It seems that Turkey has blocked access for it’s citizens to Youtube (again).

As with the block on the 7th of March, it looks like it could be Greek/Turkish trolls getting into a flamewar which has caused the Turkish courts to mandate a block.

The Turkish courts do not seem aware of internet trolls and how you are not supposed to feed them.

In Turkey itself, making fun of the state is a criminal offence and can be punished by imprisonment.

Apparently, the block is being actuated by Turkish ISPs using DNS to send an alternate landing page. Until the block is lifted, the Turkish people will be having to utilise proxies outside the country or possibly making a connection by one of the head-end youtube IP addresses.

Thankfully the Turkish ISPs have better prudence than to use the blocking methods of the Pakistan ISPs which broke the DNS trust model and severed youtube access for many other countries for several hours.

The last ban was lifted after 3 days when youtube contacted the Turkish courts with proof that the alleged offending video had been removed.

…Tanya & the gang want *you* to help them stop it happening.

Background: In an interview with the Royal Telvision Society’s Television magazine, Neil Berkett, CEO of Virgin Media said “this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks”. He confirmed that Virgin Media are already in talks with big-name content providers to get them to cough up more money to have their service provided faster than others.

Full-on protection racket style.

If you can’t understand why Europeans would be upset at a UK ISP’s actions, it is because destroying Net Neutrality hurts *everyones* freedoms on the internet by handing control of the content from you, the public, into the hands of big corporations.

Naturally, Virgin’s customers seem very upset at the prospect, they are already being hit with traffic throttling between 10am and 9pm and the prospect of an unwelcome third party ‘illegally’ spying on their browsing habits in the shape of Phorm.

Quite why Virgin Media seems so hell bent on commercial suicide is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they intend to get out of the broadband market.

If you’re a resident of the UK who has adopted (or been forced to adopt) the all-singing, all-dancing and often non-working DVB-T digital television standard, you’ll have probably spent some time cursing your TV aerial or the trees between it and the transmitter. I don’t have any such issues myself, being no great fan of modern television programming but members of my family still insist on vegetating in front of the inane spectacle for hours on end, becoming disconsolate when the ‘entertainment’ carried over the air by UHF radio waves and an MPEG-2 stream is interrupted.

Looking around for an alternative, I saw a revised design of an old antenna design in the web technical digests, namely the Gray-Hoverman antenna. Based on the Hoverman antenna of the 1960s, the now computer modeled design is said to outperform other commercial antennas for limited line of sight applications over long distances.

I’m going to try to evaluate whether the Gray-Hoverman would be useful for UK DVB-T and I’m considering making one myself.

The design is licensed under the GPL v3

Sniff Petrol as an abnormally factual and rather amusing article about Car magazine’s website relaunch.

Car went for a trendy new ‘Web 2.0′ look (is it Wordpress?) and had a ‘most seached’ keyword cloud box, rather like delusionofgrandeur’s tag cloud on the right.

The inevitable onslaught of ‘alternative’ searches from users ensued. You can see the screenshots over at Sniff.

Here we have two videos, found via The Register, of a wind turbine generator failing catastrophically in high winds in Denmark.

The wind turbine in the videos has apparently failed to ‘feather’ it’s blades and has subsequently got into an overspeed condition. Engineers had been sent out to attempt to stop the turbine but they had [wisely] retired to a safe distance when they realised that it would be too dangerous to work on the turbine. They did, however, leave their van underneath and it nearly gets flattened by the generator head.

There’s quite a bang just as the blades separate. I’d be interested to know whether it’s just the sound of the stress failure or if the blade tips actually went supersonic at the moment of failure.

The turbine was 60 meters (~200 feet) high and was located at Hornslet near Aarhus. The Danish Climate Minister has ordered an investigation into the failure of this turbine and another turbine earlier in the week.

Both videos show the same turbine failing.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

The BBC, in their never ending quest to be trendy have decided to change their homepage. They’ve developed something of the NASA syndrome* and gone for clicky/slidey widgets everywhere. They have also increased the width of the rendered page to approximately fit 1024 wide displays.

Now, each of the widgets on the page requires a pretty hefty chunk of processing power to render, my E6750 dual core desktop doesn’t notice but my Nokia N800 certainly does. Loading the BBC webpage on the internet tablet takes about 17-20 seconds while each widget unit is rendered. Once rendered, any state-change in a widget (a ‘reveal’ for example) takes a further 5-6 seconds.

To add insult to injury, the ‘New BBC Homepage’ is just a facade over the old site, click on any news item or department link (after slogging your way through the cripplingly slow main homepage on your mobile device) and you’ll be presented with the old webpages. The only other option is to use the ‘mobile/pdas’ link which is in itself, a content-crippled portal to the BBC site.

The TV licence in the UK now costs a staggering £135.50 a year for which you now get very little intelligent programming. I find that I watch about 20-30 minutes of television in an entire week, the only channel of any real factual value seems to be BBC parliament which is nothing more than a relay of proceedings.

I had enjoyed the BBC website and BBC News in particular but the inexorable decline of the journalistic standards has, over the years, diminished it’s value for me. The new homepage system has pretty much removed all remaining value by making the site at best uncomfortable to use and at worst inaccessible from the now common mobile devices.

As a British citizen, it is unfortunate that the BBC now fails to provide me with any useful service.

*At least on nasa.gov with the N800, the site fails over gracefully and allows you to quickly and easily reach the existing, still high quality factual content.