Tag: ISP

According to one IPv6 provider, we are now just days away from the IPv4 ARPAgeddon, or IPocalypse [not to be confused with the iPocalypse]. With IPv4 providing only 4.3 billion addresses, we all knew that the end of the reckless and fancy-free Internet era was coming -- we just didn't know when. The death knell has started to ring. Asia is on its knees plaintively pleading for its fix of IP ...

AOL used to be king of the dial-up hill. At its peak, over 26.7 million households accessed the Internet via AOL, a figure that no American ISP has ever surpassed. That success came at a cost, though: those CDs (and floppy disks!) that arrived in your letterbox, often on a weekly basis, cost AOL over $300 million. The data comes from Quora, a service that is fast becoming the go-to place for ...

Not one to let the hyperconservative Australian government walk away with the censorship crown, the UK government plans to make the surfing of Internet porn opt-in. Next month, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey will meet with major UK ISPs to discuss a blanket block of porn. Rather than porn being available to all, UK surfers will have to contact their ISP to be allowed on a 'porn surfing ...

Curious about how your current Internet provider compares to other local options? Take a look at Ookla's Net Index, which has compiled user test results from around the world into easy-to-understand rankings. Data is gathered from both speedtest.net and pingtest.net, and covers the entire globe. In total, Net Index has sifted through more than 1.5 billion tests, and there have probably ...

Say what you will about Sweden's Pirate Party, but they certainly have some kick-ass ideas about protecting the rights of Internet users. Recently the Party announced that they would begin operating the Pirate Bay from within Swedish Parliament -- where they have immunity from prosecution for actions taken as part of their political mandate. Now they're preparing to offer Swedish residents ...

Just weeks ago, Australia received its very first female Prime Minister. It was a surprising bit of news, and it came just after word had broken out that the "toxic" issue of government-run Internet-censorship was set to be shelved. Unfortunately, Julia Gillard is not the shiny new PM that everyone had hoped she would be. She wants to push forward with the much-hated Internet filter, and doesn't ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/07/03/pirate-party-to-host-pirate-bay-swedish-parliament/'; You may remember that, back in May of this year, the Swedish Pirate Party became the new ISP of the Pirate Bay. That alone was not only surprising, but proved to be politically spectacular in the rawest sense of the word. Now the Pirate Party wants to take their stand even further, ...

Speaking at the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Facebook's Tom Cook presented a slide that puts Facebook's rapid user growth into perspective. Actual numbers were carefully omitted, but Data Center Knowledge performed some easy deduction to conclude that the top peak represents 60,000 servers. The plateau towards the end of 2009 represents 30,000 servers -- so they've installed 30,000 servers ...

The Australian Attorney-General's office recently confirmed to ZDNet Australia that it's trying to implement a data retention regime in the country, and that they are currently in talks with ISP's about the proposed plan. Australian ISP's aren't currently logging web histories or most other user activity unless instructed by warrant, but that could soon change. The proposed regime would likely be ...

Canada requires the television and radio industries to adhere to Canada's Broadcasting Act, which is governed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Currently, ISPs are not considered broadcasters, and it's pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that they should not be. However, the CRTC has escalated this issue to the Federal Court of Appeal in order to ...

Have you ever put much thought into Internet piracy? 'Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!' -- no, I mean, really thought about it. digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/01/06/bulletproof-safe-havens-are-all-the-rage-for-internet-pirates/'; In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it's wrong. There's simply nothing more to it: it's ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting your rights online again, this time with a tool called Switzerland. Switzerland lets you check your ISPs compliance with net neutrality, making sure they're not trying to shut down specific kinds of traffic, like BitTorrent and VOIP. Naturally, Switzerland is Open Source. It's also a command-line tool, and still in alpha, so it's not ...

As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life ...

Internet Service Providers are coming at high bandwidth users from all directions, but mostly poorly. Dave Winer once again is at the forefront with his Comcast controversy where the ISP threatened to cut off his service for using "too much" bandwidth but wouldn't tell him how much "too much" was. You can hear the DLS podcast here. Comcast is sending out threatening letters labeling customers as ...

Nevermind all that DRM stuff that we talked to the FSF about, the iPlayer is causing all sorts of other trouble for ISPs. The player, built for viewing and downloading popular television shows onto computers through the special application is taking a toll on the ISPs bandwidth. So much so that they are looking for compensation from the BBC, threatening to initiate traffic shaping that would slow ...