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...

You know those lists that determine what IPs should be blocked from mail servers ? Well, maybe the idea at one point was interesting (maybe not)... . I realized today that I'm again on a couple of lists, nothing major, I realized this because an email I tried to send was blocked. After investigation it appears that these would be the among the different reasons:

• Dynamic IP (which is not true of course)
• Someone on the same netblock sent a "bad" email .... in November !!!
• A server on my netblock bounced an email
• I bought a can of SPAM and I'm sure they know about it

Some of those lists are like "Minority Report", like aspews.org who base their list on "preventive" action, meaning you don't have to have done anything wrong to be listed.. It's like when you get stopped and searched just because you're... .. you know. read more about apews and it's origins

But people are allowed to use lists, of course.. . feel free... however you might want to compare, oh because some will require payment for delisting (or a huge amount of time), some don't care.. . so be careful if you do use lists, you can compare them if you want, and/or check if/where your IP is listed

If you are using Spamassassin you may edit "/etc/spamassassin/local.cf" and add:

Yah, basically I just decided that I HATE THOSE LISTS, they are just there because people are to lazy to properly configure their servers, many don't even respect the basics. I noticed that many mail servers, and I'm talking about corporate mail servers don't even know how to properly issue the "HELO" command !!! So I'm currently testing a couple of settings, if you have Postfix you can also try:

It's amazing how much crapmail is rejected before being sent to any filter or mailbox lookup, and this is just because the proper BASIC configuration hasn't been met..

Another tip from workaround.org (please follow this link for full implementation info):

This feels alot better, so much cleaner is the postqueue and happy I am. As for the list guys/gals, I'm sure there are plenty of them with very good intentions and such but they can still go screw themselves because they contribute to enabling crappily configured servers to function and disabling legitimate emails from properly configured mail servers... . Of course this does not change the fact that my emails might still be unjustifiably rejected by mail servers using RBL/DNSBL but at least I'm not a part of it..

One MX at a time.

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 but 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 ?

Do you wonder if your internet is being sieved somewhere along the line ? People have been working on this subject and this question lead me to a few sites like OpenNet Initiative, You canget some gathered information on per country basis and more. Herdict is another site that I that met thanks to the previously mentioned site allows you to report a blocked site and view other's reports.

I also did a whois on a random IP that posted a spam comment, the "remarks" sections was quite explicit:

% Information related to '212.138.113.0 - 212.138.113.255'
...
remarks: ------------------------------------------------------
remarks: Part of this IP block has been used for proxy/cache
remarks: service at the National level in Saudi Arabia. All
remarks: Saudi Arabia web traffic will come from this IP block.

And this led me to this page which has more details..

Other ideas are to publish parts of censored material all over the internet to play ball with the filter "guys". More concise information and more at irrepressible.info.