I always knew there was something suspicious about the free loading, I-don’t-fucking-wanna-know-about-your-blockbuster, culture hating non-movie goers.

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“+100 geek points” – Alex Kent.

Had no idea they caught me on their wheeling cameras but they did. Pretty cool. I’m the only person I know on there. It really puts those privacy issues on to another level when it’s you. It’s the same with a lot of other things. We know that the ‘information technology workers’ at your ISP (or your company’s IT dept) ARE reading your email. Or that each of us are recorded some 100 time a day on CCTV. Or that everytime you pay at a parking meter, that coin is DNA analyzed and added to the states records. With your name on it.

But when this information is actually made easily available, to everybody, it becomes a little invasive. Especially 1) if you have something to hide and/or 2) if you’re bothered. I think Google Streetview still falls into the ‘security through obscurity’ category in that if I wasn’t now shouting of my existence there, nobody would know. And with that photo, nobody from outside my circle of friends would recognize me. I obviously don’t think Google is invading my privacy – but I also understand those caught in less favorable situations. What’s good about it is that it really reminds us that we are constantly being watched and recorded, and if we’re not happy about it, we better start behaving.

[Important Update] Just to be clear – and to make me not look like a Tory ***t – I am against bio-metric ID cards and governments cataloging our DNA just in case we might do something. There’s been too many cases of people being wrongly accused and arrested for that to make sense in anyway. It’s preemptive invasion of privacy. CCTV is supposed to prevent crime by making it clear that you’re on camera and your wrong doings can be proven with it. BTW, those records are public, you have the right to ask for the tapes and watch them. Within the last 6 months, I’ve reported to two crimes to the police, both of which were committed under CCTV cameras. What did the Police do? Nothing. CCTV didn’t prevent the crimes, neither did the Police use them to solve the crimes.

So, to sum up, and clarify the last few words in the original post; It’s not great that we’re being followed with all the cameras but we haven’t got that much to worry about either as we’re still pretty anonymous.

Recently, many ISPs in the UK have been complaining that the – maybe surprisingly large – success of iPlayer is putting strain on their networks. Now they want a slice of the TV license fee payed by the UK households.

This is ridiculous.

BBC already pays a considerable amount of money to feed their programming into the backbone. And it’s the ISPs, therefor the consumers, who need to pay for it to be delivered on our screens. What they’re asking is a bit like asking your corner shop keeper to pay – on top of his store rent – your rent so you can have a place to eat at.

Video has become really big on the Internet in the last few years and that of course is more consuming for the ISPs to handle than just standard, often relatively light-weight, webpages. ISPs perhaps didn’t see this coming and instead of preparing for winter, prepared for the Mega Wars and started advertising ever higher download speeds. All the time knowing that there is no way of delivering it if most or just many customers peaked at the same time.

ISPs now have to continue to invest in new hardware to increase their capacity which on the other hand we may not see as increased advertised bandwidth but as more reliable and consistent service.

One questions still bothers me. Why are they pointing their finger at BBC and iPlayer? I’m pretty sure Youtube still consumes more more bandwidth than iPlayer. Is it because it’s harder to go after corporate money (Google) than public money (BBC)?

–kristian

- Anyhow -

What’s really annoying is that it’s only downloading at under 5Kb per second. Strange, isn’t it? I’m downloading something that is being uploaded by hundreds of people around the world, including some servers with very high upload speed. Smells fishy. Almost as if someone in between has made the decision for me that I’m not to play minesweeper tonight. Of course, as an avid reader of this blog you’ll know that the broadband service at the Suklaa HQ is provided BT. (We’ve had the service for a good four months now, not that it’s been good four months. Can’t wait until it’s over, eight months left.) What BT is obviously doing is traffic shaping. I guess easiest way I could explain traffic shaping is that imagine your stuck in traffic on A13 (or any other busy road). There’s bottle neck on that road; for me on A13 (towards London) it’s where main road continues as A1261 to Canary Wharf and A13 tears off. For Internet traffic this could be at your local exchange. To continue on A13 you have to queue for a while. The main reason why the queuing takes such a long time for 95% of the roads users is that the last 5% is skipping the queue*. Somehow magically those 5% of commuters feel that they are so far above other commuters that they have the right to skip.

How does this relate to BT? Pretty obvious. Like many Internet service providers, BT is slowing down parts of the traffic on the web so that other stuff can move faster. It might make sense if you had tunnel vision (hey, I don’t want MY Internet to be slow because my neighbor is downloading last 5 years worth of Hollyoaks) but looking at the bigger picture, I also don’t want my Skype calls to crumble – which they often do – because BT thinks it’s taking up too much space on their network. It’s much easier to widen the bandwidth of the Internet than it is to widen a road in an urban area. Also, it’s easier to make everyone equal on the Web.

Has any of you noticed anything like this with your ISP?

–kristian

*There’s a maximum limit to what a road can take over a period of time. This maximum is not exceeded by some cutting in. Sure, their time spent on that road is decreased but at the same time it takes longer for the others. You could argue that cutting in actually increases the average time spent on that road due to increased risk of accidents.

ps. I’ll post some links to proofs about BT’s traffic shaping practices when I get a chance. It’s 23:40 and I’ve got an early morning again.

[update] The download was in fact finished by the next morning which further implies that traffic shaping is taking place.

–kristian

I went into my Blogger template, found the AdSense code they’d put there, and took it out. Thirty minutes later the code was back in. Scaaaaary.

–kristian

The problem is that even though her name comes up on Google, none of the links take to anything useful. None of the email address seem to be working anymore. This is true at least at the time of writing this. It’s strange because it feels that even if you use the internet sort of moderately, one in a while, you would leave enough of a mark for some one to look you up. Or I’m just generalizing because I am quite easy to find, or get in touch with, just by typing two words in the Google search; my name. Then again, unlike all the ‘Johnny Boys’ of the world, my name is quite rare.

Today, I came up with a plan. I’ll reverse google her. By getting her name up in the Google search, she or some one she knows might find this page and then get in touch with me. Absolutely brilliant.

So the person I’m looking for is Alarna Finucan. She lives, or lived, in Brisbane, Australia. If you see this, do get in touch. It would be very nice to hear from you.

-kristian

kristian

It’s funny how somethings in world can really drive you mad. MySpace is one of those. I think the popularity of it is based on that anyone trying to use it goes instantly insane. Not in a good way either. I registered with them about a year ago to be able to view one bands profile. Then I didn’t go there for almost a year until few weeks ago I finally configured my profile and almost went mad while doing it. There’s many things wrong with MySpace. Here’s my list of few of them:

1. First thing you want to do after registering is alter the layout of your page. This is really hard if you don’t know how to do it. Plus once you figure out how it’s done, you’re forced to go to these websites that as a Mac user you’d never go otherwise. Just try Googling ‘MySpace Layout’(I’m intentionally not linking to any of them as I bet some of them can be harmful for Windows PC’s).

2. Ads. I don’t mind ads, I like ads. But when they don’t compliment (or are part of) the websites design, they start fighting against it. Just look at the front of MySpace.com. On the other hand you could say that MySpace.com hasn’t been designed, it’s been put together, therefor it isn’t hurt from being littered by adverts that don’t fit the design as the design wasn’t there in the first place. ha.

3. Spam. First it comes through our letter boxes, then it becomes the most common type of email and now it’s got its own MySpace.

So, what’s next. I haven’t been using MySpace for that long at all so I guess I could just stop using it without replacing it. But that’s boring. Instead, this is where you’ll find me from now on: virb.com/tapaninaho. That’s right. I decided to jump over Facebook and go straigh to Virb, the web 2.0 of social networks. It’s actually so web 2.0 that it’s still in beta(!). Come join me. This is where everyone will be in six months time.

kristian