First Skype, now Microsoft

Earlier this month, the skype network went down for more than 24 hours Thankfully I don't use Skype, so I wasn;t affected. The only downside I noticed was that the TWiT podcasts were delayed because of the outage. Now the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage server are down (or are having problems). No updates, and no activations for many of you out there. This is what happens when you rely more and more on the Internet.

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Nokia E61 Dialup Networking

Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn't work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly. After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn't a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ;-) ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone.... Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).

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Free Hotspot Access

You're in luck, if you have a XS4ALL Internet account. Normally, you have an hour a week free Hotspot access, and this summer you are even more lucky. XS4ALL provides over 900 free Hotspots throughout the land this summer (June, Juli, and August).

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Internet Mail Is Coming To An End

Today, the end is near. Mail servers are failing al over the world. The dutch ISP's Planet, and Chello are having sever problems with their mail server. Chello having problems is nothing new :-) . They always seem to have a problem of some sort. It's beyond coincidence that even Planet AND Gmail are having difficulties at the same time.

XS4ALL is still working as expected (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) :-)

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ADSL Technology... wooohoooo (not)

I'm one of those lucky bastards who lives like a gazillion miles from a phone central. This means that the ADSL speed reduces dramatically on high speeds. My older ADSL subscription was an Ultra Fast subscription (20Mbps/1Mbps). Due to the distance I only got about 6Mbps (if the wind was blowing from the right direction). The cheaper version (Basic, 8Mbps/1Mbps) is slower, but I get relatively more speed (around 5Mbps). So for me, the additional <1Mbps more costed about 20 euro's a month..... Damn, it's about time that they start using different technologies to bring the Internet into peoples homes. How the hell will they be able to bring phone, Internet, and TV over the Internet? Currently, it would mean that downloads 'stop' if you pick up the phone, or that artifacts appear on the TV signal when browsing the Internet.

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Internet Porn On A Different 'Channel'

Most internet traffic for browsing is using ports 80 (http) and 443 (https). The wise governor (Huntsman) of Utah has suggested to ban pornsites from these default ports. This way it should be easier to block traffic to these sites (just block the porn-port). So I guess that the following ports will be used in the future of Internet browsing:

• 69 - porn related websites
• 666 - websites about satanisme
• 1337 - TechTalk
• etc.

Thankfully, the world is bigger than Utah, but I do feel sorry for those who live there......

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Next Generation Internet

Researchers at the Stanford University believe that the current Internet isn't fit for the future. They believe that a fundamental redesign is necessary to accommodate future usage.

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and 'backward-compatible' style of academic and industrial networking research.

Well, I think they have a point. BUT, starting over from scratch means that you throw everything out and start with absolutely nothing. Will the 'old' Internet still be there during the migration? Are we (the consumers) gonna have two Internet connections (one plain-old-Internet, and a new-and-improved Internet)? That's not gonna happen.... So migrating means that 'both' Internets are active at the same time, and accessible over the same 'wire'. There has to be some sort gateway between the two. This introduces backdoors etc. The new network is bound to fail if your not able to access info on the plain-old-Internet. A long time ago, we had a separate 'Internet' in Holland called 'HetNet' (TheNet). That didn't last long, because there was no (official) gateway between the two. So that meant that you had to switch between the two... I guess it's pointless to say that HetNet didn't last that long (HetNet is a dutch ISP atm). So I guess that I'm more than curious how they're gonna solve this.

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Everything you need to know about IPv6

A great article on Ars Technica about the history of IP, and about its successor... IPv6

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First KP, Now AllofMP3

Yesterday I wrote that ISP's in the Netherlands are thinking about blocking website which are known to contain child pornography. In that post, I also asked myself; "What's next??"..... Well, it isn't going to be the blocking of gay sites, or satanism.. No, it's gonna be AllofMP3.com (according to nu.nl). Well, if the dutch RIAA (Brein) gets what they want :-( .

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Thoughts On Music

Switching to DRM-free music....I couldn't agree more.

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