It seems that my country always manages to make its way into the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Historically, the ever infamous incident of Michael Fay, the American who received strokes of the cane for theft and vandalism, surfaces again and again in conversations. Over the recent years, we were noted for our abysmal score in the Press Freedom Index, and our refusal to allow for public protests during last year’s IMF meeting.

But we always manage to out do ourselves. Now one of the major ISP here and the one I’m currently subscribed to, Starhub, is ranked third in the world for the amount of BitTorrent traffic blocking it does, right behind Comcast and Coax, which are both in the US. The results might not be statistically conclusive due the the low number of participants, but I can testify to that even from reliable distribution sources, such as downloading Ubuntu 8.04 over BitTorrent, the transfer rate is just downright disappointing.