Today we take a look at Three’s mobile broadband offering, which is offered in direct competition with both O2’s and Vodafone’s  mobile broadband services.

Three differentiate themselves from the pack right off the mark by offering both a prepay (dubbed threepay…urgh) and a subscription based service (for which im sure the marketing department were sorely disapointed, since they couldnt figure out how to inject the brand name into another already existing, perfectly usable word) which runs at approximately €25 per month and €20 per month respectively. Though it should be noted the prepay can only be topped up in increments of €10 - so you could easily find yourself with a misterious €5 credit that always just seems to hang around every second month or so. lovely.

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For many years now ive been using a version of Windows. My first computer may have been a commodore 64 followed by a macintosh but i never used those things properly. They were simply little boxes that sat there and looked at me with their buttons and switches. Nowadays I think back and tell myself “Its ok. You were an idiot back then and didnt know how fun computers can be”. Still feel ashamed for not paying them the level of respect they deserved.

But now that I know the joys of computing I can safely say that out of everything Ive tried so far… Windows operating systems are the number one system for all the masochistsout there. Thats why I decided to switch to a flavour of linux.

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Ok so i wasnt going to do this but Ive been thinking about the whole P2P thing all week since reading this article. Lets take a moment now and discuss a few of the finer points of P2P shall we?

Ok so we all know that yes people use P2P networks to pirate music, movies and software but its used for so much more. A lot of people use it to get free and open source content that would be otherwise inaccessible. One good example would be a copy of a Linux distribution. Fedora for example weighs in at well over 3 gigs in size. Wouldnt that be fun to download directly from a server? Wouldnt that be so much fun for the people paying to host said server? I mean how many people actually download this stuff right? It couldnt possibly raise bandwith costs that much could it?

Yes. Yes it can.

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Ok so everyone knows about the different CMS (Content Management Systems) that are out there in the wide open world of the interwebs. The main ones you might have heard of would be Wordpress (Hey this site is made using that one), Joomla, Drupal (personal thought: Its awful) and finally e107 (also awful IMHO).

We now have a new one to wow us all. Its called Diferior.

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Ok so we decided that people should have a chance to converse with us here at IG in a more direct fashion. As such we have set up a room on DALnet where we can do just that. So for all you IRC users out there the details are as follows:

irc.dal.net

#irishgeeks

For anyone unfamiliar with irc clients and the whole irc thing I would reccomend downloading a stable version of xchat as it is a solid open source irc client and has an easy to use interface. If you dont wish to do this then dont worry. In the coming days we will be adding a Java applet to the site that you can access the room from.

we look forward to hearing from you all soon. Cya in the room and remember people. Keep it geeky.

So right now the boys over at bittorrent.org are working on ways to bypass the filtering set up by Comcast. The socalled Sandvine stuff that they use that is. Now this is going to be a very tough thing for them to get done but if they succeed then things could get very interesting.

Personally I believe that theyre right to try and bypass these security measures. I think they should because I dont wanna wait longer than i have to to download the several gigs that makes up the latest Fedora Build. I salute their vigilence and their dedication to the ways of bittorrent. Now read on for details on their plans.

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These days, nothing worries an internet service provider more than peer-to-peer file trading. Depending on where you live, P2P can account for between 50 and 75% of broadband internet traffic. We mostly have the popularity of BitTorrent to thank for this crazy amount of data going to and fro.

This amount of traffic can raise the ISPs daily costs of delivering service, cause congestion either in your neighborhood or on the ISP’s network, and force the ISP to buy increased bandwidth capacity.

But if you’ve been paying close attention to your BitTorrent transfers lately (or if you’ve simply been reading the news) you’ll notice that ISPs have begun to take drastic measures to slow that flood of data currently clogging up their pipes.

Even though many of them deny it, most ISPs actively engage in traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling, connection denial or some such tactic to keep the amount of bandwidth consumed by high traffic applications on their networks to a minimum. While this does often ensure better performance for everyone in the neighborhood, it can mean painfully slow transfer speeds for those dabbling in P2P — legit or not.

While there are valid arguments for and against shaping, we’re not here to debate. We just want the fastest BitTorrent transfers possible.

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Sexual predators and online pedophiles are a growing concern among parents whose children use the internet. The FBI estimates that there are now over one million pedophiles active online. With many of them involved with child pornography. The majority are and chatting with children online daily.Here is a simple checklist that you can review in order to determine if your child’s habits online should cause you concern for the safety of your child and even your family.

Teaching your child not to reveal any personal information in chat rooms or over the internet which might lead a predator to the child can go a long way to ensuring their safety. Knowing what to look for is the first step.

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The bog-standard wordpress theme was starting to get a bit old, ah lets be honest, it was boring out of the box. So today we thought was a good time, after all, to update the site with a snazzy new theme.

We’re still getting used to this new design, and would like to hear what our readers think of the new design. We’ll be considering it for the next week or so, and probably updating it to suit our needs.

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On the 15th Febuary 2008, applications for Eircom’s Web Innovation fund will end. The fund was launched last november ‘to promote, mentor and sponsor innovative web applications in the Irish Internet industry‘, aimed at focusing on and stimulating web 2.0 technologies in the Irish market place, awards for successful submissions range from a financial contribution to the development of the product/project, Eircom products (from the broadband, ISP and hosting portfolio), marketing promotions and more - the fund is valued at 100,000EUR.

If your one of the Irish entrepreneurs out there with a product or project that fits the criterea, you have exactly 3 days to submit, which means RUN!!!!!! get submitting pronto. Even I think I may have something to qualify, and will be doing all I can to submit on time.

[Eircom 1, 2]

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