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?"
That's lousy (Score:3, Informative)
Why would it be so bad in a day where technology should be so advanced?
What about disabling pictures/whatever in your Internet browser settings?
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
Lucky us. Netherlands mostly is fair use policy: use anything you want, just dont upload on 100% capacity all the time.
In my case: upload more than 80% and your downloadspeed will get less optimal: just network behavour by design. So we just limit it on 80%, thats about 75kilobyte/s.
25eur/month.
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Time to start lobbying your uni for more bandwidth. Alternative maybe Wimax or a G3-USB-stick for your notebook.
Chances are, if an entire campus is starved for bandwidth, you have at least a small selection of internet hotspots or internet cafes around. If not: start one IMMEDIATELY and cash in on this blunder.
If all else fails and your connection is as expensive as the author's, limit your network usage to only scan for papers and factor in the costs into your education fund.
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There are cheaper options for college students...
>>>1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte.
Holy cow! That's $25 per gigabyte! There's a solution available: Dialup. I don't know if it's available where you live, but I have Netscape ISP for just $7 a month. It uses image compression to squash pictures downto 20%, and has NO limit on how much you can download. Last month using bittorrent, I downloaded over 10 gigabytes and uploaded 7 gig....
Re:That's lousy (Score:5, Informative)
$40/month isn't the sort of amount you want to be spending on non-necessary things like internet access.
OUT! Leave your geek card at the security desk.
How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ? Yes, there's a lot of garbage on here, but how could any tech-savvy individual dismiss the evolutionary leap of the global information network ? Computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of our century, because they unlock a million other uses and are the first step toward unifying humankind.
What, you think all this man-vs-man, you-don't-know-what-I-know hate-breeding business is the path to enlightenment ? *cough* Wehell... thanks for nothing!
Re:That's lousy (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually we might better see computers as a culmination of several centuries efforts. I believe it is the poet Lord Byron's daughter or grand daughter that came up with the notion of digital information processing and that has been quite a few decades back to say the least. Then there are all of the mathematical, chemical and physics issues that had to be hammered out and finally the birth of electricity, electronics and even the notion that individuals might find computers useful that had to be develo
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Internet non-necessary... When was the last time you were in college?
Re:That's lousy (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Here at Imperial the student halls are for the most part directly wired into the campus network at 100mbps, which itself forms part of the internet backbone. We got ridiculously fast downloads with a silly bandwidth restriction (5GB a day) and it all came with the halls fees (which are ridiculously high, but this is South Kensington, I suppose).
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Re:That's lousy (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's lousy (Score:4, Interesting)
Telecom NZ was formerly a subsidiary of NZ Post and thereby wholly owned and controlled by the government. The New Zealand economy went into a tailspin beginning in the 1970s, hit with the oil shock and the diminution of trade with its largest overseas market, the UK, who had just entered the European Common Market. In response, during the 1980s and 90s the governments, first Labour and then National, went on a privatization binge (see Rogernomics [wikipedia.org]) and sold off infrastructure right and left in an effort to encourage capital investment. Power generation and transmission, rail lines and rolling stock, and the telephone network were peeled off and their new corporate structures were remarkably free of constraints or oversight from the former owners.
As a result of this monopoly position, Telecom has had two decades in which to milk the cash cow of assets it was more or less gifted from the public domain, and has been loath to increase capacity any more than absolutely necessary. The latest government, after reviewing the pathetic state of everything from landline and mobile pricing to broadband uptake and service levels, finally reinstituted regulation of Telecom and forced a split of the company into wholesale, retail and services divisions. In addition, it has mandated local loop unbundling for competitive DSL providers. Much of this is too little, too late, however, and the elephant in the room has been unacknowledged.
New Zealand has only one transoceanic fiber link to the rest of the world, and its operator, the Southern Cross Cable Network [southerncrosscables.com], is 50 percent owned by Telecom. The rates for international traffic on the SCCN reflect its monopoly status and appear to be governed by the doctrine of artificial scarcity. As a result, NZ ISPs have to be ultra stingy with bandwidth, forcing onerous data caps on business and retail customers and enforcing a two-tier pricing model on local and international traffic. Of course, in a nation with a land mass and population similar to the state of Colorado and an urgent need to be connected to global markets, this is criminally insane. But until competition [bizjournals.com] enters the picture or the government grows some balls, we're stuffed.
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Brett and Jermaine!
"Don't put me in der wit 'im! I'm innocent, i'm innocent! whuut?"
Re:That's lousy (Score:4, Informative)
Same here, 2.5 cent / MB!?!
If he made me a list I could download the things for him, burn them and send the discs for less :D
I see that people have suggested large cache, I guess ad- and flashblocker are basic stuff to.. But uhm, I guess the web of today do require quite a lot of bandwidth duh to all the bloa.... uhm, web2.0 and flash ..
I wonder if I would really waste my precious 1 GB of data on crap like youtube if I had a cap. Uninstall flash, block all ads, block shitty iFrames, get a decent deal on the connection, .. :D
No Script (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Script (Score:5, Informative)
I find No Script to be a bit of a pain, usually, because I seem to spend half of my time allowing things that I need. Adblock, however, is the only thing that keeps the internet usable for me when I exceed my download limit. I get shaped down to 56k instead of my usual 10 Mb/s - a very painful fall. Adblock lets me load pages in far less than half the time it would take without it. It's shocking how much crap is foisted on us at our own expense, really.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
... because I seem to spend half of my time allowing things that I need...
You can either white list those "things that I need" or go to better Web sites. If you want Web 2.0 then you need a better connection. If you want to save bandwidth turn off all scripting and disallow iframes, meta-refreshes, plugins etc. Better yet use Lynx as people have already suggested. A Website that can't be viewed with Lynx is a Web site not worth visiting.
Re: (Score:2)
It is pretty painful whitelisting everything manually in NoScript. They probably don't want to create trusted whitelists since someone could potentially do some dns poisoning and cause the whitelist to be tainted. I usually just turn NoScript off when I'm visiting my usual set of sites, then turn it on when I'm going into uncharted waters. It does make web browsing a painful experience at least until the whitelist contains most of the "good" websites so that your pages don't look all broken.
Re:No Script (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (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 do
WTF!?!?! (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, all you have to do when visiting a site to be white-listed is is :
1. visit the site.
2. navigate your curser to the 'S' with the red circle and slash (in the bottom right corner of FF), and choose "allow this page". If you have not set NoScript to refresh the page withe new settings (Windows= 'tools'> Add-ons> highlight (left-click/hover on NoScript in the 'add-ons' dialog box) NoScript, click on the 'Options' button> select 'General' tab> checkmark the box labeled 'Automatically reload affected pages when permissions change.'
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
For extra credit,try the "appearance' tab (Tools>Add-ons>NoScript>Options.
Personally, mine is set at:
(long story, short version) "Show..."
"Status bar labeled" == unchecked
"Full Domain" == unchecked
"Full Address" == unchecked
It provides a nice experience online for me, along with control over which parts of a web page can load.
When in doubt, you can always try "temporarily allow XYZ.org/com/net/edu".
P.S. I am currently having to settle for a Windows machine against my choice, but the above info is the same under Linux and Firefox, except it is accessed from "Edit">"Preferences">....
You're talking jibber-jabber (Score:2)
It takes two clicks to permanently whitelist a site. Your "usual set of sites" will take a minute or so to add.
>"potentially do some dns poisoning and cause the whitelist to be tainted"
You said you turn noscript off for your "usual" sites then on again when you "venture out". How is this safer than just whitelisting your usual sites?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A Website that can't be viewed with Lynx is a Web site not worth visiting.
So how would you rate my university's website, the only place I can sign up for my classes (IE only)? Should I quit until they fix it for lynx?
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So how would you rate my university's website, the only place I can sign up for my classes (IE only)? Should I quit until they fix it for lynx?
I don't know what University you go to. One university I was thinking of going to (when I was just a teeny-bopper) offered me a partial scholarship but I turned them down because of the very poor customer service. I would have probably done the same with your university. If you've already committed yourself financially then you can always try to ask for a refund or a transfer. I'm sorry to hear about your school. You should complain to the student union about this absurdity.
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No , just post your university name here, and then write a paper about browser comptibility , reffering to this article.
Re:No Script (Score:4, Informative)
Tip: focus on "accessibility for handicapped" as the main theme. Papers on these topics get higher grades and a higher chance of anyone actually caring.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why every site I create is built in plain ol' XHTML/CSS first. Once that's done, I'll go ahead and 2.0 it up a bit with some fresh AJAX, but I'll leave the original functionality of the site untouched.
JavaScript enabled? You get the full experience.
JavaScript disabled? You also get the full experience.
<sarcasm level="extreme">What?
Not every web developer is a conscientious as me?
That's an outrage!</sarcasm>
Seriously, though, why, in this day and age of the internet making information to a
Re:No Script (Score:4, Informative)
I suggest FlashBlock instead of NoScript if he only wants to stop flash from being auto-downloaded and leave the JS alone.
Justin.
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: (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 a
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The most recent NoScript upgrades have done good work with the Untrusted lists -- you can make most decisions permanent from the icon menu, now. I've never needed more than fifteen seconds to get any site working -- even the crazy blogs with six adservers, three tracking services, and four types of embedded media.
But even if it was more trouble, I'd still use it. Remember, NoScript is message-agnostic -- it's not an adblocker by any means, it just limits the services your computer will make available to web
Re: (Score:2)
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Change your NoScript settings to always temporarily allow Full Domains (or even Base 2nd Level domains if you're ok with that) and you'll find very few sites give you reason to whitelist or blacklist anything else (apart from the embedded links to Youtube videos that seem to litter the web.)
In addition to NoScript I run Flashblock and Adblock Plus, too. I find pages load far faster for me in Firefox than they do in IE.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Script (Score:4, Informative)
And don't forget the wonder that is "Flashblock". That will stop your YouTube movies and other Flash content from loading until you explicitly click on them, so no more "driveby" bandwidth wastage.
Re: (Score:2)
With Adblock, you can specify domains/directories that are bandwidth wasters, a few hours training your blacklists and sites like CNut actually fly!
Pay close attention to stuff that transfers in the backround, i.e. just block that stuff right away. Then quadruple the size of your cache, and look into it and see what are the largest items. Block them.
Also, See if you can find any free wifi that you can download files on. ( i.e. do some war walking at home, and at school ).
Use Squid (Score:4, Informative)
Here you go (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Here you go (Score:4, Informative)
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."
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair he could be in a third world nation where that is actually the top teir plan. For example a 1mbps "unlimited" connection in Vanuatu goes for the princly sum of $585 USD per month.
Perhaps 1gb downloads per month is all the submitter can reasonably afford, or even get.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:To quote Adam Savage: (Score:5, Informative)
There are two kinds of problems in this world:
Those you can do something about, and those you can not.
Soulskill did not say so, but I am willing to bet he is from South Africa (as I am). I will therefore answer in this context, if the context is wrong, apologies.
The 1Gb limit is fairly typical as is the charging per bandwidth by your university. Even if you go to the library, you still have to log in and you are charged.
The reasons for this are numerous (and I am not going to claim that I can give a fair analysis in such a short space) but it includes the facts that
* South Africa get's its international connectivity from the States and Europe. So there are seriously long cables that run to serve RELATIVELY small population of internet users.
* There is an effective monopoly (or by now duopoly) on bandwidth provision (and yes, this is being fought)
* South Africa (and most other third world countries) needs to pay for it connectivity to other countries (but why not the other way around?)
This landscape is changing, extra cables are being laid under sea, SLOWLY the market is being deregulated so we can look forward to some cheaper bandwidth in future. In the meantime, these are the cards we are being dealt.
So before giving an answer as simplistic as this (and being marked insightful 5!!!!) consider that the world is larger.
I hope this does add insight.
Flame away.
Re: (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 mak
easy (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Does flashblock do anything that noscript doesn't do?
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Re: (Score:2)
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I'm not sure, I only use Flashblock, but on Youtube, Flashblock is great. You click a video and it starts loading.
You click back and forward, the video doesn't reload. The flash is blocked.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:easy (Score:5, Informative)
Use adblockplus rather than adblock. Adblock is obsolete, and does not work with current Firefox versions.
Here are some bandwidth saving keys to add to your user.js file: // Don't submit every character I type in the search box to google // Update extensions and Adblock filters every 15 days. // Note that the first is measured in seconds, and the second is measured in hours. // Block pages from autorefreshing
----
user_pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.search.update", false);
user_pref("extensions.update.interval", 1296000);
user_pref("extensions.adblockplus.synchronizationinterval", 360);
user_pref("accessibility.blockautorefresh", true);
---
Leave youtube videos loaded in the tab until you are sure you won't want to watch it again. I typically turn the sound off and allow a youtube video to load while I am surfing in another tab. When the video is done loading, I turn the sound back on and watch it from the beginning.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or you can hit pause, switch to another window/tab and it will continue to load. When done, unpause.
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: (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.
Re:Squid. (Score:5, Informative)
Something like "Downloadhelper is good for Youtube. It's a Firefox extension. You don't need Javascript or flash enabled to use it. Just download the video and watch it as many times as you want. I know there are other programs like this, but this one is actually up-todate and simple to use.
Re: (Score:2)
The only time I don't preview my posts is the only time they need to be corrected. Here is the Link to downloadhelper:
http://www.downloadhelper.net/ [downloadhelper.net]
Re:Squid. (Score:4, Informative)
It is *possible* to cache YouTube videos and the like, but you'd need some technical skill to pull it off. Basically, you'd write a Squid pre-filter that replaces embedded YouTube videos with an embedded call to a local cgi-script. On the first invocation, the cgi-script would download and cache the video while streaming it to the client. Subsequent calls would skip the download process.
Of course, this only saves bandwidth when you re-watch the same video over-and-over.
Even in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, Squid didn't help with bandwidth all that much. I once set up a Squid cache in transparent-proxy mode at an ISP with around 400 dial-up customers. I gave it 4 GB of cache space, which doesn't sound like much now, but our biggest drives were 500mb full-height SCSI bricks. I tuned every configurable option and pulled every trick in the book to maximize the caching. The experiment lasted around a month, during which time Squid saved us around 30% on our inbound bandwidth, according to log analysis. We finally had to shut it down because customers started to notice that they weren't seeing real-time data (like stock quotes) and some of them threatened to sue.
Bottom line: If you want low-bandwidth internet, use one of the these:
Lynx [isc.org]
Links [jikos.cz]
ELinks [elinks.or.cz]
w3m [sourceforge.net]
Re: (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: (Score:2)
When tethering via mobile data plan (where I also happen to have a 1 GB/mo cap), I frequently connect to my office computer via compressed SSH tunnel, using a port redirect to a squid cache server running there, eg:
ssh user@workstation -C -L 3128:localhost:3128
Then I set up a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I like polipo [jussieu.fr]. It's much, much easier to use for personal browsing and you can have it cache your cgi-bin stuff or whatever. You should be able to set it up to cache the youtube videos, even if they are 'Cache-Control: no-cache'.
I tried to install squid, but it brought back sendmail nightmares. Squid is just way overkill for personal browsing proxy/cache.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do you suggest this "somewhere" is? All his connectivity is /after/ the point at which he is charged, so the ZiProxy would be charged full rate for the uncompressed version of something just so it could compress it and send it on...
[Insert game show "UH-UH" honk *here*]
hosts file (Score:3)
Firefox connections (Score:2, Informative)
When in doubt, consult the source.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections [mozilla.com]
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: (Score:3, Informative)
What would be nice is if they had a large caching system on the local university network (whic
make believe you are a cell phone (Score:4, Interesting)
force text only. no flash or images
and set your browser to identify yourself as say, blackberry's browser. opera can do this sort of cloaking through an easy menu interface. large sites you visit will automatically downstep your content. otherwise, purposefully only visit sites that are mobile friendly versions of the main sites. for example, slashot's mobile friendly site is http://slashdot.org/palm [slashdot.org]
A wifi card and your neighbour's internet. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Good call (Score:2)
You've been moderated funny, but that's pretty insightful actually. It just goes to show how ridiculous these limits are, when there's a good chance you could find more free, unused, and unrecognised bandwidth just lying around on the airwaves.
Host files (Score:2)
I don't know what OS you're running, but this will work with any of them. Go search for a host file blacklist that routes known ads/spam/flash to localhost. Here is the one I use:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm [mvps.org]
Instructions are on the page. This saves a huge amount of bandwidth in addition to the time spent waiting around for slow adservers before the page loads.
It probably blocks some slashverts, but oh well. Life isn't fair.
-b
Don't browse (Score:2)
User curl or wget.
Disable prefetching (Score:5, Interesting)
about:config
network.prefetch-next false
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Crap like this enabled by default hurts Firefox mindshare.
From my about:config there dozens of entires i had to manually change for firefox to work smoothly,plus adblock.
Adblock doesn't have the NoScript functionality of "Block everything unless i told you otherwise" and i have to block ads one by one(i don't use susbscription filters).I once tried using blocksite,but its much slower to operate and interface is primitive.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ [mozilla.org]:
It is important that websites adopt tag based prefetching instead of trying to roll-in silent downloading using various JS/DOM hacks. The tag gives the browser the ability to know what sites are up to, and we can use this information to better prioritize document prefetching. The user preference to disable tag prefetching may simply encourage websites to stick with JS/DOM hacks, and that would not be good for users. This is one reason why prefetc
Some Firefox suggestions (Score:3, Informative)
I have a couple of suggestions for Firefox...
Don't load images: Preferences -> Content and uncheck "Load images automatically".
Block other media you don't want: FlashBlock [mozdev.org], AdBlock [mozilla.org], QuickJava [mozilla.org] (for Java and JavaScript)
You could also try fiddling with the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency [mozillazine.org] in your about:config. I haven't tried it, but setting it to 2 might yield good results.
Try a compressing proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that RabbIT [khelekore.org] does that too, but I've never used that software myself.
Don't stream, download. (Score:2)
I don't have flash installed, so I just download the videos to watch. This is particularly easy from youtube.
I use this bookmarklet, there are many other sites like this, but I find this convenient, and you can always just use FireBug to watch for the FLV files. javascript:document.location='http://keepvid.com/?url='+escape(window.location);
The most proactive approach is.... (Score:2)
No offense to wherever you are, but I haven't seen such crazy restrictions since....well those are the worst I've ever heard of. And I've been around since the BBS days.
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No offense to wherever you are, but I haven't seen such crazy restrictions since....well those are the worst I've ever heard of. And I've been around since the BBS days.
In the early days of DSL in my region, there were some ISPs that offered those restrictions. They were reported to be good ISPs, just a tad costly if you exceeded their limit. It didn't seem "so" bad at the time 1GB at 640k/256, well except you could bust your limit after 1/2 hour.
For the life of me I can't remember the name of the ISPs in question, mainly because I didn't use them. Part of the reason to get DSL was to download things CD sized like linux.
Use a text browser (Score:2)
Four ways (Score:3, Informative)
1. Adblock Plus (not plain Adblock)
2. FlashBlock
3. Modified Hosts file (http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm)
4. If you need to watch a Youtube vid more than once, you can download it to your PC via keepvid.com.
Do like what the guy from... (Score:2)
Do like what the guy from those AT&T commercials who has cable internet does.....get a LONG ethernet cable.....and borrow a neighbor's connection. Shoot...even offer to pay like 10 bucks a month for the privilege.
It's either that or learn how to cantenna and war-drive.
Use Opera (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody suggested this yet, so I will:
Use Opera.
One of its really great features is the ability to browse the web with image loading turned off, either completely, or just by allowing already-cached images to be displayed. Ever ended up on a random forum while googling something and had half a dozen megabytes of flashy avatars and signatures loaded, plus someone embedding giant images into the thread? I have. Image loading toggle is a keypress or a mouse click away.
If you globally turn JavaScript and plugins off, you won't be surprised by a site loading a megabyte of JS from somewhere (damn those huge libraries), or by any kind of Flash content or embedded videos. Helps security, too. You can always whitelist sites you regularly use.
The third great thing about Opera is instant Back/Forward navigation. Nothing is reloaded. Extra bandwidth savings. Extra time savings, too, with mouse gestures.
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Basically every browser ever made has a "don't load images" setting. Nothing unique to Opera about that. Same with turning off Javascript and plugins.
Sure, they have those settings... Hidden somewhere deep inside the Preferences dialogs or through 3rd-party extensions. Not on a toolbar, not on a configurable keypress, not per-tab but globally, and usually requiring you to reload the page to see the changes.
Invest in a better package (Score:2)
I personally would invest in a better package.
Work out how much you are paying over the odds each month of extra bandwidth and then just pay that up front for a better package. You are certainly likely to get a better deal.
Firefox's search bar (Score:3, Informative)
Turn this feature off. Click on the downarrow to the left of the search box, select "Manage Search Engines" and de-select "Show search suggestions".
You can also disable this (annoying) feature for Google page searches from their Preferences page. This sets "SG=0" in the Google PREF cookie -- which I've set in my proxy server so it's effectively disabled for all my browsers.
Live Without Video! (Score:2)
Seriously - you can tinker around about the edges, but 1 minute of YouTube video a day will negate all your hard work.
Also: use the low bandwidth versions of sites, such as Google [google.com], BBC News [bbc.co.uk], or Washington Post [twp.com]
. On Slashdot, set "Simple Design" and "Low Bandwidth" here [slashdot.org].
My suggestions (Score:2)
I wonder how an ISP can defend such pricing in 2008 where a simple Youtube video can set you back 100 MB. I've noticed that my everyday usage goes beyond 500 MB on a slow day, but it's usually well over 1000 MB per day considering the fact that I watch some videos and such.
Anyway, install an ad blocker,
Where do you live? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably New Zealand (though I hear South Africa is pretty bad too).
The problem with living on an island in the middle of the pacific is that there's not much content generated locally, and since we're pretty much BFE to the rest of the world, we have to deal with this sorta stuff. Just about everything is considerably more expensive. Sucks, but then living here kicks ass on the US overall, so ya deal. I sure as hell couldn't afford my current ocean view back in California (even now that the housing market
A non-technical solution: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
There needs to be karma-neutral way to mod posts redundant.
Re: (Score:2)
Based on the following:
- Use of the word "uni"
- University that charges students above-market rates for every tiny little thing which would be free in civilised countries
- 1/100 of currency unit abbreviated 'c'
You know he's in Australia or New Zealand. Add in the 1GB/month cap and he's solidly in Kiwi country.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh come on. Australia is bad but it's not THAT bad.
I have iinet ADSL2 here, 65G/month. Including phone and everything it's under $100/month. That's for service hovering around 20Mb/s.
It's a far cry from the wonderful, beautiful, heavenly unlimited 100Mbit full duplex I had in Tokyo but carrying on like we are all labouring under such ridiculously low limits is disingenuous.
And I know for a fact that iinet services Canberra. So what's the problem, apart from extreme penny-pinching?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)