Vodafone goodness, Vodafone badness
I got annoyed at my lack of decent connectivity when I'm away from home. Fucking around with a bluetooth dongle and a phone is just irritating, especially when I was being a cheapskate and avoiding paying for the calls by dialling in to a modem at home at a stunning 9.6kbps. So I got a Vodafone 3G datacard. It rocks. For £notverymuch a month I get 250MB of data transfer at up to 380kbps - which for the forseeable future I am unlikely to go over, given that really all I care about most of the time is reading mail over an ssh link. However, I do on ocasion need the intarwebnet too, like to pull up a map. That works nicely too. But it seems that Vodafone have done a couple of naughty things.
First, presumably in a misguided attempt at saving me money (hah! OK, in an attempt to make sure I don't suck all the bandwidth in the cell I'm in) they re-compress large JPEG files to make them even smaller at the expense of making them really bad quality. This is teh suck. I wonder what else they are trying to "optimise" for me.
Second, in case the person with whom they have contracted to provide the service is a kiddie (you know, one of those kiddies who can't enter into binding contracts like that) the web is censored. Getting it uncensored was a simple matter of making one phone call, but even so it was fucking annoying.
Thankfully, there are obvious and trivial work-arounds for both these stupidities. ssh tunneling is my very special friend.