Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth?

forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by simply browsing around. For example, when I play a YouTube video, click a link, and then return to the video, the whole video reloads. When I read some websites, such as BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, my status bar shows a whole lot of data being transferred through other domains. Some pages seem to send/receive data at certain intervals for the duration of my visit. When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded. In addition to this, Firefox often requests internet access of its own accord, even though I have automatic updating turned off. All this is costing me! How do I stop unsolicited use of my internet connection? How do I go about not wasting bandwidth like this?"

A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[jamonterrell]

I'm thinking that's your best bet.

Re:Only things you can do

[chibiace]

ASCII porn? take up playing MUDs.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair he could be in a third world nation where that is actually the top teir plan.

You're using Telstra BigPond in Australia, aren't you? Sigh.

Re:That's lousy

[vanDee28]

Actually, computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of the PREVIOUS century ;)

Re:That's lousy

[Lord Ender]

For university students today, internet access falls between beer and food on the scale of necessities. If you have $100/month to spend, you would use the first $40 for Natural Light, the next $40 for access to Facebook, and the remaining $20 for Ramen Noodles.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

South Africa (and most other third world countries) needs to pay for it connectivity to other countries (but why not the other way around?)

Because you want to talk to our computers, we don't want to talk to your computers.

You should fix that by setting up lots of high quality porn sites and legal, regulated, audited online gambling.