Fucked Up Japan

Walked into a Softbank store the other day and told them I wanted me an iPhone to replace the piece of shit brick I was carrying around. Despite concerns over Softbank allegedly not giving iPhones to foreigners or charging them ridiculous amounts for one, they upgraded me straight away with no credit or Visa expiry checks and I paid nothing upfront.

BULLSHIT BAD POINTS:

There’s been a lot of criticism over how crap the iPhone actually is when compared to the fantastically more advanced Japanese phones, so I think I’d like to go through some of it and explain the bullshit away, since most of the criticism seems to come from people who obviously don’t have an iPhone or maybe not even Japanese phone, like the commenters over and JapanProbe. I’m guessing a lot of shit is hyped about Japanese phones, but let me tell you they really aren’t all that, even when the interface is in English.

Read on for the full review…

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…And this time it’s serious - by which I mean it may actually affect me!

OCN/NTT Communications (read, my ISP) have announced a new daily *upstream* limit of 30gb in order to curb the heavy usage of a few p2p users - like myself, I guess. There are no current plans for a download limit, however they will send warnings to users found to be sharing files via the popular Japanese p2p application Winny .

Now 30gb may not seem like much to you, but when you have genuinely fast internet like myself…

30 gb uploaded is nothing, as you can see. Curious that my upload is actually faster than my download speed, though. According to speedtest.net, my internet is faster than 99% of everyone else who has taken the test, and is well above the Japanese national average of about 4 mb/sec.
Assuming my torrent seeds (for legal material, of course) were all running at maximum throughput, Azureus would rape 30gb in about 16 minutes. Yes, 16 fucking minutes. This could be a problem 128 minutes. Still a problem, despite my dodgy calculations.

For anyone else worried or affected by this fascistic limit, I did some calculations to figure out what the global upload speed limit should be set to so as to ensure the 30gb limit is never exceeded:

• Assuming you will be using your net for other things too like online gaming and such, let’s say a daily limit of 24 gb. That gives us a nice round figure of 1gb/hour to work with.
• 1,000 mb / 60 minutes works out at around 16.666 mb / minute.
• 16,666 kb / 60 seconds gives a final speed of 277 kb/s maximum. All decent torrent clients like Azureus and uTorrent allow you to set global speed limits.

So there you have it - set your upload limit to 270 kb and you should be safe. You might also want to turn on forced encryption and disallow torrent connections to unencrypted peers. This will make perfectly sure that your ISP has no idea what you’re actually transferring, even with deep packet inspection. I also highly suggest running PeerGuardian, which updates daily with lists of banned IPs, like anti p2p companies injecting torrents with corrupted data to fuck up your downloads, as well as various evil and / or governmental organizations that will harvest your IP address if they find you sharing and then proceed to sue your ass. You have been warned.

How fast is your internet? Does your ISP inflict insufferable limits? Answers in the comments, please!

A city employee from southern Japan has been demoted for viewing more than three-quarters of a million pornographic pages during work hours over a period of 9 months. According to the BBC, that breaks down to 10,000 a day, or a staggering 20 pages a minute! Even as a virile tech-savvy teenage boy I could only muster around 2 pages a minute, but that was perhaps due to the fact that I got porn through a 56k modem, and this particular government employee probably had fibre-optic ‘net. In fact, when you look at like that, he could have done a little better, I think. It should be noted however that the article mentions nothing about how many times he spunked over government furniture and/or junior female employees while viewing aforementioned porn.

As a result of his actions, his pay was cut by $200 a month! This is the nature of Japanese government - even if you spend your entire time at work looking at porn, that’s still only on about the same level as say, raping the prime ministers daughter - and hence only minor reprimands are admonished. Something more serious like disagreeing in public with your company superiors might warrant 30 lashes.

An example of porn he might have been looking at….