Its quite interesting how Western countries have accused China of hacking into their systems. What I really can't understand is if these systems are so critical to the country and there are so many secrets on them, why put those machines on the Internet to begin with?

Its not rocket science just pull the cable that connects the server to the Internet. Have your own private network not connected in any way to the Internet.

Every now and again I hear friends talking about how popular web sites such as Facebook, My Space, Google Mail, You Tube and Bebo are blocked by their work. CatPass.info is a site that acts as a proxy to sites that have been blocked. In return  (nothing is free in this world!) you get some adverts thrown in at the top of your browser. Not a big price to pay to enable you to see these once blocked sites?

Okay after rebooting my machine twice I finally got the BBC iPlayer to work. Wehoo!

What can I say it actually works! The picture however is very "letterbox" style and not really 100% optimised for computer screens. Oh well will download some more now and see what I get. 

The BT Home Hub I have installed in place of my Conexant Hasbani router has recently started being a real pain in the ar*e. For no reason at all it will drop the Internet Connection and commence downloading updates from BT to update the firmware. It does this without disconnecting the BT Home Hub phone (one of the reasons I went for the hub) but it drops every other Internet connection.

I use the Internet a hell of a lot for work and dropping a VPN connection or a remote Citrix connection is not fun when you are in the middle of some important work. Yes I understand that BT wants to update the firmware but not when I'm using the hub and definitely not when I'm working on the damn thing! If this continues I am going to rip the damn thing out and go back to the Conexant. The Conexant is a simple bit of equipment but it works and is reliable. BT obviously weren't thinking straight when they decided to run updates on the Home Hub, and I suggest if they want this piece of equipment to be key to their new strategic idea of bringing TV, Phones and other services into the home that they had better think good and hard about standard of service. If you are going to update a piece of software you ask first you don't just disconnect people and let them lose their work.