Episode: 306
Title: HPR0306: News Cast Ep 1 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0306/hpr0306.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:56:54

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Music
Hacker Public Radio newscast. Hi Hacker Public Radio listeners and welcome to another
short episode on News About or Surrounding the new Slash Linux world, the free and open
source software world, and frankly anything I find interesting. I'm your host, Phoenix.
Google Outages hit Internet Land on Tuesday, 24th of February. Users in the UK and US were
unable to connect to Google's email service for around 4 hours. Google News also suffered
an outage as well. This is the second time that Google has suffered a major outage affecting
both its free and paid customers in the past 4 months. In the UK, Virgin Media announces
that it will be upgrading its lower tier customers from their 2-mech line to its 10-mech service
from May. However, Virgin still used traffic shaping techniques such as throttling. This
will be applied to upgraded customers as well. As a Virgin customer affected by this upgrade,
I called up to ask for more information such as, would I be charged for this upgrade? No
needed the woman at the end of the phone not know anything about it, but her advice was to wait
until the changes and see them. Well done Virgin, just as the name suggests when it comes to decent
customer service. Also in the UK, Justice Minister Jack Straw had his hotmail account hacked into.
It was used to try and launch an audacious forward attack. Hundreds of the minister's contacts
received an email saying that he was stranded in Nigeria and needed $3,000 to settle an outstanding
expense before he could return home. The email also went on to say that he was in Nigeria promoting
a charity named, empowering youth to fight racism. It claimed that he hit the sticky patch due to
his losing his wallet. The hotmail account was suspended today and his believed that no
monies were sent to the scammer. Love and more hate him, Simon Calmer,
apparently dropped this revelation that he plans to be frozen when he dies in hope that medicine
can bring him back to life in the future. The creator and judge of the ex-factor and the
American Idol series was dining with the British Prime Minister when he dropped this into the
conversation. The Prime Minister Brown, it's not so sure that the British public would be behind
him. He said, I'm not sure me coming back from the dead would be quite as popular as Simon,
in fact, there may be a public campaign to stop me from being frozen. Brown jokingly shared
during the same dinner party. I'm not meaning to be rude, but do you really call that nice
break, Simon? Events. Well, if you have an event or a user group meeting that you would like
me to mention on this newscast, then please drop me a line. The email address is phinics
at thelinicsociety.org.uk. That's phinics at thelinicsociety.org.uk. Same goes if you have a
story or an article that you want me to mention. As I've not received anything yet due to the
early days of this newscast, you're in events that I have for you on Scotland. Close to my heart,
the University of Aberdea, Aberdea Dundee Linux Society, have Gavin Henry doing his open
LDAP replication strategies talk on the 12th of March at 7pm. More information on the talk can
be found at www.thelinicsociety.org.uk.4 slash events. Also at thelinicsociety, Nick Walker,
the newly elected vice-president, will be given a talk on the 26th of March at 7pm. The talk is
entitled web penetration, privilege escalation and maintenance. And information on this talk
can also be found at www.thelinicsociety.org.uk.4 slash events. I'd also like to take this
opportunity for a shameless plug. Thelinicsociety's birthday is on the 15th of March,
which will herald another year. Happy birthday to thelinicsociety and all of its members.
Scottish Developers also have a busy month ahead. On the 19th of March at 6.30 in Glasgow,
there will be a talk entitled the version of control and testability. Registration is optional,
but the cost is free. On the 8th of April at 7 o'clock in Edinburgh, JQuery and Introduction,
Registration is required, but the cost is free. On the 14th of April 2009 at 6.30 in Glasgow,
Scottish Developers and the SQL Server user group will be having a talk entitled two DBAs,
walk into a room full of developers. Registration is required, but the cost is free.
For more information, you can visit the Scottish Developers website, which is www.scottishdevelopers.com.
As usual, show notes and links contained within this episode can be found as either a comment
and touch towards this HBR episode on the HBR website or at www.thelinicsociety.org.uk.
You can follow me on Twitter and under the username of Finix, which is spelled F1NUX.
That's F1NUX. Thank you for listening. Finix signing off.
Thank you for listening to HACRA Public Radio. HBR is sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of her students.
