Author: Kriss Andsten
April 19th, 2012 by Kriss Andsten; Category: Industry
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    Sergey Brin is a smart dude, but I don’t always agree with him. In the recent Guardian article, he shoots for a two pronged take on why the net is threatened, now more than ever:

    • Government regulations/censorship (including private sector lobbying for more of this).
    • Walled gardens, where content isn’t freely indexable by third parties.

    The former is a problem. I can see why it’s happening, but the perceived (by politicians) problems aren’t always easy to solve by limiting access to this page or that site. We’ll leave that alone for now.  Read more [+]

    February 23rd, 2010 by Kriss Andsten; Category: Technology
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      Peer-to-peer is rather interesting to work with. Disruptive technologies always fascinate me, especially when it’s closely related to work so I can spend oodles of time on it. It’s also interesting to see the developments in the area – even if I don’t always agree with the sentiments of the researchers (for instance, I quite agree with “http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/analysis-of-bittorrent-utp-congestion-avoidance/” George Ou on BitTorrent – for now).

      Even so, there are good apples and bad apples. BitTorrent got an undeservingly bad name from people confusing content with transport. Even if I don’t think that they got it right with their be-nice-to-the-network idea, they tried. All in all, a sane actor.

      Pando, on the other hand, is an actor that seems quite sane – working in the P4P working group, seemingly trying to make a living out of a very kosher sort of P2P. The protocol isn’t too bloody bad either – the only problem is that parts of the client lodge themselveswhere it’s quite invisible on a Windows system. That, and the usual foray of “Would you want to make xyz.com your default website? Search page? Dog grooming service?”. Read more [+]

      February 1st, 2010 by Kriss Andsten; Category: Technology
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        Working in the field of traffic analysis, you get to see a rather modest number of good solutions to a given problem, a larger number of decent solutions and – sadly – quite a few less than stellar ideas as well.  My favorite pet peeve – and believe me, there’s a slew to choose from, is using FTP as an update mechanism for games, and doing it in a not very thought-out manner.

        Say that you have 4000 asset files in a given game. Most of them are pretty small – well under 8KB. You want to support users going from version A, B or C to version D, utilizing the least amount of bandwidth in the process. Logic dictates that it would make a lot of sense to get a checksum of all your local files, send the checksums to the server and have the server return a list of files you need to update, right? A minimum amount of bandwidth is utilized and the user can update from pretty much any version. Read more [+]