Many DirecTV users with the Hughes boxes are experiencing outages. This issue began over the weekend as the receivers would reboot at random intervals. Currently, some people (myself included) are getting a reboot every 10 minutes or so. According to the response to a call to DirecTV support, they are aware, and working on the issue, and are offering refunds for any downtime.

No, it's not an episode of "When Analysts Attack" it's a real-life espisode of a dubious report, a backlash, and some ethically questionable blogging, all captured by the clever members of the Domino community ! eWeek's Sean Gallagher notes, " There's been a bit of fun happening over at Ed Brill's blog. And it's spilling over to his work blog. Ed has had a long career at Lotus and IBM--he's been the Notes/Domino brand manager, and now he's the head of worldwide Notes/Domino sales. His personal weblog became the target of some anonymous drive-by sniping(read the comments) after he publicly questioned the fairness of a report by the Radicati Group. Then, lo and behold, it turned out that the comments had been posted from an IP address at Radicati Group." and "Sara Radicati admits that one of her employees, without her permission, posted some comments on some blogs."

There are over 10 million visually impaired people just in the US who are being blinded by the DMCA. On the back page of Software Developer, Warren Keuffel has a commentary (free reg) that summarizes what he found to be issues still brewing over the use of the DMCA to prevent people from implementing technology designed to translate eBooks into Braille. XML is being used now to facilitate the translations of eBooks and other electronic formats and to help disabled people get simple access to reading material that others of us may take for granted. The DMCA effectively blocks many of these new innovations (go figure). Is short, the American Federation for the Blind has sent comments the US Copyright office, Congress is looking at the issue, The Association of American Publishers is fighting it, all the while fair-use and disabled students continue to suffer.

For those of you who bought tools like the TeleZapper (or rolled your own), "Castel Inc., a maker of automated dialing technology, boasts that its DirectQuest software is immune to the TeleZapper." Additionally, it, "also includes a feature that lets salesmen transmit any phone number or text message to residents' caller ID displays." There are still ways to fight the estimated 19 million calls per day (6.8 billion/year), but passing the out of service tones might not be one of them any longer.

"Rain" posted these tones in a prior discussion.