UPC Breaks the Internet

UPC continues to manage to make me irate, today its the fact that *every domain* whether it exists or not, on UPC it exists. How is this so? because UPC has unilaterally decided that should a website, server, or domain not exist that they will serve advertising to me instead – how very helpful (sarcasm!).

Only its not at all helpful. Most modern browsers have the option already at the application level, without breaking the inherent functionality of the Internet. Effectively this is what happens:

• if a website exists, UPC will give you its correct IP Address.
• if a website does not exist, UPC will pretend to be that website, and give you the IP Address of a server in the United States, which currently shows a search page with advertisements.

There is a couple of issues I have with this. First and foremost, I’m already paying a hefty fee by European standards for my Internet access, and don’t appreciate having my internet experience co-opted so that my ISP can earn an extra buck or two… particularly when I did not sign up to this!

Secondly is the privacy concerns this raises, if every domain thats misspelled goes to this server in the US, what is stopping UPC from simply logging all these requests – privacy laws are much more lax in the United States than here in Europe. Particularly why this is worrying is there is no other obvious motive for having the server over there in the first place, why not a Dublin hosting provider? I’m very suspicious of this.

This is in direct contradiction to how the Internet, or any network for that matter, is designed to work. If something your looking for doesnt exist, whatever program is looking for it has functionality to handle that absence smartly. Since all domain queries return a site address, its fairly obvious that applications that rely on being able to know if a site no longer exists will stop functioning correctly. This will likely be a subtle change and not something thats readily obvious to the observer – which makes those of us with home networks have even more overhead to deal with. Thanks UPC!

If you feel this is all a bit too much, you can change your DNS settings to the following, which I’m assured by UPC tech support will not behave badly when a site doesnt exist:

1. 89.101.160.8
2. 89.101.160.9

You can also use the various free dns providers out there.

Academic Achievements

Just Read This Job Description: “You must have a 1st class degree from a respected University, technical degree subject.​ You must have 3 “A”s at “A” level, one must be Maths.​ You must have evidence of a passion for programming.​”

They must be dreaming, to be perfect academically AND have *evidence* of a passion for programming? Dream on!

For a start, I can count the number of people I’ve met in my life who have a real passion for programming on ONE hand; of those, most would say that while at UNI their passion for programming was all but entirely extinguished.

Secondly, relying so heavily on academic performance is grounds alone to ignore this company for the rest of time. Academic performance is by far and away the worst indicator of how good an individual is at programming. Particularly because most universities are woefully out of date.

For the most part, GOOD programmers are hackers; people who don’t (or cant) accept authority readily and march to their own drum. These kinds of people rarely find themselves getting all-A’s, quite often the exact opposite is true.

A couple of names come to mind: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin).

What kind of company would outright exclude such people. Its madness.