‘Lost’ finale breaks download records for TV show
May 29, 2010 Australia, Internet, Media & Advertising
According to Torrent Freak, the ‘Lost’ finale is on track to receive more downloads than any other TV episode in history with over 900,000 downloads within the first day. They also recorded over 100,000 active clients on the torrent at the same time which is also some sort of record.
According to their stats 15% of downloads came from Australia where the free to air TV screening of the finale was delayed until several days after it was shown in the US. Clearly this indicates that when people can easily obtain their entertainment over the Internet they would rather watch the show as soon as it becomes available than wait until a time deemed convenient by their local TV station. If the TV programmers are surprised by this then they are somewhat out of touch with reality.
Updated response time stats
Jun 30, 2009 Internet
This site has been on the new hosting for a few months now so I thought it was about time to post an updated response time chart from the Google Webmaster console.
Google have updated their webmaster interface since the last chart but you can see there has been a huge improvement in response time since I moved the server. Some of the other charts show that the rate of URLs fetched per day has also improved.
The move has gone very smoothly, largely due to WordPress having a simple interface for exporting the DB from the old server and uploading it to the new one. Hooray for WordPress!
SMS spam from +856207349489
I recently got my first foreign SMS spam to my mobile. It said:
“You won $123,000 USD,send your email address by sms text message to(+856207349489)so we shall send you an email with more information on how to claim your money”
Obviously this is some sort of scam, and a quick web search reveals quite a few people have received exactly the same message. Usually these sort of scams are sent via email because it cost the sender practically nothing and is very difficult to trace back to the individual responsible. SMS on the other hand almost always costs has a financial cost to the sender and is far easier to trace. The sender in this case has likely hacked or socially engineered they way into another party’s phone account in order to send out these messages. There is probably a fairly small window of time in which you could reply to the message before the SMS service is cut off by the telco who provides it.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing much SMS spam in the future.
Edit: The Age have published an article on this type of activity which they are calling Smishing (SMS phishing).
Tags: sms spam
NBN to sing, dance – Minchin
Apr 30, 2009 Australia, Enviroment, Internet, Telco
According to The Australian, shadow communications minister Nick Minchin has been quoted as saying: “Senator Conroy is claiming this all singing, all dancing NBN is also going to save the planet.” I’m taking his quote out of context, but it goes to show how petty and soundbite-driven politics can be at times.
The article I am linking to (well, until it link-rots away) actually raises some of the advantages the proposed NBN could bring to the country. I think once the network is built people will come up with all sorts of amazing high-bandwidth applications to use on it. Many of these will reduce the need to travel, bringing convenience and environmental benefits for most of us, but could be of huge importance for people with mobility challenges.
Cleaning up the link rot
Apr 26, 2009 Internet, Media & Advertising
In this blog I often make reference to current events in the news and include a link to the source of the story. Sadly it seems that many of these news stories have a very short shelf life on the publisher’s website and have vanished leaving nothing but a 404 error in their place. I found a useful plugin to help with the link rot problem which has revealed around 80% of my broken links point to newspaper publisher’s websites.
Recently the print media have been complaining that Google is stealing their content (one example if many such articles), however they are never able to cite any specific examples of this behavior by Google. Personally I think they are just scared and confused about new technologies like RSS and Google News. It seems to me the print media are missing a huge opportunity to place their archives online and collect advertising revenue. Some of these newspapers have archives that go back hundreds of years. Imagine how much of a valuable resources these would be to people conducting research of our recent history? This open approach to use of the newspaper archives would certainly earn the publishers more revenue than they get from serving up 404 errors.
ICANN adds IPv6 for root zone DNS servers
Feb 6, 2008 Internet
ICANN has just added IPv6 connectivity to six of the root DNS servers (A, F, H, J, K, M). This is a good step forward for IPv6 deployment which has been fairly slow to date.
More info in the ICANN IPv6 announcement.
The business side of TV
Jun 24, 2006 Australia, Current Events, IPTV, Music & Entertainment
Do adjust your mindset ( The Age / Alan Kohler )
In this article Alan Kohler takes a look at some of the challenges facing the free to air TV stations in Australia. Audiences are in decline, costs are on the rise, and there are increasing challenges from other forms of entertainment. What does this mean for the industry, and what impact will technology like IPTV have?
IPTV on the way
Jun 3, 2006 Internet, IPTV, Media & Advertising, Telco
IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )
From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind – something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”
With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ – IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.
There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.
Yahoo & ninemsn to offer VoIP
Apr 4, 2006 Internet, Telco, Telstra, VoIP
Yahoo, ninemsn tackle telcos (Australian IT / Michael Sainsbury and John Lehmann)
From the article: “LOCAL internet joint ventures Yahoo!7 and ninemsn are gearing up to inflict more pain on the ailing $33 billion telco sector, with the launch of cut-price internet-based voice services (VOIP) later this year.
The two groups join eBay’s ground-breaking Skype service as the latest threat to fixed-line revenues that last year earned Telstra $8 billion.”
Customer VoIP uptake is a major threat to the revenue base of the major telcos, especially when the consumer accesses the internet via Wireless or other alternative technologies. The startup costs for a VoIP provider are tiny relative to a traditional phone service provider so I think we’ll be seeing a lot of competition over the next couple of years.