Cybersurf

This week Telkom announced substantial reductions in the pricing structure of their ADSL packages. ADSL is a type of technology that allows your regular phone line to give you broadband, always-on access to the internet. Personally I have the Home DSL 384 package and the price of will drop from R449 to R359 per month – much cheaper, of course, but still quite expensive if you consider that you still have to pay the ISP and additional R200 per month.

I am not sure if the price cut applies to existing subscribers or only to new customers.

It also appears that Telkom is having difficulty keeping up with the demand for ADSL – I have heard that people are having to wait for weeks for their installation.

Besides that, we have no indication if the increased take-up of ADSL means that more people are going to share existing bandwidth. It is all to do with contention ratios – and Telkom refuses to tell us about their contention ratios.

For a rapid change of tack, let’s get down and dirty – yes, let’s talk pornography.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has approved a domain name for pornographic sites. This means that instead of having porn sites ending in dot com, or dot co dot za – they will be encouraged to take up sites ending in ….. wait for it…. Dot ex ex ex. – triple ex for porn – sounds quite logical to me.

But of course this move has raised its own set of controversies. The freedom of speech people say – you can’t force pornographers to change addresses – they will end up being put into a triple ex ghettoes – and they argue that pornography – by providing consistently viable business models has made the internet what it is.

Personally, I believe it’s a good thing – the dedicated domain name – not pornography because it will make it much easier to filter out porn sites – all you do is put on a filter that blocks out all ex ex ex domain names, and you won’t end up seeing all those dirty pictures by mistake.

Essentially, if you want porn, you’ll know where to find it, on the other hand if you don’t want it. You’ll know where not to go.

This last week was also notable for yet more virus news – the so called Bagle virus proliferates, and I have received several e-mails complaining about virses sent in apparently legitimate e-mails from banks. We have said this before on Cybersurf – do not open attachments unless you are very sure that they are clean. The rule with attachments is simple:

When in doubt, throw it out.

You absolutely must have anti-virus software on your machine – and do not go for the freeware. If you pay for good anti-virus protection and make sure it is updated daily; it could be one of the best investments of your online career.

This will not guarantee immunity but it will certainly help.

There has also been a whole host of e-mails in circulation claiming to have news about the capture of Osama Bin Laden. This is a hoax – do not open it.

If he has been captured I can assure you, you will hear about it on Safm – not from a viral hoax.

That is all we have time for today, if you would like to take a peek at the script for this program, please click along to the Cybersurf blog which you can find at cybersurf.blogspot.com – if you missed it – cybersurf.blogspot.com.

Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week, same time, same place for more Cybersurf

// posted by Steven Lang @ 5:09 pm