Checking the back-end of my blog I found a strange search term that has been used a lot to get to my blog:
“How to noble a village you are account sitting”
The answer: Not
June 30, 2009
June 23, 2009
AskAPhD.org
Using Twitter I found a user named AskAPhD, as a PhD (to be) that seemed interesting so I had a look at what this was all about. Turns out that the guys at this website have launched a forum where PhDs can sign up to answer questions from each other but also the general public.
I reckon this is a cool concept and although still in infancy stage now, it deserves recognition from the research community. I hereby ask all of you that are doing a PhD, or are generally academically inclined in one way or another to sign up at: askaphd.org. Thanks!
June 9, 2009
P2P and TalkTalk
This is a rant. It is a rant about ISPs and their bizarre, out of fashion policies.
I switched from British Telecom (Money-Eating-Ex-Government-Mega-Corporation) to TalkTalk (Cheap-and-Cheerful-ISP-with-Limitations). And the switch went remarkably well, no problems at all in fact.
I am even happy with the performance, my Speedtest data shows a significant increase in performance compared to two months ago. So far so good!
When the salesguy came round, I asked him about throttling, and he didn’t know. I took the gamble, knowing about ways to get round it if I really want to. But that is besides the point, it now turns out that he should have known, as it is a TalkTalk policy to cut down P2P (Peer to Peer) traffic to an absurd level. This is fine when P2P means Gnutella, Napster, Torrents or other popular (ex)-means of downloading pirated software, movies and music. But when P2P means BBC iPlayer, Spotify or Ubuntu DVD-downloads, it is a different story.
The fact is that in the recent year P2P has grown up to become a mature and stable platform for distributing data among a large usergroup. Legally! TalkTalk is clearly basing its policy on the 2-5% of users that still use old-fashioned P2P downloads to satisfy their needs, but the fact is that the majority of P2P use these days is completely legit and should not be limited.
Besides that, there are far superior alternatives to getting quality “illegal downloads”! If you happen to work for TalkTalk, read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/09/games-dvd-music-downloads-piracy
In the mean-time, just make sure my iPlayer and Spotify work again, both services I pay for, or am prepared to pay for!
