A Quantum Immortal

Do you care about a free, open internet?
Do you care about Israel?

If so, please head over to netneutral.org.il, and help.

netneutral is a new site that I created, under the banner of the Israeli Pirate Party … but forget your politics for now (the site is not affiliated with IPP, it’s independant). A paralemnt member by the name Yaniv Levin has proposed a new law. Roughly translated, it reads:

If a police officer has reason to suspect that a website is used to commit a felony, that police officer has the authority to issue a warrant limiting access to this website. ISPs will have to respect this warrant and block the said website.

If you see yourself as unjustly damaged by this warrant, you can appeal it in a court of law.

Now tell me, how is Israel different in this aspect from Iran, China, or even U.S for that matter?

This law makes it so the mere accusation is enough. Regulating illegal activity should be a matter for lawmakers and courts, it’s not right that every police officer will have this much power.

Do you have anywhere between 2 seconds and 2 weeks to help?

• Got 2 seconds only? Please share this post and netneutral.org.il
• If you have some more time, please head over to our github. There are tasks there for designers, marketers, coders … whoever can contribute.
• Do you know key people in the Israeli startup industry? We would appreciate if you let them know what we’re trying to do. Internet companies had a major role in defeating SOPA, we will need the help of Israeli startups as well.

I’ve been playing Magic online for quite some time now, and have always had problems connecting to other players. Magic isn’t a bandwidth intensive or particularly sensitive to network latency, but I found that more and more I’m getting disconnected, have huge (10 seconds +) lag, and just plain connection problems.

Well, today, the problem is solved. It appears that Smile 012, my ISP, had to classify me as a “Gamer Profile” in order to get a straight connection working. These two test sites just would not work 99% of the time under the normal profile. It appears that the so called Gamer Profiles are connected to the internet backbone by fewer hops (012 usually charge 15 NIS – 4$ for this privilege). I’m not sure why it worked – as I mentioned, Magic shouldn’t be affected this much by latency.

Anyway, if you have the dubious pleasure of being a 012 customer, and want a supposedly better connection to the backbone, just tell them the tests sites I listed don’t work well for you – they won’t charge you for it. I think it also improved my torrent speeds.

I’m visited the US with my family for a couple of weeks, and staying with an Aunt, who has a 56Kbps dialup internet connection and an 8 years old laptop (which is usually kept tucked away in some closet). 

Whenever we try to use the internet the response we get is something like “but you already used it yesterday, why do you need it again so early”? Everything takes ages and ages to load up – very painful. Add to that the fact that we’re about 5-6 people who have to share this tiny laptop+internet connection…

We’re now at the mall and I feel much relief – free internet here at several computer stores, we’re leaching computer time from them. The saying is “you don’t know how much you need X until it’s gone” – but when you get it back again (high quality internet here at the Apple Store – Shlomo, you’ll get your keyboard) for a short while, then you really know how much you’re hooked.