Amazon France – Adieu, not Au Revoir

You know how it goes: you discover a company that pleases you and can’t stop raving about it to friends and family. I’ve been like that regarding Amazon for some years. These days I mainly used Amazon France: books, toys, cameras, you name it. In the last couple of years I’ve spent more than 2000 Euros with Amazon France. I was what I would think of as a Good Customer.

I was even, ironically, signed up as one of their Premium Customers, which ensured they got even MORE business out of me!

I liked their prices – not always cheapest, but close enough.

I liked their web-site.

I liked their customer service – when something “went wrong” they would sort it out. It has to be said, though, that my experience of Amazon’s customer service is more based upon dealing with Amazon UK in times past, not so much with Amazon France.

So I was a keen customer and advocate, and spent oodles of money with Amazon. So how come today I cancel my Premium account and, once my final orders have limped in some time next week, will cancel my whole account and never, ever, darken their web site again? Continue reading Amazon France – Adieu, not Au Revoir

September 18th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: FPage, France | 2 comments

Sockstress mitigation on Linux using Shorewall

This week’s hot security issue in the networking world is sockstress.

Nasty little vulnerability, found in all known TCP implementations. Given the right circumstances (read up on it) it allows a very neat DoS attack to be mounted on a large destination with minimal attacking resource. And the really elegant part is that it exploits a fundamental weakness in the very architecture of TCP as implemented on all major platforms. Continue reading Sockstress mitigation on Linux using Shorewall

September 16th, 2009 | Category: FPage | 2 comments

Chrome really is nearly there!

chrome_logoYesterday I realised Chrome is going to be successful.

Chrome is Google’s web browser. It first appeared just over a year ago. For much of that period I’ve been pretty lukewarm about it. Thought it was more of a symbolic gesture than a serious attempt at muscling in on the browser market.

To a technical person, Chrome had been positioned as nothing so special. The items that stick in my mind are very fast Javascript and better memory utilisation. Also more granular at the process level: one process per tab, or some such concept. Nice sounding. But with Firefox boasting of the new TraceMonikey Javascript engine, and Microsoft doing reasonable work on IE8, I reckoned it was not sounding like anything too unusual.

Continue reading Chrome really is nearly there!

September 3rd, 2009 | Category: FPage | Leave a comment