Well, it finally happened. Amid the trumpets and fanfare of a valiant uphill battle by those with any sense, Ajit Pai (the head of the FCC, and someone who is often painted as a puppet of Big Telcom and President Donald Trump), has succeeded in dismantling net neutrality in america. I expect that lots of kinds of internet traffic will begin to be throttled very shortly including but not limited to anything encrypted or “unidentifiable” to ISP’s packet classification filters (such as VPN traffic), peer-to-peer file transfer traffic such as BitTorrent, and quite probably media sites that compete with the cable operator’s parent company media holdings. Prepare for a world of slow media services and “internet fast lane” prioritized service packages.
I have also been made aware that many states are proposing state-level net neutrality legislation, but bureaucracy is notoriously long and arduous and may or may not apply over state lines as there aren’t a whole lot of good systems in place to determine jurisdiction when it comes to online matters. Apparently there are also several states that are attempting to sue the fcc to undo the FCC net neutrality, but at this point, I have difficulty finding much hope for that.
As you may have seen in my previous article, Firefox just got MASSIVE speed and memory management improvements and is now out of beta! I’ve been using the beta version for the past month or so and have been blown away with it’s performance, making it my current everyday browser.
Further, as an amendment to my previous article about LastPass support in firefox 57, that’s now out of beta too and can be found on the LastPassMozilla Add-ons page. Although, it IS worth noting that the current version of the LastPass plugin for firefox disables the “copy password” function due to an issue with the new webextension API. LastPass says they are working on bringing it back for the next version. A good password manager like LastPass is a MUST for online security in this day and age of mass automated password attacks and identity fraud.
I have been attempting to do a full immersion test of Firefox 57 which is currently in beta. Firefox 57 brings with it an enhanced multithreaded css layout system which dramatically improves page load times and general responsiveness. (as well as a nice new ui upgrade and using less ram) In many third party tests this has put Firefox 57’s page load times ahead of even google chrome which has notoriously been the fastest browser for most of the web for some time now. I have been using it in parallel with Opera (my current browser of choice as it’s just about as fast as Chrome, uses most of the same add-ins, but has additional features such as integrated compiled-in ad blocker that takes abp config files and an easy to use, free, integrated vpn) largely because there wasn’t a version of LastPass that would work with Firefox 57 due to LastPass (an excellent password manager that securely stores your credentials in the cloud and helps you create new complex passwords that you don’t have to remember as it fills them in for you), not having an extension ready that works with the webextension framework that Firefox introduced last year (and clearly said at that time they would be discontinuing support for the old extension system upon this new release) creating a large base of temporarily angry paying LastPass users for several weeks now. Thankfully the wait for a beta is now over and I can put all other browsers aside and give it the big real-world test and see what works, what doesn’t, and overall how “good” it is. Stay tuned!
And if you’re not using a password manager, you really should be, LastPass is free (or extremely inexpensive if you want to use it across multiple platforms such as desktop and mobile), and available on all platforms (windows, mac, linux, ios, android), go grab it now!
So it appears that I am not the only one with wishes for a “workstation class” Ryzen part aimed at content creators, 3D animators, and the like… Many sources are now reporting the possibility of AMD releasing a 16 core 32 thread CPU for somewhere in the <$1000 market space on a new NON-AM4 platform with quad channel DDR4 memory that supposedly solved many of the inter-CCX cache latency problems. as well. The rumor says that it should be out around the same time as Computex. While this is still deep in rumor territory, It certainly has me excited as a 16 core Ryzen *should* perform better than a currently available dual 8 core Xeon rig for DRASTICALLY less expensive. It’s no single-CPU 32 core Naples box, but honestly, I think a 16 core Ryzen workstation would be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to the content creation market, and I imagine AMD can build them at substantially less expensively than the Naples parts as well, allowing lowly nerds like me the possibility of affording one.
