Technology

No More Netgear Equipment

This entry was posted in Marketing Technology on by

Tegan will not be buying any Netgear equipment in the future:

So that’s it. I’ll never buy another one of their products again. And if anyone asks me, I’ll tell them to avoid Netgear like the plague, because Netgear doesn’t care about its customers.

I used to be a happy Netgear customer as well but the last Netgear wireless router I bought was incredibly flaky so I spent $60 on a newer Belkin model which has been just fine for the last year.
This equipment is becoming so inexpensive and so widely distributed that I don’t believe vendors can really afford to provide much direct customer support. So, the product better work out of the box, be well documented both online and with a local copy (hey, if it is broken you may not be able to get online) and the software upgrade process should be a snap.
Hey, when my $39-$69 phone breaks I just toss it in the trash and go to the nearest store and buy another one which may not be the same brand.
Same with home routers.

Google Web Accelerator

This entry was posted in Google Privacy Technology on by

This is something I won’t be using!
First, pages download just snappily on my broadband connection, thank you.
Second, just why would I want to give these folks even more information about my browsing habits than they already get when I use them for searches? Their privacy disclaimer is particularly disingenuous:

5. How does using Google Web Accelerator affect my privacy?
Google Web Accelerator receives much of the same kind of information you currently send to your ISP when you surf the Web:
* Google will receive your requests for unencrypted pages (those with “HTTP:”, not “HTTPS:”, at the beginning of the URL), along with information such as the date and time of the request, your IP address, and computer and connection information

As you all know this can be a lot of information and they conveniently do not say anything about not gathering the info in the cookie they left on your system the last time you used anything Google.
You do delete your Google cookies regularly, don’t you?
Via beSpacific.

Now This is Broadband!

This entry was posted in Capitalism Economics Internet Regulation Technology on by

Services like this should be doable at similar prices in dense urban areas of the US:

Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) officially launched its 1 Gbps symmetric service for the residential market. Approximately 800,000 households, out of a total of 2.2 million households in Hong Kong, are wired to receive the service. The 1 Gbps symmetric service is priced at US$215 per month.
HKBN noted that its 1 Gbps service is up to 166x faster downstream and 1,950x faster upstream than the advertised bandwidth of the incumbent’s ADSL service.
HKBN Premium bb1000 service is being offered on the same metro Ethernet infrastructure that delivers the company’s Mass Market bb100 (symmetric 100 Mbps for US$34/month) and Entry Point bb10 (symmetric 10 Mbps for US$16/month) services.

Even the low end blows away the crap that has commonly been labeled residential broadband in the US.
If they are allowed to proceed the Verizon and SBC buildouts, while not quite up to the Hong Kong standard, will be a substantial improvement over current US offerings.

Concerns About Flash Player Security

This entry was posted in Marketing Privacy Technology on by

Have you all updated your Flash Player configuration to stop marketing folks and others from using it like cookies? Modulator reported on this back on April 1 and it was not an April fools joke!
Last Friday Internet Week wrote:

Macromedia’s Flash media player is raising concerns among privacy advocates for its little-known ability to store computer users’ personal information and assign a unique identifier to their machines.

Read the article. Fix your Flash settings!

Marketing Intrusion…

This entry was posted in Internet Marketing Privacy Spam Technology on by

I have a few words for this guy:

Mookie Tanembaum, founder and chief executive of United Virtualities, says the company is trying to help consumers by preventing them from deleting cookies that help website operators deliver better services.
“The user is not proficient enough in technology to know if the cookie is good or bad, or how it works,” Tanembaum said.

Mookie, take a used hot poker and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
We can make our own decisions about which cookies or other server generated markers we want to keep on our systems! For a fee I might consider letting you keep a few more markers on my system but you damn well better ask first.
I’m rather perturbed that I now have to spend time learning how to configure Flash Player to kill off the stuff ol’ mookie is trying to spawn and then propogating that accross all the family systems.