Singnet Service Outtage

or, More Funny Proxy Technology from Disneyland with the Speakers Corner

In plain English, Singapore Singnet's proxy servers to all foreign content went down around 5pm in the afternoon. BBC was inaccessible; so was wired.com, cnn.com, GOOGLE, all of blogspot (I pity Singaporean blogspot users, they get it every time our proxies go down!). Webmail is down, antivirus updates are down. HOWEVER, irc is up, Winmx is up, bittorrent has no problems connecting to US IP addresses.

In Singnet's English, "Please be informed there is a congestion in the Internet service to United States. We are currently investigating this and apologise for the inconvenience caused." (RIGHT. The BBC is located in the US, which is why it's also unavailable?)

Note to all: Singnet's communicade obfuscates.

"There is a congestion" suggests that it's NOT the fault of Singnet. It has nothing to do with Singnet's creaking, rusty, falling-apart proxy technology.

The typical English-hobbled Singaporean reader reads "to the United States" to suggest that the congestion is due to a failure in the United States. Not Singnet fault okay!

Well. I now come with great tidings for Singnet's users. The problem is with Singnet's proxy technology: it is their proxy servers that screwed up.

Ailing Singnet users, try this for size on your Mozilla/Firefox, IE or Opera. Under Internet proxy settings, change to one of the following:

202.157.192.130:3128
219.93.175.67:3128
219.93.181.3:3128
219.93.175.66:3128
219.93.174.195:3128 (fastest)

Tada. Internet surfing is now back to normal, thanks to free, alternate, proxy servers located in... Malaysia.

This is a list of fast, free, non-censoring, proxy servers available on the internet for Singaporean users wishing to cut their dependence on our silly ISPs' funny proxy technology.

ICQ will even work even with the new proxy settings. You just need to change the proxy stuff in ICQ manually...