Category Archives: Misc

Silicon Republic reports:

Serious questions are being asked of the security of Ireland’s websites following a week of regular distributed denial of service attacks against Government websites, the lotto and Boards.ie.

What exactly is going on? In the space of a week, Irish websites have found themselves inundated with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that once again, as of today (22 January), a number of Irish Governmental websites are down with confirmation from those attacked.

Once the vestige of pranksters, DDoS attacks which flood a website’s servers with fake traffic from multiple points to shut down the website are now cosndered criminal behaviour with those found to be perpetrating such crimes usually facing harsh punishments.

Hmmmm.

Anyone?

Irish Govt and private sites being inundated with DDoS attacks (Colm Gorey, Silicon Republic)

Lotto ticket terminals brought down by cyber attack (Irish Times, Wednesday)

1next:train

Next Train Ireland is a strikingly simple app that will quickly show you train times for any station in Ireland.

Incorporating lovely graphics and a “modern UI that follows the Material Design guidelines” the app’s features include journey planner and realtime station ‘lookup’.

App maker Stephen McBride writes:

Next Train Ireland (formerly called Next DART under the old Android Market store) is one of the earliest Irish-made Android apps, having been released in late 2009 before Android phones were even offered by phone operators in Ireland.

It has gone through a number of iterations since then but has been a bit neglected in the last two years. I finally got around to working on an update a few months ago and, having looked at the mess that was the codebase, decided to re-write it completely from scratch.

Compared to the official Irish Rail app this new app is much cleaner, more intuitive and gets you the information you need in fewer steps.

Feedback from new and existing users is most welcome.

Anyone?

Next Train Ireland

0522-apple-cork-ireland-630x420

Apple’s European HQ in Cork

 

Bonkers writes:

I was just reading about the Apple tax case whereby it looks like they owe Ireland a figure somewhere between €8bn and $19bn, depending on which source you use.

Then I read that if Apple gets landed with a bill for back taxes the Irish government intends to appeal the ruling. That means that taxpayers money will be spent on lawyers to go to Brussels to argue that Ireland should not receive this money. I’d like to say you couldn’t make it up but here we are and its very real.

So I ask what could Ireland do with (for example) €10 billion of Apple back taxes ?And how would Broadsheet readers spend it?

Here’s my attempt-

1. National Childrens Hospital -€1bn
2. Dart Underground and Metro North -€3bn
3. M25 Cork to Limerick motor way -€800m
4. Upgrading our water infrastructure -€500m
5. Investment in mental health services -€1bn
6. Closure of peat and coal fired power plants and replacement with greener energy -€1bn
7. Investment to help solve the homelessness crises -€500m
8. The remaining €2.2bn restored to the National Pension Reserve Fund before the looming pensions crises begin.

Anyone?/FIGHT!

Yesterday: Meanwhile At Davos

(Apple)

The_Survivalist

What you may need to know:

1. A self-sufficient loner lives off a small plot of land in a time of starvation. His existence is threatened when two women seeking food and shelter discover his farm.

2. It’s Mad Max in a field up north.

3. This is writer/director Stephen Fingleton’s debut feature. He’s up for a BAFTA. Good for him.

4. Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Bono.

5. What happened to Mia Goth’s eyebrows?

6. Broadsheet prognosis: We’ve heard good things.

Release Date: February 12.

sackvillest

Sackville Street after the Easter Rising, one of the 1916 images exhibited at Photographers’ Gallery, London

“The exhibition reveals how photography (like Yeats’s poem) served as a weapon of propaganda for the nationalist cause, helping create heroes of the slain and mythologise what was a relatively minor event into one we’re commemorating 100 years on. ”

…The other problem is the rather partisan tone of the wall-texts: the sense of British wrong and Irish right pervades (the decision to paint some of the gallery walls shamrock-green hardly helping).

Hence we’re told that “Ireland’s economic fortunes had declined markedly” after the official Act of Union; that British conduct was frequently “draconian”; that Prime Minister, David Lloyd George “ignored a democratic mandate”, and so on.

…Which is a pity, as the last thing we need is any kind of blame game. If that were the case, one might stress in riposte that the rebels were bankrolled by Germany. But such an approach seems unnecessarily polemical at a time when reconciliation is the order of the day. Besides which, it denies the photographs the proper chance to speak for themselves.”

A two-star review for the Sean Sexton Easter Rising photo collection

Fight!

Easter Rising, The Photographers’ Gallery, review: ‘needs less blame’ (Telegraph)

Thanks Colm King