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Thursday, August 14, 2014

On Tuesday many internet routers, used to find the pathways to different parts of the web, reached their memory limit of 512,000 entries in the tables they use to store the routes, causing problems for many users.

A router is used to direct a user towards the area of the internet where they will find the content they are looking for, e.g. a web page. The recent problem was caused by the arbitrary memory limit built into the design of many aging routers. A limit was needed to prevent the cost of hardware from becoming prohibitively expensive in the days when physical data storage was still comparatively expensive. This small amount of memory in turn limits the number of directions which can be stored on a single router leading to different parts of the internet. When this limit was reached, it caused outages of services among Internet Service Providers. Many routers, including older ones provided by Cisco Systems Inc., are limited to storing a total of 512,000 routes or paths.

This limit was reached on Tuesday, reported to have been triggered by Verizon publishing another 15,000 paths. Those affected included eBay, LastPass, and clients of the web hosting company Liquid Web, who lost much of their services until Verizon withdrew some of these new paths. Problems nevertheless continued throughout the day, even after the withdrawal.

A longer term fix is possible, but it would require manually replacing old routers with newer, more capable ones. It is hard to tell what issues would temporarily cascade though the internet by taking down routers from part of the internet for maintenance. Many experts have warned that problems could continue until these difficult fixes have been implemented, although the recent switch to a newer form of IP Addresses, IPv6, will temporarily help the issue. Wired News reported that Andre Toonk, a network engineer, had stated that the number of network outages on the internet, typically around 1,500, yesterday peaked at 2,587, enough to become clearly noticeable.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

In what participants are terming a victory, all 28 of the occupiers arrested this morning at the Thomas Cook office in Grafton Street, Dublin, Ireland have been released with a minimal punishment and Thomas Cook management are returning to the negotiating table.

Employees had made plans to strike in order to obtain a larger redundancy package following the announcement of the closure of their store; when the company attempted to close the store earlier and without warning, in response the workers began an occupation.

Of the over 44 people occupying the office last night, 28 refused to leave and were arrested between 4am and 5am this morning in a pre-dawn raid by the Garda Síochána reported to have involved at least 80 officers. “It was quite scary” when the police broke through the office’s glass door, noted occupier Caroline Cullen, speaking to Wikinews. “We haven’t had any notice”, she recalls telling the officers. Occupiers had expected the police to arrive later at 11am.

Cullen reports that of the 28 arrested, 27 went immediately to jail where they spent about nine hours; the 28th, Avril Boyne, was nine months pregnant and entered labour as the police arrived. She was taken to hospital and delivered a healthy baby girl, Chelsea, just after 11am.

While in jail, Cullen says that the 27 “weren’t treated like criminals”. They were not handcuffed and were provided with good food. The meal consisted of a hot lunch of fish & chips, and chocolates for dessert. The Gardaí also gave the occupiers private toilet facilities.

In court, the arrests of the 27 for contempt of court were purged, on the condition that they each sign a document saying they would comply with the court order in the future.

The employees of the Thomas Cook office in Grafton Street will return to work as usual tomorrow, with negotiations about the size of the employees pension package resuming tomorrow morning between the employees and Thomas Cook management. The workers will be represented by TSSA general secretary Gerry Doherty. Cullen told Wikinews that the Thomas Cook workers were “absolutely delighted” with the situation and hope to have a final settlement with the company tomorrow.

The Thomas Cook employees were supported in their occupation by the community and an impromptu and growing coalition of left-wing political groups. Socialist Party Councillor Matt Waine and People Before Profit Councillor Richard Boyd Barrett were among the 28 arrested this morning; the Workers Solidarity Movement and Eirigí also supported the demonstrations from the beginning; Sinn Féin made an official declaration of support after this morning’s arrests; and two Labour Party (Ireland) TDs, not speaking officially for the party, criticised Thomas Cook management’s conduct in statements released after the occupiers were released.

Trade union Unite has declared solidarity with the TSSA and the Thomas Cook workers.

Speaking to Wikinews from Socialist Party headquarters, Matt Waine told Wikinews that he and his party consider the results of the Thomas Cook occupation “definitely not a loss. It’s a victory. The workers have laid down a very important marker for other workers that are in a similar situation.” Workers, though, must remain militant, he said: “we feel that this issue has thrown the gauntlet down as to what they [workers] can expect from the police, the state etc. if they take action…this doesn’t end here. I think the issue still remains of justice for the workers in terms of a decent redundancy package.”

Waine also took issue with the TSSA’s refusal to support the occupiers after last night’s court order ruled that the industrial action was an illegal occupation. While allowing that the TSSA’s response in court was made “under pressure”, Waine said that always complying with the law, as general secretary Doherty pledged the TSSA would do, is “not what the trade union should stand for. The rights of members should be paramount.”

Thomas Cook management was unavailable for comment.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

The Independent Monitoring Commission has reported that the Provisional Irish Republican Army has undergone major changes within their military structure and shows that the IRA Army Council wants to put its military campaign behind it. The Commission consists of John Alderdice, a former Alliance Party leader; Joe Brosnan, former Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Republic of Ireland; John Grieve, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terror Branch; and Dick Kerr, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Agency.

The report states the IRA no longer has the capacity to mount a military campaign anymore or return to one. The units that have been shut down were responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training. The IRA decommissioned their arms last year.

The report also mentions that the IRA has also put its criminality beyond use and is “clamping down” on criminals within the organization, said Lord Alderdice, as he presented the report. He also added, “That doesn’t mean that criminal activity by all members has stopped but the leadership has made public statements and internal directions, investigated incidents of breach of the policy, even expelled some members and has emphasised the importance of ensuring that business affairs are conducted in a legitimate way.”

Finally, the report added that there is not enough evidence or intelligence to identify who killed Denis Donaldson, a British spy who infiltrated the IRA and Sinn Fein, before revealing his status as a spy.

However, the report added that splinter groups like the Real IRA (RIRA) and Continuity IRA (CIRA) are still threats and are still continuing their activity. The Real IRA was the group behind the deadly 1998 Omagh bombing. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) “was not capable of undertaking a sustained campaign [against the British State], nor does it aspire to” according to the report.

It is also noted the creation of two new organizations, Oglaigh na hEireann (Irish Gaelic for “Volunteers of Ireland” and is used by the Irish Defence Forces and the various IRAs.) and the Republican Defence Army. However, the groups are small dissident factions according to the report.

The report also added that the two loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) are also beginning to move from violence but at slower pace and not at a grassroots level like the IRA. Another loyalist paramilitary, the Loyalist Volunteer Force

The report was received warmly by Irish Toaiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ahern, said “These positive and clear-cut findings are of the utmost importance and significance. It is time to make decisions and for Northern Ireland to look to the future.”

“The IRA has done what we asked it to do, and while issues like policing remain to be solved, the door is now open to a final settlement, which is why the talks next week in Scotland are going to be so important.” said Tony Blair in a live statement.

In a surprising reaction, the notoriously hardline leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley, also welcomed the report. He believes that his party’s pressure is working and if Sinn Fein signs up to policing there could be a deal. Paisley said, “If the police question is settled absolutely on a democratic basis and principle we would have come a long way along the road.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said “The DUP don’t have anything other than very limited options. They will or will not participate in power-sharing arrangements. If they don’t participate they are condemning people here, but particularly their own constituents, to second class public services, run by second class fly-in, fly-out British ministers. All the DUP can do is to delay, is to attempt to slow down, but they can’t stop the process of changing.”

Saturday, December 30, 2017

After 171 years of existence, telegram services were permanently stopped in Belgium as of yesterday. The service was launched in 1846, and about 9000 telegrams were sent across the country from January 2017 to November 2017.

On December 12, Belgian telecommunication company Proximus, who provided telegram services in the country, announced they “will definitively end [our] telegram service” on December 29. Jack Hamande, board member of the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications, said, “It is mainly 10 customers using the telegram in Belgium today […] in finance, judicial services and insurance”.

The first telegram line was laid from Belgium’s capital Brussels to Antwerp. Usage of telegram has decreased enormously over the decades. According to Proximus’s statistics, about 1.5 million telegrams were sent during the early 1980s, with many telegrams coming from Italy, but the number dropped to fifty thousand in the early 2010s. Sending a twenty-word message via telegram in Belgium would cost around €16 (about US$19). Hamande said, “Most of the current users of telegram will shift to registered mail […] we see no reason to force the company to maintain this service.”

Telegram is still functional in Italy. It was invented in Great Britain in the 1830s, but was stopped there in 1982. The United States stopped telegram services in 2006, and the last telegram in India was sent on July 14, 2013 which began in 1850. In the mid-1980s, about 600 thousand telegrams were sent across India each day.

“If you ask young people […] they don’t know what a telegram is”, Hamande said.