Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Net Neutrality Defined
Doc Searls, one of the tech community's best commentators on technology and its impact on us, has done an outstanding job of explaining network neutrality--what it is, why it has made the Internet successful, and why it needs to be preserved.
He also analyzes the broadband carriers and their dream to turn the Internet into a sophisticated form of cable TV. This is an article that deserves close attention. Here is just one of many key points:
"In fact, the asymmetrical build-outs of service to homes has done enormous harm to market growth by preventing countless small and home Net-based businesses from starting and growing.
Specifically, by provisioning big bandwidth downstream and narrow bandwidth upstream, while blocking ports 25 and 80--in crass violation of the Net's UNIX-derived network model, in addition to the end-to-end principle--the carriers prevent customers from running their own mail and Web servers and whatever server-based businesses might be possible. Again, all the carriers can imagine is Cable TV. That's been their fantasy from the beginning."
The end of network neutrality means the choking off of new engines of economic growth, especially in rural communities and underserved urban neighborhoods. Small businesses and entrepreneurs have been creating jobs at a furious rate over the past decade, fueled in large part by the Internet. If we lose the Internet as we know, to be replaced by glorified TV, communities and neighborhoods lose their future.
Read this article.
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Google Desktop copies company files to Google
By way of Slashdot, this article reports that CIOs at UK companies are up in arms about Google Desktop.
When someone uses the "search across computers" feature of Google Desktop, it copies files from the local computer to Google's servers--usually a breach of security for most companies, who don't want confidential files copied to servers outside the company. Google's popular desktop utility is being banned in many companies because of the security problem.
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New Mexico reforms voting systems
New Mexico has enacted a new voting law that requires all counties in the state to use a single, uniform balloting system. You might think it involves buying a lot of the new electronic touch panel voting machines.
Instead, the entire state will use.....paper.
Voters will mark their choices on a paper ballot that will then be fed into an electronic vote counting machine. In the event of discrepancies or disputes, the paper ballots can be easily counted and verified.
Good for New Mexico. There is just too much risk with the all electronic machines that have been shown to have problems with trivial spoofing of vote tallies and other bugs in the systems.
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We didn't really expect you to actually use broadband....
The broadband access providers (aka the telephone and cable companies) are shocked, just shocked, that their customers are actually using broadband.
Their response?
According to this article in The Register, the big companies are already installing software that slows down much of what people want to do, to the point of making them give up and/or buying the service from the access provider.
This article talks about Skype, the popular Voice over IP service, and how the cable companies are using software to slow down Skype calls, with the hope that their customers get fed up and buy VoIP from the broadband provider instead.
The two tier Internet is already well underway, and the only cure is to distribute ownership of the network among property owners (us), the community, and the broadband providers. By doing so, we get the ability to set some of the rules. If we simply give up and let the phone and cable companies recapture natural monopolies over broadband, they get to set the rules.
Communities that pursue distributed ownership of the network will become havens for business, because broadband services will be cheaper, better, and more plentiful.
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Posting comments to this site
For some time, anyone has been able to post comments without the need to register as a user. Comments did not appear immediately so that I could review comments for spam. That has worked reasonably well for about a year, but the spambot attacks have become a severe problem. Spammers use scripts that roam the Internet, looking for sites that allow comments, and when they find one, they run scripts that know how to post a comment in a form.
Spam has been increasing slowly but steadily on this site, but over the past few weeks, it has become relentless. Just over one night in the last week, more than 400 spam messages were posted, and those have to be deleted. Even with good site management tools, it takes too much time.
So I am going to try something new. There is now a user login block on the right hand side of the page. You can create a user account, and once you get an email from the site with your userid and password, you can post comments freely (the email typically arrives within a minute or two).
We will see if this works. One advantage is that I will be able to let my readers post and see their comments immediately. As always, we will never, ever resell or redistribute your email address. We may occasionally send a note to you about site administration or other issues.
Thanks for your patience.
Andrew
AOL says, "Pay us to deliver email"
AOL struggles mightily with spam email. It has millions of subscribers who receive hundreds of millions of spam emails per week. At enormous cost, AOL (and every other provider of email service) has to try to filter out this dreck.
A core problem is that the cost of sending email is very low. It's easy to buy a server that can pump out millions of emails per day, and the service providers have to receive that email and deliver it to their users. It uses a significant percentage of the available bandwidth on the Internet.
AOL has proposed charging a small fee to deliver email from bulk senders. This approach of charging for email has been around for a long time. If it cost, as an example, 1/100 of a cent to send an email, it would be a barely noticeable fee for most people, who send out just a few a day--if you sent 20 emails a day, it would cost you six cents a month for email. But if you were a spammer sending out a million emails, it would cost you $1000/million emails. All of sudden, sending spam costs real money. Spam would stop overnight.
But the problem is a bit more complex. Many nonprofit and civic organizations also send out lots of email, and AOL's current plan would not discriminate--senders of large amounts of email would have to pay. In return for payment, AOL would guarantee that an organization's email would get delivered to the recipient's mailbox (i.e. not get tossed in the spam bin).
But charging some for email delivery and not others would create a powerful incentive for AOL to put most resources into delivering the paid mail and correspondingly less into unpaid mail. So if you are sending a single (free) email to an AOL subscriber, it would get treated differently.
This is not a simple problem, and there are no obvious and simple solutions. But creating multiple classes of service on the Internet is likely to cause as many problems as it solves. It would be a difficult transition to go to fee-based email, but doing it across the board so that every email continues to get the same level of treatment would be better than AOL's proposal.
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People obey traffic laws, Atlanta shuts down
If you are interested in how the ability to make and publish your own video programming is going to change the media landscape, take 5 minutes to watch this video made by some young people in Atlanta.
If you have ever driven on Atlanta highways, you know that the traffic on the ring roads circling the city are some of the worst in the country. Despite a posted speed limit of 55 mph, traffic routinely moves at speeds up to 80 mph.
This group of young people made their own video of....(gasp!)
Obeying traffic laws!
Oh, the horror! Their video shows just how desperate commuters are to drive over the speed limit, including one incident that could have been a serious accident. But who would have been at fault? They were just driving the speed limit.
It's a great demonstration of the video streaming technology. The video is hosted on Google, and yes, the quality is mediocre. But it really does not affect the message at all, which is that Atlanta's traffic situation is completely out of control.
And it was not one of those breathless six o'clock news stories (...up next, the dangers of dust bunnies and the story of one family's struggle. Could there be dust bunnies in your neighborhood? News Channel 7 investigates because we're on your side!).
People young and old should be telling their own stories in every neighborhood and community in the country, and there should be a community-owned video server so that our stories are not turned into billboards that fill Google's pockets and return nothing to the community.
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Rural communities slowly getting more broadband
The number of rural people using broadband more than doubled between 2003 and 2005, but that is still just a little more than half the number of urban broadband users. A new Pew Foundation study says availability seems to the primary factor--no surprise to anyone that lives in a rural area of the U.S.
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PCNA 2006: IP is a social contract
Garth Graham is the visionary leader behind Telecommunities Canada; Graham has been thinking about communities and technology longer and with more clarity than most of us, and when Garth talks, I try to shut up and listen. In the hallway between PCNA sessions, I made a casual statement about how "technology is a tool." It's an innocuous phrase that has been uttered by millions of technocrats at one time or another.
But Graham looked me straight in the eyes and said, "Andrew, I have to disagree with you. IP is a social contract, not a tool."
The instant he said it, I knew it was true, and I realized I had missed an important piece of the puzzle. IP (Internet Protocol) is a relatively simple set of rules used by all the individual networks that comprise the "Internet." The IP rules work only because individual network operators have informally agreed to abide by them for the last twenty years or so--an informal social contract.
The alarming proposals for a multi-tiered Internet discard that social contract and replace it with business contracts between network access providers and content providers. Content users are left out completely.
As Garth said, "We can't let this happen." I agree.
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World of Warcraft takes aim at Chinese censors
Cory Doctorow, writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail, says that some of the more than 4.5 million World of Warcraft players are taking aim at Chinese communist censors. The popular multiplayer online game has a worldwide audience of participants, including many in China.
The gamers intend to subvert the censorship rules against discussing certain topics like freedom and democracy on China's Internet by embedding forbidden information in the game itself. Players can import texts and images and carry them around as they play. As they do so, they can pass that information on to other players.
The information can be blocked, but it will be very expensive to do so. Blizzard Entertainment would be forced to spend much money to block the information passing, or risk losing American players who are angry that other American companies like Cisco, Google, and Yahoo! are working with the Chinese government to not only censor information but identify Chinese users who are writing about forbidden topics.
In at least one case, a Chinese citizen turned in by Yahoo! was imprisoned and tortured. The gamers are forcing Blizzard to take a moral stand. It will be interesting to see how this plays out--in this case, literally.
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