Knowledge exchange site Stack Overflow and its cousins Super User and Server Fault created quite a stir when they were released by noted developers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. And though it should probably have been obvious, in the process of building out these niche sites, what they had actually done was build a knowledge exchange platform.

Now that platform, called StackExchange, has been released to the general public to build their own knowledge exchange sites. That is, if you're willing to pay a monthly minimum of $129US.

That's right; the smallest plan that is available right now would cost you $1,548US yearly. I hate to make this story about the pricing, but given how outrageous it is, it's hard not to. As someone who has struggled to launch sites, it seems to me that the only people that would choose this platform for a fledgling site would be people with money to burn. Now, Joel and Jeff are smart guys. Maybe they've simply figured out that people with money to burn are the best customers.

Another surprising thing about StackExchange is that of their four plans, only the most expensive one allows you to actually host the site on your own premises. That plan costs $2,500US per month - for the privilege of using your own bandwidth!

There's no doubt that StackExchange is a powerful platform. And anyone that claims they can reverse-engineer it in a weekend is insane. It's the kind of platform that you would love to see generating interesting little sites all over the place dedicated to tight niches like woodworking, late 60's Mustang restoration, DIY plumbing, or even whistling. But the pricing model that is being used threatens to make StackExchange virtually irrelevant -- to everyone online except for Spolsky and Atwood, that is.

Google has joined with the Open Technology Institute to help identify which ISPs are restricting peer-to-peer traffic, launching M-Lab to help users discover whether or not they're being affected.

One of the tools M-Lab will use is Glasnost, a java applet that initiates a torrent transfer between a user's pc and the remote testing server. It compares the results to the speed of a normal transfer to see whether or not the peer-to-peer traffic is being throttled.

If you're curious about your own ISP, run the Glasnost test and see what it reports. You'll have to be patient, though - the recent news about Google coming onboard has increased traffic on the site greatly and it's having a hard time keeping up.

It's good to know that once M-Lab is online they'll have 36 Google servers in 12 locations to help run the tests.

[ via Torrentfreak ]

Internet Service Providers are coming at high bandwidth users from all directions, but mostly poorly. Dave Winer once again is at the forefront with his Comcast controversy where the ISP threatened to cut off his service for using "too much" bandwidth but wouldn't tell him how much "too much" was. You can hear the DLS podcast here. Comcast is sending out threatening letters labeling customers as abusers, without telling them how much their download or upload caps really are.

The bottom line for Comcast appears to be: you're using too much. We're just not going to tell you how much is too much, because we're the ISP.

It's not just Comcast, either, back in 2002, CNet wrote that ISPs are considering new pricing plans that would adversely affect file-swapping. Bell Canada customers suffered through a 10Gb cap but complained that the monitoring software wasn't BC's responsibility.

Internet bandwidth usage is growing, some say wildly, for US businesses. Most companies buy broadband with speeds much higher than their workers have at home and with an inexpensive Flash key, a worker can download movies or songs and transfer them to their pockets with little trace, except for that pesky bandwidth usage.

ISPs are accused of bandwidth throttling, or traffic shaping, to slow down people using P2P software file sharing. Bell Canada calls it "downgrading the internet services of bandwidth hogs," and this month the Canadian Association of Internet Providers has asked the Canadian federal regulators to prohibit BC's throttling of Web traffic on their network.

The implications for small business? Last month, Bell informed smaller Internet Service Providers that it was bringing in traffic-shaping policies on the network space it sells to them, effectively downgrading the services these smaller companies are able to provide to their customers. How about US businesses? What sort of bandwidth regulation might they be looking toward?

Cyber Bandwidth Monitor does pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to do, and more. This little WIndows utility tracks your upload and download speeds over time and plots your network activity on a little graph. The utility grabs data once per second, but you can adjust the settings so that it refreshes more frequently. You can also tweak a ton of display settings, ranging from the font and window size to the graph scale.

In addition to real-time information, the program also logs all of your activity over time and can send you daily, weekly, or monthly updates. Cyber Bandwidth Monitor also has a few other useful features, like built in Ping and Traceroute utilities.

[via Shell Extension Cty]

Ever need to manage or monitor your web browser's bandwidth usage? Say, for example that you want to send a large file via FTP, but want to do some web browsing while you wait. You don't want your web browser to eat up your bandwidth, but aside from avoiding media-rich web sites, what can you do?

You could install Firefox Throttle or IE Throttle. These two browser plugins let you cap the upload or download speeds of Firefox or Internet Explorer. You can choose from a variety of presets or set a custom speed. And you can exclude IP addresses or web sites that you're willing to make exceptions for.

Another neat tool is a status bar add-on that shows your upload and download status in real time.

[via sizlopedia]

If you remember the late 70's, you probably remember gas rationing in the United States when OPEC cut oil production. This lead to pandemonium at the pumps and confusion for American citizens. Well to a lesser degree, having bandwidth cut off would also lead to having to make tough choices.

Perhaps this is why the Egyptian government has asked that all Internet users temporarily stop downloading movies, music, and other large files as a result of their Internet access being hampered earlier this week. Egypt's main cable link to Europe was inadvertently cut by a ship's anchor, causing widespread Internet bottlenecks to Egypt and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has asked that consumer stop downloading large file so they don't affect "affect businesses who have more important things to do.'"

Ars Technica points out that this isn't the first time this type of event has occurred. Algeria, Taiwan, and Vietnam have all had their Internet access affected by similar circumstances. As the world becomes more and more dependent on the 'Net, we think it's alarming to see how fragile the infrastructure truly is.

So, in conclusion, if you're in Egypt and your downloading last nights Lost episode, knock it off! :)

[via Slashdot]

Flickr is making our holidays a little cheerier with some bonuses for Pro and Free members alike. The biggest bonus is for Pro users, of course: Beginning this month all Pro account will have totally unlimited storage and bandwidth. While probably only a fraction of Pro users were bumping up against the old 2GB-per-month upload limit, who can argue with unlimited? Free users have cause to celebrate, too: The per-month upload limit for free accounts has been bumped up to 100MB, a 500% increase over the previous 20MB limit. A Pro account still costs $24.95 per year, and a free account clearly still costs nada. For those "Giving the Gift of Flickr," Flickr also has a new system that lets you buy a Pro account activation code that will work for both existing Flickr users and those just signing up, and they also have a cute little card you can print out to stuff in that special someone's stocking.

But wait, there's more! The Flickr crew have blessed us with a cute holiday easter egg: If you add a note to one of your photos with the text "ho ho ho hat" or "ho ho ho beard," Flickr will add a cute santa hat or beard to the photo wherever you put the note. You can see it in action on the dashing Merlin Mann. Lovely!

[Via eclecticism and Waxy.org]

Files-Upload will let you upload up to a 1GB file unlimited times and unlimited storage on their site, and you can do it using your favorite FTP program. The catch here is that your files will only be retained for 6 months since the last download of that file. If you don't feel like downloading files every six months, you will lose files. Files-Upload offers a free subdomain "myname.files-upload.com" for easy access to those files. There is also a web interface to upload files if you want, but hey who wouldn't want to use FTP for most things? Either way, and even with the 6 month half-life of your files, FREE is a hard price to beat to only have to do a re-download every 6 months to keep them alive. Worth it, don't you think?

An article on NewScientistTech via Slashdot alerts us that many people these days are addicted to the Internet, and may be as clinically ill as alcoholics. Apparently Internet addicts try to hide their online activities and go online to get rid of a bad attitude (most likely trolling blogs), a habit that researchers say is dangerous and isn't healthy. First off, I thought most of us who are "addicted to the Internet" already knew we were, and I don't know if it is such a bad thing in many cases. Sure, there are times when it goes way too far, and mental help is required to fix the problem. Severe cases do exist where there is no end in sight. On the other hand, for all of us only mildly addicted, I think we are addicted because work requires it or because of our individual interests, and it can be a good thing. The lead author of the study, Elias Aboujaoude says "In a sense, they're using the Internet to self-medicate..." I don't consider this a bad thing, at least we are being medicated. It can be awfully helpful after a stressful work day to come home and surf, browse, read Download Squad and check on the latest news. I find writing code is therapeutic as well. I personally think that the reason we want to hide our Internet habits is because it is the very last place we can control a degree of privacy. With the whirlwind that is our busy life, it is comforting to know that you can have somewhere to go to drop everything and just be who you are, even it is on the inside of your head and stored behind a password. This article was an interesting read, so if you have some time to be Internet addicted today, check it out.

Apparently Verizon didn't realize when they got into the broadband Internet business that they were getting into, well, the broadband Internet business. TechWeb is reporting that Verizon, which charges its customers $38 per month, thinks that companies like Google and Microsoft whose apps use up that bandwidth should chip in, too. The Verizon rep quoted in the article says that content providers like Google and Microsoft ultimately need broadband networks to reach customers, but is apparently blind to the fact that without content providers like Google and Microsoft, there would be no demand for that bandwidth in the first place. Head over to TechWeb for the full, and much more neutral, article.