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Showing posts from May, 2006

Net Neutrality: More

Net Neutrality is continuing to get a lot press, so I have attempted to gather various sources of information that I have found and put it all here. Adam Livingstone of BBC Newsnight recently wrote an article, " BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers , " where he made several good points. First he starts with an analogy about driving your car down the road, and as you get closer to a place of business, your car begins to slow down. And if you turn around, it speeds back up. Later Mr. Livingstone puts a different twist on the analogy -- instead of losing speed going to the same store, when you go to a rival store, your car goes faster. From that perspective, as long as the speed to the first store is reasonable -- but it's not resonable to take my broadband speed and slow it down to dial up or worse. Mr Livingstone also introduced a new, interesting concept, Cachelogic, which is used to speed up content delivery in a P2P environment. I wont go into the details

Blocked for Spam

By the time you read these, I will have gotten this problem fixed... I recieved a notice in my email that my Blog has been disabled to to suspecting that my blog is spam. This system has detected that your blog has characteristics that resemble spam. Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerly apologize for this erroneous result. Though I guess I can understand that spammers can consume a lot of bandwidth and storage, so a mechanism is required to protect against it, I find it hard to beleive that this blog fit into the suspicion category. Tell me, for the few who are reading this, does it feel like spam?

Skype-d Voice Over IP

Have you heard of Skype? Now owned by eBay, Skype is a cheap or free way to make phone calls using the Internet as the transport ( VOIP ). Think of it as instant messaging, but with audio. Many Podcasters are using Skype to record interviews, as the quality is as good or better than recording a traditional phone call. (Right now I am in the process of trying different techniques for recording the Skype calls for use in Podcasts -- once I feel confident in my solution, I will post it here.) Cheap or free you ask? If you and the party you are calling have Skype installed on your computers, then the call is completely free. If you want to call a landline (a phone number - Skype calls this SkypeOut), from the U.S. and Canada to the U.S. and Canada, it is also free until the end of the year. The posted rates are $0.021 per minute after the end of the year. So if you like this service, and want to continue at no cost in 2007, you will need to convince you family and friends to put Skype on