[Hidden-tech] dial up accelerator?

[Tim Boudreau]

The two things that can be helpful for that are:
 - A caching DNS server closer to you than your ISP - whenever you connect
to a web site, a minimum of two round-trips to somewhere have to be
completed - the first one sends off a name like "google.com" and gets back
an address like 74.125.226.228.  Then and only then does your computer even
know where to go to talk to google.com.  So a server, ideally in your home,
which remembers what sites you've been to and saves that round-trip is a
big help.
 - A caching HTTP proxy, such as Squid - http://www.squid-cache.org/ - most
web servers out there use compression in this day and age, so your ISP
doing some sort of extra compression is not going to help you much (and not
at all for secure connections, which you'll be using for most things).  But
having nearby copies of repeatedly accessed content can help.  It basically
means, if you go to, say, somecompany.com, you don't use bandwidth
downloading their logo every time, it comes from a machine on your home
network.

Both of these things only help for sites you visit more than once, and both
of these give the maximum benefit if they sit at your end of the wire (I'm
not sure how you'd do this with dial-up, but you certainly could - I
vaguely remember tricks to make a gateway machine dial out on demand from
the dark ages of the mid-90s).  And they're both available as free,
open-source software - software such as these are the bones of the internet.

I run a DNS server in my house on an 7-year-old laptop running Linux,
talking to a wifi router from Best Buy - you don't need fancy hardware, and
this sort of thing doesn't really call a very powerful machine - anything
built in the last 10 years or so will serve.

I realize these sound like pretty technical solutions - I don't know of any
non-technical, turnkey box you just plug in that will do these things. But
such a thing probably exists, since you're definitely not the only one who
could benefit from DNS and web caches.

At any rate, those are the specific services that might help in this kind
of situation, so you know what to look for.

-Tim

--
http://timboudreau.com
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