Onno (VK6FLAB)

Charging him with a crime sounds like a good start … though I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

So … the US Congress can just summon a citizen from a different country … and the citizen is compelled to … do what exactly?

In other news, Aussie Influencer discovers that the UK has an even stricter social media ban…

Does this mean that the reverse is also true?

I wonder what the criteria are to define what an artist is, or what requirements are needed to qualify for such assistance.

Oblivious or Complicit, neither is something you want to run your government.

So the people in that office are either oblivious, or complicit.

I wonder if the USA will run out of essential items before or after the next election.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eswatini

Aka Swaziland.

Just Americans?

Given the level of financial inequality across the planet, I’d hazard a guess that this experience is significantly more widespread than just one country.

I’m in Australia and there’s a significant proportion of the population that wants to emulate the USA.

Legal Terms and Privacy

By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver, and our Privacy Policy. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads.

WTF?

From memory they use Cisco.

In 2023, apparently Optus attempted to blame them for the default values on the hardware (IIRC the size of the routing table), which several people pointed out was blatantly absurd. Apparently Optus also didn’t follow up with a welfare check of each of the failed calls in their network. Apparently they had to physically visit each affected router across the entire network. They were fined. I’m not aware of any other penalties.

Now, in 2025, it appears that Optus didn’t follow their own processes, ignored several early customer reports about emergency calls not working, didn’t inform the communications minister, under reported the impact, didn’t inform customers and didn’t make any announcements until it was fixed.

In 2023 I couldn’t help but wonder if the staff at Optus had ever heard of testing. Today it seems obvious … to me … that they don’t.

Disclaimer: Note that whilst I’m an ICT professional, I don’t have any direct knowledge of the internals of these incidents and I’m relying on memory of reports and commentary and Wikipedia, I have also never played with Cisco routers, so YMMV. I also note that I haven’t been an Optus customer for about a decade, and my own experience with their ICT systems as a customer over fifteen years or so has been … let’s call it “suboptimal”.

Just so we’re clear … we’re angry because it’s the second time it’s happened and if anything their response was worse this time around.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Optus_emergency_calling_outage

I live here and that’s pretty much the case. Mind you, this is the first I hear that we’ve agreed to this and I daresay there will be some vigorous discussion among us Sandgropers.

Is it possible that the cars were actually there with the incoming population, but licensed elsewhere?

If I have any credibility with you from 20 years of reporting on rightwing & fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Leave aside morality: this isn’t a match in dry grass, it’s a torch. We do not want what this could ignite & we would not win.

– Jeff Sharlet

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/jeffsharlet.bsky.social/post/3lyiw5khpqs2l

So he was “just following orders”?

I can think of another group of people who attempted to use that argument in the 1940’s.

“accidentally”

Can we do the Epstein files next?

300,000?

90,000 according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-04/pro-palestine-large-crowd-perilous-on-bridge-march-police-say/105607802