Thanks but no thanks

I thought I'd visit a blog of a blogger who visited my blog.

Found his blog had closed, and was redirected to another site.

First hoop.

Got this message:

You are accessing

roezer.com

This website is participating in a project to stop the spread of viruses and malware online. Often, people do not realize their computers are infected.

Your computer or network (196.25.255.246) is showing signs of infected behavior. You are being alerted so you can take action.

To resolve the problem:

• Make sure your anti-virus, anti-malware, or computer security is up-to-date.

• Run a full scan of your computer and remove any viruses, worms, trojans, or other infections found.

• If your computer or network stops showing signs of infected behavior, this alert will no longer trigger.

Warning: JavaScript is not enabled in your browser!

In order to request temporary access to roezer.com, you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser!

Too many hoops, so I gave up.

There are two main reasons I disable Javascript. One is that it is sometimes exploited by sites that have viruses, malware, and other bad behaviour. The second is that some sites, especially news sites, have streaming video or whatever they call it that eats up bandwidth at a rapid rate.

Telkom recently upped the monthly bandwidth allowance to 9 Gigs, and for the last two months we have managed to reach the end of the month without having to buy more bandwidth, but I'm not taking any chances by enabling Javascript for all sites all the time.

How lekker is local?

There's been some discussion in the South African blogosphere about the merits of local versus overseas hosting.

For example this blog is hosted at the blogspot server, which I believe is in the USA, and so the argument goes that South African readers have to get it from overseas, and ultimately we have to pay for international bandwidth in foreign currency. So the argument runs that local is lekker, and one should use local hosts for blogs.

But for the last couple of days Amatomu, the best-known South African blog aggregator, which I assume is locally hosted, has epitomised the World Wide Wait, and waiting for pages to appear is more boring than watching the proverbial drying paint.

Another disadvantage with local hosting, for blogs, at any rate, is that individual blogs are swallowed up by the host. If you check Amatomu, blogs hosted by overseas servers are listed individually, and not as coming from Blogspot, or Wordpress or whatever. But the local ones are not listed individually; all posts are shown as coming from "Blat - to utter without thinking" or "Thought leader" or whatever the host is. So local isn't really so lekker.

Americans whinge about proposed Internet bandwidth cap

For the first time ever, it seems American ISPs are thinking of implementing bandwidth caps to curtail Internet usage, and many users are up in arms about it.

But Comcast's mooted 250 Gig cap seems infinitely generous compared with Telkom's 3 Gig monthly maximum, and anything else one has to pay extra for.

clipped from www.consumeraffairs.com The era of unlimited Internet usage for a flat monthly price is one step closer to its end, as cable giant Comcast officially announced today that residential subscribers would top out at 250 gigabytes (GB) per month of data bandwith availability, beginning October 1. Critics of metered broadband say that the plans offer too little bandwith for too high a price. Customers will shy away from using high-speed Internet's full potential, such as uploading or streaming videos, if they are afraid of going over their limits in doing so, and that companies who are supporting metered plans do so to protect their own video channels and hamstring competitors such as YouTube.

For a long time I've been annoyed by URL-only posts on Usenet newsgroups, and sometimes respond to them with a URL-only reply, to explain why I find them annoying. I never even try to look at You-Tube or other streaming video, I get annoyed with too many unnecessary graphics on web sites, and blogs that play music on all posts. Even with this, I find that I often run out of bandwidth before the end of the month, and have to pay extra to retain access.

If Telkom offered 250 Gig, most South Africans would be delirious with joy.

Things that bomb my computer: Flash 9 and Technorati

Flash 9

I'm getting urged more and frequently to "upgrade" to the latest version of Flash, because something or other won't display unless I have the latest version.

I've actually installed it a couple of times, and have regretted it immediately, and done a "system restore" on the same day to get rid of it.

The trouble is, the things I might want to use it for are still quite rare, while the things that it breaks on my computer are things I use every day. With Telkom's bandwidth caps, I never watch videos on the web, and as soon as a blog or other web site starts playing songs I navigate away from it a quickly as possible for the same reason (and also because, when I'm on the computer at 2:00 am I don't want to wake up the rest of the family with sudden bursts of loud music). No matter how interesting the stuff I'm reading, having the site consume my bandwidth at a rapid rate while I'm reading means it's just not worth it.

But what Flash 9 appears to break is the batch files I use every day to back up important data on to a flash drive, and copy it between my desktop and laptop and vice versa. There is something in the Flash 9 installation program that overwrites the autoexec.bat file without simply adding its own requirements to what is already there. Any program that does that is badly behaved, and I don't want it on my computer.

Technorati

Technorati is (or was until recently) a useful blog search tool.

It was useful for finding blog posts on particular topics. I often used it before or after writing something in my blog to see what others were saying about the topic. If someone had already said some good things, I could link my post to theirs, and so on.

A few months ago, however, the Technorati people changed their navigation system to make it far more difficult to use, and split stuff between several different pages. No doubt this increases their advertising revenue, since if you have to look at four pages to find the information you could previously get on one page, you'll be exposed to more ads, and by making the information you are looking for harder to find, you'll take several wrong turnings nagigating through the maze, and so be exposed to even more ads. I suspect that this will be counterproductive in the end, as most people will find it too much bother, and some who, like me, have bandwidth concerns, will just spend as little time on Technorati as possible.

But the latest "feature" takes the cake.

Over the last week, every time I've gone to Technorati, my computer freezes. I can be typing something -- like the URL of a blog I want it to ping, and suddenly the letters no longer appear on the screen. The mouse does not respond. And the hard disk light stays on for a minute, two minutes or more. I've never actually timed it, because I usually simply switch the computer off and start again, or at least attempt to exit the browser. But it doesn't respond to those clicks for a minute or more either, and when it eventually does respond and close the browser, the next time I open the browser, it tells me that the last session terminated abnormally.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of behaviour with Technorati?

It makes me suspect a virus or trojan being installed on my computer from the site.

Why I avoid YouTube, Podcasts etc

I never watch YouTube or other online video stuff. I never listen to Podcasts (don't even have a speaker connected to my computer). I hate it when people refer me to such things online, or when they fill their blogs with multiple photos and videos. I now avoid Facebook, because I'm overwhelmed by demands to look at things that require me to download and install yet another bandwidth-consuming (and possibly privacy-threatening) "app".

Why?

The end-of-the-month broadband blues, that's why.

Read this article: The cap that chokes.

We switched to broadband nearly two years ago, just after my BBS computer finally crashed. We calculated that by giving up the extra phone line, broadband would cost about the same as we were paying for dialup (about R750 a month), and we wouldn't have to rush to get everything done on the Internet before 7:00 am, and then wait for callmore time to kick in again at 8:00 pm before looking again. At least if someone referred to a web site in an e-mail or newsgroup, one could look at it any any time of day, instead of saving it up for the evening.

Or so we thought.

What they didn't tell us was that the 2 Gig cap would mean no access at all for half the month. We increased it to 3 Gig (the max). Last month we ran out on the 26th. The month before we ran out on 21st. At least for the last couple of months e-mail still worked, but before that even e-mail was cut off. That doesn't apply to web-mail addresses, of course, like Yahoo or Google mail -- they are still cut off.

And if someone refers to a web site in an e-mail message, sometimes it's not a matter of waiting till callmore time in the evening to look at it, but waiting till Internet access comes back at the end of the month.

It makes blogging impossible. It makes online calendars virtually useless, if you can't check your appointments for half the month. And then the first three days of the month are spent catching up -- trying to read the comments on one's blog (and the complaints that one hasn't responded to someone's comment), reading other people's blogs, deleting spam, marking Usenet trolls as read, putting all the real e-mail into the "to reply" folder.

And that happens even when I do avoid videos, YouTube, podcasts and the like. I wonder how anyone manages to use them. Some people must be looking at those YouTube inserts in blogs, or listening to those podcasts, but how do they manage it?

No Web access

I've had no access to the Web since last Thursday (15 March), and am posting this from an internet cafe, so there won't be any new postings or responses to comments here until access is restored, whenever that may be. So if you've made a comment on this blog and there has been been no response, that is why.


I'm not sure what the problem is -- my normal e-mail still seems to be working for now, though Web mail on Gmail, Yahoo etc is gone. We've reported it as a fault, but it could be that we have just run out of bandwidth -- kids looking at too many YouTube videos or something. I never look at YouTube myself for precisely this reason, but I think my sons do. If that is the cause, then we'll have to forbid videos altogether. My wife is looking for a job, and losing Web access for 2 weeks each month makes it difficult.

Running out of bandwidth

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit.

This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven't responded to e-mails etc, that is why.

There seems to be an idea the "broadband" means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I've never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth.

Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.