Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth? 450
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?"
No Script (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry (Score:1, Insightful)
You're screwed. Welcome to the age of greed.
Go minimal (Score:1, Insightful)
One word! (Score:1, Insightful)
Lynx.
To quote Adam Savage: (Score:5, Insightful)
At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra.
"Well there's your problem."
Squid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Install a cache server. Like Squid.
http://www.squid-cache.org/ [squid-cache.org] /thread.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_cache [wikipedia.org]
--
BMO
Re:Squid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which actually doesn't help the youtube problem. Squid can't cache youtube videos. You'd think it'd be able to, I would expect it to, but it doesn't.
Library (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, if you're at a University, or hell, any community, you should have a library which usually has some kind of internet connection. And you don't have to worry about being charged some arbitrary amount per MB. : /
Re:Squid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Judging by my squid analysis (using Calamaris), Squid will only save about 10% of a small network's bandwidth -- even if it is setup with a reasonably large (5GB) cache and a large size (100MB) for the maximum size of cached objects.
Re:easy (Score:2, Insightful)
Does flashblock do anything that noscript doesn't do?
Re:That's lousy (Score:1, Insightful)
The base right now is that the original poster has made a bad deal on his internet access.
Many sites has so much junk embedded that it's almost impossible not to enter the limit imposed by the ISP unless you use Lynx or some other text only browser.
One may question if it's worth it to have such a lousy deal or if it's better to have a deal where you pay a little more per month and have a higher or no limit solution.
For me I have a 10/100 internet connection for about $40/month with no caps.
Re:No Script (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest FlashBlock instead of NoScript if he only wants to stop flash from being auto-downloaded and leave the JS alone.
Agreed. I don't argue that NoScript isn't useful for some people; but for the average person it's too extreme of a solution. FlashBlock stops the vast majority of current web annoyances without requiring user intervention just to get the average site's navigation working.
Some may argue that for a site to require JavaScript for navigation is ridiculous; but we've got to deal with the real world here. Disabling all client-side scripting by default just breaks too many sites.
Re:No Script (Score:2, Insightful)
I use both noscript and flashblock. flashblock handles youtube videos and such much better than noscript ever could, because the DOM still loads and doesn't require a page reload. I just have to click on the icon. not only that, but flashblock works on a per-object basis, so that I can load up as many youtube tabs as I want without having 25 videos trying to play at once. I much prefer that than to have youtube videos load as soon as I open them, and that seems like that would be quite useful for this guy as well.
Re:That's lousy (Score:5, Insightful)
Add that, the high cost of internet access at uni is a problem, even if the poster has good internet access at home. I'm in that situation: my home connection is great, but my uni has really low limits and high costs. This is fine when I can download something at home and bring it into uni, but if I go over my cap at uni, I can not browse anything at uni. This means I can't look up some papers or follow some links.
To the poster, I say, as first step, use No Script (as was said underneath). For you, the cost of whitelisting everything is less than the cost of the net. Also, don't "Always allow" if you can get away with it. If you always allow YouTube, you are back to the start again.
Re:A wifi card and your neighbour's internet. (Score:1, Insightful)
That is an insane download cap (Score:2, Insightful)
1 GB/month may SOUND like a lot, but it really isn't.
Your 1 GB/month alocation would be eaten up if you have some task in the background soaking up 3.2 kb/second in bandwidth. That's how rediculously small that amount is.
33.6 kbit/second constant load on your connection would add up to 10.5 GB/month
Slashdot's frontpage alone is 630 kB. 3 visits a day for a month takes up 55 MB
New York Times' frontpage is 830 kB. 3 visits a day for a month takes up 72 MB
TVGuide.com isn't much better at 720 kB.
The basic view of gmail takes up 62 kB. The standard view is 630 kB.
It would be impossible for you to download the latest WoW patch.
I've no clue how much Windows Update requires, but Vista's Service Pack 1 is 435MB, XP SP 3 is 316MB.
MS Office 2007 Service Pack 1 is 218 MB.
Back in 2003 the average email was about 59 [google.com]
kilobytes in size. Spam comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate [wikipedia.org], so if you're only getting 2 actual emails a day, you'll be getting 8 spam messages. This gives you a total of 17 MB/month (if you're downloading everything).
Today, all I've done for the last three hours on my computer is browse techsites and played Second Life - the totals here are 21MB up, 314 down for a total of 335 MB data. In three hours. Sounds like a lot but that's "only" 254 kb/second - pretty much the slowest ADSL connection you can get.
Forgot about listening to internet radio. 1 hour a day at 64 kbit/second is 824 MB in a month.
A standard ping packet is 32 bytes. 1 ping/second takes eats 80 MB/month.
Basicly what I'm saying is - you're fucked. A 1 GB/month usage cap is fucked up, too small and ridiculous.
To give you an idea of HOW ridiculous it is, In Denmark (25% sales tax) I can buy a 3G modem, subscription included for 6 months for 355 US$. This has no caps at all. Maximum speed is 7.2 Mbit/s, expected claimed average is between 2 and 3 Mbit/s. Every month after that the subscription is 51 US$. Roaming in Sweden is free of charge as well.
Re:No Script (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
RSS-alternatively (Score:2, Insightful)
RSS is a great way to help reduce bandwidth waste and a great way to read the news. I love RSS. I find having a program with all of my news feeds together is much more efficient for me than looking at the ten or so sites separately. It also has features like a quick search and allows me to read the news on my laptop when I don't have a net connection.
My suggestions for good and free clients are:
Windows: Feed Demon [newsgator.com] OS X: Vienna [vienna-rss.org]
Not only are they great readers, but they also support CSS-Styled views...I can't stand RSS readers that look and behave like email clients.
Oops, you missed out Liferea (Linux). BUT (and thats one big BUT) though both Vienna and Liferea support browser-like eerm.. browsing (via the address-bar), a lot of rss-readers do not have the ability to block adverts by means of plugins or addons. Liferea offers the about:config, but I'm not sure how Vienna could handle this. I'd use an rss-reader only (in this handicapped internet situation) that downloads ONLY the full text, and nothing more.
Re:That's lousy (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet non-necessary... When was the last time you were in college?
Re:No Script (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the guy is doing something wrong. I use NoScript all the time, and I've whitelisted probably 3 sites permanently. The rest I whitelist on a case-by-case basis, as I'm concerned about XSS (and while NoScript claims to protect against XSS and CSRF, but I don't like to take chances.) I have about 70 RSS feeds, many of which are blogs which point to external links, so yeah, I probably visit 100s of sites.
As you say, most work just fine without Javascript. Those that do lose functionality, I often don't care about that functionality (gawker sites require Javascript to view any comments--but I don't care about comments on those sites.) A very few provide useful Javascript, or were coded such that it's necessary, and I'll enable it on those for as long as I am using the site.
It's not cumbersome. It's trivial. The only problem is when a site loads script from many, many sources, and it may take a while to narrow down which site provides script for the functionality I need. Once I've figured that out, though, it's pretty easy to do again.
Re:To quote Adam Savage: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not like I'm in the States and too stupid to realize things might be done differently elsewhere.
You, on the other hand, might want to realize that there are a whole lot of Americans on this US-based Web site. Furthermore, we're well aware of the rest of the world, thank you very much. We don't care all that much about it, but we're certainly aware of it. So, enough with the automatic anti-American sentiments. Most of us here are American, and if you'd like this dialog to remain civil, tone it down a little.
I understand that the popular idea among many people of other countries is that Americans make good verbal punching bags, but frankly, it just makes you seem uncivilized.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Re:That's lousy (Score:1, Insightful)
In from the left comes Woktenna/Cantenna.
See if you can get Internet connection
from outside cheaper and better.
Talk to neighbours and see what they got.
1 GB per month is next to nothing.