This Day in Blogging History: Crowdfunding a stenographer for Manning; Tory MP expensed his servants' wing; Swisscom's epically shitty Wifi

One year ago today

Help crowd-fund a court stenographer for the trial of accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning: The trial of Bradley Manning begins on June 3, 2013 The Freedom of the Press Foundation is crowd-funding donations to hire a court stenographer to record trial transcripts.

Five years ago today

UK Tory MP added a servant's wing to his house at taxpayers' expense: Sir John Butterfill from Bournemouth West, Dorset used his expense account to add a servant's wing to his country house. At first he denied that these people were servants, calling them his "gardener and his wife," but later, he said, "the mistake I made was that, in claiming interest [from the expenses allowance] on the home, I didn't separate from that the value of the servants' … er the staff … wing. I claimed the whole of that and the whole of the council tax related to that."

Ten years ago today
SwissCom's WiFi is crap; its executives are thin-skinned: Esme Vos wrote a little blurb on her blog about the shitty experience she had with SwissCom's expensive, crappy WiFi service, and SwissCom's sales director wrote back to tell her she was biased and basically a Bad Person for being publicly dissatisfied with what is, undoubtably, the worst pay-for-WiFi service in Europe.