldn’t order it like that anyway, I said might as well and got it, not without getting very worked up over needing to talk to someone to confirm the order. Unfortunately, they took advantage of that and, even though it listed free shipping, they called to ask if I could come over to pick it up and I couldn’t get many words out, so ended up accepting… Which, of course, made it even harder later, as I had do what I said, which meant actually meeting people, but somehow managed it on Monday and have the games now, so that’s one good thing at least.
Then, largely while I was waiting out the weekend and trying not to lose it completely by constantly thinking of what I’ll have to do, I started and finished Blood of Elves as well, so I went through both books very quickly, and also threw together a little two-paragraph review. Now I guess I’ll be waiting for the next books to be translated, and of course to become available as paperbacks, so I have quite some time to wait yet, because apparently the translations stopped after 2008, when this one was translated, and were only restarted recently, with a release, obviously first in hardcover, being scheduled for the coming months.

But the reason I can’t write more or think of much else right now is that my ISP was taken over by the evil, monopolistic RCS&RDS. Without any warning, I found that my computer had detected a new network last night and that my IP had changed, which is quite a problem for me when it comes to administering this site, plus that their site no longer worked. Initially, I largely shrugged it off as perhaps some work on their infrastructure, as they had changed IPs once before, years ago, and merely sent an e-mail to ask what happened, but when I saw that their site still wasn’t back today I started searching, first by looking up information about my IP, being shocked to see that it listed RDS as my ISP.
Realizing what happened, I searched for information about such a takeover and immediately found a forum topic apparently started by an employee from RDS to brag about the purchase and say that they’ll shortly send people over to all subscribers to have them sign new contracts with them. Of course, I have no intention of doing that, so I posted messages on forums asking for options and then started looking for all alternatives I could find and sending messages to ask for details, starting with whether they cover my area as well. Also had quite a nervous breakdown at some point during it…
So far, no luck with that, as this area was generally “ruled” by two LANs and the other one had already been taken over by RDS two months ago, so we’re out of options now and the solution seems to be to gather people together and make it attractive for a network from another area to come here, because a few have already said they will if I can get them a certain number of subscribers from a single building. They must obviously sense the opportunity, since now there’s a void here for those who still prefer such networks, but it’s a matter of finding people and banding together to get it done, and of course also of choosing the best service out of what could be available, which is what caused that breakdown in the first place. And I’m definitely not the right person for this job, though I’m doing everything I can and then some…

Though this time it’s presented as a proper book, the structure still has something of a short story feel to it, jumping to certain largely self-contained scenes and playing them out. They’re connected and it creates a story from them, but it’s not quite right and there’s still little actual world building, despite the author giving the impression that he really knows what he’s going for.
That said, it does manage to touch upon a fair number of important issues and contains brilliant moments. Often said moments show up in dialogues, which certainly seem to be the preferred means of presenting the action and usually do it wonderfully, with added witticisms that make it an even better read.

Rating: 4/5

The problems I recently mentioned were caused by a faulty BitDefender update reminded me of a debate that, while definitely being tackled plenty of times by plenty of people ever since patches and updates became such a frequent occurrence, never reached a conclusion. I’m referring to whether updates, particularly those that fix existing problems, should be written and released as soon as possible, accepting the risk of them breaking something else, or time should be taken to thoroughly test them, forcing users to wait for a solution to their current problems for days, weeks or, in case of particularly complex issues, perhaps even months longer than they’d have had to otherwise. In addition, what should be done for software that relies on immediate updates in order to perform properly, and by this I mean, for example, antivirus or accounting software?
Yes, I’m going to start from the assumption that such updates will unfortunately be necessary, both to respond to recent developments and to fix the ever-increasing number of bugs that seem to be a given at launch. Of course, it’d be preferrable to thoroughly test software during development and not release it in such a state, but the complexity requirements, the number of possible configurations, the deadlines, budgets and price targets tend to conspire against this ideal. For relatively expensive but not overly complex software developed by sufficiently large independent teams which can afford to take all the time they need before launch, bugs would be inexcusable, but that’s rarely the case, so you have to take all these factors into account when determining what flaws can be tolerated at launch and which trade-offs would be preferrable in this battle between complexity, speed, cost and reliability.

Personally, I’d sacrifice speed before anything else, at least when it comes to the launch date, and possibly also to adding post-launch enhancements. This quite clearly can’t apply to patching security vulnerabilities or critical flaws that make the product unusable for some or all of its intended users, or to things such as, to stick to the above-mentioned examples, definitions updates for antivirus software or the updates required by accounting software in order to keep up with the latest legislative changes, but when it comes to the original launch and for adding any enhancements that aren’t absolutely necessary, it’s certainly better do it later, but well, instead of on time, but poorly. If the developer needs to delay the release in order to thoroughly test the software and fix any issues noticed during such tests, they should be allowed to do so instead of forcing them to release a product that will, in effect, end up being tested directly on the users.
Past this, it starts being extremely difficult to choose… Which means that it can’t be an “one size fits all” situation. No developer, publisher or regulatory body should make a decision regarding these other trade-offs and force everyone to accept it, but instead they should offer choices, allowing users to pick what they’re most comfortable with. In terms of complexity and cost, that definitely means making different versions available, at different prices and perhaps also with different release dates, possibly making the particularly complex software modular, allowing users to select which components they mean to use and only pay for those and not the others. And in terms of speed and reliability, it most notably means clearly specifying which releases, including patches, are thoroughly tested and which are not and allowing people to choose exactly what they want to install and when, according to what’s more important for them. In addition, when it comes to insufficiently tested security updates, the vulnerabilities they fix should be clearly specified, along with any other actions the users who prefer to wait for a more reliable patch may take to protect themselves for the time being.

Of course, this will take us right back to the matter of choice and the fact that so many users aren’t fit to use a computer, much less to be trusted to make such choices on their own, which currently leads us down this rotten path of dumbing everything down as much as possible, kicking aside any needs or desires expressed by anyone who actually knows what they want. However, even leaving aside the fact that those who’d actually deserve to be offered the proper tools for what they want to do shouldn’t suffer because of those who should get to learning before actually doing anything, what seems to be missed is that just these clueless users are the ones least likely to know the first thing about dealing with such issues when they pop up, as they invariably do, and then they’ll swarm the support staff with confusing and often violent complaints because they don’t know any better, which makes it even more difficult to isolate and ultimately fix the actual problem.
The point is that, after first making sure that developers and publishers don’t promise what they don’t know they can deliver and then, after setting achievable public goals, that they thoroughly test the software and only release it when it’s actually done and, for lack of a better term, safe to use, the users should be offered the necessary information and the right to make choices, including bad ones. Make default settings only install critical updates and thoroughly tested non-critical ones, to reduce the number of potential issues to a minimum, but also tell people exactly what each update does and how thoroughly tested it is and allow them to select precisely what they want to install. On top of this, while there should of course be some default settings that ensure the program’s functionality in most common situations and the settings that are particularly tricky to handle correctly may perhaps be hidden by default, users should easily be able to unlock as much as possible in order to tailor the experience and functionality as they deem fit and, in case of problems, also to apply or perhaps even devise workarounds before thoroughly tested patches become available.

Other than those who think they’re far smarter than they really are and would start tweaking and using experimental features despite having no clue what they’re doing, who should be ignored anyway, I really don’t see how such an approach could cause problems for anyone. It will allow developers to still create complex software and offer new features even after launch while also taking advantage of the skills of their more knowledgeable users, who may point out things they might have otherwise missed, but at the same time it’ll also allow users both the freedom of choice the PC was until not so long ago known for and the option of aiming for the highest possible reliability by easily protecting themselves from potentially harmful updates.

I generally stay away from short stories, not to mention fairy tales, and this is essentially a collection of short stories that are at least in part inspired by well-known fairy tales. That said, while I can’t give it a higher rating, I must stress that it has some great moments and overall it proved to be a pretty good read, even though I wished for one coherent story and a much better and more detailed description of the world in which the action takes place.
Do have to wonder how did it take somebody such a long time to make a game inspired by this, because it’s excellent material for that. The author lists the ingredients for potions and their effects, places and conditions where some of them grow, all sorts of monster types and the abilities of some of them, the Signs used by witchers, their more unusual physical abilities… The scope is narrow, but the amount of detail offered within the confines of said scope is significantly beyond what could be expected from this format.

Rating: 3/5