Skip to content

{ Author Archives } Simeon Miteff

In honor of Benoît Mandlebrot

Python+matplotlib generated set:

2010 10 18 General Comments (1)

ZaCon II and generosity

Today I attended and presented at ZaCon, a local information security conference, with a difference: ZaCon exists without funding (on purpose, don’t offer) or any frills that would make you want to attend other than a passion for infosec. The event was well organized (with impressive amateur AV and video-conference wrangling). The presentations were interesting [...]

Tagged ,
2010 10 09 General Comments (0)

Broadband data caps explained

Data volume quotas or “bandwidth caps” are restrictions introduced by the South African ISP industry to cope with the introduction of ADSL. Prior to ADSL, the amount of upstream bandwidth required by an ISP to service N users was naturally limited by the fact that telephone calls are expensive: users dialed up, did what they [...]

Tagged , , , , ,
2010 09 17 Technical Comments Off

Why Diaspora will succeed

I’ve just read an ITWeb article entitled “Diaspora won’t work in SA” (referring to the soon to be launched Diaspora social network). The article quotes Steven Ambrose of WWW Strategy : “According to Ambrose, only 12% of South Africans have access to the Internet and of that 12%, only 4% have broadband. This means that [...]

Tagged ,
2010 09 09 Technical Comments (2)

Localloop.co.za now locally hosted

One of the weird ironies about this blog has been that although it is focused on networking in South Africa, the web server hosting it for the last ~two years was a Linode.com virtual machine in New Jersey, USA. The server’s IPv6 connectivity was via tunnel to HE.net in New York. Now, thanks to the [...]

Tagged , , ,
2010 09 01 General Comments (4)

The smart phone I would want

Until I can use the same software I use on my two computers, on a mobile phone, I don’t consider the “smart phone” to be a general purpose computing device. Paul Graham has a similar metric, he wants the device to be capable of hosting it’s own development environment. Graham, among many others, has done [...]

Tagged , , , , , ,
2010 08 13 Technical Comments (1)

Open access consumer broadband in South Africa

An open access network (OAN) is a horizontally layered business model for telecoms that has some interesting advantages. It is typically implemented by separating physical infrastructure from services. This creates a virtual market place, where end users have a choice of multiple service providers, and the service providers in turn are freed from having to [...]

Tagged , , ,
2010 08 12 General Comments (2)

TLUG Talk: Fiber optic networking

I’m presenting a talk at the TLUG meeting in Pretoria tonight, on fiber optic networking. These meetings are open to the public. See the link for details.

Tagged , ,
2010 03 01 Technical Comments (0)

RSAWeb (sort of) responds

Shortly after my post revealing that RSAWeb (among others) provide hosting for known South African spammers, I got an email from their Technical Director, Mark Slingsby, asking how recent my lookups were1, and requesting me to name the offenders2 so that his sysadmin team can follow up. I replied with a detailed response, noting that [...]

Tagged , , ,
2010 02 18 General
Regulatory
Technical Comments (0)

ISPA members provide hosting for local spammers

This morning I read this article on MyBroadband about the ISPA “hall of shame” list of South African spammers, and conducted a quick (somewhat non-scientific) investigation to see where the mail servers for the domains provided on the ISPA list are hosted. After filtering out domains without MX records, MX records without valid A records, [...]

Tagged , ,
2010 02 12 General
Regulatory
Technical Comments (1)