* Posts by Ipsus301

2 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2018

VPNFilter router malware is a lot worse than everyone thought

Ipsus301

Re: Signatures and mitigation steps...

Totally agree. I have no idea if my router has been infected and other than advice to reboot my router (which I typically do weekly) there has been no outlining of steps to detect and protect yourself beyond hope your ISP has updated your router (as far as I can tell my only option as I can't find a way check for firmware updates).

Any advice would be appreciated.

nbn™ CEO didn't mean to offend gamers, just brand them unwelcome bandwidth-hogs

Ipsus301

Re: As a gamer I use a lot of bandwidth

Your example is correct. Most games are now purchased and downloaded. However, after that initial download most patches (containing bug fixes and occasionally new features) are typically smaller and not frequent (i.e., less than once a week and usually far less often). After the initial download, the internet traffic required for most online games is quite small for the reasons stated in other people's posts.

I play an online game that patches very frequently, once a week, compared to all the others I have played. The average patch size is around 2 GBs. The initial download was 35GBs. So over the course of a year downloading the game files & patches was around 140 GBs and the game data (sent while playing) was immaterial, but let's say a GB a week (from let's say 20 hours of playing) and round up to 200 GBs for the year.

That's about the same as streaming 4 hours a week of HD video. So using some broad assumptions it seems to me that after including initial download of a games, plus regular patching, plus game data (for online games only) and averaging it out per hour, that online gaming takes up about 20% of the bandwidth as video streaming.

What is ridiculous in Australia is right now I can only download at ~8Mbps at the best of times (non-NBN) while my gamer friends in Canada and the US typically have 300 Mbps downloads. So initial download game files sizes are only going to get larger as it is relatively trivial for people in the largest game markets to download these initial large files vs. the exercise in frustration that it is for me in Australia today. So as sad as FTTN NBN is likely to be, I am super looking forward to finally getting it as I expect to improve my download speed by 5X to get up to ~40Mbps. I'd definitely go for a 100 Mbps plan if I was getting FTTP. Ah well, fingers crossed I get a decent FTTN connection.