I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
I think that is what they want. They have succeeded in driving me away to XFCE, which is actually quite good and does everything I need. To me GNOME is like a solar flare, quite impressive at first, but then fading out as it gets higher and higher from the surface of the sun. They are in a little bubble floating off into space, becoming more and more irrelevant to normal Linux users. Maybe they will meet an alien civilization some day who will understand what they are trying to do.
Sorry I don't have enough bandwidth to even watch the adverts on the front without it stopping and starting all the time. I guess it looks fine on the CEOs desk, though, so that's all that matters.
With a container you still have the kernel-user boundary to cross on each syscall. I guess with OSv you could potentially optimise the whole OS, libc and application down into a single binary. Yes, it's interesting how this is developing -- Docker as well. Having lightweight containers or OSes like this is really taking off. I guess there may also be a bit more guaranteed isolation running it with OSv, less risk of a kernel bug leaving an exploit path, i.e. the isolation is at a different layer.
If you don't know what Wayland is odds are you don't care about this article.
He must be posting for those people who reckon a thing isn't worth investigating until they've heard a hundred mentions to it. Wayland is just now entering these people's consciousness.
I don't think you really "plan" for this sort of thing - it just happens. People will do something.
What happens with most people when they have nothing to do is that they turn to distractions. What happens to a few is that they turn to their creative interests (I have enough interests to safely keep me busy until I die). But most people will be slipping into drug dependency or gang warfare or watching soaps 24/7 or gaming. Maybe soaps and gaming are the best we can hope for, actually. Keep them anaesthetised and out of trouble. If you want quality of life, you have to make it yourself. If the requirement and opportunity to work isn't there, then it is easy to stagnate.
They should at least get their kids a C64 or ZX-Spectrum, they were common and would not ruin their weird role-playing game.
Yeah, exactly. I don't remember spending all my time outside as a child. First ZX81, then ZX Spectrum, then Atari ST -- there was plenty to do inside with with pre-86 technology.
Yeah. The technology is at the stage where everyone can manage average quality. But you still need to add the magic that makes it mean something to people. The magic isn't in the wires or the chips or the plugins or the notes or whatever -- it is in how you put it all together. There's a whole scene in Brazil of people with cheapo Casio keyboards producing amazing stuff. Not 24-bit 96kHz or 6 channel or anything buzzword-compliant, but music that moves you and makes you pay attention and listen. All I can say is that making the technology easily available means that the odd genius can work wonders more easily. The rest will continue to produce poor clones of stuff they already know or weird crap that no-one likes. Then it is just a question of whether that genius is fooled by the music industry's lies or not, whether he/she appears in future as a "professional" or "amateur".
yeah, people like to live in a comfort zone — but i've found that some of the best friends come from right out of that comfort zone..
What about people who have a mix of genes from all over? Does that explain the wide genetic diversity amongst my friends, and how I like to hang out in diverse places with not much racism?
What is described here seems rather incestuous, like "all my friends are clones of me", like a bunch of Greys. I guess there are some people like that.
How about weakening it enough that it is crackable. Like when Debian accidentally weakened all the keys generated by ssh, but done intentionally. Also I like the 'humint' reference, i.e. they are planting moles in these organizations for their own purposes... great.
Also, what about the weakness that an update of the app (forced on them by NSA/etc) may send your private keys upstream. Like Mega they claim it is hands-off, but in reality there is a mechanism through which they could obtain the private key if pressured/blackmailed/waterboarded/whatever.
it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary". Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me. Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Supposing that a soul-like thing exists and it is the seat of consciousness, then the evolutionary advantage is that you'd be lying down unconscious if you didn't have one. It's much too easy to get eaten that way. So evolution went with souls (or whatever we might call them, supposing they exist).
Yes, "take it or leave it" is the only option. The throttling I'm seeing is amazingly consistent and just for that one IP address as far as I can see, so I think it is real throttling being done by their software, although probably no human in Telefonica has any idea that it is happening, even the guy that configured/misconfigured it. Yes, traceroute shows all "* * *" through Telefonica networks most of the time, and pchar gets stuck. I will consider your advice about MTUs and fiddle with that a bit.
The question is how to adapt to whatever they're doing to the network. I will experiment with the suggestions people have made here.
But the NSA, and undoubtedly their partner services such as the GCHQ have a secondary task of reporting criminal activity to the appropriate LE agency if they encounter it. No doubt, the BBC and British taxing authorities are interested in anyone bypassing the television tax. So any VPNs that are found that might be bypassing this tax could be throttled. Or cut off completely.
As long as you are not watching live TV, there is no law broken; however watching live British TV is illegal -- as I understand it. The laws were written before even VHS probably. Whilst I would happily pay the license fee to get genuine British TV in Peru (not some cut-down version), I know that will never happen because of regional licensing of programmes. They probably turn a blind eye, as the BBC promotes British values (reason/science-based, establishment, anti-alternatives, mostly royalist), and it is in their interest for British worldwide to continue to be kept in the loop. You don't have to agree with all of it to see the value of the rest. Maybe if I show my passport to my webcam and pass a facial recognition test, they could let me on.
[...] I am the calmest guy in the world but they pissed me off. But this is typical of latin america, and if you grew up in the states it is hard to get used to the lack of rhyme and reason there.
Yeah, this sounds just like the Telefonica we know and love here in Peru. What gets me is that they will happily lie to people who don't know. I always make sure I have a leaflet from the regulator in one hand and a folder of documents in the other when I go there, so we start off on the right basis. They happily screw over 90% of the population because they don't know any better. I don't know how it is in Colombia, but there is a culture of accepting loss here rather than informing and defending yourself. Telefonica ripping you off is part of life. I wonder how this started? With the conquistadores? There is one businessman I talked to here who says he will never employ anyone who worked for Telefonica, because it is like an institutional illness they never recover from. Yes, it take a while to get used to all this.
It seems that I was wrong about the multiple connections getting more bandwidth, so unfortunately MLVPN won't help me -- but thanks all the same. I was looking at multi-path in the past when we were considering moving to a distant village which only had slow 512kbps connections, to tie several of them together. This definitely has its use cases! I've made a note.
Did you know that in most cases, you only need to bypass whatever method is used for checking your location. The server that does this, is usually not the one you stream your video from. It means that after passing the location check, you can actually connect directly to the video server for watching the video itself (and suffer much less from connectivity issues, if at all).
Having said that, did you try contacting your ISP for support? Perhaps they change something in their routing tables which happens to work very bad for you? Maybe they can help.
Many thanks for the suggestions. I'll investigate them.
Talking to Telefonica leads to premature aging and death, and is best avoided. In case of any problem I go to the regulator OSIPTEL first to hear the truth, and then armed with the truth I can detect their lies and misdirections and force a solution. This works for billing and contract problems, but really I think the chance of resolving a technical issue like this through Telefonica support is nil.
Thanks -- I'll try port 443 if/when they unthrottle me. Yes, I also get packet loss when there are storms. I guess they interfere with the microwave links over the mountains. Anyway, that is irrelevant as I get good bandwidth on all connections apart from that one IP so the weather doesn't explain it.
I set up my own OpenVPN with an obscure port number, but using common recommended settings otherwise. Ping times are ~220ms. In my HTTP tests I was downloading one large file with 'wget', so JS/etc weren't an issue. I notice that other people mention that iperf tends to give theoretical rather than practical figures, so that agrees with my experience. Someone below suggested 'pchar' which looks promising but I haven't managed to get results out of it yet.
The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids -- perception and media attention creates a new social reality. Social reality is not based in actual reality, however... but it's stuff like this that gives rise to all kinds of prejudices -- racism, sexism, religious persecution... it's ironic that the NSA's surveillance policies are based on such faulty logic... and now they are the victim of it as well. Ah, but I digress... short answer: Your router doesn't need a tin foil hat.
The "NSA effect" introduces doubt. There is someone watching my traffic, and they would probably meddle with it if they could get away with it and had the resources. What if all 'suspicious' encrypted streams were slowed at various choke-points on the internet in the name of national security -- i.e. "if we can't see what you're sending then your traffic will be penalised"? Wouldn't they love to do that? What kind of internet would that be? I don't think that is entirely paranoia.
I think the submitter's theory was that the NSA man-in-the-middle data capturing would slow down the connection.
I know that the NSAs monitoring (as described so far) is passive. My theory is that they would quite happily throttle all 'suspicious' high-bandwidth encrypted streams if they could get away with it. And they have been getting away with quite a lot recently. If a few choke-points like that develop on the internet where encryption == slow, then what kind of an internet is that? I hope we don't get to that point.
Course of action: Switch ISPs, get a new IP address (if they are not very good at configuring a shaper this will work, otherwise not), try a proxy, stop using it for a day or more and it will go away (temporarily most likely). This is done dynamically in the shaper. There is not some dude with his finger on a 'throttle' button. Everything is automatic. Just figure out the how their throttling deterministic state diagram works and you can avoid throttling. Most likely they are throttling you because of your volume of use. It costs a lot for transit access and you are using more than most others by streaming through a vpn.
Thanks for the explanation and suggestions. The volume of use is not excessive, typically 20GB a month, 40GB max. But maybe the shaper is very sensitive, because the bandwidth peaks are quite high probably. So perhaps I could try and limit the peak bandwidth used to avoid triggering it as another option.
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.
Well my VPN is encrypted so they don't know what I'm transferring, although I don't use it for anything sensitive. I guess if I turned off all the encryption and it was still throttled then that would eliminate the NSA as the culprits.
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.
Calling Telefonica is not a solution to anything, unfortunately. They can't even get billing right. They obviously do have some technical people somewhere, and mostly they do a pretty good job, because uptime is good and we haven't seen many problems otherwise. The customer-facing people though... what can I say... Until you learn how to make an official complaint and involve the regulator, you can't even get basic billing and contract problems solved. The chance of making progress with some obscure technical complaint is nil. They are also a monopoly in many parts of Peru.
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I will stop using GNOME if this ability is fully removed.
I think that is what they want. They have succeeded in driving me away to XFCE, which is actually quite good and does everything I need. To me GNOME is like a solar flare, quite impressive at first, but then fading out as it gets higher and higher from the surface of the sun. They are in a little bubble floating off into space, becoming more and more irrelevant to normal Linux users. Maybe they will meet an alien civilization some day who will understand what they are trying to do.
Sorry I don't have enough bandwidth to even watch the adverts on the front without it stopping and starting all the time. I guess it looks fine on the CEOs desk, though, so that's all that matters.
With a container you still have the kernel-user boundary to cross on each syscall. I guess with OSv you could potentially optimise the whole OS, libc and application down into a single binary. Yes, it's interesting how this is developing -- Docker as well. Having lightweight containers or OSes like this is really taking off. I guess there may also be a bit more guaranteed isolation running it with OSv, less risk of a kernel bug leaving an exploit path, i.e. the isolation is at a different layer.
If you don't know what Wayland is odds are you don't care about this article.
He must be posting for those people who reckon a thing isn't worth investigating until they've heard a hundred mentions to it. Wayland is just now entering these people's consciousness.
I don't think you really "plan" for this sort of thing - it just happens. People will do something.
What happens with most people when they have nothing to do is that they turn to distractions. What happens to a few is that they turn to their creative interests (I have enough interests to safely keep me busy until I die). But most people will be slipping into drug dependency or gang warfare or watching soaps 24/7 or gaming. Maybe soaps and gaming are the best we can hope for, actually. Keep them anaesthetised and out of trouble. If you want quality of life, you have to make it yourself. If the requirement and opportunity to work isn't there, then it is easy to stagnate.
They should at least get their kids a C64 or ZX-Spectrum, they were common and would not ruin their weird role-playing game.
Yeah, exactly. I don't remember spending all my time outside as a child. First ZX81, then ZX Spectrum, then Atari ST -- there was plenty to do inside with with pre-86 technology.
Yeah. The technology is at the stage where everyone can manage average quality. But you still need to add the magic that makes it mean something to people. The magic isn't in the wires or the chips or the plugins or the notes or whatever -- it is in how you put it all together. There's a whole scene in Brazil of people with cheapo Casio keyboards producing amazing stuff. Not 24-bit 96kHz or 6 channel or anything buzzword-compliant, but music that moves you and makes you pay attention and listen. All I can say is that making the technology easily available means that the odd genius can work wonders more easily. The rest will continue to produce poor clones of stuff they already know or weird crap that no-one likes. Then it is just a question of whether that genius is fooled by the music industry's lies or not, whether he/she appears in future as a "professional" or "amateur".
yeah, people like to live in a comfort zone — but i've found that some of the best friends come from right out of that comfort zone..
What about people who have a mix of genes from all over? Does that explain the wide genetic diversity amongst my friends, and how I like to hang out in diverse places with not much racism?
What is described here seems rather incestuous, like "all my friends are clones of me", like a bunch of Greys. I guess there are some people like that.
How about weakening it enough that it is crackable. Like when Debian accidentally weakened all the keys generated by ssh, but done intentionally. Also I like the 'humint' reference, i.e. they are planting moles in these organizations for their own purposes ... great.
Also, what about the weakness that an update of the app (forced on them by NSA/etc) may send your private keys upstream. Like Mega they claim it is hands-off, but in reality there is a mechanism through which they could obtain the private key if pressured/blackmailed/waterboarded/whatever.
War is Peace.
It's all explained in the novel "1984".
This is a War on War. We are fighting to eliminate fighting!
it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Supposing that a soul-like thing exists and it is the seat of consciousness, then the evolutionary advantage is that you'd be lying down unconscious if you didn't have one. It's much too easy to get eaten that way. So evolution went with souls (or whatever we might call them, supposing they exist).
Yes, "take it or leave it" is the only option. The throttling I'm seeing is amazingly consistent and just for that one IP address as far as I can see, so I think it is real throttling being done by their software, although probably no human in Telefonica has any idea that it is happening, even the guy that configured/misconfigured it. Yes, traceroute shows all "* * *" through Telefonica networks most of the time, and pchar gets stuck. I will consider your advice about MTUs and fiddle with that a bit.
The question is how to adapt to whatever they're doing to the network. I will experiment with the suggestions people have made here.
But the NSA, and undoubtedly their partner services such as the GCHQ have a secondary task of reporting criminal activity to the appropriate LE agency if they encounter it. No doubt, the BBC and British taxing authorities are interested in anyone bypassing the television tax. So any VPNs that are found that might be bypassing this tax could be throttled. Or cut off completely.
As long as you are not watching live TV, there is no law broken; however watching live British TV is illegal -- as I understand it. The laws were written before even VHS probably. Whilst I would happily pay the license fee to get genuine British TV in Peru (not some cut-down version), I know that will never happen because of regional licensing of programmes. They probably turn a blind eye, as the BBC promotes British values (reason/science-based, establishment, anti-alternatives, mostly royalist), and it is in their interest for British worldwide to continue to be kept in the loop. You don't have to agree with all of it to see the value of the rest. Maybe if I show my passport to my webcam and pass a facial recognition test, they could let me on.
[...] I am the calmest guy in the world but they pissed me off.
But this is typical of latin america, and if you grew up in the states it is hard to get used to the lack of rhyme and reason there.
Yeah, this sounds just like the Telefonica we know and love here in Peru. What gets me is that they will happily lie to people who don't know. I always make sure I have a leaflet from the regulator in one hand and a folder of documents in the other when I go there, so we start off on the right basis. They happily screw over 90% of the population because they don't know any better. I don't know how it is in Colombia, but there is a culture of accepting loss here rather than informing and defending yourself. Telefonica ripping you off is part of life. I wonder how this started? With the conquistadores? There is one businessman I talked to here who says he will never employ anyone who worked for Telefonica, because it is like an institutional illness they never recover from. Yes, it take a while to get used to all this.
It seems that I was wrong about the multiple connections getting more bandwidth, so unfortunately MLVPN won't help me -- but thanks all the same. I was looking at multi-path in the past when we were considering moving to a distant village which only had slow 512kbps connections, to tie several of them together. This definitely has its use cases! I've made a note.
Did you know that in most cases, you only need to bypass whatever method is used for checking your location. The server that does this, is usually not the one you stream your video from. It means that after passing the location check, you can actually connect directly to the video server for watching the video itself (and suffer much less from connectivity issues, if at all).
Having said that, did you try contacting your ISP for support? Perhaps they change something in their routing tables which happens to work very bad for you? Maybe they can help.
Many thanks for the suggestions. I'll investigate them.
Talking to Telefonica leads to premature aging and death, and is best avoided. In case of any problem I go to the regulator OSIPTEL first to hear the truth, and then armed with the truth I can detect their lies and misdirections and force a solution. This works for billing and contract problems, but really I think the chance of resolving a technical issue like this through Telefonica support is nil.
Thanks -- I'll try port 443 if/when they unthrottle me. Yes, I also get packet loss when there are storms. I guess they interfere with the microwave links over the mountains. Anyway, that is irrelevant as I get good bandwidth on all connections apart from that one IP so the weather doesn't explain it.
'pchar' looks interesting. I left it running all night piped to tee but if it generated any output, it never flushed it. I'm trying again now.
I set up my own OpenVPN with an obscure port number, but using common recommended settings otherwise. Ping times are ~220ms. In my HTTP tests I was downloading one large file with 'wget', so JS/etc weren't an issue. I notice that other people mention that iperf tends to give theoretical rather than practical figures, so that agrees with my experience. Someone below suggested 'pchar' which looks promising but I haven't managed to get results out of it yet.
The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids -- perception and media attention creates a new social reality. Social reality is not based in actual reality, however... but it's stuff like this that gives rise to all kinds of prejudices -- racism, sexism, religious persecution... it's ironic that the NSA's surveillance policies are based on such faulty logic ... and now they are the victim of it as well. Ah, but I digress... short answer: Your router doesn't need a tin foil hat.
The "NSA effect" introduces doubt. There is someone watching my traffic, and they would probably meddle with it if they could get away with it and had the resources. What if all 'suspicious' encrypted streams were slowed at various choke-points on the internet in the name of national security -- i.e. "if we can't see what you're sending then your traffic will be penalised"? Wouldn't they love to do that? What kind of internet would that be? I don't think that is entirely paranoia.
I think the submitter's theory was that the NSA man-in-the-middle data capturing would slow down the connection.
I know that the NSAs monitoring (as described so far) is passive. My theory is that they would quite happily throttle all 'suspicious' high-bandwidth encrypted streams if they could get away with it. And they have been getting away with quite a lot recently. If a few choke-points like that develop on the internet where encryption == slow, then what kind of an internet is that? I hope we don't get to that point.
Course of action: Switch ISPs, get a new IP address (if they are not very good at configuring a shaper this will work, otherwise not), try a proxy, stop using it for a day or more and it will go away (temporarily most likely). This is done dynamically in the shaper. There is not some dude with his finger on a 'throttle' button. Everything is automatic. Just figure out the how their throttling deterministic state diagram works and you can avoid throttling. Most likely they are throttling you because of your volume of use. It costs a lot for transit access and you are using more than most others by streaming through a vpn.
Thanks for the explanation and suggestions. The volume of use is not excessive, typically 20GB a month, 40GB max. But maybe the shaper is very sensitive, because the bandwidth peaks are quite high probably. So perhaps I could try and limit the peak bandwidth used to avoid triggering it as another option.
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.
Well my VPN is encrypted so they don't know what I'm transferring, although I don't use it for anything sensitive. I guess if I turned off all the encryption and it was still throttled then that would eliminate the NSA as the culprits.
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.
Calling Telefonica is not a solution to anything, unfortunately. They can't even get billing right. They obviously do have some technical people somewhere, and mostly they do a pretty good job, because uptime is good and we haven't seen many problems otherwise. The customer-facing people though ... what can I say ... Until you learn how to make an official complaint and involve the regulator, you can't even get basic billing and contract problems solved. The chance of making progress with some obscure technical complaint is nil. They are also a monopoly in many parts of Peru.