Category: Internet

Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)

by philg

Ten years ago, I reported on receiving 3 Mbps Internet service while eating six meals per day: Royal Caribbean Voom Internet service review: now you can live and work on a cruise ship.

How much better is cruise ship Internet a decade later if it uses Starlink and brags are using Starlink?

The bad old days of 3.36 Mbps downloads for $18 per device per day are gone. Celebrity was charging about $31 per day for 3.53 Mbps of what they call “Wi-Fi”. Actual Wi-Fi access was free, but it worked only for the Celebrity app and for iMessage.

(Customers using Starlink-based Wi-Fi on United Airlines report download speeds of roughly 400 Mbps and upload of 40 Mbps, i.e., 100X faster download than what Celebrity offers. United’s pricing so far seems to be $0 (free to MileagePlus members, but anyone can join MileagePlus).)

How did it work? WiFi coverage throughout the ship was excellent, but not perfect. A FaceTime call would often get interrupted due to a weak connection, for example. Some of my phone apps barely worked due to, I assume, the sluggish speed. Dropbox, for example, had a lot of trouble syncing photos and was very slow (maybe an hour to upload 50 or 100 images from a day in port) when it did work. A lot of sites and services were painfully slow to load, probably just because 3.5 Mbps was a much better fit for 2016 sites and apps than it is or 2026 sites and apps.

It was fairly easy to bounce a single connection from one device to another.

Let’s look at the economics. Celebrity is charging roughly $1,000 per month. Starlink sells a residential 200 Mbps plan or $80 per month with “unlimited data”. Let’s ignore that the typical customer connects multiple devices to this plan. Starlink’s retail price is 40 cents per month per Mbps of service. Celebrity is charging $283 per month per Mbps of service, a markup of more than 700X or 70,000%.

Note to Elon: Maybe prevent customers from branding an Internet service “Starlink” unless it is provisioned to at least 20 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up. Otherwise, the Starlink brand is being tarnished.

Summary: Celebrity Wi-Fi is good enough for some basic communication, but not good enough that you could live on the ship and do a remote job (Club Med Miches in the Dominican Republic was at 118 Mbps down and 196 Mbps up and we indeed found a French guy who was digital nomad-ing it from Club Med with occasional returns to his base in tax-free Dubai).

Full post, including comments

One can mock the righteous, but Google won’t index it

by philg

One of my favorite posts from 11 years ago, Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate, poked fun at Tim Cook for complaining that people he’d never met in Indiana and Arkansas were racist and might put up a “whites only” sign while simultaneously going to work every day in a white-only environment:

I was trying to find this to add to White people who live in all-white neighborhoods say that Scott Adams was racist and it turned out that Google had elected not to index this page:

(It’s in the Bing index, however, so the problem isn’t a technical one.)

Full post, including comments

Checking on the Snowflake stock price

by philg

On April 1, 2021 I began questioning the value of Snowflake (SNOW) stock relative to Oracle (ORCL). I did a follow-up two years ago, How is Snowflake stock doing?:

SNOW is down nearly 30 percent while the S&P 500, thanks to Joe Biden’s careful stewardship of the U.S. economy, is down 10 percent (but actually that 10 percent over 1.5 years is more like 25 percent once inflation is factored in, a stunning loss of wealth for Americans).

In April 2021, SNOW was valued at roughly 30 percent of the value of Oracle (ORCL), the backbone of business data processing. What is the company’s market cap today, as a percentage of Oracle’s market cap? SNOW is worth $54 billion. Oracle is worth $165 billion. So I think the philip.greenspun.com fact checking department must rate my April 2021 claim as #False. SNOW turned out to be a loser for an investor, but not because 30 percent of Oracle’s valuation was absurd.

Let’s try to figure out how an investor who shorted SNOW on April 1, 2021 to buy ORCL would have done. It’s a touch tricky because Oracle has paid investors a dividend of $1.28-$1.60 per year during this period while Snowflake hasn’t paid dividends (the company has been losing money every quarter so where would the funds for a dividend come from?). It seems that Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have been stripped of features so I can’t figure out how to get a custom-date-range chart out of either. If we look at the five-year chart on Google, though, we can see that Snowflake has gone down from $236 to about $111 (Sept 26 price) while Oracle has more than doubled (in nominal dollars) from $72 to $168. In other words, Oracle stock has kept pace with inflation in the cost of buying a house (house prices up 50 percent and mortgage rates up to the point that a monthly mortgage payment has roughly doubled) while Snowflake stock, um, hasn’t.

Since there is more to corporate life than delivering profits to shareholders, let’s also check in on “Snowflake’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion” (from the apparently white male CEO):

“While diversity, equity and inclusion has long been a focus for Snowflake, we are committed to doing more. We have the responsibility to lead, and we will do so. Snowflake, under my personal leadership, will undertake a comprehensive review across our company of all of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to help ensure that we are taking appropriate steps. We have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion council at Snowflake, and I am proud of the work they have done.”

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are not causes — they are important pillars that are central in what we do as a company. This important effort continues, and we will do our part to lead.”

So… Snowflake is a leader in diversity, but was not a great stock to buy if you wanted to preserve your purchasing power.

For completeness, let’s also look at the S&P 500 on the five-year chart:

The S&P 500 has gone up from about 4,000 on April 1, 2021 to 5,750 today. In other words, someone who bought and held the S&P 500 would have experienced an erosion of purchasing power during this period (up in nominal dollars; down in real dollars adjusted for the cost of buying a house). The erosion is more severe when one considers that the S&P 500 investor owes capital gains taxes (24 percent federal plus up to 13.3 percent California state tax) on what are entirely fictitious gains (due solely to inflation).

Full post, including comments

Could all of our phones be blown up by a cyberattack?

by philg

“How could Israel have triggered Hezbollah pager explosions?” (Daily Mail):

… the cause of the explosions was likely the lithium batteries that power the pagers.

While lithium-ion batteries are commonly used in consumer electronics, they can overheat and catch on fire – even exploding violently in some cases.

This is due to a phenomenon called thermal runaway, a chemical chain reaction which occurs when the battery experiences a rapid temperature change.

As this chemical reaction progresses it can lead to a sudden release of energy which can cause devices to explode with intense force and heat.

Thermal runaway is triggered when the battery is overheated, punctured or overcharged.

Question for today: If we believe the media reports implying that these were standard pagers to begin with (i.e., not supplied to the noble Hezbollah members with added explosives by an enemy pretending to be a legitimate pager supplier), what stops a malicious person from breaking into iOS, Android, or a popular app and perpetrating a similar attack on smartphones? The attack could be targeted as well. For example, a “Save Our Democracy” program, inspired by the statements of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, could wait for a few weeks to try to figure out the “threat to democracy” level of the phone owner. Just before Election Day, then, the phones of anyone who has clicked “like” on a tweet from Donald Trump or the Babylon Bee would explode.

People have been buying cases to save their smartphones from external threats, such as impact. What if the threat is the phone itself and the case should protect us from the phone?

Full post, including comments

How does a pig butcher have an 11-year-old Facebook account?

by philg

Here’s one of my recent Facebook posts (from Stuart, Florida, recently named “Best Coastal Small Town” by USA Today):

Then there is the standard-for-Facebook-these-days pig butcher at the bottom:

Hi! Philip I noticed you popped up on my social media feed recently and we seem to have a lot of the same interests. Btw do we know each other? Hopefully we can build some positive interactions here!

Here’s the young lady (URL: https://www.facebook.com/amiana.muah) who shares my passions:

(Does it make sense to quote a famous venereal disease sufferer on the subject of “the sensual life”?)

What I find interesting is “Joined July 2013”. How does a scammer have an 11-year-old Facebook account? Amiana Muah (based on the URL) had an account in 2013 and his/her/zir/their credentials were stolen? It doesn’t seem plausible that a scammer would sign up for a Facebook account in 2013 and not use it for 10 years (it looks as though “Anne Graf”‘s posts started on May 1, 2023. We are informed that Meta leads the world in AI, but hasn’t been able to figure out that this account is fake after almost 1.5 years of posts).

Full post, including comments

What can the mostly peaceful computer users do with AT&T call and text records?

by philg

“AT&T security breach exposes call, text data from almost all customers” (The Hill):

A security breach at AT&T exposed call and text data from nearly all of its customers, the company revealed Friday.

The records of most of AT&T’s cellular customers between May and October 2022, as well as a single day in January 2023, were illegally downloaded from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform, AT&T said.

The question for today is… why bother? I assume that a mostly peaceful download of this nature was done in order to make money, but how does money get made?

Here’s one theory: the information gets sold to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in India who call us multiple times per day with concerns about our rooftop solar, Medicare, and final expense insurance coverage. With the purloined data, these folks can call us with caller IDs that make it seem as though a friend is calling and, therefore, the spam call is more likely to be answered.

A second theory is that the mostly peaceful Internet users who performed the download can determine which financial institutions an AT&T customer relies on. That will make it easier to call the customer and say “I’m calling from Citibank about your account. Can you please verify your account number…”.

How else can these call/text records be turned into cash?

If not on data security, what’s been the corporate focus for AT&T?

The Pride shirts might be working. AT&T says that it doubled “Percent LGBTQ+ representation in U.S. workforce” between 2018 and 2022 (from 1 percent to 2 percent, so still quite a ways to go considering that 21 percent of American Gen-Z adults identify as LGBT and 7.1 percent of Americans of all ages).

Full post, including comments

What’s a good summary of the Julian Assange situation?

by philg

It seems that Julian Assange, who was never a political prisoner (only Russia and China hold political prisoners), is finally free after 14 years of prosecution by various nations (Wikipedia). During these 14 years, I’ve lost the thread. What did he do that was bad/illegal? I found this summary of Judaism in a Belmonte, Portugal museum:

It would be good to have something of about the same length explaining the Julian Assange situation.

I remember that he published a lot of stuff that the U.S. government did not want published. That’s not supposed to be a crime, though, right? Various American newspapers have done that. The government employee who leaks the information is a criminal, but the Washington Post and New York Times aren’t criminals even if the information could be considered helpful to one of our enemies.

Then I’ve heard that Assange encouraged (or helped?) a U.S. Government employee to obtain information that was later published. That would have been a criminal act if he’d been in the U.S. when he did it, but he wasn’t in the U.S. so what law did he break? CNN says “pleading guilty to conspiring unlawfully to obtain and disseminate classified information over his alleged role in one of the largest breaches of classified material in US military history.” But I still can’t figure out how a conspiracy is against U.S. law if it doesn’t happen in the U.S. It’s against U.S. law to kidnap Americans and hold them hostage, but Joe Biden isn’t seeking to prosecute anyone in Gaza for having done these very things in Israel. In fact, Joe Biden has actually rewarded the Gazans who continue to hold Americans hostage by sending them all of the cash, food, water, etc. that they need to keep their war going.

Finally, what did Assange publish that actually was harmful to the U.S.?

Related:

Full post, including comments

30th anniversary of spam? (which was about immigration)

by philg

From “An Ad (Gasp!) in Cyberspace” (New York Times, April 19, 1994):

An Arizona lawyer had an entrepreneurial idea: advertise his services over the Internet, the global web of computer networks.

Advertisements are beginning to appear all around the network, usually followed swiftly by messages of outrage and dismay from longtime denizens of cyberspace. However, no one can recall so relentless and pervasive an advertisement as the one sent last Tuesday by Mr. Canter’s law firm, Canter & Siegel.

Paying nothing beyond his $30 monthly connection fee, and with little more than the press of a button, Mr. Canter advertised his firm’s bid to provide legal services for people wanting to participate in the planned “green card” immigration lottery, in which the Federal Government intends to allow foreign applicants to vie for a United States work permit. Mr. Canter’s missive went to nearly every nook and cranny of the Internet, which has an estimated population of 20 million users.

The mailing list that Mr. Canter employed was the addresses of more than 9,000 Internet Usenet news groups. The Usenet is a particularly anarchic and popular segment of the Internet composed of discussion groups, typically in the form of electronic bulletin boards.

“The Internet is changing,” Mr. Canter said. “People don’t like the invasion of what has been their private world. But as long as it’s set up the way it is, where anyone has access to it, it’s a public forum, and they have to accept anything that comes into it.

“In fact,” Mr. Canter added, “I’ve received a lot of calls from people who want to know how to do it.”

So pleased is he with the the response, in fact, that he said he planned to write a book on how to advertise on the Internet.

Some more detail from WIRED:

in the early 1990s, Congress devised the Green Card Lottery program to encourage diversity in immigration. Unfortunately, it also provided an opportunity for charlatans to charge exorbitant fees to file lottery entries for hopeful immigrants.

In truth, all it took to enter the drawing was a postcard with your name and address mailed to the designated location.

Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities.

The spam is still available from Google Groups, which establishes the date as April 12, 1994:

Related:

  • Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (Wikipedia): Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The “Green Card” spam, however, was the first commercial Usenet spam
Full post, including comments

The Brave New World of text message spam

by philg

This year will be the 30th anniversary of the modern text message (SMS). It seems to also be the year of text message spam. I don’t remember receiving even a single spam or phishing text message prior to 2021 and in 2022 it is a near-daily occurrence. Here’s an example:

How is it supposed to work from here? I’m supposed to reply “My name isn’t Logan and here is my Visa card number…”?

Also, is it trivial for senders to spoof the from number? What if I call (304) 607-3405? Will that number belong to Logan, Selina, or Lucy? Or some person entirely unaware that his/her/zir/their phone number has been appropriated?

Why didn’t we get these before coronapanic?

Update from this evening… my uncles are looking out for me beyond the grave:

(In addition to being blind, Lisa will also be suffering from heatstroke if she wears that outfit on a date here in south Florida!)

Full post, including comments

Xfinity xFi Pods mesh network review

by philg

One of the worst things about having moved from an apartment to a single-family house is that we were kicked out of the AT&T fiber 1 Gbps symmetric paradise and plunged into the dark pit of Xfinity cable Internet service (more money, 1/30th the upload speed). The good news is that the xFi Gateway (modem/router/WiFi base station) seems to provide reasonably good service through three walls, at least when one is not experiencing a complete service outage from Comcast. Beyond three walls it gets dicey and our old-school laser printer requires a Cat 5 connection.

Enter the xFi Pods. This is an official ISP-sold and -supported tri-band mesh network. Even more exciting, the pods include RJ45 jacks for dinosaurs who have laser printers requiring Cat 5 connections. At two for $200, the price is lower than shutting down the Xfinity WiFi network and building a new network with Eero or Netgear or similar. Carriers need to make everything idiot-proof so I imagined that setup would take mere minutes.

In case it helps others, this post is to report that the Xfinity system is

  • about one hour to set up (multiple attempts at configuration and repeating the same process about 6 times finally resulted in the Pods both affiliating with the Gateway)
  • not great at connecting clients to the closest wireless access point to the point that a phone will drop off WiFi altogether because it was trying to connect to the far-away Gateway and never discovered the alternative of a nearby Pod
  • prone to complete failures where both Pods will be offline and the only way to fix is to unplug everything, including the Gateway, and apply power sequentially

This is on top of the overall fragility of Xfinity, which fails at unpredictable times and fails hard after brief power outages (power cycling the gateway is insufficient; one needs to call Comcast and have them send a reset signal).

On the plus side, the Xfinity app is easy to use and it is easy to see which devices are connected to which access point (Pod or Gateway). Also, the Xfinity app gives you alerts when someone new connects.

With or without Pods, a deficiency of the whole Xfinity system is that, unlike with AT&T and Verizon fiber standard gear, there is no way to set up a guest network. Every service person who comes to the house will need to be supplied with your private network password (since Verizon doesn’t see fit to cover Jupiter, Florida, except on its fictional coverage map).

Here’s a question for network nerd readers: does the heavily promoted WiFi 6 standard have better protocols for ensuring that a client, e.g., smartphone, is always connected to the best wireless access point in a multi-point (but same SSID) system?

Related:

  • UniFi versus Araknis versus Ruckus (updated to reflect the fact that a lot of this stuff is certified to work only up to 40 degrees C and therefore shouldn’t live in an unairconditioned garage)
Full post, including comments