LagBuster makes online games play faster — even Call of Duty

This was intended to be an update column on bufferbloat, a problem mentioned in my January 2011 predictions that is messing with our enjoyment of bad movies on NetFlix and other streaming video services. There’s good news about bufferbloat but that will have to wait a day or so because this column is about something completely different — LagBuster. If you are a serious gamer you need LagBuster.

The difference between bufferbloat and lag is that bufferbloat is mainly downstream (video server to you) while lag is mainly upstream (you to the game server). Bufferbloat is caused by large memory buffers in devices like routers and in applications like media players messing […]

By |September 26th, 2012|2012, Gadgets, Internet, Technology|99 Comments
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LinkedIn SNAFU

I’ll be posting a column shortly about today’s announcements from Apple, but first an apology.  If you received a connection request from me through LinkedIn, I probably didn’t send it.  LinkedIn sent it all by itself.

Twice now I’ve been faced with a dialog on the LinkedIn network where it proposes to blanket the world with link requests on my behalf. Twice now I’ve selected NO! and from the responses I’m getting in my e-mail twice now LinkedIn has gone ahead in and sent the requests defying my express orders.

Am I the only person experiencing this?

I’m a native English speaker and pretty good at reading the language, too, so I don’t think I’m sending the requests by mistake.

Of […]

By |September 12th, 2012|2012, Companies, Internet, Social Media, Technology|50 Comments
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What’s a WeJIT?

This is the third in a series of columns about interesting new technologies.

Every few years something comes along to fundamentally change how we use the World Wide Web, whether it is online video, social networking, dynamic pages, or even search, itself. This week a new technology called WeJIT was announced that looks like something small but is really something big because it extends collaboration from specialized sites like wikis to everywhere HTML is used.  WeJITS are collaboration in a persistent link.

WeJITS come from Democrasoft, a company here in Santa Rosa that is best known for Collaborize Classroom, a cloud-based service used by more than 30,000 teachers to interact with students, deliver lessons from a global peer reviewed library, and even give […]

By |August 24th, 2012|2012, Breaking News, Education, Internet, Social Media, Technology|36 Comments
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JavaScript video technology only 17 years in the making


This is the second in a series of columns about interesting new technologies, in this case JavaScript video.

Three quarters of the bits being schlepped over the internet today are video bits, so video standards are more important than ever. To accommodate this huge load of video data we’ve developed compression technologies, special protocols like the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), we’ve pushed data to the edge of the network with Content Distribution Networks (originally Akamai but now many others). All these Internet video technologies are in transition, too, with H.264 and HTML5 video in the ascendence while stalwarts like RealVideo and even Flash Video appear to be in decline. The latter is most significant because Adobe’s Flash has been — thanks to YouTube — […]

By |August 22nd, 2012|2012, Internet, Media, Software, Technology|66 Comments
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Click fraud the old fashioned way

While click fraud and identity theft are probably the most common forms of larceny on the Internet, I just heard of a company that sets a whole new standard of bad, lying to advertisers about, well, everything.

Click fraud is when a web site either clicks on its own ads to increase revenue, gets someone else to click on them with no intention of buying or works with botnets to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third party ad network to work. What I am writing about here is something […]

By |August 14th, 2012|2012, Advertising, Internet, Media|55 Comments
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