I have a unique setup at my home with fios, I have the fios router connected to a netgear 600 with dd-wrt installed. The speed is perfectly fine but for whatever reason DNS is unbearably slow. I’ve configured the Google DNS servers to try and speed things up but those appear to be slow. Sometimes it can’t even resolve to Google.com. Right now I’m on a VPN to Denver and pages are resolving and loading wicked fast! I’m going to have to investigate this more but its a weird issue nonetheless.
Category: Rants
The internet, is it still a series of tubes?
It looks like congress had a hearing about net neutrality and they still don’t understand the issue: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-rube-goldberg-theory-of-regulation-net-neutrality-hearing-gets-testy.ars. What options do you have with limited options or in some cases a monopoly? How can you say one doesn’t exist when your DSL provider is limited to 256k upload download and the only cable company in town caps your monthly internet usage at 50GB? I’m fortunate to live in an area with Fios, with a pretty damn speedy 15mbps/5mbps connection for a reasonable price. But my parents are limited to Time Warner Cable and DSL clocked at 1.5mbps/256k for the same price I pay for my internet. I keep reading stories about the caps in Canada, as low as 50GB and in New Zealand, as low as 50GB. How can we have another Apple of internet services that starts in the garage if our home broadband is so expensive? And we’re still behind some other countries like South Korea where you can get a 100mbit/100mbit connection for US $30/month. But there is still hope! If only each city would invest like it does for water and sewer systems and bring in Fiber to the Home where an ISP can hook you up for no or minimal cost? And finally treat the internet like it is, a utility and not a service. Its the future for heaven’s sake! Just look at companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Amazon. If we allow the ISPs to do what they want with the monopolies they have where we don’t have any options of anything comparably different we’re screwed. I like what some cities in Utah have banded together to do, which is what I said before, that the internet should be a utility and open to competition. The city invests in the infrastructure and leases it out to ISPs when someone signs up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_Infrastructure_Agency. Or is that too close to socialism or some other stupid argument?
Of course when you propose competition, the current monopoly steps up: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars
NY Times Opinion Piece on the State of American Democracy
Having been reading tons of articles over the past year on politics and corporations in America and seeing all the money that was thrown around in the elections I reached the same conclusion as this op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=2&ref=opinion. That basically American politics is owned by the corporations who are sitting on a ton of money and bitching about high taxes. All the while making sure all profits go to the top and all risk goes to the bottom. We saw that with the wallstreet bailouts. They hardly knew what a CDO was and bragged that they did and didn’t have to explain it to the little guy because it was too confusing. The rating agencies basically rubber-stamped these investment vehicles when all one had to do was look into them and see the credit history of the people the loans were being made to was going downhill at an alarming rate. Then the government has to step in and bail them out with no strings attached and zero changes to the way the system is setup. The EPA just authorized the use of GMOs without proper investigations into long-term effects and basically giving the finger to small organic farmers who have to worry about the GMO seeds being spread to their fields and destroying the organic part of their crop. The EPA head is a former employee of Monsanto, the big large GMO Corn maker who just got approved to sell Organic Alfalfa. And you have the Republicans saying we need to cut this and that benefit to the people and the democrats going along with it because they have no spines. And cutting this and that regulation because it’s too difficult to keep up with all these laws and such that protect our air and water so instead of making $100 billion the company only makes $10 billion but allows us healthy air to breath and clean water to drink. And for some reason people still vote these loonies into office. It’s so depressing. I should take some drugs to help with that from the pharmaceutical companies who charge $100 a bottle of pills to Americans that they charge $0.50 some other company as a generic because the healthcare bill in America was worked out behind closed doors with these lobbyists. Hopefully we can get our democracy back and hopefully we can pass some amendment to the constitution to stop corporate money from invading politics and prosecute people who make these backroom deals for quick financial gains for the downgrade of society.
That became a bit of a rant, so be warned. But basically, we need to get out democracy back to help the people not the corporations.