I knew it was only a matter of time. Comcast has made the first move, and starting October 1st there will be a cap for customers on their data transfer limit. Comcast customers will now have a 250 GB cap for the amount of data they can transfer.

The decision isn’t a huge surprise as a lot of analysts were predicting this would eventually happen. What is kind of surprising is how quick Comcast was in implementing the new policy.

Here’s the official proof of the bad news. Comcast’s reformed user agreement:

It’s no secret we’ve been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for our Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time. Rumors circulated online last year and they popped up again in May.

In January, we added new frequently asked questions about what we consider acceptable use of our service to our online Help site www.comcast.net/help and Security Channel page www.comcast.net/security.

We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive. Today, we’re announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at http://www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 - 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

• Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

This is the same system we have in place today. The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted. As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.

As stated above the new monthly data usage threshold will officially take effect starting October 1st. We are notifying customers in a number of ways. For example, we have posted a preview of the amended AUP as a PDF on this page. We are also running banner notices on our Comcast.net home page and on our Security Channel Web page to alert customers about this upcoming change. In addition, we have provided a number of FAQs that are available at http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-
Questions-about-Excessive-Use. Finally, we will also notify our customers directly by including an insert (also called a bill stuffer) in an upcoming monthly billing statement.

At first I took this as very dire news, because most Internet Service Providers (ISP) will probably jump on the band wagon. I will say that 250 GB is a generous cap, and you’d have to be doing a crap load of data transferring to come close to it. What really bothers me is that this might lead to a snow ball effect. Where the cap keeps shrinking, and to make sure the cap stays at a reasonable level you have to pay for a different service. This is the kind of policy I can see data transfer capping such as this leading to.

[via: DSL Reports]

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Ok, the title might be misleading considering Internet Explorer (IE) has the largest market share in the internet browser world. Depending on where you get your browser stats, IE has around a 60%-75% stake in the internet browser industry. Of course if you talk to internet experts, most use one of the other browsers and for good reason. IE might come standard on computers, but there are browsers out there that execute functions better than IE, all the while having better security and compatibility.

IE 8 is in the second phase of its beta, and things are starting to look up for the dominant internet browser. There have been vast improvements in IE 8’s security, along with some interface options that weren’t featured prior to the IE 8 Beta 2. One of the best features of the recent beta is the drop down security menu in the main toolbar. Within the menu, most of the important security functions are just a mouse click away. For more casual users this is a blessing; no more having to navigate through menus to get to IE security options.

The other big update is security related as well, but is a passive update that you might not even recognize. IE 8 has added a cross site scripting filter, which will greatly help keep phishing attacks at bay. Cross site scripting allows a potential phisher to basically run certain scripts on someone’s browser. With IE 8 this malicious scripting in automatically detected. Once IE 8 finds the script, it will then automatically erase the content from appearing on your browser. The rest of the page will load as normal.

If you want to give Internet Explorer 8 a chance, you can find Beta 2 here. For those who have forever given up on IE, I don’t blame you. It will take a lot for Microsoft to pull me away from Firefox. IE8 does have its upsides, but even the improvements in IE 8 Beta 2 haven’t shown enough to detract me yet. There’s always IE8 Beta 3 though.

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The 2008 Olympics have been the most watched Olympic Games in the history of the event. Atleast from a ratings point of view. The reasons can be found in the fledgling economy, and the need for people to rally around our nations’ athletes. Or perhaps it was the controversy of the games being held in Beijing. Then of course there’s Michael Phelps. Whatever the reason, the Olympics attracted a viewer base unlike any before it.

What’s so interesting about the Olympics isn’t necessarily ‘how many’ were viewing, but how were they watching it. NBC had exclusive video rights to the games in the United States. This means that NBC has exclusive rights to showing the games on television, and streaming video of events on their website. NBC’s site garnered nearly 1.2 billion page views, and 72 million video streams throughout the Olympics. These numbers were nearly double of activity to the site for the 2004 Athens games.
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If you’ve been keeping up with the invisibility cloak technology, there’s been some progress as of late. Harry Potter fans have probably already created a countdown, and started a savings account to prepare for an invisibility cloak release. While the invisibility cloak would be a really cool invention, the technology behind it could lead to more practical applications.

Metamaterials is a really ground breaking technology, and one that could lead to the next advancement in many different computer technologies. Metamaterials is a simple technology to understand, as all it does is slow down and bend the reflection of light. It’s this bending of light that could lead to the invisibility cloak, and faster internet speeds.

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