…and I swear I wasn’t surfing porn or downloading torrent files or colluding with Russians online, but I did spend part of the afternoon reading news sites and trying to get some handle on that business in Virginia other than “KKK skinhead nazis viciously attacked peaceful anti-fascist flower children with guns and cars and, I dunno, super-aryan powers or something”…
… which I suspect is not entirely what happened but I still don’t know and apparently won’t learn from reading the news. Anyway, that must be where I blew my ration – news sites do seem to suck up bandwidth – or else Verizon is just screwing with me for fun. But I do need to stay the hell away from the internet today. It’s Monday and I hope to go to town for a water run, and otherwise I’ll just be poking around electrical circuitry with iron tools and nothing could possibly go wrong with that. So there’s no point reporting on it, right?
I’ve had two bandwidth-related incidents lately:
1) A prepaid “smart” phone (that I keep for phone calls only, no surfing or texting) had a system crash/reboot. In the process it turned ON the unwanted data radio which I had carefully turned OFF. The phone then proceeded to update itself, using $100 worth of bandwidth in the process. (Had I felt a need to update the phone, I could have done it for free on my home WIFI)
2) Just last week I pulled a different “smart” phone from my pocket to discover that it had apparently gone off on a little web surfing party all by itself. I caught it in the process of ordering $49 worth of stamps from the USPS! AFAIK, I’ve never visited that site with that phone, so I have no idea how it ended up there!
My guess is the story is more like “put two violent extremist groups with opposing viewpoints together, shake vigorously, enjoy…”
Probably blame on both sides. Neither group, facists or anti-fa, seem to have a brain cell to share between the lot of them.
Fighting over ideas is fucking stupid.
I block ALL ads, scripts and pop-ups. No autoloading videos or anything else permitted. I go to a website for news, and don’t allow anything else. If they’ve got things so wrapped around that crap the site won’t load without it, I just X out and don’t go there. Something on your browser is loading a bunch of stuff you don’t want or need. Find it, block it, and you won’t exceed your limit.
How does one block auto-loading vids? They are a pet peeve, but I haven’t found a way to consistently block them. I have unlimited data, but abhor the feeling of not being in control of my own computer!
We have an 8Gig datacap here and I was recently informed we had gone over to the tune of an extra $15 per Gig. Ain’t no way I was the reason. We have Verizon…
Ben, there are several online guides to stopping autoplaying videos. Just do a search on how to block/stop/disable videos from automatically loading for your brand of browser.
Also, make sure the instructions you find are fairly recent. Some of the old ones focus on disabling Flash, and Flash is now being replaced by newer technology.
I hate damned autoplay vids, too.
Loathe!!!! those vids. I have Firefox, had to do the about:config thing to disable autoplay but all the options are in alphabetical order, you just scroll to it, toggle the option from true to false, done (I hope – until someone finds a way around it). But I wish Firefox made it easier to do.
For Firefox, I suggest an add on called PrefBar. It allows you to disable images on your page among many other things with check marks on your tool bar. So many websites have bandwidth hogging ads on them that this gimmick, along with AdBlock plus saves me oodells of bandwidth.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prefbar/
Neo-Nazis vs. antifa.
Nazis vs. communists.
Same thing. It’s been done before. Turned out poorly for both sides last time.
Me? I’m rooting for winter. Just like last time.
The whole goddamned lot of them can go to hell.
What Goober said. Especially the go to hell.
Thanks Jag for the Firefox information, didn’t know about that. I do use AdBlock Plus. Everything helps.
Most browsers still have an option to display the source code of a webpage (URL). Things have changed a lot since I even considered myself mildly competent at writing simple HTML code – but I can still scan a rendering of a page and get a good idea of what all it’s loading. You’d be amazed nowadays at all the shite that comes thru the pipes.
Hell – Joel – even your site even wants to serve me PayPal’s images sometimes. I understand – but I still say ‘no’.
An average person can get a lot of mileage by simply disabling Javascript in their browser (or use a JS addon- etc.). Don’t complain about loss of functionality – that’s the idea. On my old browser I can pull up a webpage and then toggle the browser to display it in “simple HTML” which pretty much gives you all the content and images without the layout coding and frippery – nice option.
There’s also ways that ISPs and different devices can add to your bandwidth – keeping it simple solves much of this.
You can rein it in – but it’s probably going to take time away from being online (RTFM) unless you want to look it all up on ‘anything but Google’ or read forums that discuss it in excruciating detail.
(Metered) Bandwidth – it’s what’s for feedlots. Our bandwidth gives a full accounting to anyone listening.
Crazy talk…