Raindeer - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to be the world's greatest ISP (arst.ch) 3

Submitted by Raindeer on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @08:02PM

Raindeer writes: We're not always aware of it here in the USA, but there are many ISPs out there in the world who do things quite differently than what we're used to. Some of these ISPs ideas are even really good. Ars surveys the global ISP landscape and paints a picture of what a dream ISP might look like.

So what would it take to craft a truly "cool" ISP, one that attracted legions of adoring customers who sing its praises to everyone they meet? Fortunately, ISPs around the world are doing innovative things at prices that will make your jaw drop. Join us on our worldwide quest to find the coolest ISPs in the world, then get ready to write your own service provider a strongly worded note once you know what else is possible.

Submission + - Nominum calls Open Source DNS 'a recipe for proble

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @07:19AM

Raindeer writes: "In an effort to promote its new Cloud based DNS service SKYE, Nominum one of the commercial DNS-software, providers slaundered all open source/freeware DNS packages. It said: "Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse.(....) So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems. " This has the DNS community fuming. Especially when you know Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS Cache poisoning problem of last year. Something PowerDNS, MaraDNS and DJBDNS all open source weren't vulnerable too."

Submission + - UAE hacking Blackberry's for interception (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @07:32AM

Raindeer writes: "It seems the UAE had some trouble reading Blackberry communications and turned to SS8 for a solution. SS8 suggested an unobtrusive program to be loaded on all Etisalat's customers Blackberry's. 'Trust me guv, nobody will notice'... yeah right. The programme eats batteries for lunch and the server it needed to communicate back with was overloaded (IDIOTS, like you don't know how many devices there are!). Annoyed Blackberry users saw their devices slow down to a crawl and started to complain. A little investigation later and a programmer found out the so called performance upgrade rolled out to all Blackberry users was a snooping programme by the SS8 company."

Submission + - Iphone users use 640MB per month (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Raindeer on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @08:12AM

Raindeer writes: T-mobile NL saw a great increase in mobile data usage from the introduction of the iPhone 3G. The monthly usage of mobile increased from 12Terabyte to 80Terabyte a month. How stunning a number that is, I only realized last night in bed. The average iPhone user uses 640MB per month. T-mobile also said it was 30-40 times more than the average mobile data user at 16-22MB per month.

Submission + - How the Net works: Peering and Transit explained (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Friday September 05, 2008 @07:21PM

Raindeer writes: "Ars Technica just posted an article I wrote, where I explain Peering and Transit. In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, "What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that...Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as "peering" or "transit," and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll to take a look at the economics of peering of transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."

Submission + - Japan: 900 Gigabyte upload cap, download uncapped (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Friday July 04, 2008 @03:15AM

Raindeer writes: "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japans broadband addicts. From now on if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterdays wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems"

Submission + - Will ferrets bring you the Exaflood?

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Monday April 14, 2008 @04:10PM

Raindeer writes: "Ars Technica had two good stories on the future of the Net. One story examines the future of broadband networks and how ferrets will be bringing it to you. The article points to a new OECD-study on how we will need 50Mbit/s minimum in the coming years. (Also explaining why squirrels and sharks are natural enemies of the internet)The paper also examines business models and regulation for new networks.
The other one is an interview with Andrew Odlyzko of the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) project, explaining how the predicted Exaflood that would overflow the web is not happening and the growth of traffic is actually slowing and there is no sign that ISP's cannot keep up with bandwidth growth."

Submission + - OECD Broadband stats using Google Moving Graphs (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Tuesday March 25, 2008 @05:18PM

Raindeer writes: "Google recently gave people the possibility to use motion charts, just like prof. Hans Roslin of Gapminder.org fame. I haven't used it to show the distribution of wealth and health around the globe, but to display the progress of broadband in the OECD. One of the variables is the amount of households that have a PC. In countries where this percentage is relatively low (USA) broadband penetration is low too."

Submission + - The day the Routers died (secret-wg.org)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Friday October 26, 2007 @11:44AM

Raindeer writes: "The RIPE 55 meeting has just concluded. There was much debate on what to do on the imminent depletion of the unallocated IPv4 pool in 2010. We could do nothing or we could create a market place and facilitate transfer of IP-adresses, but it's all a train wreck waiting to happen. This is best shown however by a beautiful song "The day the routers died" also available on Youtube written and performed by Gary Feldman. So please all upgrade to IPv6 soon, or else you will not get 40Gbit/s to your mother."

Submission + - UK conspired with mobile companies on roaming (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Thursday October 25, 2007 @05:42PM

Raindeer writes: "The Times revealed that the UK government actively conspired with phone companies to keep mobile roaming charges high. A Freedom of Information Request revealed that the UK Government were "not happy bunnies", when the European Union wanted to lower charges for mobile roaming in the EU dramatically. Ewan Sutherland, a leading telecoms policy consultant, said: "I hadn't fully appreciated that the Government had gone over to the Dark Side to that extent." Even now the charges are excessively high at 49 eurocent per minute. But the chances that the EU would actually support a simple idea that would promote competition are marginal. Data roaming charges (for Brits) are even more excessive at up to 21USD per Mbyte."

Submission + - Should the BBC pay ISP's for iPlayer (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Friday August 17, 2007 @05:38PM

Raindeer writes: "In the UK debate has broken out about the BBC's iPlayer. Part of it, because it does'tn support open source, but seems to be some evil Micrsoft plot. Another part of it is because of the choice for the Kontiki P2P distribution system, which according to some important industry insiders and bloggers is unfair towards ISP's. In this article I evaluate the arguments in favour of making content providers pay for their bits and show how these are flawed and would stifle innovation."

Submission + - Google Adsense for Open Source and Charity

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Thursday March 08, 2007 @04:37AM

Raindeer writes: "It would be great if it would be possible to select in Google Adsense that (part of) the revenue will be sent to charity. This way it will become easy to contribute to open source projects or other good causes. This will increase the income of those charities. It will also become possible for accounts that generate little revenue to send the money that is there to a charity. (And yeah, Microsoft and Yahoo can also implement this idea, but unfortunately for them most of the money is at Google at this moment) I hope Slashdot-readers will help me generate more attention for this idea and come up with ideas to get this idea higher up Google's to-do-list. I have blogged about this and written about in my journal and a Dutch site. The origins of this idea lie in me looking at the enormous amount of $8 on my Adsense account (the payout limit is $100) and wondering if there was something better to do with it, instead of waiting 12 years for the first check."

Submission + - Appeal to Google! Use Google Adsense for Good!

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @07:34PM

Raindeer writes: "I sent the Google Adsense people the following suggestion/feature request; for Google to add an option to allow the pay-out of (a part of) the Adsense revenue of a site directly to a charity. The Google ads on my blog don't generate much income and well, I don't really care about it, they're partially a service to let people find interesting companies and partially a way for me to keep track of statistics (before Google Analytics came around). It's a bit of a long tail idea, where many small sites help generate a big amount of money for charity. I hope some people in the blogosphere help to give this idea some thrust and also encourage Google to allow people to easily let a charity become the beneficiary of the revenue the Google Ads generate."

Submission + - A photo journalist critisizes Creative Commons

Submitted by

Raindeer

on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @07:58AM

Raindeer writes: "Sion Touhig, an award winning photojournalist, wrote a very interesting piece on how the internet has changed the industry of photojournalism. He blames this (at least partially) on the Creative Commons. Though I disagree with him on this, it does remain a fascinating read on how the lower costs to produce content, the lower transaction costs in finding and disseminating content and the decline in advertising revenue for mainstream media is changing an industry. There are some good reactions already on his blog "

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