Matthouse

Consumer ISP tirade

October 6, 2009 – 12:05 pm
Last year sometime, I discovered through my day-job that Qwest DSL was hijacking DNS queries for non-existent domain names, and redirecting them to a search page.  For my day-job, this problem manifests itself as employees being unable to access corporate resources even when connected to VPN.  After about 3 seconds of troubleshooting (isn’t vnc great?), I found this: This innocent looking page is actually quite bad…  It has many implications – for starters, Qwest is almost certainly making money on this page, due to the search traffic.  The privacy aspects are chilling – who knows what information Qwest is passing along to Yahoo (the search provider), or what information they’re storing about what domains you mis-type (or what domains you type correctly, so they can advertise more accurately when you do make a mistake).  The whole thing scares the willies out of me. Thankfully, there’s a clever link in the upper right ...

Posted in General, Rants, Technology | No Comments »

FCC tackles net neutrality

September 30, 2009 – 10:55 am
I just realized I haven't posted in ...  Well, a long time...  I didn't go out of my way to come up with something to post about, this just seems like something I should chime in on... One of the things Obama talked about while campaigning was reforms in the area of telecommunications.  I usually don't believe a single thing a politition says, but that goes double for when they're on the campaign trail.  Right, left, Red, Green, Blue, Purple, doesn't matter...  Most of them will say whatever they think will get them (re)elected.  You have to judge a person by their actions. Obama's new FCC chair recently proposed new rules regarding the neutrality of network service providers of all types, not just common-carriers.   In the past, they've had a "policy" on this, pretty much saying "net neutrality is good".  The new rules pretty much say that service providers of all types can ...

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Corporate laptops: Fix or Replace?

April 24, 2009 – 4:35 pm
My coworker Peter sent me this link to computerworld. It's about a study conducted about the cost of replacing laptops after 3 years (which is usually the amortization schedule for computer equipment), or stretching their use out to 4 or even 5 years.  It's an interesting article, and makes some good points. There's two basic categories of computer (or for that matter any technology) purchases.  One school of thought is to get the cheapest available that will do what you need, because it will either break or become obsolete soon anyway, and you can just replace it when necessary.  This is the category in which most consumers fall -- spending as little as a few hundred dollars on a new computer every 12 to 24 months.  The other school of thought is to spend the most you can afford now, and buy the warranty to protect your investment for a longer term.  ...

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Oracle buys Sun

April 22, 2009 – 2:42 pm
I'm sure by now most people know that Sun was waiting for some knight in shining armor.  Sun's major asset is the huge amount of technology (and patents on that technology) they own, and their engineering capabilities.  Back in the day, every internet company owned Sun equipment, leading Sun to adopt the line "we put the Dot in Dot-Com".  However, they've been loosing money ever since the dot-com bust back in 2000, never quite being able to re-gain their footing.  This is mostly because Sun's core technology, proprietary servers and the patented operating system they run, are becoming increasingly irrelevant because of strong competition from open standards-based hardware and free software (x86 computers and Linux).  They have tried to branch out, releasing the x86 version of their operating system, as well as some other technologies, for free (but still not open), investing heavily in Java and other technologies that everybody find ...

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VoIP (Reducing Household Expenses)

February 6, 2009 – 3:44 pm
OK, so even though the economy does seem to be bottoming out (the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed its first positive week of the year today), I've recently been on a kick to reduce household expenses.  So far, this includes: Shutting down and winterizing the hot tub -- should save at least $40/month So that's it so far...  I have a couple other things I'm looking into, but it doesn't feel like there's that much monthly expense that we can easilly do without (that is, going without being a no-brainer). For a long time I have lothed Qwest.  Probably for many of the same reasons I don't like Comcast...  So I've been with Liberty Bell Telecom for several years now.  They have excelent customer service (real people in my state answer the phone when I call), and are cheaper than Qwest when compared side by side.  They recently increased their prices though, so ...

Posted in Family, Financial, General, Technology | No Comments »

Online ad tracking

September 2, 2008 – 7:41 am
Full disclosure:  I work for an advertising company, and have spent almost my entire career doing so.  With that said, nearly every product and technology I've ever worked on has been within the bounds of what I would call moral. This article entitled "Ad targeting based on ISP tracking now in doubt" is one of those technologies that should never have existed in the first place.  The company partners up with ISP's and, in exchange for a cut of the revenue, gets access to the users' data stream, along with the oppertunity to inject their ads when they can. I don't have any problem with ad-supported services.  What I have a problem with is ad-supported services that aren't free, or where the user doesn't have any reason to believe the service is, or could be, ad-supported, or any way to opt out of the ads.  It's like purchasing a brand new video game, ...

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Comcast caves, goes back to “normal” traffic management

March 27, 2008 – 1:26 pm
As a follow up to my previous post about Comcast, in which I jumped on the blogger bandwagon, Comcast seems to have had a change of heart. According to this press release, Comcast has agreed treat peer-to-peer file sharing protocols with the same priority as any other packets. The PR-speak has a lot of fluffy stuff in it, but that's pretty much what it boils down to. This is an important development, because it means Comcast saw the writing on the wall, both in backlash from its customer base (which translates directly into lost customers), as well as the impending reprimand (or worse) from the FCC. Apparently, net neutrality (wikipedia) still exists, which is extremly good news for the consumer. In short, it means that if you buy an internet connection from Comcast, they will no longer restrict what protocols you can use with it, but will ...

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Godaddy censors the internet… again…

March 12, 2008 – 11:55 am
WIRED is running an article entitled "GoDaddy Silences Police Watch-dog Site"...  On many occasions in my hosting business, people flock to Godaddy to buy their domains, against my advice.  Yes, they're cheap, and cheap is always good (their cost of $10 per year is below my cost through a reputable wholeseller).  However, do you *really* want the risk?  If you're a business, do you really want to wake up one morning and find your domain wiped from existance, simply because somebody complained to godaddy about you?

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99.9% uptime

March 5, 2008 – 4:20 pm
After being out sick since Saturday, and coming back today to find 687 unread items in my RSS feed integrator, I found an interesting post on Slashdot, entitled "Why is Less Than 99.9% Uptime Acceptable?". Within the first sentance, the original poster mentiones five-nine's (99.999% instead of the three-nine's (99.9%) listed in the subject, but I digress. The original article asks the same basic question:  Why do we put up with availability of 99.9% (which they say (I didn't do the math to check it) translates to about 3 and a half days a year) , or even 99% out of our cellular, internet, and other "new technology" communication services, when we have demanded 99.999% (5 minutes per year) availability from our traditional phone service? The answer is right there in the article...  Traditional phone service is regulated as a monopoly utility by the Federal Communications Commission and the Public Utilities Commission, just like the ...

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Qwest discussing a wireless deal with Verizon

February 27, 2008 – 1:16 pm
Once again we turn to CNET's news.com for this article, which says that Qwest (the phone company) is in touch with Verizon (the wireless company).  For a number of years, Qwest has sold bundled wireless service that they resell from Sprint along with their home phone and broadband services.  According to the article, Qwest is unhappy with the terms of the deal, and is looking for a "more tightly integrated partnership". Of course investors might be looking to Qwest to come up a wireless merger/aquisition, since they are currently the only major phone company that isn't part of a wireless company.  Wireless isn't profitable, as I've pointed out before (and the article mentions), but they want to get subscribers locked into bundled packages with their other, more profitable services.

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