As long as the vast majority of the people falls neatly into predefined categories they're still happy. And leave the fantasising about what exceptions might exist to the people at the fringes.
Too many things here. And too lazy to RTFA, let alone dig even further.
TFS suggests a Google Maps search (wondering how they know that he was searching for that spot in the first place) is the strongest evidence linking him to the crime. If so, the rest is really weak!
Many crimes do not have a "smoking gun" kind of evidence. It is often a whole lot of clues, each of which may be overturned on the "beyond reasonable doubt" requirement, but the lot of them may not. And if this were used as "yet another piece of evidence", fine. But a key piece of evidence... well, that's getting hairy.
That may or may not be the case for generic TLDs as you suggest.
However: who is going to control the TLDs? The summary suggests the applicant, and that's also my impression from previous such news.
Many companies will want to register their company name as TLD. So instead of google.com we now have to go to search.google or www.google. That doesn't simplify stuff. So to really simplify it, Google tried to register.search and then have it allowed to run "dotless", so just http://search./ And with so many company/brand names being regular words (apple, windows, lotus, office - just to name a few) it can just as well become a terrible mess.
Maybe the software is pretty much finished? In that case there's not much more to do - no new features to add, and sooner or later you'll run out of bugs to fix.
Add greylisting to the mix. For me it stops approx. 90% of junk at the gate. That alone saves >90% of your server's spam workload (90% of the spam checker; a bit extra due to the mail server not having to process the mail at all).
Of course I don't know about legitimate mail but if someone is trying to send legitimate mail trough a spam-type minimised mail server that doesn't retry, that's their problem...
The amount of energy currently used, if more properly distributed, may lift many people out of misery. Without any new, additional sources of energy. The US is of course a prime example of excessive energy use - 5% of the world's population using about 25% of the world's energy.
Example. At my home it's 32 now, with humidity at about 80%. The "very hot weather warning" is in force. Many people will say "I need to run my air-con! It's too hot!". No, they don't NEED to run air-con. I dress light, have my windows open, and a fan on. And keep it easy. There is no need for air-con, just a want. And this way I use a fraction of the energy. Saves me a pretty penny, too.
Of course there are genuine needs for energy, but a lot of energy use can be cut without seriously lowering your living standards. Don't drive, take a bike. Don't fly to a far-away destination for vacation, instead have a look at where you live - there is definitely a lot of interesting stuff to see closer to home, too. Get proper isolation for your home (I'd wish my home was built better for that matter - saves a lot on heating in winter) - in this case you can improve your comfort and lower your energy use in one go.
It won't eliminate the NSA. It only suggests that there is no man in the middle doing decryption/encryption. NSA won't work as MiM; that'd be too easy to detect; and that's also not necessary for listening to a signal (regardless of whether they can decrypt it).
They care about what you send over that connection. They do want to know. As long as you're watching the BBC, they won't care much.
But as soon as you switch to jihad-TV, they will care, and to know whether you do so, they'll have to keep on monitoring your BBC broadcast stream, to make sure you're not secretly switching networks. Or as soon as you switch to some encryption method resulting in them only seeing random bits, they also start to care about your connection.
And with the suspect j-word twice in this comment it'll likely be flagged and added to my dossier.
In the end what OP wants to be answered, is the question whether his provider throttles traffic. The odds are, provider does this.
To test, you don't need traceroute necessarily.
Are all connections to the VPS slow? Only VPN or also http, smtp, ssh, etc? Then there certainly is an issue on that specific connection.
Try to find another server within the same data centre to connect to (same route for the packets to get there), see what happens.
Find a server in a different location, same protocols, and see what happens.
Have someone test your server from a different location (or do this yourself using a proxy somewhere), see what happens.
If you can connect fast to other servers, and other people can connect fast to your server, then the problem is almost certainly intentional throttling of your IP by your provider. To confirm, try to move your server to another IP address (I'm aware this is easier said than done) - the connection should be better.
Except for the very last step, OP did this all already according to description. Conclusion should be quite clear, and a call to ISP complaining about this issue would be appropriate.
The problem is people (you included) now consider it normal. It's not normal, nor is it supposed to be normal to jump through such hoops just to get on a plane. It should simply be turned back to more reasonable measures.
I'm in no way saying that a person deserves this kind of treatment for opting-out of a scan, and I think that the current security procedures border on reprehensible. But people need to understand that they are part of air travel nowadays.
This is just sad. I understand it's part of travel, yet I don't accept it as normal. And that's what we have to continue to tell one another: it is NOT normal!
In most parts of the world it'd have been discarded as "ridiculous, over the top, just can't be true".
So nobody is questioning the account which purportedly happened in the US is just illustrative of the image of the TSA, and US-style security in general.
And forego whatever reason you have to make that trip?
The fact that plane tickets still cost significant amounts of money (unless you're not part of the 99%) means that the traveller thinks they have a very good reason to make that trip. Flying is a way to get from A to B. It's merely a means to an end. And that's why so many people still do it.
Even eliminating flying for vacation and unnecessary business travel (I regularly drive for work when it's only 4-6 hours, when I know others would fly for that kind of business trip) would make a huge impact.
And I'd expect you to be the one spending less time on travel... door to door... the time to get to and from airports, the hours spent just getting through security (without being flagged)... that easily takes four hours already. Actual time spent on the plane has to be added to that.
Over in the US you'd really have to get your railways back in order. Preferably high-speed (think 300 km/hr, that's 186 mph for you guys). Can save a lot on flying, those trains are usually faster than planes on short to medium distances. However I'm afraid TSA will move in quickly as it's a new market for them.
On the other hand yes planes are quite a necessity nowadays. I've just returned from a long summer break in my home country, a 11-12 hour flight if done directly (for me it was more like 17-18 hours with change - better airline and cheaper fare). Happy it doesn't involve the TSA but I'm still affected by US-style security as the US demands foreign airports to follow their ways, such as using full body scanners. At least this time no need to take off my shoes, that's an improvement over previous trips.
Flying is the only reasonable option for me. The only alternative is the train - takes about 10-12 days, costs a lot more, and requires (transit) visa for at least China, Mongolia, Russia and Belarus...
Then those 94% should have a word with the Muslim terrorists. After all those Muslims are doing something right, that they don't get right: getting the headlines.
After all one of the main reasons terrorists commit their terrorist acts is getting attention for their cause. And nowadays it's the Muslims that get all the attention.
For a very long time, word of mouth is the most important means of advertising. It's the only thing Google relied on to get their services known; they never advertised themselves. They just relied on word of mouth. This site is another example of the power of word of mouth. It's how I got to know about both.
Now word of mouth is made even more powerful thanks to the Internet. When booking a hotel, or another service, people will read reviews. Same for buying books and many other things. Reviews are the new word of mouth - without them you're nothing.
A single negative review can really hurt your business, especially as on almost all those sites there is only room for a visitor to leave a review, but no room for the business owner to comment on the review, e.g. to provide explanation of certain events. Tripadvisor is one of those many sites where a review can not be commented on.
So it's not too surprising that a company is keen on finding negative reviews, and doing something about it. Bad experiences happen, and the company is not always at fault. It may be an honest misunderstanding, it may be force majeure, whatever. However thanks to the Internet those negative comments travel far and wide, and very fast.
There's no undiscovered bacteria that's going to make you obese even if eat salads all day (yes, I've had people tell me this was why they were over weight) It's a very simple process, eat less... a lot less, and you will lose weight.
OK, blast me for the example, but salads are not necessarily that healthy. Just look at the dietary information of a McDonald's salad (they publish those things these days; where I live on the back of your placemat). The amount of calories is quite similar to most of their burgers.
Of course the calories are not in the greens. They're in the cheese, meat, and especially the oily dressing that's added to the salads. Not adding the dressing (they serve it separately so that's easy) can cut the calories in such a McDonald's salad in half. Taking a "green salad" that contains little cheese and no meat instead of a "chicken deluxe salad" or however those things are called, also helps a lot.
People wear footwear for quite a while already, many generations when it comes to tapeworms, yet the species has not been wiped out. Which is no surprise, as last time I heard about it we get tapeworms through eating uncooked meat, which may harbour the larvae of the worm.
And when it comes to gut bacteria: without them, we'd die very quickly. In our bodies we have orders of magnitued more bactreria in the gut alone, than we have cells of our own.
If Google were to go down suddenly, as in total meltdown and disappear from the Internet, it'd probably cause the traffic to go down by some 40% at first (as has just been demonstrated accidentally), but as soon as people figure out it's permanent they'll very quickly adapt and find alternatives. This was a short outage, and the majority of the people that were affected (just the people that happened to be online and using one of Google's services - probably YouTube is a biggie there in data volume) just sat it out, reloading the page, all the while thinking it was a glitch in their connection.
Google is so reliable it's the site that I use for connection testing. So a failure to connect to Google I'd likely have interpreted as an error on my (provider's) side.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as the vast majority of the people falls neatly into predefined categories they're still happy. And leave the fantasising about what exceptions might exist to the people at the fringes.
Too many things here. And too lazy to RTFA, let alone dig even further.
TFS suggests a Google Maps search (wondering how they know that he was searching for that spot in the first place) is the strongest evidence linking him to the crime. If so, the rest is really weak!
Many crimes do not have a "smoking gun" kind of evidence. It is often a whole lot of clues, each of which may be overturned on the "beyond reasonable doubt" requirement, but the lot of them may not. And if this were used as "yet another piece of evidence", fine. But a key piece of evidence... well, that's getting hairy.
That may or may not be the case for generic TLDs as you suggest.
However: who is going to control the TLDs? The summary suggests the applicant, and that's also my impression from previous such news.
Many companies will want to register their company name as TLD. So instead of google.com we now have to go to search.google or www.google. That doesn't simplify stuff. So to really simplify it, Google tried to register .search and then have it allowed to run "dotless", so just http://search./ And with so many company/brand names being regular words (apple, windows, lotus, office - just to name a few) it can just as well become a terrible mess.
Maybe the software is pretty much finished? In that case there's not much more to do - no new features to add, and sooner or later you'll run out of bugs to fix.
Add greylisting to the mix. For me it stops approx. 90% of junk at the gate. That alone saves >90% of your server's spam workload (90% of the spam checker; a bit extra due to the mail server not having to process the mail at all).
Of course I don't know about legitimate mail but if someone is trying to send legitimate mail trough a spam-type minimised mail server that doesn't retry, that's their problem...
The amount of energy currently used, if more properly distributed, may lift many people out of misery. Without any new, additional sources of energy. The US is of course a prime example of excessive energy use - 5% of the world's population using about 25% of the world's energy.
Example. At my home it's 32 now, with humidity at about 80%. The "very hot weather warning" is in force. Many people will say "I need to run my air-con! It's too hot!". No, they don't NEED to run air-con. I dress light, have my windows open, and a fan on. And keep it easy. There is no need for air-con, just a want. And this way I use a fraction of the energy. Saves me a pretty penny, too.
Of course there are genuine needs for energy, but a lot of energy use can be cut without seriously lowering your living standards. Don't drive, take a bike. Don't fly to a far-away destination for vacation, instead have a look at where you live - there is definitely a lot of interesting stuff to see closer to home, too. Get proper isolation for your home (I'd wish my home was built better for that matter - saves a lot on heating in winter) - in this case you can improve your comfort and lower your energy use in one go.
there are five and a half billion people who need more cheap energy.
Need? Or want?
I was thinking of flight schools myself. Those definitely should be banned, as they directly helped the 9/11 attackers.
It won't eliminate the NSA. It only suggests that there is no man in the middle doing decryption/encryption. NSA won't work as MiM; that'd be too easy to detect; and that's also not necessary for listening to a signal (regardless of whether they can decrypt it).
They care about what you send over that connection. They do want to know. As long as you're watching the BBC, they won't care much.
But as soon as you switch to jihad-TV, they will care, and to know whether you do so, they'll have to keep on monitoring your BBC broadcast stream, to make sure you're not secretly switching networks. Or as soon as you switch to some encryption method resulting in them only seeing random bits, they also start to care about your connection.
And with the suspect j-word twice in this comment it'll likely be flagged and added to my dossier.
In the end what OP wants to be answered, is the question whether his provider throttles traffic. The odds are, provider does this.
To test, you don't need traceroute necessarily.
Are all connections to the VPS slow? Only VPN or also http, smtp, ssh, etc? Then there certainly is an issue on that specific connection.
Try to find another server within the same data centre to connect to (same route for the packets to get there), see what happens.
Find a server in a different location, same protocols, and see what happens.
Have someone test your server from a different location (or do this yourself using a proxy somewhere), see what happens.
If you can connect fast to other servers, and other people can connect fast to your server, then the problem is almost certainly intentional throttling of your IP by your provider. To confirm, try to move your server to another IP address (I'm aware this is easier said than done) - the connection should be better.
Except for the very last step, OP did this all already according to description. Conclusion should be quite clear, and a call to ISP complaining about this issue would be appropriate.
I take it you're a terrorist? If not, why'd you feel addressed?
The problem is people (you included) now consider it normal. It's not normal, nor is it supposed to be normal to jump through such hoops just to get on a plane. It should simply be turned back to more reasonable measures.
I'm in no way saying that a person deserves this kind of treatment for opting-out of a scan, and I think that the current security procedures border on reprehensible. But people need to understand that they are part of air travel nowadays.
This is just sad. I understand it's part of travel, yet I don't accept it as normal. And that's what we have to continue to tell one another: it is NOT normal!
In most parts of the world it'd have been discarded as "ridiculous, over the top, just can't be true".
So nobody is questioning the account which purportedly happened in the US is just illustrative of the image of the TSA, and US-style security in general.
Just leave.
And forego whatever reason you have to make that trip?
The fact that plane tickets still cost significant amounts of money (unless you're not part of the 99%) means that the traveller thinks they have a very good reason to make that trip. Flying is a way to get from A to B. It's merely a means to an end. And that's why so many people still do it.
Even eliminating flying for vacation and unnecessary business travel (I regularly drive for work when it's only 4-6 hours, when I know others would fly for that kind of business trip) would make a huge impact.
And I'd expect you to be the one spending less time on travel... door to door... the time to get to and from airports, the hours spent just getting through security (without being flagged)... that easily takes four hours already. Actual time spent on the plane has to be added to that.
Over in the US you'd really have to get your railways back in order. Preferably high-speed (think 300 km/hr, that's 186 mph for you guys). Can save a lot on flying, those trains are usually faster than planes on short to medium distances. However I'm afraid TSA will move in quickly as it's a new market for them.
On the other hand yes planes are quite a necessity nowadays. I've just returned from a long summer break in my home country, a 11-12 hour flight if done directly (for me it was more like 17-18 hours with change - better airline and cheaper fare). Happy it doesn't involve the TSA but I'm still affected by US-style security as the US demands foreign airports to follow their ways, such as using full body scanners. At least this time no need to take off my shoes, that's an improvement over previous trips.
Flying is the only reasonable option for me. The only alternative is the train - takes about 10-12 days, costs a lot more, and requires (transit) visa for at least China, Mongolia, Russia and Belarus...
Then those 94% should have a word with the Muslim terrorists. After all those Muslims are doing something right, that they don't get right: getting the headlines.
After all one of the main reasons terrorists commit their terrorist acts is getting attention for their cause. And nowadays it's the Muslims that get all the attention.
Reviews are important, very important.
For a very long time, word of mouth is the most important means of advertising. It's the only thing Google relied on to get their services known; they never advertised themselves. They just relied on word of mouth. This site is another example of the power of word of mouth. It's how I got to know about both.
Now word of mouth is made even more powerful thanks to the Internet. When booking a hotel, or another service, people will read reviews. Same for buying books and many other things. Reviews are the new word of mouth - without them you're nothing.
A single negative review can really hurt your business, especially as on almost all those sites there is only room for a visitor to leave a review, but no room for the business owner to comment on the review, e.g. to provide explanation of certain events. Tripadvisor is one of those many sites where a review can not be commented on.
So it's not too surprising that a company is keen on finding negative reviews, and doing something about it. Bad experiences happen, and the company is not always at fault. It may be an honest misunderstanding, it may be force majeure, whatever. However thanks to the Internet those negative comments travel far and wide, and very fast.
And nature would take care of keeping us slim, thanks to natural scarcity of food (plus the exercise one gets while searching for that food).
It does not explain why we get obese now. It only explains why we can get obese to begin with.
There's no undiscovered bacteria that's going to make you obese even if eat salads all day (yes, I've had people tell me this was why they were over weight) It's a very simple process, eat less... a lot less, and you will lose weight.
OK, blast me for the example, but salads are not necessarily that healthy. Just look at the dietary information of a McDonald's salad (they publish those things these days; where I live on the back of your placemat). The amount of calories is quite similar to most of their burgers.
Of course the calories are not in the greens. They're in the cheese, meat, and especially the oily dressing that's added to the salads. Not adding the dressing (they serve it separately so that's easy) can cut the calories in such a McDonald's salad in half. Taking a "green salad" that contains little cheese and no meat instead of a "chicken deluxe salad" or however those things are called, also helps a lot.
People wear footwear for quite a while already, many generations when it comes to tapeworms, yet the species has not been wiped out. Which is no surprise, as last time I heard about it we get tapeworms through eating uncooked meat, which may harbour the larvae of the worm.
And when it comes to gut bacteria: without them, we'd die very quickly. In our bodies we have orders of magnitued more bactreria in the gut alone, than we have cells of our own.
If Google were to go down suddenly, as in total meltdown and disappear from the Internet, it'd probably cause the traffic to go down by some 40% at first (as has just been demonstrated accidentally), but as soon as people figure out it's permanent they'll very quickly adapt and find alternatives. This was a short outage, and the majority of the people that were affected (just the people that happened to be online and using one of Google's services - probably YouTube is a biggie there in data volume) just sat it out, reloading the page, all the while thinking it was a glitch in their connection.
Google is so reliable it's the site that I use for connection testing. So a failure to connect to Google I'd likely have interpreted as an error on my (provider's) side.
Losing too many high-performing athletes.