Blocking Network Packets – The Comcast Fiasco

Sometimes you just can’t be neutral. That, apparently, is the reasoning behind Comcast’s recently revealed actions regarding several peer-to-peer applications, including BitTorrent.

In case you haven’t been following the story, here’s a quick rundown.

It started five days ago when the Associated Press ran a story called “Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic.” In this story, the reporter, Peter Svensson, points out that Comcast was blocking P2P traffic by interfering with certain packet streams.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

This may have never been major news except for two things: First, back in August, Comcast denied that it was doing this exact thing, Second, Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, was released six days ago. And when the #1 Linux distribution in America is released, you can bet your sweet bippy that the FTP mirrors for it will get hammered, leading people to consider using BitTorrent to get it. Comcast users had problems getting Gutsy.

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SATA HD stage rack – Plug any 2.5 or 3.5-inch SATA drive into your PC in seconds

For me, this HDD USB dock is a dream come true. In the past, how many times did I have to open a computer just to install an old, unused drive, then recover just a handful of files?

Too many times.

Sure, external drive enclosures exist to facilitate the task, but there’s nothing out there that’s as quick and easy as this hard drive dock. Compatible with both Windows and Macs, this thing only costs $46.79 and you can plug in any 2.5 or 3.5-inch SATA drive,  just like you would do in good old days, not unlike those eight-track cartridges.

HD stage rack

2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA HDD Stage Rack (GeekStuff4U)

Bartender Scams (Video)

Is your bartender giving you the booze you paid for? The following video shows how some people are getting ripped off by crooked bar owners.



Sansa TakeTV: Taking digital video content to your TV

Being the good geeks you are, you should all know Sandisk, a corporation that has been manufacturing diverse flash memory products and MP3 players for years now.

But like all companies, Sandisk has to take steps to innovate if they want to keep consumers looking their way. Monday, the company released the Sansa TakeTV, a flash-based USB device that will let you transfer video content directly from your PC to your television, eliminating the need for large set-top boxes. The Sansa TakeTV is both small and compatible with all current television models on the market.

The way the device works is insanely simple:

  1. Plug the Sansa TakeTV into your PC and copy your video content onto it (MPEG-3 or 4, DivX and xVid).
  2. Plug the device in your TV (supported AV outputs: Composite, Analog and S-Video)
  3. Hit play on the TakeTV remote.

The Sandisk TakeTV is compatible with Windows Vista, Windowx XP, Linux and Mac. The 4GB version, which offers approximately five hours of video playback, goes for $100, and the 8GB version, which offers twice as much, goes for $150.

Sansa TakeTV

Seesmic: A video Twitter on steroids

Even if I am a French Canadian guy, I rarely browse the French blogosphere. There’s something about “la langue de molière” that is so anti-tech that the hairs on my arms stand up whenever I hear some of the bogus expressions French people come up with to designate technical concepts.

However, there is one exception to this, and it is Loïc Le Meur’s blog (which, incidentally, also has an English version). Here is a small excerpt from his English “about” page:

Loïc is a well-known serial French entrepreneur who created and sold 4 Internet startups, also blogger and vlogger. Loic’s blog is #1 in France, read by more than 250 000 unique visitors per month, he made hundreds of video podcasts including the only podcast with President Nicolas Sarkozy).

A few weeks ago, Loïc launched a new online service, Seesmic, which could be described as some kind of video Twitter on steroids.

Seesmic

When it launches, his new concept will probably revolutionize the world of online video content as we know it. But don’t take my word for it, watch the following videos and make your own impression.

And here’s another interesting video that shows how discussions are handled between people in Seesmic:

These clips are a part of a series of videos that Loic films to document the launch of his new startup. The whole series can be seen on Seesmic’s front page. This should be particularly interesting for those of you who desire to learn a thing or two on how a new business evolves in the first few days of its existence.

Facebook News Trifecta

FacebookBy David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I have three stories about Facebook today, one focusing on its ads, one on its apps, and one on its popularity.

The first comes to us from TechCrunch and talks about how Facebook Flyers can allow you to target your advertising on the site to certain demographics. Here is a bit from the post:

Flyers let you target by country, city, gender, age range, political views, relationship status, education level, workplace affiliation, or any keyword in a person’s stated interests. It’s that last option that could be really powerful. For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into traveling. Such targeting could theoretically allow advertisers to reach exactly the people they want, instead of the scatter-shot approach favored today.

This is something that many websites with a diverse membership have been trying to effectively do, and while some have succeeded, I think that this might become the most detailed version of targeted advertising.

The second story comes from a new service site called APPMRKT, which allows people to buy and sell Facebook applications. Currently, there are only five advertisements for applications on their sales page, with features ranging from a 924 user GTalk application that would allow a web based Google instant messenger client in your Facebook page, to a 52,000 user Friends Quiz application. Prices also range from a buy it now of $1200 to $20,000 depending on the popularity of the application and its included features.

The third, and final story comes from TechCrunch once again, this time focusing on its popularity, and growth. It seems that while MySpace is still the most popular social networking site, Facebook is coming up fast in rankings.

From the article:

New figures released by HitWise show that in Australia at least, MySpace is now losing market share as the Facebook juggernaut continues. Traffic to MySpace in Australia has dropped 5% as Facebook has tripled its traffic in the 10 weeks to October 13, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Anyone want to take a guess at how long it will be before Facebook overtakes Fox’s MySpace?

Mac OS X Leopard: A Guided Tour (Video)

Yesterday, the folks at Apple released a great guided tour covering some of the new features of Leopard, their latest release of OSX. As it always is with Apple’s presentations, this one was very informative and excellently done. Videos after the jump.

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Audi R8: The slowest car we’ve ever built (Video)

I’ve always loved the design of Audi cars. They’re good looking, classy, and the R8 is no exception to this.

In an unprecedented move, Audi UK is investing more than 6 million pounds (roughly $12 million dollars) to support its new R8 high-performance car with one of the most ironic claims in the history of advertising: “the slowest car we’ve ever built”.

The R8 is, of course, anything but slow. It is the fastest production car Audi has ever produced, but because each one is constructed with painstaking precision, largely by hand, it actually has the by far the slowest build process of all Audi models. Only 450 cars will be delivered in the UK this year, and 750 in 2008, with prices starting at £77,000 ($155k).