Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Filter In The Wire

I called up Bezeqint again tonight to complain about the world class crappiness of our internet connection here at home. I do this once a week or so, hoping against hope that at some point I will find the one person who will know how to fix the intermittent performance issues we are having. The support guy, a little sharper than your average bear, starts going through the possible reason things are slow. At some point he says something like, Oh and the content filter is not helping any. Content filter? What content filter? I am philosophically opposed to any content filters and as far as I know we don't live in China or Saudi Arabia. He tells me since the beginning of February they (our ISP) have been filtering porno and Kabbalah sites for us (only joking about the porno Kabbalah). But, not to worry it's a free service they gave us. I told him to remove the filter this second or I will blog about it (?). This he promptly did. I am not sure yet if its solved our performance problem, only time will tell.

You know what's the saddest thing though, we've had this porno filter on for at least a month now, and no one in this house noticed. Or if they did, they never told me.

p.s. Speaking of Saudi Arabia, check this out.

p.p.s. Talk about a hard luck story. First you wander into a mine field, then you fall off the helicopter that has come to rescue you. When your number's up, it's up.

6 comments:

mart said...

Great post Peter.
I think that that is REALLY a hutspa. "We decided that you can't watch this anymore so we filtered it out. Hey and we also did not bother to let you know. But don't worry, it's free." Next thing they will tell us that we would be arrested if caught bringing playboy magazines into this country. Didn't we leave such a country years ago?

But talk about filters, imagine what kind of filters the Saudis need with that kind of sand storm.

Haflo said...

I am a surviver of bezeqInt battle myself.

The deal is .

they have a really shitty router named
red something , its a 15 y.o Italian hamster with a bad back who try to handle your traffic.

** technical yada-yada please skip **
he has really shitty QoS
rules that can majorly fuck up some applications (ventrilo skype and most of bso games).
** done **

they also have a second really great router named static
super computer with no filters and 40 virgin girls waiting for your packets to speed up their journey.

To solve your problem , you need to convince them to route you through static. the thing is its much easier to make Hasidi to eat pork then make i BezeqInt Idiots to configure it.


the thing is apparently when you buy
internet at any speed you don't buy the ability to do stuff on the internet
you just buy a little icon that show you two little computers .
if you actually want to do stuff on the internet you need to get the "gamer" extension (which will route you through static instead of red) . oh which cost twice as much . talk about 80% ...

I did manage to get gamer for free .
took me one month of calling them each day with screenshots and logs of packet losses and delays . ( which moved me no where )

the big step was returned call from really bad tech-guy , who said really really stupid things . I am a calm guy (mostly) but it got to a stage which i asked if he understand what am i talking about , he said yes . i asked him a technical question and his answer " am i in school again ? i don't have to prove myself to you " . i actually yelled for him to go off the damn line and give me someone who learned networking at some stage of his life.

i got a name of "the one" . the one guy who actually know and want to help . there is one in every isp , but you cannot reach him , but i had a name .

i actually got him , i had to call at 3 am (thats when he works) . but from there we got the problem , got connected to a really cool manager who moved stuff fast , and got me routed right and got me out of my hell .

took me three month in general ,
typical service at camel land.

blackpetero said...

Oh, god. Please don't tell me I will have to start calling them to try get a static route. I never even told the part of the story where they discovered I had been paying less than half of what I should because I have a permanent IP address (for ostrin.org).

joch said...

Hey, I'm on the red something router. Maybe that's why I sometimes get about 1000ms latency on WoW?

Back in the old days, before actcomm was acquired by bezeqint, they had people who knew something. They even had detailed instructions on their home page how to get your Linux box connected.

Anyway, it sounds much easier to just switch ISP. Any recommendations?

joch said...

PS.
My porn works just fine. Maybe it's a Ra'anana thing.

Jozie said...

lol
You guys are so funny. kol ha kavod haflo for your persistence. My hat is off to you. Some people would have given up long ago- and just complained loudly for a few months. Very loudly.