The CDN just sends you to the edge servers that are closest peer to the DNS server. I thought there was a very elaborate geolocation scheme, but there is not. They merely use the location of the DNS server that resolves your query.

I was so disappointed. There is no magic. They do not know nor care about the end user's IP address. The CDN just sends you to the edge servers that are closest peer to the DNS server. Certain companies actually seem to own patents on this simple technique.

For public wireless networks, there is a popular solution to extract revenue, aptly named the Revenue eXtraction Gateway, or rXg, by http://www.rgnets.com/. It explicitly and effectively works by filtering content and inserting advertisements along with the usual wireless gateway tricks.

This is an honest revenue extraction service and, while it can be done at the ISP level, it does not pack affiliate cookies. It's probably one of the more legitimate ones available. It does require a significant back-end infrastructure to support its operations, though, which may or may not cover expenses.

Yes, that is, if the CDN has also implemented EDNS0 extensions, which some have not.

Thanks for the info!

Saw this in Reddit this morning but thanks for reposting it.

Seriously, the drawback to using public DNS like OpenDNS and Google DNS is that they present a serious performance problem.

Even though the physical DNS servers are "anycast" and geographically diverse, the IP addresses are still the same. Threrefore, the large content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai and LimeLight still use the IP address of the DNS server to judge your location.

Therefore, any service that uses a CDN (even Google's use them in spite of their own network) will really serve your content out of a data center that is not geographically or logically near your machine's location.

The article (if you read it) mentions that his ISP, like most that have similar revenue-extracting services, really does offer alternative DNS servers that do not pack affiliate cookies. You should use those if you want to enjoy high-performance, edge-serve content via Akamai (AKAM) and LimeLight (LLNW).

Otherwise, you'll all get your edge content served from some random data center in the central USA.

The shell company that holds the patents itself produces no products, but Apple and Microsoft certainly doâ"it's just that they hold the patents jointly through this 'Rockstar' entity.

If this weird patent system is still what we have in place, this sort of joint ownership should be allowed. Leaving aside the relevance and desirability of the patent system today, I can't really see a problem with this. It's not really the same as a company that's never been associated with any endeavour related to the patents they own and who exist only to bilk money out of other people.

You don't need to create a contact in iOS 7. Just find the number after the call is done and ask for it to be blocked. It's near the bottom.

This person may not have the right to make money off of their work, but if they don't want to give it away, you have no right to TAKE it.

If they choose to offer it up for donations, that's their business. If they want to charge for it, that's also their business. But the moment you want to use their product, you should be bound by their rules.

When you go to buy a phone, do you only pay the cost of materials? Apparently, that's all you think it's worth, since you're arguing that taking the 'bits' doesn't deprive anyone of anything. Well, if you go and get a phone, maybe you should just pay for the cost of the sand that it took to make the silicon and that's it, hmm? That's all that's really in there, after all: silicon, some plastic, some aluminum and a nice layer of bits. That's, what, $50 worth of materials?

The value isn't the bits, the value is the WORK. This is the same reason why I pay for a haircut, despite the fact that I leave with LESS than when I came in.

The only one imposing anything on anyone else is you. The author of a work that has posted it in an app store in an attempt to make revenue is playing by all the rules in their game--you're the one circumventing them and it's bullshit. You have no moral justification for your actions. If you use the application that was made, pay for it. If you don't, don't. But don't try to tell me that you get to use it and not pay for it.

RSA SecurID tokens have absolutely nothing at all to do with this.

Having worked with pre-2000 versions of RSA BSAFE, the thing that the NSA paid RSA to do was to change the default selection of the random number generator with a weaker one. Nobody had to use the default version--it was just picked if you didn't specify one (or a callback to your own RNG). We had our own multi-threaded rendezvous noise generator thing since this was back before hardware entropy engines.

Oh, and before that, the NSA had unsuccessfully tried to get RSA to tell people that 512-bit keys were safe enough. It wasn't successful mostly because the old guard was still running the company then.

Well, in benchmarks, Safari's rendering is faster, even if the UI isn't. :/

I turned off all the animations and things. I think it's in the accessibility section.

It's not bad. This is much better than when the iPhone 3G was upgraded to iOS 5 (I think? Maybe 4?)

I find the apps are generally worse than the OS itself...which means it's good that Apple is demanding that they optimise for iOS 7.

Parallax isn't available on the 4, just the 4s and up.

I've had my iPhone 4 for 3 years. I'll keep it until next year, so that'll be 4 years. I'm sorry that the first gen iPad got the short end of the stick, but it's the exception, not the rule. Android devices work in the other direction--I don't know of any that have been supported with the latest updates for 4 years.

I think they've properly settled into their groove. If you get a new iPad Air, it'll have a 64-bit processor in it and be fairly future-proof. You'll almost certainly get 3 or 4 years out of that.

This is WAY less of an upgrade treadmill than I was on for PCs or even my Mac desktops a few years ago.

In our area, the phone company, before installing FiOS, installed these boxes on the telephone poles that had miniature DSLAMs on them about seven or eight years ago. A side-effect of this project was nearly perfect 56k connections (which cannot be reached due to FCC limitations, but whatever).

It's not the same kind of "digital" line that you're thinking of when talking about DSL, but it was much better than it was more than ten years ago when I dropped my faulty cable modem for 56k dialup for a few months time.

We all probably know that AOL has Turboweb, now called TopSpeed, which compresses graphics. On broadband you have to specifically turn it on by clicking "TopSpeed" and "Use AOL Proxies for broadband" and "Always compress graphics" and "Turn on maximum graphics compression" for extreme cases. It works very, very well on 768 kbps DSL.

If you don't use AOL, you can use a number of accelerator programs but they constantly come and go. One of them is known as Slipstream but there are many more. They work just like AOL by using proxies that compress the graphics.