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though nowadays routers come with individualized passwords, but they didn't used to

When Verizon FiOS first came to my area, the autogenerated WEP password was based on a 5 character SSID. There were online tools that you could use to lookup what the default password would be and almost no one, relatively speaking, bothered to change it from the default. Came in handy on more than a few occasions to get free wifi as just about anywhere you go you were in range of someone that had FiOS.

Another brand used the wireless MAC as the WEP key. shm

No, those are not the addresses that your ISP gave your router. Those are local network addresses which have nothing to do with your IP - your router invents them and hands them out to nodes on your network.

To see your public IP address visit http://www.whatsmyip.org/

Tell me more... I'm a sysadmin who loves a challenge. What else do these guys do? I would love to read their end user license agreement. Probably says something like "WE READ YOUR EMAIL!" Go to here and see if your ip address always changes, if it does everytime then they are proxying you in a pool of addresses, if it changes everytime you reboot your dsl modem, that's just because it's dhcp. I would be very very surprised if they proxied everything. Plus you can't proxy SSL sessions without breaking them, so things like gmail should act normally if they are doing things they aren't meant to... What make is the DSL modem?

If http://whatsmyip.org/ is his site, as indeed sumdumass thinks, according to his post, then my take on this is a variant of the aforementioned poster: there are tons of clients available for whatismyip, including ones written in Java. I can't imagine your friend is perplexed by this, since it's almost certainly a result of his site providing too good a service, i.e. servicing requests from clients (that are configured too greedily) too often. The solution is not to block Java user-agents, but to configure the site such that too frequent requests from any client are ignored.

How much bandwidth is required? A lot less if everyone would take the 5 minutes required to implement GZip compression on their Apache servers. It saves you bandwidth, it speeds up your site for users (especially those on dialup), and saves the bandwidth of aggregators (assuming they advertise an Accept-Encoding header for gzip; deflate)

So my plea to the internet community today.. make sure your web server is configured to send gzipped content. TFA says he doesn't know how many RSS feeds can support gzip. The answer is easy really, any feed being served by Apache (plus a LOT of other webservers. AOLserver even added gzip support recently). Here's how to setup Apache and here's where to check if your site is using GZip or and get an idea of the bandwidth savings you should see get. If you're site isn't gzipping, show your admin (if it's someone else) the 'how-to' above and ask them to implement it -- it's an absolute no-brainer win-win for everyone that takes no time at all to setup really. It's really absurd IMO that it's not enabled in Apache by default.

How much bandwidth is required? A lot less if everyone would take the 5 minutes required to implement GZip compression on their Apache servers. It saves you bandwidth, it speeds up your site for users (especially those on dialup), and saves the bandwidth of aggregators (assuming they advertise an Accept-Encoding header for gzip; deflate)

So my plea to the internet community today.. make sure your web server is configured to send gzipped content. TFA says he doesn't know how many RSS feeds can support gzip. The answer is easy really, any feed being served by Apache (plus a LOT of other webservers. AOLserver even added gzip support recently). Here's how to setup Apache and here's where to check if your site is using GZip or and get an idea of the bandwidth savings you should see get. If you're site isn't gzipping, show your admin (if it's someone else) the 'how-to' above and ask them to implement it -- it's an absolute no-brainer win-win for everyone that takes no time at all to setup really. It's really absurd IMO that it's not enabled in Apache by default.

or whatsmyip.org, too...there's lots of them.