zerosleeps

I’d like to say it’s been fun, but it hasn’t. It’s been miserable. Was it good for you, Telstra? Was it? You took my money month-after-month in exchange for connection to your telephony and Internet services, and I was happy. I never complained. I ensured that the money I owed you was there for the taking.

And then you turned around and shafted me. Your glitzy new website (paid for by some of the aforementioned money, no doubt) began advertising super new plans! Cheap phone calls! Gazillions of Internet! Join now!

So I tried. I rang you up, and told you all about the creaking old bundle I was on, and why I wanted to pay a little bit less for a whole lot more, just like your website told me I could.

But you said I couldn’t. Those plans are only for new customers. You told me you’d be happy to switch my current service over, but that would see the start of a new 24 month contract. That’s TWO YEARS in old money. You didn’t want to know about the thousands of dollars I’ve happily given you over the last couple of years. And you laughed when I pointed out that the feeble download-limit you’ve imposed on me over that time just doesn’t work here in 2012.

What happened to loyalty? What happened to looking after existing customers?

So sod you. I’m off. I’ve had offers from about half-a-dozen other companies. Damned good offers. Don’t even THINK about gripping on to that telephone line I’ve been renting from you for two years: I’ll need that where I’m going. I’m serious. I’ll go postal on your ass. Serves you right for not even trying to hold on to my custom.

“Change Internet banking password” has been on my todo list for a long time, because I’ve always had this niggling feeling that it wasn’t very secure. It didn’t have any special characters, and it was quite short in length.

So I steered my browser towards NAB’s homepage, logged in, and found the functionality I was after.

And then I saw this:

Your new Internet Banking Password must be between 6 and 8 characters in length and consist of a combination of letters and numbers (e.g. 1acb1234).

What. The. Ho? This isn’t Weatherzone, where it’s cute to create an account so the temperature is always displayed in Kelvin instead of Celcius, this is an Internet banking site. A password of just eight alphanumeric characters doesn’t cut the mustard these days. Are you listening NAB? It’s people’s money. My money. Savings. Credit cards.

Update 2012-06-26

Spotted on The Register today, in a story about a breach of user passwords at eHarmony:

…more than 1.2 million passwords were cracked in 72 hours, using three NVIDIA GPUs…

I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened.

Spot on. I speak for myself and almost everyone I know: I have money, and I want to buy a legal and high quality copy of your TV show/movie. Make it easy.

Even though I don’t know what “Game of Thrones” is.

This is a pretty scary read. It’s a slightly dramatised transcript of what happened in the final few minutes of Air France flight 447, taken from the aircraft’s voice and data recorders. Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic on 1st June 2009 killing everyone on board.

What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447.

Let’s start with a problem: the latest iPhone software update was going to take an estimated 6 hours to download here in Sydney. By undoing a “performance” tweak I had made on my network, it downloaded in about 12 minutes.

Before I reveal the solution, let’s talk about those acronyms in the post title.

DNS

Okay, so Domain Name System (DNS) is like a phone book for the internet. When you type “zerosleeps.com” into your browser, there’s a little magic going on behind the scenes. Your computer or router will ask your DNS service for the IP address associated with zerosleeps.com, and DNS will respond accordingly, spitting out something nasty like “65.39.205.54”.

Now you might be able to remember “65.39.205.54”, but what about remembering that, and Google’s IP address, and BBC News, and Daring Fireball, and…? And with the deployment of IPv6 it would only get worse, with IP addresses of “2001:4860:0:1001::68”.

That’s why DNS was invented.

CDN

Right, what about Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)? Well these puppies are used to help deliver content to internet users worldwide. Now zerosleeps.com is hosted on one server, somewhere in the USA, and that’s just fine given the volume of traffic received. But take a service like the iTunes Store, which simultaneously delivers massive amounts of data to tens of thousands of users worldwide? CDNs help with this problem by storing the same data in lots of different geographic locations, and try to serve that data to users from the closest of those locations. That means that global network traffic is decreased, because instead of downloading that movie from Apple’s servers in California, there’s a good chance you’ll end up being served by a data centre much closer to home. It also means you’ll be watching the movie much faster.

So what’s my beef with all of this? Well there are oodles of DNS servers out there, all keeping themselves synchronised with each other so that when a new website comes online or moves, within minutes you’ll be able to access it without knowing or caring what that new site’s IP address is. For the vast majority of home internet users, the DNS service you use is your internet service provider’s (ISP) own service. Sometimes, ISP’s DNS services can be a bit slow, or out-of-date, or unreliable, so geeks like me can tweak our network settings and tell our computers to use a much chunkier DNS solution, such as the one provided by OpenDNS.

However, because OpenDNS don’t have any servers located in Australia, I end up being dealt with by a DNS service located in the USA or Singapore or somewhere. What this means is that when I request data from a CDN (i.e. buy a movie in iTunes), the CDN thinks I’m in the USA or Singapore, and directs my computer towards an iTunes server somewhere around there. See how everything is coming together now? Although OpenDNS provides me with faster DNS lookups than my own ISP, what actually happens on the rare occasion that my computer requests data from a CDN is that I end up with slower data transfers.

The solution? Well the simplest thing to do is for geeks like me to put more faith in our geographically-correct ISP DNS service.