Adrien’s blog
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In France, up to now, we were very in advance with domestic Internet connections: many ISPs were providing very fast connection (up to 20 Mbps) with plenty of free services (phone-over-IP allowing unlimited free calls, TV access, wireless "boxes" with routing capabilities…) for a cheap price (30€/month in average). Unfortunately, the quality and usefulness of the actual internet connection is getting worse and worse now…

Many users complained about big problems with their ISP: Free. The new fashion for some French ISPs is to restrain the bandwidth for some internet services including newsgroups, bittorrent and other P2P sharing networks. Ok, let’s face it: most of these services are used in a illegal way, for the sake of sharing copyrighted content for free. Hence, we have to admit it’s a huge highway for domestic piracy. But unfortunately, these networks are also used for legal activities. Some websites (including Jamendo and ratiatum) use Bittorrent or eDonkey to distribute files, in order to avoid investing in expensive file servers. Free’s limitations prevent us from using these services now.

Last but not least, not only the peer-to-peer transit is restrained but also instant messaging services like MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk and others!!! Sometimes it becomes unusable: some messages "disappear", making the conversation very awkward and misunderstandable, this is very very frustrating!!! And for this case, I see no reason at all!

The ironic thing is that, while they save bandwidth with such restrictions, they’re installing fiber cable in order to allow bandwidth up to 60Mbps! What’s the point if we can’t download anymore??

Interresting readings (in French): 

• Les FAI en guerre contre le cryptage de BitTorrent - PC INpact

• Forums FreeNews / déconnexion intempéstive de Widows Live Messenger

I just read that Microsoft is launching a new product: "SoapBox", a service that allows users to exchange videos. Yeah, like YouTube, Google Video and many others. Of course it’s "in beta", to follow the web2.0 hype invented by Google with its Google Mail. It’s a shame that everyone does the same thing, especially Microsoft.

You could think that it’s too late, Google Video and YouTube are having too much success already, but you would be wrong: even if Microsoft’s service is limited (only 100 MB of space for personnal videos while the others are unlimited) and private (you need to be invited, just for the hype "à la Gmail" I guess), they will take profit from its links with their so-called "MSN/Live Spaces" that are already integrated with the very popular Live Messenger!

I’m sorry to understand that we live in a world in which success is based on vertical expansion of services instead of basing on innovation. Damn, Microsoft could afford to create innovative services instead of simply copying other’s ideas, and being so late!!! Moreover, they dare to call them "Live Ideas", they’re not even theirs!! But you know, it’s so easy for them to package all their dumb shit with the so successful messenger so that everybody will use their services for the sake of integration, and hence simplicity…

Again, we can observe a "trust" problem: Microsoft do all they can to turn us into sheeps who use MS "Live" services with MS "Internet Explorer" browser on MS "Windows" operating system. You know, it’s so easy for users that way; why should they switch to something else?

As long as all these services are not fully interoperable, Microsoft will always win.