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"A July 1999 IETF specification (RFC 2638) discusses paid prioritization by saying: “It is expected that premium traffic would be allocated a small percentage of the total network capacity, but that it would be priced much higher.” Another specification (RFC 2475) published half a year earlier says that setting different priorities for packets will “accommodate heterogeneous application requirements and user expectations” and “permit differentiated pricing of Internet service.” (An RFC is a policy document, often accepted as standards, published by the IETF.)"

I would also add that the abstract of RFC 2474 says:

“Differentiated services enhancements to the Internet protocol are intended to enable scalable service discrimination in the Internet”

http://www.digitalsociety.org/...

I explained the dispute between Level3/Netflix and Comcast in better detail here and it's not as simple as you made it out to be. http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/video-level-3-versus-comcast-peering-dispute/ http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/division-of-labor-between-broadband-and-cdn/

I explained the dispute between Level3/Netflix and Comcast in better detail here and it's not as simple as you made it out to be. http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/video-level-3-versus-comcast-peering-dispute/ http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/division-of-labor-between-broadband-and-cdn/

The real fight, not the cosmetic fight over ISPs censoring content which they can't do anyways, is over the government setting peering and interconnect prices even though this has always been set by the free market. In this case, the hardline Net Neutrality proponents want to set ISP peering rates to zero, or at least heavily regulated by the ISPs. The FCC tried to compromise by putting out incoherent regulations that would outlaw paid prioritization but not outlaw paid peering which are essentially the same thing (see http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/fccs-utter-incoherence-on-paid-prioritization/). The FCC thought that compromise rules wouldn't get them sued by the ISPs and slammed by most of congress, but that happened anyways.

No, I've posted one of the more thoughtful posts here. http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/the-need-for-a-broadband-transparency-standard/. It's not a straightforward answer.

"why can so many service providers in northern Europe and southeast Asia provide an extremely consistent 100+ mbps, even at night when virtually everyone is online (say in South Korea), to every single household for anywhere from $10-$50/month?"

The actual data shows US providers more honest. US promise index was 93%. EU promise index was 84.3%.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/10/ookla-data-debunks-fcc-report-us-isps-exonerated/

These priority lanes have existed since the beginning of the broadband era.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/video-level-3-versus-comcast-peering-dispute/
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/division-of-labor-between-broadband-and-cdn/

These priority lanes have existed since the beginning of the broadband era.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/video-level-3-versus-comcast-peering-dispute/
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/12/division-of-labor-between-broadband-and-cdn/

I was thinking about the same thing earlier today and I remember this from last month: Facebook and Twitter score an F for Fail in online security test. No SSL auth for starters.

I'm wondering how far could a site go in security without automatic SSL for both auth and browsing? Does it make sense to have the browser encrypt username and password before sending them over to the server? Is there a suitably strong method for this that makes it hard enough to brute-force to make it secure enough to use?

If such a way would be viable, this would be good news for websites in terms of minimizing costs. Gawker, Facebook and so on don't have a problem for shelling out $500 for an SSL cert, which starting projects can hardly afford. But as the large user base makes the fixed-price cert more affordable, there comes another problem: hardware power. I don't remember what's the difference between CPU and memory requirements of HTTP and HTTPS, but it's huge.

A small startup project isn't maxing its hardware or can easily afford a few dollars a month for a better hosting. However for a big company the increase in hardware costs for added security is a lot more per month. The abovementioned alternative would instead decrease hardware requirements: instead of encrypting the password and comparing it to the encrypted password in the database, the server can skip the encryption as the browser did it already on client-side.

Although now wonder if we're being manipulated:

Level 3 outbid Akamai on Netflix by reselling stolen bandwidth
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/11/level-3-outbid-akamai-on-netflix-by-reselling-stolen-bandwidth/

Forced SSL doesn't even work for Google, Twitter, and Facebook and probably most other sites even if they support SSL. That's because the javascript on those pages will opt to transmit authentication cookies in the clear. http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/10/even-forced-ssl-is-broken-for-facebook-google-twitter/

Most YouTube videos are 360P at 330 Kbps, topping out at 720P at 2.25 Mbps. But I hear 720P is very rare. (Source)

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/youtube-adds-4k-video-capability-but-how-improving-1080p-first/
Google just announced that YouTube will now support “original” resolutions of up to “4096P”, but it’s actually a maximum of 3072P narrowscreen or 2304P widescreen. This announcement makes it sound as if our computers and broadband connection lags Google YouTube when YouTube is actually the weakest link. YouTube’s biggest problem is their over compressed “HD” video that looks nothing like HD video.

For those just tuning in, parent poster is not making this up. Mac keyboards have been infected with keyloggers in the past. The mind boggles why Apple would make their keyboards re-flashable.

When I said "densities nearly doubled" I meant PPI nearly doubled (which means much much better improvement in density occurred last year).

Also, here's a webpage explaining what I'm talking about with the false advertising: http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/apple-using-fake-489-to-815-ppi-on-iphone-4-ads/

They mislead on various items in the keynote. The comparison shots they used for "non-retina display vs Retina display" are way off accurate. There was a good blog post about it here:

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/apple-using-fake-489-to-815-ppi-on-iphone-4-ads/

Moreover, they say that the aluminosilicate glass-ceramic on the front and back is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness -- but by all indications, even the toughest Aluminosilicate glass ceramics (Gorilla Glass) rate at a 7 on the Mohs Scale. Sapphire is a 9 and is *4x* harder than a 7. This makes a big difference becuase at a 7, it's comparable to quartz and therefore most types of sand in hardness. This means a few loose grains of sand in your pocket can result in a scratched up device. If it were truely comparable to sapphire in hardness, this would not be the case. These sort of distinctions matter. I don't see how being 1/4th as hard as sapphire is "comparable to sapphire" in hardness. I wonder if Apple would accept a "comparable" payment to the iPhone's retail price . . .

It's one thing when Apple just loosely throws around superlatives like "revolutionary" and "magical" to try to generate a Reality Distortion Field, but it's another thing entirely when they exaggerate and mislead in their claims about their device.

The facts about urban wireless towers is that they're very low power because of the high population density. They use very small cells in urban towers to achieve a very small coverage radius so that they can put up more towers in the city and reuse the same spectrum. Furthermore, just being in-doors cuts the power level 10-fold and I'd really doubt that you're getting more than -40 dBm which is equivalent to 100 nanowatts of power even if you're outside the windows. My Wi-Fi Access Point is 5 feet from me and it's got a power level of -13 dBm which is about 1000 times stronger than a -40 dBm signal. Now if you think that's high, your cell phone probably has a signal strength of +10 dBm which means the power density is 100,000 times stronger than a -40 dBm signal. And if you think the phone is dangerous, check out this article from me http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/sar-ratings-are-not-a-measure-of-radiation/ and this article http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/01/cell-phone-exposure-prevents-or-reverses-alzheimer-in-mice/. So really, worrying about that cellular tower is just silly. If you're really worried about it, buy one of those $100 "Electrosmog" meters and measure the signal strength yourself at various places.

The facts about urban wireless towers is that they're very low power because of the high population density. They use very small cells in urban towers to achieve a very small coverage radius so that they can put up more towers in the city and reuse the same spectrum. Furthermore, just being in-doors cuts the power level 10-fold and I'd really doubt that you're getting more than -40 dBm which is equivalent to 100 nanowatts of power even if you're outside the windows. My Wi-Fi Access Point is 5 feet from me and it's got a power level of -13 dBm which is about 1000 times stronger than a -40 dBm signal. Now if you think that's high, your cell phone probably has a signal strength of +10 dBm which means the power density is 100,000 times stronger than a -40 dBm signal. And if you think the phone is dangerous, check out this article from me http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/sar-ratings-are-not-a-measure-of-radiation/ and this article http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/01/cell-phone-exposure-prevents-or-reverses-alzheimer-in-mice/. So really, worrying about that cellular tower is just silly. If you're really worried about it, buy one of those $100 "Electrosmog" meters and measure the signal strength yourself at various places.

Looking at federal spending, almost all of the subsidy is being wasted on high cost areas for telephone service where we use USF taxes to subsidize $16K per year per phone line http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/americans-are-subsidizing-16834-phone-lines/. USF subsidies work out to about $7B and some of it goes to libraries, schools, and low income families. However, around $5B is mostly wasted on high cost funds.

The tax payer subsidies are not funding the "Internet industry" as you claim. The telecom and cable industry spends about $50B in private investments per year on communications infrastructure and that's 10 times higher than the USF subsidies. The stimulus funding that was approved this year was only $7.2 billion, but it came with so many strings attached that no large Telco or cable company took up the offer.

It's unfortunate that the Slashdot community is going to rate up unsubstantiated claims as "informative".

They advertise it as "up to" and not "at least". It is confusing, but it's not misleading. That's why I've proposed a better transparency standard http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/the-need-for-a-broadband-transparency-standard/.

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/analysis-of-bittorrent-utp-congestion-avoidance/ BitTorrent’s new uTP protocol claims to be “network friendly”, but testing suggests that it’s just as nasty to web surfing, online gaming, and VoIP as before. BitTorrent still consumes 90% of the network and causes very high jitter.