Timepass Tips

Got time to kill? Got an unlimited-usage broadband connection? Welcome to Time and Bandwidth Wasting...

Today, so many of us have unlimited, always-on connections with speeds between 64 and 256 Kbps that the phenomenon described above is more commonplace. I asked around and found I’m not special (as in “He needs special schooling!”), and hordes of people are doing exactly the same thing with their connections.

Warez
We all know that many of us are downloading illegally using P2P clients. Of course, most of it really isn’t a waste of time and bandwidth, but very often, especially for people with 256 Kbps unlimited connections and above, you soon run out of things to download—you already have all the latest movies, you have all the music you like, now what? Some of the people I spoke to claimed to just start downloading whatever everyone else was downloading—especially the torrent users. “The advantage with torrent sites is that they list the latest uploads as well as the most popular ones, so all I do is choose a nice big file that interests me and set it to download,” said a college student from Mumbai on condition of anonymity.
“What if you already have those files?” I asked. “Then there’s always enough porn to download,” he replied.

One of my best buddies from college is a Warez freak..You can view his blog here.

Pornography
It didn’t surprise me when most of the people I spoke to said they downloaded porn when not downloading anything else. Then there was a student from a well-known college in Bandra, Mumbai, who said, “Well, actually, my bandwidth is used mostly to download porn, but when I’m not doing that, I surf casually looking for interesting software or a good print of a movie.”
Pornography was such a popular choice, I almost didn’t feel like adding it to this list of Timepass Tips—it seems more of a primary use for broadband! Anyway, one thing is clear, a lot of people (almost all male) spend a lot of time using their bandwidth to enhance their knowledge of the private lives of the birds and the bees.

Open Source Psychopaths
It’s really no secret that there are thousands of open source supporters who feel compelled to have Anti-Microsoft feelings. If not Microsoft, these people generally dislike all the big corporate software companies -Symantec, Adobe and the like. So it should come as no surprise that some of them spend all their free time plotting to take over the world from those they think have taken over the world!
One such friend of mine uses FreeBSD as his OS. He’s in the US, but I have an account on his box. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he had queued up almost every trial version Microsoft has on offer for download at Microsoft.com. “Converting to Windows?” I asked. I should have known better: “Nah, just putting my 3 Mbps connection to some good use and doing my bit towards wasting some of Microsoft’s bandwidth.” Turns out there are a group of 30 or so of them, all of whom use open source operating systems, and all of whom set up scripts to download anything available at Microsoft.com when they’re not doing anything—and oh, they all have 3 Mbps connections or faster! So if you’re trying to download something from Microsoft and aren’t exactly getting blazing speeds, you have my friends to thank for that!

Online Gaming
Gaming is turning out to be a very popular use for broadband. Though most of us are more likely to go to places like Yahoo! games, an increasing number of Indians are getting addicted to online MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). If not that, then it’s multiplayer First Person Shooter (FPS) games—Counter Strike is the clear winner here for India. Most of the people I spoke to were obsessed with Counter Strike, and wanted even more servers to play on. Broadband connections bring with them a wonderful “value-added service”: the local LAN setup you get within your neighbourhood! With a population density ants would be proud of, Indian metros are generally divided into areas of dominance by ISPs. So chances are that the ISP you have a broadband connection from is also supplying everyone in your local area, which translates to a nice LAN setup for gaming—with blazingly fast ping times and the opportunity to be famous amongst peers you actually meet!

Multimedia
With broadband, no longer do we need to avoid pages that contain the word “streaming”, as in streaming audio or streaming video. An increasing number of people are now able to watch video or listen to Internet radio. One such person is Anurag Bhateja, MD of Bhateja Computers in Chandigarh and a self-confessed Net freak. “I love funny Web sites and videos. I watch online trailers and read about the entertainment industry in my free time. I also love sites such as StumbleUpon.com.” He says he’s been inspired by the articles of Pawan Duggal, noted cybercrime lawyer: “I am totally against piracy and pornography, and am working on a site that will educate people about Internet crime.”
Another Digit reader (and another Anurag) is Anurag Patel, an IT Professional from Mumbai, who has an always-on connection. “I feel like my bandwidth is being wasted if I am not doing something with it. I recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation, which took almost two days. When I am not doing anything like that, I spend time on YouTube.com, or look for developer documentation. I also waste a lot of bandwidth downloading from RapidShare.de, from links that other Digit readers on Yahoo! Messenger keep providing—even though most of them are useless for me, because I’m on Linux.” For those of you who don’t know about it, RapidShare has become a popular place for people to share almost any sort of file with their friends.
Another popular way of using bandwidth is Internet radio, especially from within programs such as Yahoo! Messenger or Winamp. A Digit reader from Delhi, a college student who asked not to be named, uses Winamp for streaming video. “Since I have a computer that my sister and father also use, I cannot really use my broadband to download the things I want, because they might find it on the hard drive. Instead, I use Winamp’s Internet TV Library, which has everything from music videos to porn. I also visit adult sites that offer free streaming video.”
“We save water, we don’t waste food, and we suffer in the heat to conserve energy—why can’t we conserve bandwidth the same way? After all, what’s more scarce in India than bandwidth?”
Now that’s food for thought!