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?"

Comments

That's lousy

[Antony-Kyre]

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

[Z00L00K]

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:That's lousy

[teh moges]

For many uni students, $40/month isn't the sort of amount you want to be spending on non-necessary things like internet access.

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:That's lousy

[Barryke]

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.

Re:That's lousy

[Horus107]

I was really shocked when I read that the uni charges 2,5c per MB. I have a free of charge internet connection in my uni (cable or WLAN) that is fast as hell (sometimes download rates around 12 MB/s).

Re:That's lousy

[phoenix321]

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.

Re:That's lousy

[jabithew]

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).

Re:That's lousy

[electrictroy]

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..... still only cost me $7.00.

Re:That's lousy

[Dan541]

Some parts of the world, such as Australia have very little bandwidth available.

Re:That's lousy

[forrestm]

I should mention I'm in New Zealand, which unfortunately is behind most of the world in terms of internet

Re:That's lousy

[Laser_iCE]

That's practically the complete opposite of Australia. We are given monthly download limits (on most ISPs and adsl(2) connections), but are free to upload as much as we want. It's just such a shame that most Aussies are such leechers :(

Re:That's lousy

[lorenzino]

>> on non-necessary things like internet access.

WHAT ?

Re:That's lousy

[buckyo]

If you're using Firefox, you can install Image-Show-Hide to toggle images on a page. Disabling/enabling images would then become a 1 click affair.

Re:That's lousy

[MoonBuggy]

I'm still amazed to hear that your university is charging you such a high rate for access (well, actually I'm surprised they're charging you at all for on-campus access); obviously connections differ depending on where you are, and the number of cables from New Zealand to the rest of the world has an impact on that, but having had a quick look around it seems that even a fairly pessimistic bit of number crunching at NZ prices has your university paying less than 1/10 of the cost they're passing on to you. Has anyone complained about this? Do they provide a reason for the inflated costs?

Re:That's lousy

[Uber Banker]

Oh how times have changed. When in Imperial (1997, FK Hall in Southside, now raised to the ground and re-built, a great shame) we'd have 3 floors of rooms, 8 rooms per floor, around a central spiral staircase (there were 16 such staircase units, 8 across and two up, 8 coming off (above) the 1st floor communal area and 8 above the 5th floor communal area - this particular design was devised in the late 50s/early 60s and made rioting students easier to compartmentalise and contain the rioting, there were no riots but it made a really nice 'community' feel between the 23 fellow staircasers).

I digress. About 4 of us in one staircase had a computer, yet there was no Internet connection and no telephone lines. In the end we got together and ran a phone line from the 1st floor communal area up the staircase and devised a switch to allow each computer to connect. It didn't always work and WinSock was a real pain.

Damn, how things have changed, Southside sucked in so many regards but it was fun 'hacking' the building, underground passages and more. Are the computer labs (I used EEE, CS and Maths) still 24 hour?

Re:That's lousy

[billcopc]

$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

[aliquis]

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

Re:That's lousy

[aliquis]

It's not some kind of fair use policy / design feature. It's a flaw in the shitty technology used.

(Which I belive comes from the fact that your transfer protocols sends a confirmation when it have received a package, and if you upload a lot you will have less bandwidth over for such confirmation which will therefor be sent less frequently and your download speed will drop.)

Re:That's lousy

[tsjaikdus]

Netherlands too for me. Not even my phone is restricted (2048 Kbit up/384 Kbit down) -> 30EUR/month

I assumed that paying per MB was pretty much a dead market.

Re:That's lousy

[nosfucious]

Not necessarily, but maybe online.

Once you can get your hands on a 2~16Gb usb stick, you're set. I've seen a lot of swapping of sticks on busses, uni, trains on to laptops etc.

It's just the much lamented return of sneaker net. Which only goes to prove that the biggest leeches (not leachers) are BigPond, Optarse, etc.

Re:That's lousy

[jac89]

Yeah, I was in Imperial student halls last year. First time you go over the 5gig a day (including upload) you get a 48 hour ban and then 2 weeks.. However the internet access block only takes effect once you have restarted your computer. So if you can keep your computer up you can avoid the ban.

Re:That's lousy

[jac89]

Now however I am on o2 broadband which is 10 pounds a month for a 16 meg connection (unlimited).

Re:That's lousy

[Gerzel]

Internet non-necessary... When was the last time you were in college?

Re:That's lousy

[shokk]

I'm sure bandwidth would not be such a concern if all the packets you requested weren't going overseas. In other words, if Australia had internet sites worth using they would see faster access and eventually more countries clamoring to build pipes to it, instead of the other way around.

Re:That's lousy

[vanDee28]

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

Re:That's lousy

[fedcb22]

YOUR transfer protocol? I never knew I owned TCP.

Re:That's lousy

[fedcb22]

True. But look at South Africa. We have 2x 120Gb/s cables, one linking us to Europe and one to Japan, yet we still have poor international speeds, and retarded international caps (~$7 for 1GB on ADSL)

Re:That's lousy

[evilviper]

How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ?

Spare me... He didn't say internet access was unnecessary, quite the opposite, really. He said a more expensive "unlimited" account is unnecessary.

It wasn't long ago that we internet dwellers were doing great things with far, far less bandwidth than submitter has. What does 56K dial-up translate to in MBs/month? 14.4K? 9600 baud?

Re:That's lousy

[Albanach]

Maybe you're kidding, or maybe you have no idea what caps are in place elsewhere in the world.

In the UK there are dozens of very cheap broadband packages with 2GB caps, and the UK is comparatively well connected to the internet.

Australasia is well developed, but doesn't have huge internet capacity. I can easily see 1GB caps in place there.

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:That's lousy

[descil]

College dormitories are more like prisons or torture chambers than homes. It's not a market. It's a thumbscrew.

Re:That's lousy

[whoppo]

Yeah... but you do have Brit and Jerome.. that's cool :)

Re:That's lousy

[bwhaley]

Brett and Jermaine!

"Don't put me in der wit 'im! I'm innocent, i'm innocent! whuut?"

Re:That's lousy

[__aaqvdr516]

You make it sound like the options available are plentiful. Let me give you a breakdown of my options:

1. Satellite Internet. $80/mo for 17gb 30 day rolling average

2. Dialup. Need I say more?

3. Local Wireless Broadband. T3 trunk accessed wirelessly. $80/mo 600mb per day limit (yes per DAY). Unlimited access for $250/mo

4. Get my own T1. Around $350/mo for the lowest available package up to $1000/mo.(varies by area)

I've seriously been considering buying my own T1 and setting up a co-op with a few people nearby.

Re:That's lousy

[chrisxcr1]

Brett and Jermaine!

Please excuse me for being the pedantic asshole here but it's Bret and Jemaine.

Re:That's lousy

[b4upoo]

The real deal is to attack the political system and get others to do likewise until companies that try to limit your net access are driven into the dirt. Unlimited net access needs to be seen, in this era, as a basic civil liberty that can not be limited by commercial entities or governmental actions.
          For example picture this: A young fellow gets drunk and decides to streak across campus. Sadly for him that gets him posted on the sexual predator list for life and also in some areas gets him disallowed from any net usage at all in fear that he might molest children. It's time for society to sober up. The net is nothing more than free speech for the modern citizen.

Re:That's lousy

[KGIII]

I live near UMF.

It's Natural Light Ice here as, I'm guessing, they're being thrifty and noticed it has a higher ABV.

Re:That's lousy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That's lousy

[KGIII]

I have to wonder why Australia doesn't just lay down more undersea fiber and be done with it? I know it is expensive but, well, I'm guessing they - as a nation if not their ISPs - could afford it if they wanted to. I could see the ISPs being cheap pricks but the country could most surely afford it as a whole. I'd certainly consider that within the realms of a required infrastructure update on so many different levels.

Re:That's lousy

[b4upoo]

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 developed.
            An elderly relative asked me about 1989 why I wanted to purchase a computer. She could not understand what I needed to compute. Despite a high education and extremely high I.Q. the idea of computing was lost to her.

Re:That's lousy

[spazdor]

Clearly ownership is the only situation where the possessive form is ever used!

How are your kids? Still workin' in the slave mines, begging for emancipation?

Re:That's lousy

[spazdor]

If you have to reboot your computer and it doesn't work, try configuring your IP statically to whatever your IP used to be.

It sounds like they're using DHCP to enforce their access restrictions. If this is the case, then their ARP tables might still point your IP at your computer.

Re:That's lousy

[Hadlock]

What kind of data speeds are you seeing on avg on bit torrent?
 
Btw, I download about 10gb a week between weekly TV shows and software packages (ubuntu, open office 3.0 etc); a land line here in the US costs about $15/month minimum - so for my bandwidth needs I'd have to shell out $88/month, and I'd still have to wait 1-2 weeks to see my shows. Currently I get to see all my shows that same night with the 240-350kb/s downloads I get.

Re:That's lousy

[fedcb22]

Please, which sounds better:
... that your transfer protocols sends a confirmation ...
or
... that the transfer protocol sends a confirmation ...

Re:That's lousy

[lazy_nihilist]

I believe that browsing on campus websites is still free in NZ Universities. If your dept. lets you ssh to one of their servers (The CS Dept. has this option), and you dont need to use net-account, then you can setup a reverse tunnel from home and proxy all your internet traffic through it. And internet access is FREE :-)

Re:That's lousy

[electrictroy]

Remember the Original Poster has a 1 gigabyte limit he's trying to stay under, in order to minimize his fees. That's his goal, not downloading. I only mentioned it to demonstrate how a Dialup connection is actually better than what he has now (the dialup has no limits).

One of the best ways to achieve the goal of staying under 1 gigabyte is to impose a speedlimit upon yourself. Using a slow phoneline connection is one method. And if you use Netscape ISP, since it compresses webpages downto 15% their original size, the web-browsing will APPEAR to be as fast as a DSL connection.

Re:That's lousy

[electrictroy]

I don't believe in going that far back. Otherwise we could argue Lord Byron's daughter's insight about information would have been worthless without the invention of the printing press to distribute it. And the printing press would be worthless without the invention of paper by Egyptians. And of course having paper is pointless is you don't have a wheel to

A more-reasonable answer is that modern electronic (keyword) computers were invented shortly after the vacuum tube provided the ability to represent logic & do rapid automatic calculations.

Re:That's lousy

[g0at]

Internet non-necessary... When was the last time you were in college?

Evidnetly awhile ago, as he is apparently unfamiliar with the common English word "unnecessary". :)

-b

Re:That's lousy

[electrictroy]

A 56k dialup is approximately 10 gigabytes per month...ten times what his current service provides and far cheaper ($7-10). If you use Netzero or Netscape with on-the-fly image/text compression, then the effective speed is increased to ~500k during web-browsing, or 100 gigabytes per month.

I use 56k while stuck in hotels, and the image/text-compressed web-browsing is almost as fast as my home DSL connection.

Re:That's lousy

[adrianwills]

I should mention I'm in New Zealand, which unfortunately is behind most of the world in terms of internet

Set up a Delicious account, and use they're handy little Javascript-ed Bookmark ability to instantly save the sites you want to come back to for viewing on a better connection. Yes we're a little behind here in NZ but you can get some reasonable internet access with more than 1GB for reasonable money.

Re:That's lousy

[ryszard99]

copy that:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/68078,pipe-network-undersea-cable-to-boost-australian-broadband.aspx

Re:That's lousy

[KGIII]

Nice. At least it isn't too far away (mid 2009 in the link) so *maybe* things are looking up for the folks in Oz.

Re:That's lousy

[linuxdude_tux]

If you're going to Canterbury University and are a Postgraduate student, you can request that your Internet traffic goes over the Karen network - making it free. I'm sure the other Universities around New Zealand have something similar.

Re:That's lousy

[RyatNrrd]

companies that try to limit your net access

Try "company". We're still struggling to emerge from the monopoly of our ex-state-owned-now-internationally-listed telco Telecom.

Re:That's lousy

[RyatNrrd]

We're pretty much all cavemen in New Zealand. Our Internet is a national embarassment.

Re:That's lousy

[aliquis]

But there is no confirmation about the approach of each package over UDP is there? I wasn't 100% sure so I left naming TCP specifically because I didn't wanted to write anything which was wrong. Saying the transfer protocol would include each and every protocol which would do any sort of confirmation of the transfer.

The usage of "your" is to say "which you are using."

"that TCP sends a confirmation for each package" requires that he knows what the purpose of TCP is and when it's used so he don't believe there is always a confirmation or maybe that it only happens very rarely.
"that TCP, the transfer control protocol, sends a confirmation for ..", would explain what it did.
"that your TCP, the tra...", would tell both what it is that explain that when you are using it it does confirmations.

"Which I belive comes from the fact that then you use the transfer control protocol TCP to handle your data transfer it sends a confirmation after receiving a package, and if you upload a lot you will have less bandwidth over for such confirmation which will therefor be sent less frequently and your download speed will drop."

Would get much longer, especially if I added "at least, maybe that statement is valid for even more protocols."

Re:That's lousy

[mudshark]

I'll add a little background here: In NZ, we are burdened by a regressive monopoly structure which has severely hampered our connectivity, both in country and internationally.

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) 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, 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 enters the picture or the government grows some balls, we're stuffed.

Re:That's lousy

[lazybeam]

Too bad most people are on low-value ISPs like Big Pond which count uploads, and only give 12GB transfers... For the same price as my 150GB downloads-only ADSL2 plan with another ISP.

Re:That's lousy

[Dan541]

Why host a website in Australia its too expensive. I host mine in the United States because its less than half the cost.

Re:That's lousy

[operagost]

Yes, apparently the outrageous tuition fees aren't enough to cover internet access.

Re:That's lousy

[Eythian]

At Otago university, traffic routable over KAREN automatically goes over it. This is quite handy when it comes to things like Ubuntu updates, you can set the mirror to de.archive.ubuntu.org and download at 1 or 2MB/s, better than nz.archive gets you. ('course, I discovered the other day that apparently we have an on-campus mirror anyway)

We also have a page that tells you if a given hostname/IP address will route via KAREN or not.

Mind you, we also don't have quotas or charges for students. You might get a slap on the wrist if you download too much, and asked to please not do it again, but that's the worst I've heard. Of course, if you can route it via KAREN, no problem at all.

Re:That's lousy

[evilviper]

A 56k dialup is approximately 10 gigabytes per month...ten times what his current service provides and far cheaper ($7-10).

First off, where are you getting pricing information? I see nothing saying how much he's paying per month for that 1GB.

Secondly, dial-up isn't as cheap as you'd think. What does it cost to maintain a land-line for a month where you are? And what about everywhere else in the world where you are charged per-minute even for local calls (including DSL)?

To be fair, a dry loop (no dial-tone) in the US is only about $10/mo. on top of the $20/mo. for DSL, but it won't work with dial-up, so that's rather moot.

Still, the point remains that you can do plenty on 1GB/mo. You're certainly not cut off from information.

Re:That's lousy

[spazdor]

I think you mean Brit and J'Maiyn.

Re:That's lousy

[spazdor]

Look up old pictures of Ada Lovelace.
WAY SEXY.

Re:That's lousy

[chrisxcr1]

This is what I meant, http://www.hbo.com/conchords/cast/index.html What did you mean?

Re:That's lousy

[spazdor]

(That's how you spell it in Kiwi Accent.)

Re:That's lousy

[slick_rick]

Your modulator/demodulator (AKA MODEM) already compresses everything coming over the wire as part of the protocol it uses to communicate with the modem on the other end of the line. If you are using a "compression" service all you are doing is compressing compressed data, and then de-compressing it twice. If you have a sh*tty software modem you are doing the double de-compression on your CPU, and even if you have a real modem you are still going through the pointless extra step of decompressing again after the modem has already decompressed the data. Therefore compressing web pages for modem users is often fairly pointless and may actually increase the size of the data transfer in some situations. Mostly this will just eat clock cycles on the modem users CPU.

Re:That's lousy

[jsiren]

It's the combined effect of his 1989 allowed bandwith and the 1988 Miss June that his posts of 1991 are only now beginning to bleed through. At the current rate, provided he's ceased posting since then, he's expected to catch up by 2083. Every new post will bump the date.

Re:That's lousy

[mgcarley]

I should have figured that you'd be in New Zealand or somewhere equally lacking in decent internet access (South Africa, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia...)

You neglect to mention which ISP you are with, but perhaps you might be best to upgrade your plan a step or two:

Telecom (Xtra) has "Go" at NZ$39.95/mo with a 3GB cap, or "Explorer" at NZ$49.95/mo with a 10GB cap.
https://www.telecom.co.nz/broadband/select/1,10627,205728-204466,00.html

TelstraClear has their PDQ Launch 256kbps/Turbo 2+mbit options at NZ$24/mo or NZ$36/mo plus the NZ$2.95/1GB or $11.95/10GB/mo for usage (based on the 1GB cap, can I assume you have PDQ launch+1GB?) http://www.telstraclear.co.nz/residential/homeplan/internet/pdq-broadband/speed-and-usage-plans.cfm

I'm sure ihug, orcon and slingshot all have their plans too - perhaps it is time for a change. ...myself, I could never move back to NZ from my 100mbit/unlimited (or 110mbit with some isps)broadbandy goodness. My bills would sting too much.

Re:That's lousy

[mgcarley]

Oh, and while I think about it, if you don't do it already - make sure you get all your downloads from an NZ or Australian server. Even Firefox. Thank Joe Pesci* for citylink.co.nz (among others)!

*Someone had to take over from George Carlin.

Re:That's lousy

[jgrahn]

"Which I belive comes from the fact that then you use the transfer control protocol TCP to handle your data transfer it sends a confirmation after receiving a package, and if you upload a lot you will have less bandwidth over for such confirmation which will therefor be sent less frequently and your download speed will drop."

Would get much longer, especially if I added "at least, maybe that statement is valid for even more protocols."

Except that it's not valid. TCP typically does not send an ACK for every packet.

Re:That's lousy

[aliquis]

Ok, then I have no idea why ADSL behaves that way, but it does.

Me not knowing was the reason for "believe."

Re:That's lousy

[Almahtar]

It's amazing just how useful the net is these days for any student, not just computer related.

In my biology classes I regularly teamed up with a classmate for homework and test reviews. One would use Google and one would use my overpriced biology book. Over nine times out of ten Google got our answers faster than the book could, and Google is free.

Anymore, students can save a bundle in textbooks by using the Internet instead.

Re:That's lousy

[The Original Yama]

now raised to the ground and re-built

Was it underground?

Re:That's lousy

[Hognoxious]

If you are using a "compression" service all you are doing is compressing compressed data, and then de-compressing it twice.

Three times, assuming any images are in a sane format to begin with.

No Script

[Coldeagle]

If you're a FireFox user I would recommend the No Script and adblock add on. That way you're not actually loading anything unless you specify.

Re:No Script

[NoobixCube]

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:No Script

[unlametheweak]

... 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:No Script

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconding Adblock Plus. Less maintenance and user-interaction involved. Blocks not only javascript but also images, frames, objects, and even ajax requests. Here's an easy filter that blocks all the js crap that wordpress users put on their websites: /wp-content/plugins/

Also try HttpFox. It monitors all http traffic in Firefox, including the Google autocomplete requests.

Re:No Script

[catch23]

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

[aug24]

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

[Koiu Lpoi]

Your "usual list of sites"? How long is it? Just whitelist the lot of them and be done with it, unless we're talking hundreds of them, which is a bit strange. It's really quite easy.

Re:No Script

[Jurily]

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?

Re:No Script

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

[jesdynf]

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 websites. You're still able to display a banner or text ad, to someone running NoScript; I'm not blocking ads, I'm just not allowing Flash to run by default.

So to my mind, NoScript serves the internet better than AdBlocker. If there were /no/ ads, pages would start to vanish; I don't take any steps to block ads, but I do protect my computer from historically insecure third-party plugins.

Re:No Script

[stereoroid]

You can set NoScript to block only 3rd-party scripts i.e. allow scripts from the site you went to (e.g. Google) but block all the extra crud. In Options, General, check the "allow base 2nd-level domains by default". That cuts out mostt of the extra work you're talking about, but assumes you don't go to any sites that have malicious intent in their own right.

Re:No Script

[plover]

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.

Re:No Script

[unlametheweak]

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.

Re:No Script

[kdemetter]

No , just post your university name here, and then write a paper about browser comptibility , reffering to this article.

Re:No Script

[houghi]

And if you are not a Firefox user. Become one.

Some extra things you can do on top of most other things
1) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm will block out many things without even trying to fetch them.
2) Use privoxy or junkbuster
3) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1672 ImgLikeOpera This extension is very useful for non broadband users
4) If you have more then 1 PC, install a proxy server. Or perhaps using your providers proxy server won't count for as much (a long shot, but worth ti check out)
5) Use a webinterface for your mail without too many adds, like Gmail.
6) Read /. with the "Low Bandwith", simple design and such set
7) Use Lynx, links or w3m to browse most sites and only use firefox for those that actually need it.

Do use all of the things, not just one or two. Only when they conflict yiu need to choose.

Re:No Script

[kayditty]

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:No Script

[Peet42]

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:No Script

[killmofasta]

Be Clear! A few things:

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 ).

Re:No Script

[phoenix321]

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:No Script

[ColaMan]

IE-only suggests incompatibility with text browsers, which - coupled with text-to-speech - blind people use a lot.

I'm sure there will be some "enabling" law on your books that says that people providing a service must cater for people with disabilities, much like shopping centres need to provide things like disabled parking and wheelchair access.

So, pass their web site on to any one of a number of organisations that cater for people with disabilities - they should be able to help make it more accessible.

(I was going to mention to run it through Bobby yourself, but I see that it was commercialised some years ago. Bummer.)

Re:No Script

[forrestm]

OK here is how much my uni charges: http://www.icts.canterbury.ac.nz/services/charges/index7.shtml

Re:No Script

[electrictroy]

I started using NoScript today. The only major problems I encountered were at CWtv.com, but after thrice selecting "all all on cwtv.com" I was finally able to watch my Supernatural video.

Questions:

Is there an equivalent of NoScript or FlashBlock for Internet Exploder? Also I have bothh Verizon DSL and Netscape Dialup, but I cannot use both at the same time. Is there some way to fix that problem?

Re:No Script

[LordSnooty]

"go to better web sites" is a bust. Nearly all sites use JS in some form. Many use it as a crucial part of their setup. I tried Noscript at work, I wanted to be the safe, conscientious user, but I spent so long whitelisting sites that it became more trouble than it was worth to block the 1% chance that some malicious script could cause damage. Many JS problems seem to stem from malicious code delivered through ads, but Adblock deals with these.

All in all, Noscript is more trouble than it's worth. I can see real usefulness only for security researchers, or people who regularly browse dodgy sites. But to say "use a better site" is just impratical these days.

Re:No Script

[LordSnooty]

we're talking hundreds of them, which is a bit strange. It's really quite easy.

Of course you might end up with hundreds of them, or do you only visit a handful of sites? Having to allow sites every time you click a link is as impractical as whitelisting in the first place. How do I know which sites people will link to in the future? Using noscript becomes a real pain after a while. I tried it, it was a productivity timesink.

Re:No Script

[tepples]

So how would you rate my university's website, the only place I can sign up for my classes (IE only)?

I'd rate it as a site that should be visited from the computer lab, not your dorm.

Re:No Script

[JKR]

www.privoxy.org - slightly more trouble to set up, but it rules on Windows and Linux. I usually set it up on a shared linux box and make it the proxy for my whole subnet.

After you have it running and tell your browser to use it (via network settings / proxies) you can configure it from the browser by hitting config.privoxy.org.

You will need to whitelist some sites (and specifically some edge caches for things like BBC streaming video to work), but it's usually not too hard. You can always bypass privoxy completely from the browser proxy settings, and it works for ANY browser (and things that aren't browsers but use IE for web access, like advert-loaded download "accelerators" should you be unfortunate enough to need to use one.

Jon

Re:No Script

[Koiu Lpoi]

I tried it, it was a productivity timesink.

...then you'll have to give me an example, or I will honestly have to say you were doing something wrong. You don't have to whitelist every site you go to, as most work just fine without javascript. Flash/Java is a click-through block as well. Are you really saying that moving your mouse to the lower-right corner of the screen and clicking twice has caused to to just be unable to work throughout the day, especially considering you don't have to after that?

Re:No Script

[fast turtle]

If a person wants videos then a better place to search for them is on Usenet or bittorent

Unless you happen to be on one of the ISP's that have dumped Usenet access completely as mine did (TimeWarner). Bittorrent is still a viable alternative along with other P2P apps, yet I've found that many of the files are either infested with virus/trojans or of such poor quality that You-Tube actually looks good.

Re:No Script

[evilviper]

6) Read /. with the "Low Bandwith", simple design and such set

Since the last site redesign the only difference between "Simple Design" and normal is that the CSS file isn't loaded. Once you've cached it once, you're not going to save any bandwidth...

"Low Bandwidth" might be any improvement, but here, with Javascript disabled, I can't see any differences. Perhaps if you actually LIKE and use the new comment system, it may help.

Re:No Script

[evilviper]

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.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the World. The unreasonable man persists in adapting the World to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unresonable man.
      - George Bernard Shaw

Disabling all client-side scripting by default just breaks too many sites.

NoScript is able to automatically fix a large number of javascript links. It's a minority of sites that are even affected by a lack of scripting, and frankly, most sites use it so horribly that finding other means of navigation (eg. link at the bottom of the page?) can actually be a substantial usability improvement...

Re:No Script

[Sancho]

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:No Script

[BronsCon]

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 all, are web developers not interested in making information available to ALL, anymore? Why go out of your way to cut off a large portion of your viewership?

Even sites which rely on ads or subscriptions.

Especially sites which rely on ads or subscriptions.

Re:No Script

[amilo100]

Good tip. I also have an extreme low bandwidth connection. Here are some things I found helps to conserve bandwidth:

Use Adblock Add-on as the above poster states. This helps a hell of a lot. Disable flash entirely in your browser (use Flashblock). It is sometimes handy to have to browsers â" one with add-block and flashblock and another with it disabled. If you want to view a link with flash, simply copy and paste it into the other browser.

Another extremely important thing is firewalls â" install a good firewall because (esp. on Vista) everything wants to access the internet and download stuff (only allow port 80,53 and a few other, a good firewall on vista is PCTools). Turn off all automatic updates everywhere.

It is a good idea to disable images entirely (Firefox Alt-T-O, is fast) and only re-enable it when you need it. Unfortunately Firefox does not show a place holder for an image so that you can just right-click and say show-image (like Internet Explorer does).

Turn off pre-fetching in Firefox. Go to the address bar and click about:config, then search for prefetching.

If you are using GMail and GMail's chat program regularly, download the stand-alone program and switch GMail to standard HTML view. Even if you disable images Firefox continues to load favicon. Disable this also (about:config, browser.chrome.favicons). Every little bit helps.

Re:No Script

[MBGMorden]

Research it a bit more. Back when I was in school we had all web based class signups that most students used, but remember that most of thoese places have been online a LONG time, and on legacy systems. Even though it wasn't well known you could actually use an IBM 3270 terminal emulator to connect to the old mainframe network and signup for classes that way (it all fed into the same database as the web signups on the backend).

I ended up doing that not for any browser security reasons, but just because the old text screen interface was faster and more logical for me.

Re:No Script

[Firethorn]

If they're associated with the federal government section 508 specifies accessibility requirements.

There's lots of information for semi-government organizations to make their stuff compliant.

Re:No Script

[arth1]

4) If you have more then 1 PC, install a proxy server. Or perhaps using your providers proxy server won't count for as much (a long shot, but worth ti check out)

Even with a single machine, a proxy server can be a real help. A proxy server can use far more advanced algorithms for what to keep cached and when to try fetching than the simpler caching mechanism of a browser.

Re:No Script

[Randle_Revar]

That's absurd. When I started using noscript, I spent a little time setting up my most frequently used sites. After that and a week or two of normal usage, my list was well populated and I rarely had to add anything. Nowadays I have to temporarily allow something a few times a week at the very most and maybe once a month I decide to add something to the whitelist. And it only takes about 30 seconds, tops, to allow or add something.

I do keep a backup of the whitelist, so I will not have to re-enter it at some point.

Re:No Script

[ElectricRook]

Crap... Don't remind me of those days.
The first time I used the internet, is was through a dial-up BBS, I connected UUCP to somewhere, and paid $100 for the bandwidth to download a broken Star Trek game.
The second time, I was on a Sparc2 at work. Before I knew of X windows, and was on the console. Trying to remove a file, I typed "rn file" ... But that's how I learned PERL with "CLMP"

Re:No Script

[Hatta]

If you actually use it for a while, you get a good whitelist that covers >90% of anything you'd do on the internet. The remaining 10% of the time it's really easy to click the little 's' icon in the corner and allow what you need. It's really not as bad as you make it out to be, I won't browse any other way.

Adblock has the benefit of a premade whitelist. It's obviously going to be difficult for everyone to agree on what's a desirable script, so NoScript doesn't have that advantage.

Re:No Script

[Lost Engineer]

Yeah but it would be bad for someone trying to save on bandwidth because you often have to reload sites before they will work.

Re:No Script

[original bit basher]

Back in the bad old days when the 56KB shaping you are dropped down to was the top end, I did indeed use Lynx. But from a shell account at my ISP (surely at a university there's a Linux system you can log onto with ssh). Therefore the download to my system was only the opening screen... the remainder of the download went to my ISP host, which was high speed and at no charge. For most pages the first or second screen was enough to reject pages that were not going to do me any good.

I still sometimes use this trick to this day for other reasons. But I have to admit more and more pages are not friendly to anything but browsers with Javas and Flash enabled. And Web 2 stuff requires it. But,

May I put a plug in for the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ as I believed in that before I found the campaign.

And if you don't need fancy graphics or fonts in your E-mail, there is pine/alpine text based e-mail agents. Again, less hit on your bandwidth if you run them from a shell account.

Re:No Script

[rwyoder]

4) If you have more then 1 PC, install a proxy server. Or perhaps using your providers proxy server won't count for as much (a long shot, but worth ti check out)

Even with a single machine, a proxy server can be a real help. A proxy server can use far more advanced algorithms for what to keep cached and when to try fetching than the simpler caching mechanism of a browser.

Very true, and there is more; Extreme example: When installing an OS like FreeBSD via the Internet I use my proxy. The first time I install it, the installation time depends on the speed I can download across the 'net. Now suppose I want to install on a second machine, or some got messed up with the initial install and I want to re-install; The *second* time I install, the only Internet traffic is Squid checking to see if the files changed, so the second install is purely a data transfer between my proxy and the machine I am building. It takes a tiny fraction of the time for the first installation!

Re:No Script

[Dr. Spork]

Better even than Gmail's website: Use something like Thunderbird or Outlook and get your Gmail by IMAP. That way you won't have to open your browser, and only get the text of your emails without a package of a million lines of javascript.

Re:No Script

[fscky]

Also install imglikeopera addon, it has option for loading images from cache.

Re:No Script

[killmofasta]

Yes, and No.

With Adblock you can specify OTHER domains/directories tha are bandwidth wasters.

Privoxy is one cool product, I am going to check out, thanks for the tip, but I dont think its a catch all. ( and neither is Adblock Plus ), they both help you get a leg up on the sewage.

Re:No Script

[halcyon1234]

Just whitelist the lot of them and be done with it, unless we're talking hundreds of them, which is a bit strange. It's really quite easy.

Even if it is hundreds, it's still a trivial matter. When the browser hits the site the first time, just right click the S and say "Allow this site". Done once and forever. It's all about the training. It's no more difficult (and far more effective) than hitting the This Is Spam button to train a junk mail filter.

Use Squid

[pembo13]

Setup Squid with bandwidth limits as you see fit.

Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

You're screwed. Welcome to the age of greed.

Re:Sorry

[Jesus_666]

That only works if someone actually offers something better. If the OP sits in Australia or New Zealand a 10 GB limit might be the best offer he can afford.

Re:Sorry

[descil]

Doesn't work at a uni dorm. Nor in many other situations. Which is why I'm about to blow my brains out - my life is literally just a compilation of monopolistic tithes. Welcome to the age of greed. Wake up before you get mowed down?

Re:Sorry

[jabithew]

There are only two monopolistic tithes I have to pay here in the UK, one goes to the government and the other goes to Thames Water. We're not about to be mowed down.

Re:Sorry

[descil]

That's good for you. If you want to keep it that way, I suggest you don't stop saying such positive things about your government. They're listening. And I'm pretty sure "Off with his head" came from them, too. So.. yeah. Other places however, do not have a nice selection of choices to pick from, but simply have to adapt to what they're given or vote with their feet...

PS- does grass even grow in the UK?

Here you go

[dgun]

http://lynx.isc.org/

Re:Here you go

[Skater]

Or Links. Far better than Lynx.

Re:Here you go

[The MAZZTer]

Or even ELinks!

Re:Here you go

[fxkr]

Or cURL. Far less bloated.

Re:Here you go

[functor]

Or w3m, which is even better.

Re:Here you go

[Nimey]

ELinks is even better than Links.

Go minimal

[jadedoto]

Just use Lynx.

One word!

[neokushan]

Lynx.

Re:One word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing. Yours is the 3rd lynx reference posted within one minute!

There needs to be karma-neutral way to mod posts redundant.

To quote Adam Savage:

[Weaselmancer]

At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra.

"Well there's your problem."

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Frogbert]

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:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell it doesn't even have to be third world... afaik 1GB is still the standard cap in NZ (which sometimes feels like third world)

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[AceofSpades19]

You can barely browse the web with 1 gb

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Eythian]

It is the standard in that it's the base-level cap. It works well enough for people who read a few webpages and get their email. A number of friends, and my parents are on that. Heavier users can quite happily get more, although it does get a bit pricier. I put my plan up to 100Gb the other day, and it costs NZ$95/mo.

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:To quote Adam Savage:

[Anonymous Coward]

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: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. 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.

I agree with the parent. I reside in Lebanon where internet infrastructure is poorly developed and the ISPs (for ADSL, EVDO, illegal cable internet) are essentially monopolies. The result is high cost and low quality. 2.5 gigs of throughput (2 gigs down, .5 up) costs me $50 using EVDO. Incidentally, EVDO is the only consumer-level internet infrastructure option if you want anything resembling broadband in speed and latency.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[ccguy]

"Well there's your problem."

Who's moderating today, the retards brothers? If something your comment should be -1 obvious.

Don't you think the OP doesn't know that it would be a better solution to have 100 GB/month instead? You think he's doing byte counting for the fun?

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[forrestm]

haha yeah I am in New Zealand, internet kinda sucks here really

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Klucki]

At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra.

"Well there's your problem."

He's probably Australian. Unlimited internet does not exist.

Prices vary wildly by speed and download cap. $70AUD (~$50USD) a month for a 20+Mbps ADSL2 plan gets you around 40GB. Most ISP's dont go much higher than this. If you can find one that does, expect to pay $100 or more. I'm guessing Soulskill's 1GB costs him around $40.
If you're lucky, once you use your downloads you get throttled to 64Kbps. Or, you can get charged massive fees for using anything. Typically $0.15 per MB ($150 per GB!!!!!). Oh, and download limits go as low as 200MB...

If you're like me and not in a capital city, Those prices apply to a 1.5MB/sec ADSL plan, ADSL2 is not available. And if you want the full 8MB/sec, it's gonna cost you...

What pisses me off the most is because unlimited usage is common overseas, I'm led to belive that using 100GB doesn't really cost your ISP much more than using 1GB...

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[grcumb]

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.

The figure is accurate (I'm posting from a Telecom Vanuatu 1Mbps link right now), but let's not conflate bandwidth with transfer caps.

Telecom Vanuatu relies exclusively on satellite for Internet connectivity, so no matter what happens, their Internet fees are going to be high. In fairness, though, even though they charge frightening fees, there's not a huge amount of contention (I am usually able to fill the pipe when I need to) and they offer unlimited downloads on all their packages.

A few years ago, they were offering only metred bandwidth, and prices were horrendous. In one or two egregious cases, careless or ignorant customers managed to ring up monthly fees in the USD 10,000 range.

We in the Vanuatu IT Users Society (no link - that site is on a TVL 1 Mbps link as well!) went to TVL and said, 'Charge as much as you feel you must, but make it unlimited.' Since that time, Internet use has increased by about two orders of magnitude. (Of course, that's not much, starting from close to zero.)

Vanuatu may be hobbled in many ways where IT is concerned, but we've learned to do a lot with what we've got. I've been writing for almost two years now about IT developments here. Read more here, if you like.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[linuxguy]

Cost of Internet connectivity isn't much of an excuse anymore. I know in Pakistan, you can get an unlimited 1Mbps DSL connection for $12/month. A 2Mbps cable modem connection, again unlimited use, is $20/month.

Pakistan is just as far if not further away from Europe and the US. And they have a lazy ass and corrupt govt. to boot. If they can provide inexpensive and unlimited Internet access to their population then anyone can.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Barnett]

Move to a civilized country? I find that quite ironic coming from someone living in a country that is in a perpetual state of civil war. Despite the relatively high crime rate in SA I feel a lot safer here than I ever felt in Israel. You tell me what is more likely, bringing crime under control in SA or ending the civil war in Israel?

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[ScrewMaster]

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:To quote Adam Savage:

[amilo100]

It is not really the cost of connecting with Europe. If I recall correctly, most of the undersea cables (SAT3, etc...) are vastly underutilized.

The biggest reason is the government supported monopoly of Telkom. The law has changed enough but Telkom is still a monopoly (esp. last mile connection). It is in their interest to ensure that no-one gets adequate data bandwidth at a reasonable price â" otherwise people might counter their mile high voice rates by using VoIP.

Also, most universities charge for Internet to make money. Internet access does not cost a university a tenth of R2/MB they ask students â" it is solely to support an inefficient IT staff.

Also look at Neotel's (the second national operator) prices. They have a CDMA2000 phone that casts R100 a month with 1 MB of data costing 8 cents (around R80/GB, $8/GB). That is a lot lower than Telkom or Vodacom (3G at R280/GB).

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.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[ScrewMaster]

Why was I modded Troll? If a European was taking exception to an American saying, "Well, you know, all people in {insert other country here} are stupid, would he have been modded Troll? Or would he have gotten a +5 Insightful?

Hypocrisy is alive and well on Slashdot, I see.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[bobjr94]

I live only about 20 minutes from Tacoma, WA and our area still has no DSL, no cable (none at all, not even cable tv) poor to none cell reception (for wireless internet) and dial up (we cant even get 56k dial up, it never got over 26k when I tried it). All we can get is satellite and they have smaller limits, 175mb a day for standard plan or 350mb for the pro plan. 1GB a day would be the life. Good thing I have cable at work and a 60gb usb hard drive.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[Zerth]

Ah, but Pakistan isn't an island. Australia, and by extension New Zealand, share no land borders with any other country. They are pretty much guaranteed to be a leaf node and thus screwed by any communications provider.

Now if they could get lines to South America and Africa they could become a nexus and maybe have some bargaining power.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[ScrewMaster]

It's not like I'm in the States and too stupid to realize things might be done differently elsewhere.

He didn't call anybody stupid, you stupid faggot.

Yes he did, all of America in fact, and you just furthered my point about the lack of civility. Thanks for your support. It was much appreciated.

Re:To quote Adam Savage:

[scragz]

He's from New Zealand

easy

[lucas teh geek]

firefox + adblock + flashblock + noscript + dont use youtube

Re:easy

[i'm lost]

Does flashblock do anything that noscript doesn't do?

Re:easy

[i.of.the.storm]

Better yet, uninstall flash altogether.

Re:easy

[lucas teh geek]

no idea, noscript is not something I personally use because i find it be more of a pain in the ass than a help most of the time, but i know it stops pages refreshing themselves which is why it got a mention.

Re:easy

[WK2]

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
user_pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.search.update", false); // Update extensions and Adblock filters every 15 days.
user_pref("extensions.update.interval", 1296000);
user_pref("extensions.adblockplus.synchronizationinterval", 360); // Note that the first is measured in seconds, and the second is measured in hours. // Block pages from autorefreshing
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:easy

[Dr. Evil]

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:easy

[killmofasta]

Yes, noscript blocks sites from scripting content from other sites, Flashblock blocks every flash, even on the current page. ( Flash does not need java-scrpit to auto play ).

Re:easy

[secolactico]

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.

Or you can hit pause, switch to another window/tab and it will continue to load. When done, unpause.

Re:easy

[couchslug]

"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."

I use Flashblock and Videodownloader. I download anything I want to watch (if I want to watch it I may want to keep a copy) and play the .flv file using vlc.

Works great on both Windows and Linux, and for those who are bandwidth-challenged at one location it also works fine from a USB stick.

Re:easy

[Randle_Revar]

noscript has an option to block flash and other plugins, but it only blocks flash until you allow it. If you reload, the video starts immediately (until you start a new browsing session).

Re:easy

[halcyon1234]

Use adblockplus rather than adblock. Adblock is obsolete, and does not work with current Firefox versions.

That is incorrect. I have Ad Block (not plus) running on Firefox 3.0.3. It's always run on new Firefox builds. There was a hiccup when FF2 came out, but that was fixed when I altered the "compatible browsers" line in the install (and the devs did the same shortly after).

Re:easy

[WK2]

From the Adblock website: "This branch is tested irregularly with Firefox 1.0.7, 1.5, Mozilla 1.3.1, 1.7, and Seamonkey 1.0." - http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html

On the other hand, addons.mozilla.org agrees with you, that the latest version works with 3.0.*. I did not know that. However, adblock has lagged behind the latest Firefox several times. It was not a "hiccup" with Firefox 2, but rather, the Adblock extension, for several months, failed to work with the latest version of Firefox. The same thing happened with 3.0. Adblock is an outdated and obsolete extension, does not support all of the features that Adblock+ does, has been reported to slow down later versions of Firefox, and is barely maintained. They don't even update their website anymore.

Note that this is a good thing. There is rarely good reason for two projects to do the exact same thing, and the dev's time can be better spent doing just about anything else, such as working with Adblock+.

Squid.

[bmo]

Install a cache server. Like Squid.

http://www.squid-cache.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_cache /thread.

--
BMO

Re:Squid.

[grasshoppa]

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.

[whoever57]

Install a cache server. Like Squid.

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:Squid.

[unlametheweak]

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:Squid.

[unlametheweak]

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/

Re:Squid.

[cryptoluddite]

I like polipo. 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:Squid.

[bobv-pillars-net]

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

Links

ELinks

w3m

Re:Squid.

[dow]

I'd suggest two proxies. Squid for the caching, and Privoxy inline before it to filter out the adverts and other junk. It will make most junk laden pages better to read too.

Re:Squid.

[Cycon]

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.

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 second squid caching server on my laptop, which itself connects to the first proxy via the compressed tunnel.

SSH adds some overhead in exchange for the security, but I find the compression on the link more than makes up for it, especially with large HTML and other text files. The only point of the remote caching proxy is to act as a gateway for the local one (the caching feature being secondary). If the page is in the cache, I don't end up downloading it a second time, and if not I get "free" compression (c:

Re:Squid.

[nkuttler]

I'd rather use wwwoffle. Haven't used it in years, but last time I did it cached everything, including flash movies, very well.

Re:Squid.

[Anonymous Coward]

FlashBlock is all you need for YouTube. All their vids are wrapped in a Flash player so FlashBlock by default blocks all YouTube videos (instead showing an empty space with a Flash icon in it).

You can click on the flash icon to allow that specific Flash element to load. Even if you refresh a YouTube page FlashBlock once again blocks the video until you chose to manually click on it.

Plus FlashBlock wipes out 50% of online adverts. Couple FlashbLock with AdbLock and you have one extremely peaceful browsing experience.

Re:Squid.

[pbhj]

Won't a caching server be far better though for a single user. Presumably for a small user-base most of the users are looking at different sites and there is very little crossover. For a single user they _may_ view the same pages every day or at least 90% of the same pages. Whilst those pages - eg Wikipedia, Slashdot, blogs - will change in their fresh textual and multimedia content most will only change a little in their graphical content.

This page shows a 260K download (49 requests) for an empty cache and 55K download (2 requests) for a primed cache (using YSlow for Firebug).

Youtube may still be a drain but not downloading the page "chrome" every time has to be a saving.

As an aside: What effect does increasing browser.cache.disk.capacity have in FF?

Re:Squid.

[4e617474]

I'd suggest two proxies. Squid for the caching, and Privoxy inline before it to filter out the adverts and other junk. It will make most junk laden pages better to read too.

Probably what I'd do in his situation. But if setting up Squid sounds like too much work for simple web surfing, Privoxy could be a tremendous help by itself. By default, it blocks a lot of the pop-up, drive-by advertising-related bandwidth robbers, and since the original poster already has a convenient status bar showing him who's grabbing his bandwidth and giving nothing in return, it's going to be trivial to build up a blacklist to just kill. The syntax of the configuration files may seem a little daunting at first if you're not use to something similar, but they're well-commented, and have a lot of examples. There's a straight-forward well-documented way to deanimate gifs (load only one frame, at substantial bandwidth savings), and if you delve into it, you might be able to minimize unnecessary reloads by tweaking http headers and javascript. It's cross-platform, easy to install and use if it's your only proxy (only slightly less so if you need to forward to another proxy) and it "Just Works".

The Firefox thing, do a reinstall and turn off the feedback agent, see if that helps.

Re:Squid.

[alienghic]

An additional feature of squid, If you can find some way of getting unrestricted local network access, Squid also has a peering system so you and your classmates could share cache pools. It does appears that you can limit it to only respond if the resource is in the cache. (never_direct) http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/09/17/squidpeering.html

Re:Squid.

[Solosoft]

Did you know squid also has an adblocking feature in it. This way you don't need to setup client side blocking. The adblocking is actually not too bad only missing once in awhile and ive yet to NOTICE any incorrect blocking.

Adzapper does a fairly nice job. Setup a little cron script and it automaticly updates. Also if you have something like a WRT54GL or any advanced routing device you can setup transparent port 80 forwarding too.

This script works perfect on my WRT54GL running DD-WRT v23 sp2

Proxy Script
Simple enough ... effective and does not require any end user setup. Thus "transparent"

hosts file

[JetScootr]

About 100 ad domains eat up most bandwidth if you're using the most popular sites. Put those 100 domains into your hosts file pointed at '127.0.0.1' and eliminate half or more of the bandwidth used by normal surfing at cnn.com, yahoo.com, etc. Google it - there's a site out there that has a huge hosts file you can download; it's overkill - you really only need about 200 max. Just keep checking where your unwanted cookies are coming from, and null those sites.

Re:hosts file

[Scarhead]

I agree! This is the easiest way to eliminate ad traffic. In fact, I don't have limits on my connection, but I use the hosts file to kill as many ads as I come across.

Re:hosts file

[skeeto]

Where can I find this list? It would be nice to have. I am sure some of them are in my Adblock filter already.

Firefox connections

[Anonymous Coward]

When in doubt, consult the source.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections

Re:Firefox connections

[forrestm]

That is a very useful link

wow.

[kristersaurus]

seriously though, where do you live? the moon? ocean floor?

Re:wow.

[Sasayaki]

Australia. Probably the Australian National University.

How do I know? That almost-exactly describes my current situation.

Re:wow.

[level4]

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:wow.

[conufsed]

Thats nice if you live on an ADSL2 enabled exchange with a clean path the whole way. Those of us stuck on ADSL1 pay more for less

Re:wow.

[raju1kabir]

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:wow.

[forrestm]

Awwww so true, how'd you guess I'm in New Zealand?

Re:wow.

[Nimey]

To be fair, I'm American and use "uni", mainly from being on parts of the Internet where people from the Commonwealth are.

Re:wow.

[Sasayaki]

Mate,

The ACCC has no jurisdiction here. If you live at a university college (which I currently do), you HAVE to use this service- there IS no alternative. And it's a breach of your contract to get any other internet service except possibly wireless broadband, but few are game to test that claim.

Library

[DeadDecoy]

Go to the library?
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:Library

[j-beda]

In most universities I am familiar with in North America, computer access wireless or wired required a signon with your university network-ID and password. Thus bandwidth tracking is certainly possible. If the poster is in a place with high data-transmission costs (such as New Zealand or basically anywhere outside of NAmerica, Europe and parts of Asia) it seems likely that they would implement this type of thing.

What would be nice is if they had a large caching system on the local university network (which seems likely) and that they didn't charge students for access to any local (within the local network) system access, which seems much more difficult to track and "bill" so likely is not done.

make believe you are a cell phone

[circletimessquare]

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

A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[jamonterrell]

I'm thinking that's your best bet.

Re:A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[jamonterrell]

Oh, and possibly a very good antenna, in case your neighbors aren't so close.

Re:A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, take that the other direction - Have you verified that you're actually using all your bandwidth? Are you on wifi? Perhaps your neighbors are helping themselves to your bandwidth?

Re:A wifi card and your neighbour's internet.

[kramulous]

I think that's one of the better solutions i've seen here. The original poster is NZ and I saw another NZ post that they'd got 100GB for $95. Five people, a simple proxy server (to ensure everybody gets 20GB) and they could get a 40x cost benefit.

I really like the idea. Has community stamped all over it.

Re:Only things you can do

[chibiace]

ASCII porn? take up playing MUDs.

Host files

[greyhueofdoubt]

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

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

Use Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Use http://www.opera.com/. You can set all kinds of "site preferences" including javascript, (turn it off! will save lots of bandwidth), plugins, etc.

You can also "block content", like from advertisers and 3rd party links, unneeded extra pictures and crap, etc. It's really great!!

You can also set user or author mode, including css, etc.

Also you can set up a firewall to block all of the ad servers, like admt.com, advertising.com, the whole list- block them all!

Try it- you will love it!!

Re:Use Opera

[A Friendly Troll]

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.

Re:Use Opera

[kingturkey]

You can also toggle between displaying images, displaying cached images only and not displaying images. If you need an image you can right click it and select reload image.

It's probably the most helpful feature when you're on a slow connection or saving bytes.

Don't browse

[gzipped_tar]

User curl or wget.

Disable prefetching

[mj01nir]

Disable prefetching.
about:config
network.prefetch-next false

Re:Disable prefetching

[Frozen Void]

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:Disable prefetching

[WK2]

From https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ:

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 prefetching is enabled by default.

Maybe you still disagree, but I think that is a well thought-out argument for having it enabled by default.

Re:Disable prefetching

[RiotingPacifist]

and that is why we need to use prefetch tags instead of JS/DOM hacks

Re:Disable prefetching

[Dachannien]

that is a well thought-out argument for having it enabled by default

How many webmasters do you know who put that level of thought into their work?

Re:Disable prefetching

[svank]

Also from https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Link_prefetching_FAQ:

Are there any restrictions on what is prefetched?

Yes, only http URLs can be prefetched (https:// URLs are never prefetched for security reasons). ... In addition to this restriction, URLs with a query string are not prefetched...

Banks should only allow money transfers through https, and these URLs are not prefetched.

Online polls will presumably use a query string or POST data, and so will not or can not be prefetched.

DDOSing an image through prefetch could be done by just embedding the image, so that point is moot.

Some Firefox suggestions

[gregbaker]

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, AdBlock, QuickJava (for Java and JavaScript)

You could also try fiddling with the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency in your about:config. I haven't tried it, but setting it to 2 might yield good results.

Try a compressing proxy

[keeboo]

If you have access to a remote server which do not have bandwidth limitations (perhaps a friendly sysadmin in an university?) you may try a compressing proxy such as Ziproxy which recompresses pictures to lower quality and does some extra black magic aswell.

It seems that RabbIT does that too, but I've never used that software myself.

Re:Try a compressing proxy

[mebrahim]

You can get a free ssh account and use ssh client's SOCKS proxy server + compression feature to do it.
For example:
$ ssh -C -o CompressionLevel=9 -D1080 me@my-ssh-server.ir
And set your browser's proxy settings to localhost:1080 SOCKS v5.

Don't stream, download.

[argiedot]

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....

[gandhi_2]

wardriving.

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.

Re:The most proactive approach is....

[zakezuke]

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

[flyingfsck]

Obvious solution: http://links.sourceforge.net/

Four ways

[Leemeng]

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.

Get a new ISP

[CranberryKing]

Seriously. If you don't like the policy, let them know. Dump the bastards!

Re:Get a new ISP

[jellomizer]

Exactly. Stop making yourself a victim and put the power on your side. Switch to a different ISP. There is always satilite internet as an option. I always hate it when people whine and complain how big and bad a company is. Well Change Them, It is an option it is always an option.

Re:Get a new ISP

[CranberryKing]

He does not specify that. He points out his situation at home and then at his university.

Do like what the guy from...

[MoFoQ]

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

[A Friendly Troll]

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.

no-no, no-no-no-no, there's no limits!

[arikol]

Seriously, who has a 1GB xap these days? I come from a country in the middle of f$#*ing nowhere, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, we have 3 fiber optic cables connecting us to the outside world. A 1GB cap would be something for our cellphone (perhaps). I mean,can't you pay like five bucks extra for unlimited?? Last time I had a cap it was (no, not a "cap in mah ass") 40GB, was up to 100GB when I quit that contract. Those caps were only on packets from outside the country, using those limited fiber optic cables. Domestic traffic was unlimited, no matter how cheap a connection you bought. Anyways, If you're running windows install a proper firewall and learn how to use it. ZoneAlarm makes a free version of their firewall which allows you to specify rules for all programs. That lets you block programs from calling out unless you want them to. You will be getting annoying messages and will have to allow programs every time if you want to keep maximum control. The built in firewalls on both windows and Mac are a bit lousy in that they are inbound only, that is, they block unauthorized access from outside parties. A proper firewall (many available, but for example, ZoneAlarmFree on Win and LittleSnitch on Mac) will be more customizable and block both incoming attacks and monitor what programs try to communicate OUT of your computer. Use either Firefox or the Opera browser. I like Opera better as it is smaller, faster and more full featured. Opera however does not support plugins in the way Firefox does (well, it does actually, there just aren't as many useful ones). Opera has a built in ad-blocking device which works pretty well, very good pop-up blocker, you can easily switch between having images enabled or not, Switch JavaScript on/off, Java on/off, sound in webpages on/off, abimated images on/off etc. Most of those options are in the quick preferences. Firefox is more spartan when it arrives, but has plugins to do quite a few things. Worth checking out. Firefox has fewer page rendering problem (Opera doesn't have many these days, though). Both browsers are free as in beer, FireFox is also free as in speech. Both are available on all major operating systems. I use both browsers on WinXP, Mac, and Ubuntu. So, recap: Firewall, learn it Browser, Opera and Firefox, learn their blocking features. DON'T use InternetExplorer (badbadbad) on win or Safari (not good enough) on Mac.

Re:no-no, no-no-no-no, there's no limits!

[forrestm]

I'm afraid in New Zealand broadband is outlandishly expensive. Unlimited download is in excess of $100, if you're lucky, and that's only at 256k speeds.

Re:no-no, no-no-no-no, there's no limits!

[dreemkill]

im moving from the us (NYC) to Australia (Perth) in a week and a half. im *terrified* of the internet connection there.

i fear im going to have to just spend like 200/month on a decent connection

cache in on your browsing history!

[damagehead]

firstly, I would recommend getting rid of toolbars like google, yahoo, etc. these thing transfer lot of data back and forth. secondly, and most importantly, consider installing squid caching proxy server. Squid will really help in reducing your overall bandwidth by returning cached results.

Invest in a better package

[boris_the_hacker]

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.

Re:Invest in a better package

[tepples]

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.

Are you seriously recommending paying $100 for 4 GB?

opera mini on you pc (-flash, +compression also)

[stevetures]

You could piggyback on Opera Mini (I have no idea what their eula says, Im not a lawyer, etc). They claim to compress web content by 90% on their backend before the output is redirected to your phone (or PC, in this case).

Download Opera Mini and the Microemulator

http://www.operamini.com/download/pc/generic/generic_advanced_midp_2/

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=30014&package_id=21993&release_id=587061

You could also try uninstalling Flash is generally pretty easy. Zipping all your attachments etc

Oh and stop reading pages like Slashdot. Its all just nonsense anyways. ;-)

Firefox's search bar

[fahrbot-bot]

When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded.

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.

where in the world...

[viridari]

...do they have such awful terms of service?

WTF!?!?!

[rts008]

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

[Joce640k]

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?

Live Without Video!

[stereoroid]

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, BBC News, or Washington Post

. On Slashdot, set "Simple Design" and "Low Bandwidth" here.

RSS Feeds

[BauerUK]

Most of the big news sites will have an RSS/XML feed you can subscribe to. This is usually free of images and advertisements, and is much lighter than browsing through the site itself. Maybe using an RSS reader for the sites with lots of rich content may limit the amount you transfer.

My suggestions

[eebra82]

The problem is that your ISP is using bandwidth schemes that belonged years back. You ask what you can do to minimize your bandwidth usage, but aside from ad block programs, there's nothing you can do.

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, set your browser cache to 50 GB and install two browsers; one displaying images and one that won't. So every time you check your e-mail, use the one that has images disabled.

There's really nothing you can do beyond that, unless there's a nifty program that could download JPG files in really low quality. This is possible and utilized by some older browsers back when JPG files were loaded on 56k connections. The images would first load in compressed low quality and continue until it was 100%.

Re:My suggestions

[Jesus_666]

I wonder how an ISP can defend such pricing in 2008

Because that's the standard market rate. The OP has already been identified as being from New Zealand where broadband is absurdly expensive. The only way to change that is to be a telco, lay your own optical cable between NZ and somewhere else (the question is where - as Australia isn't big on broadband either Japan might be the nearest useful connection) and then try to recoup your losses without charging as much as everyone else.

Not everyone has access to broadband as easily as Japan, Europe or the USA.

Good call

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:Good call

[shipofgold]

If you are in a place where everybody is subject to download caps this would be literally stealing. You use up your neighbor's bandwidth cap and they have to pay extra. There are countries where the entire population accesses the rest of the world through just a few fibers. Just a few big users could actually block millions of others. Infrastructure takes time to build....its coming, but until it arrives bandwidth caps are the only way to ensure that all users get access.

Re:Good call

[CarpetShark]

My point is quite the opposite: by the very fact that there is free bandwidth to steal (i.e., oversupply), and yet there is demand for more from other users, it is NOT being managed properly.

I researched this issue before...

[cwolfsheep]

That guy suggesting RabbIT may not be far off in his thinking. Realistically, we need to get admins to change behavior at the server level. For bandwidth reduction, using HTTP compression & converting non-animated GIFs into optimized PNGs will help (did this with servers I work with). I did write up my initial findings last year: I should probably go research if there's a way to shrink Flash files... http://www.wolfsheep.com/index.php/Technical/FixOurWeb

Where do you live?

[Jane Q. Public]

Where do you live, that you are getting reamed so badly? Alaska? Yukon? Argentina?

Re:Where do you live?

[ehintz]

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 has tanked).

Use the MVPS Hosts file

[TonyToews]

Try Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm This cuts most of the blasted animated ads at various websites. And blocks much of the cookie monitoring websites as well. Tony Toews

A non-technical solution:

[RichiH]

Don't click links when you want to go back. Open in new tab exists for a reason.

Re: Deploy a minifying proxy

[Peet42]

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*]

Two Options

[coaxial]

1. Get a better provider that isn't a jack ass.

2. Stop being a cheap ass.

That is an insane download cap

[MartinSchou]

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
kilobytes in size. Spam comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate, 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:That is an insane download cap

[zakezuke]

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

1GB/month wasn't a lot even back in 2000, but at least in 2000 webpages were not nearly so bulky and were geared for 640*480 screens. I avoided ISPs with those sort of caps because I crunched the numbers and noticed I could easily exceed it in hours.

The main issue was OSS, where a given linux distro was at the very least 1/2 that limit, doubt it for anything mainstream. Also having a win2k the various updates were a major percent of that as well. Waiting a month between downloads was well, unacceptable. I didn't consider my self to be a bandwidth hog, but normal use, normal accepted use could easily exceed that.

First ..

[SlashDev]

... by stopping to post on slashdot :-)

its call lynx

[timmarhy]

use it and stop bitching, or get more bandwidth.is it a slow news day or something?

about:config is your friend

[w0mprat]

Opera also has the images control down on the right hand end of the status bar. It also has the option of selecting 'cached images' option. Very useful.

No Script is a pain. I don't think it is a good recomendation. One that hasn't been mentioned here is flash block, since alot of bandwidth heavy sites pimp flash items it'll replace each with button to click. Also remember to install the filterset updater firefox extension along with adblock plus.

Flash blocker linkage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433

Both Opera and Firefox allow you to type about:config and get into the the low-level settings of the browser, many of which will take effect straight away. (an awesome feature, every application should have this). I suggest manually adjusting your browser memory and disk caches to the largest ammount you can get away with. turn of everything with 'prefetch' in the name.

{stuff to look for in Firefox 'about:config'
browser.cache.disk.capacity 128000 or 256000, bigger numbers work ok but too big may cause issues.
Check that the following is set to true:
browser.cache.disk enable = true,
browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl = true (but this not secure)
network.http.use-cache = true
Set value to false:
network.prefetch-next = false
network.http.keep-alive = false (may save you just a little traffic) also: network.http.proxy.keep-alive = false Or else just use the below settings (firefox's default is 6)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server = 2 }

So sure, you can block all kinds of stuff from downloading and cache/proxy tricks, but there is one overlooked trick, and that's hitting the stop button as soon as you have what you want to see on the page. It should stop anything more downloading.

MOD PARENT UP

[captjc]

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
OS X: Vienna

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.

Re:Unbelievable...

[risinganger]

Do you mean 100Gb, as in 12.5GB or do you mean 100GB?

If you're claiming you can go through 100GB in a single day I call bullshit. I don't care about Blu-ray so I'm using wikipedia for the stats. If wikipedia is true, then the maximum rate is 48Mbps for A/V. 100GB is the equivalent of watching almost 5 hours of high-definition at the highest level of encoding possible on blu-ray. Yet you're saying you can do that with videophone, streaming TV and "assorted" downloads, before going on to do another ~50GB the next day?

Saving ideas

[Guspaz]

Youtube solution: Install flashblock, visit the YouTube page, paste the URL into VLC, which will stream it off the site without loading anything extra.

Bandwidth saving solution: Grab a cheap VPS (you can get pretty darned awesome Xen ones with 256MB RAM and 500GB of bandwidth for $13/mth or less), run a proxy on it. Have that proxy gzip all content that goes through it, and recompress images if you can find software. Alternatively, just run squid, tunnel to it over SSH, and enable SSH compression. That should produce some savings.

Ultimate bandwidth saver for the desperate: Opera Mini on a desktop.

Opera Mini is a J2ME cellphone app that is designed to make browsing fast on slow 2G handsets. It runs all data through Opera's proxy servers, compressing content, recompressing images, and packing everything into one file to reduce roundtrips.

It can actually be made to run on a desktop at arbitrary resolutions (say, 1920x1200) via MicroEmulator. Instructions can be found here:

http://my.opera.com/larskl/blog/2008/03/29/opera-mini-in-1280-1024?cid=4986133

I daresay that it's impossible to reduce bandwidth usage more than the Opera Mini approach short of using a text-only browser through a compressed link.

Some options

[jovetoo]

Try this:

Install a caching proxy server. For example, install an old linux PC with Squid. It may not be as useful for a single user as for a group but should help a bit.

Use Firefox with an ad block extension: blocks banners etc, reducing the amount of images you load.

Re:What kind of university is that?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know where this is, but in the UK it is (was?) not uncommon for the infrastructure in university accommodation to be provided by a third party. When I was a student, broadband was only available once you moved to private accommodation and the phones in halls were on some kind of pre-pay system which required a little bit of hackery to work with a modem (since it messed with the dial tone, you needed to tell it not to listen for the dial tone until it had dialled the PIN). This charged 1.25p per minute for dial-up Internet when a 512Mb/s broadband connection was around £25/month. If you were online for more than about an hour a day, dial-up was more expensive. When I moved out of university accommodation in to a privately rented flat, four of us split the cost of a broadband connection and ended up paying a lot less for Internet between us.

Now, I believe, you can pick up the university WLAN in halls. It has a fair use policy and some over-aggressive caching, but it's free.

Re:Only things you can do

[jibjibjib]

http://www.asstr.org/

Browse with telnet. Masturbate more.

Install Squid and set it as your proxy

[skyphyr]

Install Squid (or some other form of caching proxy). http://www.squid-cache.org/ Then set your browser to use that proxy. If you're running your own LAN then you could even setup a gateway server that has a transparent proxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_proxy#Transparent_and_non-transparent_proxy_server) as well as NAT. Benefits of using a transparent proxy over setting the proxy in your web browser is that all apps which use http traffic will have it cached (where possible). Also note the https pages are never cached. Of course use AdBlock as well to cut back on traffic you don't want regardless of bandwidth ;) Cheers, Alan.

populate a HOSTS file, honey

[Anonymous Coward]

There are dozens of websites that compile canonical lists of URLs that peddle ads, spam, porn, and other crap. Start with the doubleclick sites. The lists commonly exceed 100,000 entries. Instead of matching to 127.0.0.1, use 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.0 .

Komando.com hosts one very good one. Using a host file is a good idea for business computers. It'll cut bandwidth usage in half or a third.

Use the proxy, Luke!

[hkmwbz]

Opera Mini on your desktop computer.

No Flash, but it compresses stuff mostly up to 80-90%.

All those javascript ad-hosts

[bytesex]

I just map 'em to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file. Dunno if I miss anything because of it, but it speeds up your browsing-experience a lot. Just look at your status-bar when your page has properly loaded (or won't load) and you see hosts passing that are obviously ad-hosts; put those in your /etc/hosts file mapped to 127.0.0.1. Takes a while, but is well worth it.

Filter ad servers

[bazorg]

hi. It's probably tragic that the first search result you'll get on google for "HOSTS file" is for tools and instructions on how to filter out thousands of ad servers using a custom made HOSTS file. I use it on all my PCs and when I use someone else's computer everything looks very unfamiliar...

Try Onspeed

[flipperdoo]

Have you tried Onspeed, it really cuts internet bandwidth usage

Get on IPv6

[sega01]

There is a simple and elegant solution to this. Get on IPv6 via a 4to6 (tunnelbroker.net, sixxs), run your own resolver only on IPv6, and only browse on IPv6. You'll get to see the most technologically ripe parts of the internet, and none of the bandwidth hogs like YouTube, Facebook, and probably 99.9% of all ads. You can even watch the exclusive *enhanced* Starwars in ASCII! (telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl) Or, you could just use Gopher.

Windows and Tabs

[Codex_of_Wisdom]

As for the YouTube issue. If you plan to go back to a site (like the Slashdot main page after reading an article), open the links in a new window or tab, that way you just have to close the win/tab and not reload the previous page.

RSS-alternatively

[Jerry Smith]

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 OS X: Vienna

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.

A few ideas...

[nilbog]

First of all, low bandwidth users have been though of all over the web, use mobile pages instead of regular ones. You can save a ton of bandwidth and can convert high bandwidth pages to low bandwidth ones with skweezer or google mobile.

Second, I believe firefox will let you turn off an option to load images that are not from the domain you are looking at. If that's not an option, there is probably an ad blocking plugin that does it.

Third, look into aggressive caching in firefox, there might be a plugin or something that will help you. Definitely turn off prefetching, though. This will keep your browser from downloading pages that you may never visit.

Fourth, if it was me I would do absolutely anything in my power to get a better connection - up to actually moving to a better area. Contact your crappy ISP first to see if they offer a better plan and tell them their service is not meeting your needs.

I lived in an apartment complex with super crappy wireless Internet and after it became apparent that it wasn't going to get any better I moved. We were paying out the ass for a worthless connection and now I have 50 megabit last mile fiber and pay less than your average cable connection.

Having a decent internet connection is vital to my ability to make a living.

An opportunity?:

[managerialslime]

An opportunity?

From your post, it sounds like South Africa has a tremendous bandwidth cost burden.

This might be an opportunity for a European or US ISP (or university) to offer a Citrix (or VNC or other similar) connection where the processing is done at the ISP and (relatively) low bandwidth screenshots are all that are sent between the user and the ISP.

In my own company, this approach reduces bandwidth consumed by remote sites more than 90% when compared to using straight VPN to our corporate network. While the analogy is not precisely the same, it is similar enough to be useful here.

While this adds to the computing burden at the ISP, someone would need to do a break-even analysis as to the point where it makes more economic sense until more bandwidth connects South Africa to the rest of the world.

In the very short term, perhaps you (or your university) could investigate a remote connection with another University overseas?

Re:An opportunity?:

[evilviper]

This might be an opportunity for a European or US ISP (or university) to offer a Citrix (or VNC or other similar) connection where the processing is done at the ISP and (relatively) low bandwidth screenshots are all that are sent between the user and the ISP.

I sincerely doubt that's going to help. After all web pages are mainly text, which is going to be substantially smaller than any image, no matter how good your compression.

In a similar vein, though, there are HTTP proxies out there which do heavy lossy compression of images to speed-up internet access. Such options have been heavily advertised by AOL and Netzero for dial-up users in the US. Open source proxies exist to do this.

It could potentially do a lot better, too, if good implementations of "ordered dither" were available in graphics processing libraries and applications other than NetPBM (requiring multiple conversion steps). See: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/35634.html for an idea of how much a proxy doing image re-compression with good-looking dither could save on bandwidth.

Re:An opportunity?:

[SAABMaven]

I went to college 25 years ago, but it was the same back then; if there was any resource needed by all or most students (such as parking) it was held in artificially short supply, regulated, metred, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered.

When you're a student, they get you any way they can, BECAUSE they can. In addition to the bad education that you're getting for the high tuition, honing your ability to regurgitate information without understanding.

My suggestion is to form a cooperative, get a cellular modem card, a dedicated laptop (can be old & cheap) and a wireless access point. Several of you chip in, and voila... unlimited bandwidh for a lower fixed cost than the university are rack-renting the students.

No doubt the fascist administrators will come up with a rule against cooperatives as well... but it might take a year or so, and you can rotate the antenna amongst different dorm rooms to keep it hidden.

Easiest question yet

[Destoo]

Easy. Just go to a friend's house who has unlimited internet, save it to a floppy, then bring that floppy to univ with you.

Careful. The end boss is hard.
NEXT!

eh... sounds all to familiar.

[carlhead]

Sounds like South Africa... here the standard cap is between 1GB and 3GB per month on all ADSL accounts with speeds from 384k to 4Mbit. I recommend using firefox with no-script & flash blocker.

Where?

[ironicsky]

My biggest question is where on this blue marble do you live with insane restrictions like that. I get 60Gb a month on my home connection, 6Gb on my smart phone, and unlimited internet at my University where I take night courses.

But I agree with a previous post. Use a squid-cache. However, Squid-cache isn't the most friendly thing to setup. I'd look in to a solution like IPCop or Smoothwall which are easy to install with Squid or Squid-like plug-ins

RSS

[darjen]

I browse most everything through Google Reader whenever possible. I have all my favorite sites on there and I don't click on anything that doesn't seem interesting. Some of my social news sites only have a link. Most of my other ones have description text included in the feed. I think it's easily the fastest way to get the most information. In your case, it would also be low bandwidth. Plus, I think most readers allow you to view the content offline, though I normally don't use that.

What has the world come to?

[edmicman]

It's a sad state of affairs when we have to treat bandwidth the same way we treat limited physical resources like gas or food.

bend over

[skoony]

jeez,you guys overseas really get reemed.
within a quarter mile from my abode there are at least 7
wi-fi free hotspots.
2 are librarys,5 commercial.
to go over the limits here you would have to be watching 5
hi def movies continiusly all day long for a mounth.
bummer to be you regards,
mike

Remove phone-home software (DRM)

[Narnie]

Uninstall that botnet you added a few months ago too. Sure it might just be idling on an irc channel or shooting off a few spam emails here or there, but the truth is it eats up bandwidth and clock cycles. You'll no longer be the coolest admin on campus, but is keeping that botnet client necessary to maintaining your image?

Local DNS Cache

[mebrahim]

Besides a local web cache (like Squid) having a local DNS cache (like dnsmasq) may also help a little.
But still the most effective way is probably avoiding online videos or at least downloading them only once to your hard disk and closing the web page.
Others have said enough about AdBlock Plus, No Script and other Firefox extensions.

1g a month?

[nurb432]

WTF? Id not even bother getting online.

Nothing you do is going to be good enough.

[The MAZZTer]

You can try increasing your Firefox disk cache size to help keep around common images longer so they don't have to be redownloaded. The Fasterfox extension has other settings which might help, as well. NoScript and Adblock Plus (get some good subscriptions for the latter) can help block ads from loading saving a ton of bandwidth... but at the end of the day, 1gb is simply not enough... I go through far more than that every day (downloading 1gb worth of files ATM). You're going to have to either force yourself to ration your internet usage or get more of it.

Use Opera

[functor]

I've been in your situation (I live in India, which I affectionately call "Hellholia", where I used to have a 1 GB/month cap, including both upload and download, and before that, was on dialup for about a year and a half), and I've found that the only browser that's worth using in low-bandwidth situations is Opera. Switch it to show cached images only, and use right click > Show Image to load up images in-place (something that seems to be foreign to Gecko-based browsers).

Block ads by using the no-ads proxy autoconfig script. If it blocks too much, you can use the convenient F12 quick-configuration menu to turn off proxies. Alternately, set up Privoxy, which will then block ads among other stuff.

As has been recommended elsewhere, use a caching proxy server such as Squid (you can modify one of the tunables in no-ads.pac to direct traffic to it, and you can configure Privoxy to chain to Squid as well); this should help a bit with YouTube videos that have loaded completely. (It will likely not help with partial downloads, however, and YouTube is a very good way to reach and exceed your cap, Internet video generally being expensive bandwidth-wise. Every second of YouTube's "normal-quality" video requires upwards of 25 kB, so a ten-minute video will expend 15 megabytes on its own.)

When you use rich Internet applications like GMail, opt for the cut-down "classic" versions rather than the AJAXy ones. This will save on the copious amount of JavaScript code and markup downloaded to make the slick interfaces happen. Similarly, when using sites such as BBC News, opt for text-only versions. When reading articles on websites, opt for the "Printer Friendy" versions of the pages (or, in the case of Reuters, "Single Page"). These substantially save on the excessive markup for automatic ad loading, navigation bars, sidebars, etc.

These things should both help the performance of your Internet connectivity and reduce the wastage of bandwidth, and you won't miss out on much.

My solution to your problem.

[alumunum]

Until a few months ago i had your problem. Use opera with maximum cache enabled. Install a flash blocker(you have to click on the content for it to be loaded so you don't waste any bandwidth on ads) Install an automatically updated blocking software. HostsMan blocks most domains that serve ads.

How do you measure your usage?

[careysb]

I would like to know what my usage is, is there a simple way to measure it? [AOL, Vista, Firefox (yeah I know)]

Re:How do you measure your usage?

[slashtivus]

All Comcast customers have a free McAfee subscription which has a traffic monitor built in. The traffic monitor shows usage by last boot, totals for the current month, inbound/outbound etc. I would imagine many other firewalls would have these features as well. (Yes I know, "Comcrap" / "McKrappy" and all that...)

...really?

[dreemkill]

where do you live that you get 1GB/month of traffic? i mean, that seems pretty absurd to me. most (modern) countries i've lived in at higher limits, or no limits at all.. 2.5c/meg at uni? what do you pay tuition for?

this is like... going back to being a 3-liner on a BBS. you'd think we've progressed from those days....

And when images are gotten rid of...

[EtaCarinae]

... let's not forget the numerous sites not capable of delivering compressed text/html (such as slashdot :-( ). As far as I understand popular browsers (even IE) support e.g., Content-Encoding: gzip. And wide-spread servers like Apache support it as well.

Also, couldn't vast amounts of images be replaced with structured graphics in form of SVG which should be far more compressible?

Re:Use Squid!!!

[dreemkill]

are the other people there also limiting their usage?

admuncher

[Anonymous Coward]

www.admuncher.com

not only does it block ads and other such items it actually stops it from retrieving content from ad sites and actually retrieving ads. Thus saving bandwith.

On this machine since April 2007 I have "saved 2,977MB of bandwith".

I have used admuncher for so long that when a friend complained about the ads on myspace I was like "what ads?". And then I disabled admuncher and refreshed - what a difference.

Use filtering and caching proxies

[John.Thompson]

You can run a caching proxy (e.g. "squid") on your computer to prevent re-fetching pages you've already fetched, and chain it to a filtering proxy (e.g. "privoxy") to block downloading of large but superfluous stuff like advertisements. If you're not already using Firefox, you might consider trying it, and installing the NoScript and/or Flashblock extensions to give you control over Flash, Java and other downloads that might otherwise automatically happen whether you actually want them or not.

A very easy answer

[joocemann]

Get a laptop w/ wifi. Find some 'sweet spots' in your own home or nearby where you can tap into unsecured wireless.

DONE.

Now if you're too broke to do these things, or pay for substantial internet access like most other people, then maybe you should sell your computer and buy some work boots.

Some solutions that people use

[BhaKi]

You could use a browser that does proper caching. Konqueror is good. If that isn't enough, you could install a caching proxy (like squid) locally and do all your browsing through it.

Re:Use Squid!!!

[BhaKi]

I'm not sure if I understand your post correctly. Just to clarify my original post, I should add that you should configure squid to listen only on loopback interfaces. Otherwise, anyone on your network can make you the bill-payer for their browsing.

other apps?

[gnuculus]

Could it be that other apps are responsible for the additional internet activity that you can't account for? Nowadays nearly every application you install checks periodically for updates.. itunes, anti virus software etc.. Usually you can disable these periodic checks and do them manually. Another point there are addons such as fasterfox which will download web pages before you actually visit them to make your browsing faster.. worth checking that nothing like this is installed. But of course the biggest culprit is more than likely ads..

... simple things.

[chris462]

Setup a caching proxy server, disable images by default, and install a decent ad blocker.

LoBand!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.loband.org/loband/main

Re:Unbelievable...

[easyTree]

He means he's in a 'who can download the most warez, pr0n and alias episodes using bittorrent' contest...

Naviscope

[izomiac]

It sounds like Naviscope might be helpful if you're using windows (wine might work). It's a local proxy server that shows traffic in real time. I always thought it was a nifty idea, and it teaches you a fair amount about how the websites you go to work. In your situation you could cancel any big downloads when they start since you can see them happening. The program is a bit old, so there are a few glitches on modern operating systems, but it's still quite usable. I'd also look into something to automatically filter out some of the junk on webpages (privoxy, no script, adblock, etc.).

UUCP

[drfreak]

would probably be difficult nowadays to find someone to give you a UUCP connection, but back in the day it would queue up e-mail and usenet news to be transferred according to a schedule and not on-demand as most internet connections are now.

Re:For more choices about what is downloaded...

[Randle_Revar]

the only thing I can think of is that it blocks the flash if you revist/reload a page where you already allowed the flash in this session.

Reload from cache

[glean]

I'm not certain which browsers this works on, but it does for certain on Opera. If, when returning to a page, an entire video reloads, or there are images which are contstantly used, such as on a page like this, set your browsers settings to reload from cache. Set your cache level to unlimited if possible, also, set your flash cache levels higher. All the ads blocked by the ad blockers combined probably won't measure up to stopping one Youtube video from reloading.

Elinks

[antdude]

I prefer Elinks.

ISP?

[DaMattster]

Who is this ISP? I want to know what company NOT to use! 1GB of browsing can be done in a day or two. I'd suggest that you find an alternative, if possible.

CAMPUS starved for bandwidth?

[RyatNrrd]

Our whole COUNTRY is starved for bandwidth. Srsly, when Americans visit (these are the same Americans who complain that the US is so vastly behind Europe and Japan when it comes to Internet speed and data caps) they are amazed by the crappiness of our net. It's like Canada five years ago.

Re:CAMPUS starved for bandwidth?

[phoenix321]

I'm not saying 640kbps should be enough for anyone, but speeds above that quickly approach diminishing returns, at least for now.

It's going to take a while for Linux distributions, large scientific datasets and the usual suspect p2p material.

But for most tasks, like reading scientific papers, surfing the Web (including Youtube and net radio) or sending emails, 500kbps go a long way in terms of user experience. Sure, it will take hours to download Gentoo Linux, but that's a batch process that can run in the background so it's affecting me as a user much less than a slowly responding Google search.

Delays during interactive sessions is what makes using the Internet painful. Anything under 200kpbs is unbearable by today's standard and for today's websites. Above 300kpbs, ping times and the machine you're sitting at are the main reasons for delay in page rendering, which is what most people care about most because that's what they're waiting for after clicking a link. Email works way below this bandwidth and above a certain limit, ping times matter most for VoIP and instant messaging.

We're not a bunch of hippies, that's why.

[typidemon]

as a nation

The previous 2 governments have been shedding public services like they've been going out of style. I mean, they already sold of 48% of the National Telecommunications company and gave them all of their landlines, it's entirely unlikely that they want to do that again.

Additionally, you're forgetting how expensive it is to plant that much cable and how quickly usage will increase to fill that space.

Re:with bandwidth caps - ads=illegal?

[Lost Engineer]

I doubt it. If you go to a website you are the one requesting the ads, even if you don't really intend to. A better analogy is that you send google a GOOG411 message and the response contains a text ad. I don't think google actually does this but if they did it would be perfectly legal.

Re:entitlement attitude of people

[Lost Engineer]

Um last time that was posted here on /. the response from most people was that making their limits explicit rather than advertising "unlimited" while threatening and banning heavy users was a step in the right direction.

Privoxy

[jollygreengiantlikes]

Something else to consider beyond Ad-Block and No-Script is a good local proxy.

Privoxy's default installation does a nice job of removing ads and other images, but is highly configurable (also read- IMHO not terribly easy to configure). I found that this was more useful in cutting bandwidth use at home on my 56k dial-up connection than many internet speed boosters/compression agents. JGG

Share a Proxy Server

[vinn]

So this stuff probably isn't monitoring LAN or even WAN traffic, it's probably only Internet traffic. Someone else mentioned a proxy server, something like squid. (Of course, the obvious answer is the ad block, blah blah blah.) Therefore, set up a proxy server and share it between a bunch of users. You'll get an even better economy of scale on the bandwidth usage.

There's a lot of other little tricks you can do, external proxy, compress all traffic in between, et al. However, this question (and so far 99% of the answers) is pretty newbie and I just want to slap you and say "Duh." I did like the response about Opera - I've stayed away from it for years, but maybe I need to take another look.

Re:That's lousy (correction)

[evilviper]

erm, should be "(including dial-up)"... not DSL.

Try 3GB a month

[dafing]

on Telecom here in NZ, I cant get off this plan either, so upsetting. I often try and restrain myself, but it always goes over, I get to about 5GB a month from playing ps3 online a little bit as well as OS updates all the time, its a real pain, some months Apple will have 500MB+ of updates etc. My friend bought a brand new iMac, turned it on and needed a few GB of updates for it,....he had a 1GB a month plan....when we go over our cap, it drops to "64k" speed, from 200KB+ downloads per second to about 5KB per second max.....how could anyone be expected to download "2GB" of data on that? And you cant pause it either, it has to be running constantly....

They offered unlimited plans for only 10 dollars more than what Im paying now! They got snapped up so quick and their networks got overloaded, it was all over the news here, downloads down to 1KB per second, it could take minutes to get into your email etc! So all the ones who had it got to keep it, and they stopped offering it. $40 a month for 3GB, it was $50 for unlimited remember, now its about $100+ for about 150GB a month on their best plan, something like a dollar a GB. Its bullshit.

agreed

[dafing]

$40 a month for 3GB...i often go over up to about 5GB without really meaning to with playing online PS3 Games, they work mostly ok on dialup speeds, about 5KB per second it gets throttled back to down from over 200KB per second. Still painful to use the regular internet, and things like Youtube just get cut off. I like Podcasts too, a 50MB podcast like Leo Laportes ones is just painful on dialup speeds.

Why should we have limits in the first place?

[Gel214th]

In my view the question shouldn't be how to browse frugally within the confines of ISPs limits, limits set to boost their bottom line.

These are companies that earn hundreds of millions from oversubscribing their circuits and not spending money improving their infrastructure, who then turn around and say because of [insert convenient excuse here] they have to put bandwidth caps on the public's connections.

There should not be any limits. We are moving backward if bandwidth limits and caps are now re-introduced in the US, or extended and perpetuated in other areas.

Innovation is being stifled, New Technologies and New Ideas are being limited.

And it has nothing to do with the cost of providing bandwidth, it has much more to do with supporting, legitimizing and securing the business practices and the content monopolies which currently exist.

There has never been a greater equaliser between the wealthy monopolistic elite and everyman than the Internet.

Why does the economic system require an institute of learning to limit and charge students to use the most pervasive source of knowledge the world has ever known?

The question should not be how to browse more frugally so as to stick within the box, it should be why don't we have freely available bandwidth for public use.

Do we pay for GPS?

Finally the right advice!

[Dr. Spork]

Sucks to have to scroll down so far before this good advice appears. I'd only add one thing: My favorite way of watching YouTube now is with the KeepVideo bookmarklet. All you need is to create a bookmark with the following target:

javascript:document.location='http://keepvid.com/?url='+escape(window.location);

When you get to a YouTube page, don't let the video load, but quickly hit the bookmarklet button. You'll go to a simple site where the .flv file of the video is available for download. That way, you can keep forever and view it on your own terms.

Change your HOSTS file, or add one

[rfc1394]

1. Look up how to change your hosts file, or add one if you don't have a hosts file; there's one in Windows as well as Linux.
2. Get one that has plenty of links to ad serving sires so that your web browser drops all of the advertising providers such as banner ads
3. Get Apache (for windows if you're running it) or some other web server, even one that just does dummy responses, and have it running locally
4. Install the webserver so it simply returns an empty file for every request, which will have the added benefit it will speed up your web surfing
5. Make sure all of the web sites in the host file for ad delvery sites and other unnecessary locations point to 127.0.0.1 and that is also listed as localhost.

By doing this, you redirect all those requests for web bugs, banner ads and advertisements, off the network and locally to your computer, which returns nothing, thus making your page load faster, reduces the amount of traffic you send onto the net (both in request traffic and in response traffic) AND gets rid of all sorts of ads. I have a host file on my computer. A lot of ads never even show up because they get redirected to the local computer, which isn't even running a webserver (I may change that) so they immediately timeout and don't generate any ad space.

Squid

[User38]

I saw that someone had already mentioned it. I am going to agree with them and tell you that installing something like squid, a caching proxy server is gonna be your best bet for helping you to save on your bandwidth issues. http://www.squid-cache.org/ Previous poster who mentioned it also listed the wiki for it. I strongly recommend it if you are serious about trying to save on your bandwidth usage.

Wifi appropriation

[huf67]

I would suggest to simply "appropriate" a nearby wifi access point !!! Those are as free as you can get !! And if there's no available wifi access point I'm sure a couple hundred feet of CAT 6 cable from eBay run to your neighbors house might also solve this problem of limited bandwidth.

Just a thought...

Text Only Browsing & advertiser billing

[jerunamuck]

Its been mentioned before but I'll put in another plug for text only browsing. True, many of the high bandwidth sites will not work with a text browser like Lynx or with FireFox configured with MM shut down [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9837331-68.html]. I believe that's the point, avoiding all the high bandwidth multi media browsing.

You might also consider applying my solution to spam email. I bill spammers for unsolicited email. that's right, I forward all my spam to a little script that strips out the URLs or businesses names being advertised and adds them to a simple database. Each month I send out bills to those being advertised. In face I've never actually collected a single dollar from them but strangely enough my spam dropped to almost 0 within the first three months and has remained very low. Specifically, from over 100 messages per day to ~0 per month on average. rarely, I'll get a flurry of offers to enlarge my penis but those mysteriously stop when I start sending out the collection notices. I think the trick is to leave an escape clause in the bills and collection notices that basically says they can have their balance eliminated if the spam stops.

I wonder if the same approach could be applied to banner advertisements? Browse through a logging proxy and filter out all the banner adds. Then use the same mechanism to identify the advertised and send them a bill for bandwidth plus a service charge.

Opera Mini

[Bryan3000000]

As far as I can tell no one has suggested a couple of things which can be very useful. You can use a mobile proxy - Google has one you can reach from http://m.google.com./ It reformats pages for mobile phones, getting rid of most bandwidth intensive stuff, and scaling down images - seriously reduces bandwidth usage. If I access, say, Slashdot through it, then every link I follow will go through Google's mobile proxy.

The other option is to use a mobile browser like Opera Mini. This will work full screen on your computer if you do it right, and uses Opera's mobile proxy to do something similar to the Google proxy. It will probably look better from what I can tell, and it will be more convenient. It does require installing a couple of things like Java Development Kit and Wireless Toolkit. Full instructions can be found here: http://java4me.blogspot.com/2008/01/opera-mini-as-pc-browser-big-screen.html