br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Here’s another “brilliant” example of ze German journalism, an item from the #1 German news agency dpa:
Belarus to cut off home computer internet access nationwide:
Minsk - Belorussian Ministry of Communications officials on Friday announced new laws effectively banning home access to the Internet.
A policy statement from the national telephone monopolist Beltelekom defining legal internet […]

I have long ago given up on my paper organizer, and finally I’ve bought two palm PDA’s for myself and my wife. It’s a cute (see photo), simple and cheap model. Unfortunately, it is much cheaper in the U.S. than in Europe. I bought it for about $140 each, and in the States you could […]

Google.by is owned by unknown cybersquatters (as it appears, they are most probably related to a Minsk web studio ActiveMedia). I first wrote about it in July 2003 [1]. At first, they had a graphical interface totally different from Google and their own database, which appeared to be just a tiny index of several thousand […]

After running out of free space on my 60 GB drive, I bought a new 200 GB Maxtor a couple days ago. Installing it on my PC was quite an adventure (a bit embarrassing too), but at the end we figured it out.

Some websites and main-stream media have reprinted the news that our government wants to design its own Belarusian operating system which is supposed to be a big rival to Microsoft Windows, without really knowing what they are reporting about. The original source of the news was a press conference organized by the Ministry of Information. […]

Just read this in “New Scientist”:
Many of the phone companies that own the wires connecting people to the internet are gearing up to block free phone calls that use voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology.
The online edition of IEEE Spectrum, the house journal of the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, says phone companies […]

Worker error kills power to half of L.A.
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — About 700,000 electric customers in Los Angeles lost power Monday afternoon after a worker mistakenly cut a wrong line, triggering a cascade of problems in the city’s power grid.
One of my websites is hosted by a web-hosting company in LA, so as you […]

Last night I played cubeoban, a cute variation of the legenedary Japanese Sokoban (倉庫番). I’ve passed all the thirty levels (on two levels my wife’s given me a hand), and it was fun (but too easy)! There are several other interesting Flash-based games on oos.moxiecode.com, but I liked this one best. Lately, I also have […]

For the first time ever I’ve tried online banking on 26.04.2002 (which incidentally was also the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and a date when Chernobyl computer virus usually activates itself). It felt weird: one mouse click — and in a glimpse 750 euro went away from my account.
Since then I’ve got totally used […]

A Minsk branch (www.swisshost.by) of a Swiss web hosting company (www.pchighway.com) which in turn is a reseller/client of a a Swiss telecommunications company Sunrise (www.sunrise.ch) has launched a free e-mail service for Belarusians (www.telegraf.by).
Their emailing service offers 2 gigabytes of free space, with free IMAP/POP3, spam blocker, three domain choices (telegraf.by, biz.by, me.by); the web […]