The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.

Today I notice a new bot called "turnitinbot" crawling my site and not for a new search engine.. this one is different. There is a new site called turnitin.com which sells a service to students and schools to prevent plagiarism, the idea is that students submit their work to Turnitin who then verifies it against their databases. According to the Wikipedia/Turnitin page the databases are composed of:

• content from, books, newspapers etc
• already submitted work to Turnitin
• anything submitted to "other" sites like GradeGuru
• etc etc
• Result's from spider crawling

For me this whole things seems very dirty, the only small part I can do is add this to robots.txt User-agent: turnitinbot Disallow: / I don't want people to take credit for my work but I even less want a company to push the education system into their control and make big money out of it. Is Turnitin paying you or me for our work ? No. Are they making money out of it ? Yes.

For those who submitted their work to GradeGuru and are regretting it, please understand that when you submit content to a third party you should always read and agree with their terms of service, I'm sure they mentioned that one day the free service will benefit themselves alot more than yourself.

Actually, here goes Article 14 from the Terms of Service http://www.gradeguru.com/sps/communitystandardmessagenlu.htm?tandc=tandc : Proprietary Rights in GradeGuru Content. GradeGuru does not claim ownership of the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, "Content") that you may post to the GradeGuru Services. By posting any Content on or through the GradeGuru Services, you hereby grant to GradeGuru a non-exclusive worldwide perpetual license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute all or part of such Content on and through the GradeGuru Services and through GradeGuru and its affiliated entities, other off-line services and products and to charge for access to and/or use of Your Content. This license granted by You to GradeGuru to use Your Content (including that supplied prior to the version date of these Terms) includes (without limitation) the right for GradeGuru supply Your Content to providers of anti-plagiarism tools at our discretion, so that such providers may, amongst other things, check the integrity of Your Content. I was going to put the important/shocking part in bold, but then I figured the whole article should be bold, emphasized and blinking...

I am afraid of objects that are "protected" by "security".. . untill I confront my fear of such I will just have to avoid purchasing them.

After many discussions with many people over many years concerning the Open Source "problem", things are becoming clearer. Some have said that it will just die off as there is no way of making any money out of it and hence no way of surviving in today's economic system.

About a week ago Symbian has switched to Open Source, they have about 50% of the mobile market according to this article but I'm sure they have started to lose some points to i-phone and maybe a bit Android.. In any case, if they moved to Open Source it's probably has something to do with being more viable.. how things change.

: ]

Symbian website

I always thought of CDs and DVDs as an unpractical medium for storage and use, so I avoid using them as much as possible. They are fragile:

• you mustn't touch 50% of the object
• it can break or scratch very very easily
• to hot or to cold and it can break
• it's extremely voluminous (compared to hard drive, SD cards, etc)

I am glad I haven't spent money on anything like this because I probably would throw a freaking fit.

Icky on the inside ?

I noticed chrome is available for Debian/GNU Linux among others.. They have also been putting up ads around town that are impossible to miss. Some people think this is good, probably because Google is already their start page for many people, some even type the URL of the page they want to see on Google !

Some have told me to stop seeing evil everywhere and just bend over and. ... well, while I do think that the Google search engine is unquestionably good I don't think that I want to see one entity have so much control over the Internet, because the Internet belongs to everyone.. .well, things are changing.

I went through the Google Chrome Terms of Service and tried to understand a few things...

Okay, I will do this. I've been signing to much crap without reading it in my life, I really like GPL software just for the fact that I don't have to reread it all over again each time I install a program.

I think this is somewhat "normal", however this a word out to those who think it's outrageous to spend 5 dollars a month for your own domain and web space : It's maybe time you found a local "organic/fair trade/green/wtf" email provider, one you can even get your own domain name with and all, it's worth the money, you'd have no ads (unless it's a ripoff) and some kind of guarantees. This would also be a step to insuring a stronger independence of the internet...

I'm not going there in this post, however it's got some tasty pickles..

This is the one that scared me the most, basically, the Internet is filtered out by Google's search engine results (only because "everybody" depends on it). Now that so many people are going to get the Google browser the Internet will slowly be shaped (I almost wrote sheeped) into the Googlenet. Of course in this statement Google only reserves the right to do it, but that is a guarantee that they have the intention of doing so... (don't be fooled by the "sexual content" thing being in the same article).

P.S. If you accept the terms today, hahaha lol, because you'll have to manually check every time you use the service to see if their have been updates. You can probably sign up to a newsletter somewhere, no indication of that though, so this abusive article (used by so many other companies) should be abolished ASAP.. I'm not even sure this is really legal..

Imagine your computer's operating system updater not asking you if you want to update, not providing you a way to NOT check automatically... . Even when I used to use Windows it wasn't like that (not sure how it is today).

This turns your browser into an Iphone, meaning you can't even install an extension that they don't want.. .enough said here.

So, do you still want to install this software ?

Sometimes you take things apart so many times that one day you realize that when you really do need to take that pc apart to really fix it that a screw is screwed... On my little innocent "netbook" (i dislike that word) I waited a while before I decided it was time to bring out the big tools and sort this one out once and for all.

Basically I took the drill to the screw, using 2 and 3mm shanks I drilled "carefully", the goal being just to drill out the ring part of the head. To my surprise the screw came out on it's own before I was done...

I now can set aside - temporarily - the idea of buying a replacement.. instead, I'll need to get replacement parts, but that's another story.

Geocities is closing, you can however "upgrade" to something that will cost you money... I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that people tend to prefer having a facebook lol profile with zillions of real fake friends than publishing pages with actual "content" (ouch, the "C" word).... oh wait, why is geocities gone ?. we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. .. .. so basically you either upgrade or go your own way.. .. OR, you can setup a Yahoo online profile.. . Setting up your profile is easy, and it's free! aha! It's free. . (for now), just like (domainless) websites used to be. All arrows point to the Yahoo LOL profile crap,I guess that is what people are supposed to do these days. :[

I also wonder, free web hosting, in the olden days, used to be paid for by advertisements (beurk). I guess the advertisement industry has squeezed out the last penny from those resistant animated GIF fans. .. Wait a few years and I'm sure that social networking services will have the same outcome.

I don't really like Microsofts system but i admire their sense of humour.. :]

i found a few things on this subject:

Of course I did not get a mac

in the "computer" world a driver is a software that "drives" hardware, if you want to take your mouse to the left you tell it to do so and it does so. it's like a human driver, you instruct the driver to make the car go places, the driver is the one who knows how to do it and actually does it.

now, you do pay the driver right ..? so why not pay for your software driver ? i mean it runs around those circuits and stuff, making lefts and rights on demand and this without flinching.. .

i didn't think this was possible, maybe i'm living in software communism, but i have never heard of paying for drivers...

and the thing is they use modified shopping carts specially designed so that you know it's not your shopping cart...

Building an ecosystem around a shopping car is an interesting concept.. . : ]