1,816 karma · joined April 4, 2011
There's nothing, therefore, for people to do in this thread beyond devise their own discussions around what element of the old-news that they are most interested in.
Also, network congestion has nothing to do with bandwidth limits (data caps, really). If you are transferring large amounts of data at 3am on a Tuesday when the rest of the network usage is almost non-existent, then you are not impacting anything. If you are doing it at 8pm on a Friday night, you probably are contributing to network congestion. So, why apply the concept of a limited resource (data) across the board?
We are done with the lie from telecoms that data is somehow a precious resource. It is an artificial constraint used to justify both lack of infrastructure investment and jacking up prices on customers. This is no longer a point of contention as it is finally known industry-wide and covered by the press (finally) as of a couple years ago.
Think of data caps in relation to a freeway. That freeway can carry a certain number of cars at one time. That is the only constraint. Cars that are driving at 2am when the freeway is empty are not eating into tomorrow's rush-hour-drive freeway traffic capacity. It is a constant. Likewise, it is not your 300gb of data per month that is impacting the network. It is when you are transferring that data.
And, finally, since the telecoms claim that "only two percent of users use a lot of bandwidth" and that something like 95% of users do nothing but check their email and watch one or two youtube videos a week, then there should be PLENTY of bandwidth left over for these bandwidth hogs. The solution is simple if that is the reality (which it isn't): Make email the highest priority in your traffic shaping. That way, those horrible people consuming a ton of bandwidth are not impacting the flow of those 12 kilobyte messages passing by here and there.
Oh, and finally, people do not go over their bandwidth limits because of p2p traffic. They go over it because it is 2014 and Netflix movies run several gigabytes per hour and people consume a lot of movies/tv shows every month and multiple people live in a single home. They go over it because they listen to lots of podcasts or watch video podcasts which run a gigabyte an hour. They watch streaming online networks, listen to streaming music, use remote online backup services, use VOIP, watch youtube, watch twitch.tv, stream to twitch.tv.
Youtube and Netflix account for just over 50% of traffic. P2P accounts for 10%.
I remember about six years ago, I got a notification from them for using too much data. When I spoke with them, I said I needed more data (we get everything over the internet, there are several of us here, and I also work from home). I needed to know what my cap was. They wouldn't say. They just said that I had gone over it and if I went over this non-specific cap again, I would be banned from service for a year.
Fine, then how can I buy more bandwidth at the same price? Can I just buy a second account and double my bandwidth? Whatever that cap might be? Nope. What options do I have? Nothing. Sorry, we can't help you.
When I moved, a Comcast person came by to offer me service and told me about their business offering. That is what I use. I have never had a problem with it. Granted, it is much more expensive, but at least I can generally do what I want.
I pay about $180/mo for 75Mbps down and 15Mbps up and generally use a couple terabytes per month.
Gosh, you're so unreasonable! Why do you need so much bandwidth?
It's ridiculous that anyone would ask that question in this day, but they do. And they ask it accusingly. How dare you use a lot of bandwidth. What kind of monster are you for wanting to use internet services? JUSTIFY YOURSELF!
First, we use Netflix. That is 2-4gb per hour per stream. With four people living here, that's an average of maybe two hours per person per day or 750gb/mo.
Second, we use a remote backup service across six machines and that comes out to between 50-500gb/mo.
Third, we consume a lot of podcasts, video podcasts (easily 1-2gb per episode), streaming music, streaming radio, youtube, live-streams on twitch.tv, two of us are constantly VPNed into work on at least one box, VOIP (often with video), video games, and countless other things. Multiplied by the several people that live here.
As more content is available over the internet and in better quality, this consumption will only increase.
To live with 75Gb/mo per person in the modern age when you get all of your entertainment and work and communication over the internet is ridiculous. And charging obscene overage charges is abusive.
Especially after we have all already dispensed with the "but bandwidth is a precious limited resource, like oil!" nonsense.
It never occurs to them that when you give a president some obscene unchecked powers (and especially when you have a legislative branch that abandons their responsibility to be a check and balance and becomes a bunch of bi-partisan yes-men, you are giving that power to every president that comes afterward. Including the next Nixon. Which I guess is what we have today, when you think about it.
We like to blame "the government", but I'd blame most of our current situation on an entire population that we have failed to educate on civics and how government works. They don't even know the basics and they give up or dismiss so much, because they don't know better.
So, we have an entire population that assumes if it is not enumerated in the Constitution, you do not have that right. For example "hey, the Constitution doesn't say privacy is a right". Well, no. It doesn't need to. You already have that right, without a piece of paper declaring it.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that this understanding of the Constitution has become so pervasive that it can not be changed, thereby completely reversing the entire intention of the founding fathers in constructing it. Thereby giving the government all the rights and citizens only the rights specifically declared in it (and, these days, not even that).
It's kind of stomach-turning to see that reversal.
From their customer support in their knowledge-base:
-------- "We're not currently providing specific bitrate or codec information. We experiment with different rates and encoding formats in an effort to provide the best possible listening and user-experience, and stream CD-quality audio over the web and wifi (for mobile devices), and only stream a lower bitrate if you’re on a 3G connection.
We realize that is not be as much detail as you’d like, and we apologize for this — if you have feedback about Rdio’s sound quality as you're listening, please do let us know." --------
So what is happening to the $5/mo service that is the same as the now-ad-supported service, but without the ads? I listen to an average of less than one song per day and only need it on my desktop, laptop, ipad, etc -- so there is no way I'm paying $10/mo for what used to be $5 and if I wanted to listen to ads, I'd just turn on terrestrial radio.
The NXDOMAIN interception is actually why I wounded up at OpenDNS, myself. It was back during the time that Comcast started to force it on users. I work with mega-enterprise-level email servers, among other things, and having my NXDOMAIN response screwed with is unacceptable. Between that and the occasional outages I had with their DNS over the years, I decided it was time to shift away.
Regardless, I think the good takeaway is that we live in a world where we have choices and I hope we keep that (and get more). You get to dislike OpenDNS and prefer your ISP and I get to dislike my ISP and opt for OpenDNS. :D
Well, maybe four or five or ten. Don't forget all of the advertisements and beacons on the site you're visiting.
Well, maybe also Google, if you're using Chrome.
Oh, and maybe everybody, unless everything you're doing is always encrypted and it's through a VPN service that doesn't maintain any logging and isn't subject to government subpoena and can be thoroughly trusted.
Frankly, if your ISP can see it, then who cares who else along the chain does? Nobody else providing a service that can see your data is going to do anything with it that Comcast, Cox, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and Frontier isn't already doing.
There are exceptions, but ISP-provided nameservers are often problematic. My ISP is one of the two or three biggest in the nation and they intercept NXDOMAIN, their response time is rarely better than OpenDNS or Google's DNS, and they have gone down more than a few times.
I've had none of these problems with OpenDNS.
One would like to believe that address resolution is such a basic vital service that every provider in every region on the planet both emphasizes and executes it superbly. Unfortunately, they frequently do not.
I don't know why using your ISP's nameservers is an assumed thing. Do you assume that everyone uses their ISP's provided email service? Their ISP's complimentary crappy webhosting service? Their ISP's bundled McAffee anti-virus? Of course not. You shop around for the best option for yourself. DNS is the same way. My ISP provides me with it, but so do a lot of other people. Some free and some for pay. When your ISP or another service isn't cutting it for you, you shop around for alternatives.
Yeah. I'll show myself to the seat in the corner. Sheesh.
Don't like having NXDOMAIN redirected? Disable it.
Want to filter out and be alerted on queries that seem to be due to known malware and phising and botnets? Select that option.
Want to limit access to websites with certain content? Select what you want to filter (I only filter out the Web Spam, Parked Domain, and Typo Squatting categories). Filter out nothing, if you prefer.
Are you a public library or academic institution or a work place and you have to restrict certain content? Select the porn or social networking or adware or other sections (yeah, this might rub people the wrong way, but OpenDNS is giving the administrator of a given network the control over their network to do what they want with it).
Really hate doubleclick? Add them to the bocked domain list on opendns.
I really fail to see why anyone would have significant problems with OpenDNS. I've been using them for years and I'm a software engineer who requires things to work as expected on my network for testing and debugging -- and OpenDNS hasn't ever been a problem for me, so I'd really like to know what legitimate problems people have with it (other than the fact that, like Comcast or any other provider of a service, they could theoretically be collecting data on you and utilize it in some nefarious fashion, which I just assume of all services free or paid these days).
Ex: http://i.imgur.com/UxjoLkA.png
I invite correction, if I'm wrong, but I don't believe the option requires being a paying customer of their service.
When I bought my house about four years ago, I had everything going for me. Consistent employment history with the same employer at around six figures the entire time (starting a little under that and ending a little over that). I had the 20% to put down on the home. I had perfect credit. I had no debt and no history of debt problems. Additionally, the home I was buying was in a blue-collar neighborhood at a price of about half of what I could afford (I don't need a half million dollar home and wanted the lee-way of knowing I could have massive negative life changes in the future without worrying about the capacity to continue paying my mortgage).
It took them the full time of the loan, constant mailing back and forth of many hundreds of pages of documents, many phone calls, a lot of explanation, and it took until the very final day for it all to come together.
As difficult as it was for me, I imagined it must be unbelievably so for those with less stable work history or a lower income or a history of some debt problems or carrying even a little existing debt. It's unfortunate, but at the same time . . . this is the way I feel they should have been questioning every potential loan for the past couple of decades, instead of just the last few years.
As you say, if they had, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
This also informs my opinion of people wanting to look into your facebook and twitter history (if you have one; I don't). While I instinctively want to cry foul, because of privacy and because the internet should be as much a place of unhindered open thought and exploration as it can, I also think asking to see your last six months of facebook posts and analyzing your circle of friends is not too ridiculous if I'm lending you a huge sum of money.
Don't get me wrong - I don't like it. It still feels . . . uncomfortable . . . to me. But I understand it.
It seems it would be a far simpler adjustment to make than inventing a new "time".
Smart tactic. Get their identity and then go harass them. That'll teach them to leave reviews about services and products they have paid for!
We all-to-often see people more interested in voting for and supporting things based on "what am I going to get out of this" as opposed to more vital abstract things like "is this right". What's best for me, personally, right this moment, rather than what is better for society and the freedom of the individual in the future.
So, I suspect you may be right about that motivation and I fear what will happen that will finally lead people to care about the issue (because of their own personal impact; rather than giving a damn about it as an issue at large). More, I wonder if whatever causes that will come too late.
People are now old enough to vote, who have no concept of a country that didn't have a TSA, DHS, didn't use the word "Homeland", didn't have razor-wire-fenced-in "free speech pens", and wasn't constantly under some vague threat of terrorism. Their kids are going to grow up in a world where they will not have known a time when everything they did wasn't monitored, archived, and used against them and where they had any expectation of privacy.
I fear that we'll become successively more accustom to each infringement and invasion with no expectation of it being otherwise and will therefore accept those "minor" infringements over our life time, which then become the basis point for the next generation.
As long as there is an abundance of these people undermining fundamental values that benefit all of society, we are profoundly doomed.
If you don't really enjoy what you do, then you would probably spend most days watching the clock, so you can go home. Watching the calendar, so you can have one or two weeks to yourself.
Of course, you may love what you do and can't wait to do more of it, but have external obligations and contexts that make you feel you need a vacation (from life more than work) and, therefore, take time off to go do that. But that isn't the context of most of these discussions. Most of these discussions are presented as some sort of meager escape from the toils of oppression. That's sad.
I've stuck primarily to video game content and, of those, many are extremely late. Many have simply stopped responding to or updating backers despite great delays.
Some have simply said "sorry, even though we asked for $5k and raised $40k, this is too hard and we quit". There have been more than one of those. There have been some that tried, but majorly screwed up. Like the guys who were making a game, but the engineers wrote it in Google's GO. Then the engineers left and they couldn't find anyone who knew how to make games in GO.
Some have been delivered and are either quite broken and/or just completely awful (Takedown: Red Sabre from industry veterans that received a metacritic score of 20/100 comes to mind).
There have been a few that have been quite good and many remaining to be completed that look like they could be great.
However, I think I am largely done with the crowd-funding experiment and will only be dropping a few bucks here and there for things I truly must see created by people with a reputation. I'm tired of the finished products that are total let downs and, more, I'm tired of the people who just say "oh well, sorry" and don't even finish making the thing they were paid (usually far more than they were asking for) to do.
Sure, they are obligated by terms of service to fulfill or refund all rewards for pledges (which means you are obligated to provide your game, if your game was one of the pledge rewards). But in reality, what is anyone going to do to enforce it? Kickstarter sure doesn't give a fuck (hell, they don't even adhere to their own policies, letting people double-dip by running additional crowd-funding sessions for already expired-and-unfulfilled previously funded projects and so on...
As much as I delight in the idea of crowd-funding, I think we are headed for a major landslide. Primarily, due to a total lack of enforcement (or vetting) by the crowd-funding platforms. When your entire model is based on trust and reliability and you do little or nothing to protect it, then . . . well, you have nothing.
I run across Rap Genius now and then and have always considered it to be spam, just like yahoo answers, ehow, and mahalo pages.
I'm getting ever closer to forty and I've never taken a vacation and it has been at least a couple of years since I've even had a day off due to illness (and, then, only because I was so ill that I physically could not crawl out of bed). My boss has been prompting me for dates when I want to use my vacation for the last several years, because I've always been maxed-out, and I've been coming up with excuses and delays to not have to take the time away.
A lot of that has to do with work-ethic. I strongly adhere to the belief that a man's work is his legacy. It is his definition. More of it has to do with how much I enjoy my work. If my work were more of a chore than a joy, I would probably want to take vacations and would surely not hesitate to take a day or three off when sick.
It's the same way that some people talk about how they can't wait for their in-laws to go away when they're in-town and you never hear a word from other people. In-laws are only a problem if you don't like them or can't stand them. That isn't the case with everyone. Just like vacations and work.