At some point in the next 48 hours, I’ll be leaving this house, and more importantly, leaving the cable modem that’s served me nicely for the last 4 years. It’s 256Kbps, which is not great these days, but it works, costs less than 15 UKP per month, and was available months before anywhere in the UK (except Hull) got any kind of broadband access, and years before the majority of UK citizens were able to ditch their modems.

Now the UK has caught up a bit, but Brazil is still closer to broadband rich countries like Canada and South Korea than the UK is to it. Rio de Janeiro has almost city-wide wireless access.

How did this happen? How did the world’s fourth largest economy get beaten by the ninth? The answer is obviously complicated, but I think it boils down to monopolies being far worse for an economy than you could possibly imagine, and the fact that Brazil has more than a hundred million people living in essentially abject poverty. A large pool of extremely cheap labour is very useful for making the rich minority richer. Here’s to slave-installed broadband.

Me looking through my apache logs is fascinating. You looking through your apache logs is obsessive navel gazing, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t do it. Having established the boundaries of what is or isn’t fascinating, let’s see what we can deduce from the following entry:

cf.nhyoko.med.navy.mil - - [16/Aug/2003:21:56:26 +0100] “GET /james.lab6.com/2003/07/27/chemistry/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 4286 “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=CHEMISTRY+SET&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-top” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

1. Someone in the US military read a page of this site.
2. They were in the U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka and Far East Dental Command.
3. Dental Command?!@~~
4. They use Yahoo search.
5. They use Windows 2000.
6. They use IE6 on Win2k.
7. They type in ALL CAPS.
8. They’re looking for info on CHEMISTRY SETS

The US military has more than ten thousand active nuclear weapons. That makes it my business whether they allow users like the above on their computers, on which it is also my business whether or not they run Microsoft consumer grade junk.

Update: It seems this is nothing out of the ordinary. Grepping logs for “.gov” is truly worrying. They’re looking for chemistry sets too! Obviously essential info for the social security department.