They need to do traffic shaping because different kinds of traffic have different requirements. My netflix streaming video doesn't need much bandwidth, but suffers horribly if that bandwidth is too erratic. My torrent can use all the bandwidth there is, but I don't care whether it goes in fits and starts.
I wouldn't mind at all some kind of deal with a low "guaranteed" bandwidth amount (you can always get that much) and a high "maximum" bandwidth amount (which you may not get). But ultimately... As long as bandwidth is a finite resource, things like traffic-shaping, and blocking bad actors, are crucial.
Think about a DoS attack. Do you want your ISP to be able to block that traffic, rather than delivering it all down your pipe to your router so you can filter it yourself? I sure do. But by filtering a DoS attack, while not filtering my Usenet feed, they are not being "neutral".
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
By the time mail gets that far, it's already way too expensive. I want spam sources filtered early enough that it actually does some good for my bandwidth.
The ISP is the network, not the end point; my computer is the end point. But I want the ISP to filter mail, because if they don't, I can't actually use the internet, because their traffic is all tied up sending spam which I then filter.
Think about what happened to spam volumes when McColo went off line. Remember that?
Now imagine what happens if McColo can say "you can't stop peering with us, only actual end users are allowed to filter the email we send."
That's network neutrality. If the upstreams are allowed to say "come to think of it, we don't like how you use bandwidth", then we don't have network neutrality. If they're not, then McColo stays online, because they're buying bandwidth and using it.
Not all spam is email -- consider blog comments.:)
I don't see how much simpler or more obvious the example can be. I block spam. Net neutrality bill is passed. Spammer sues on the grounds that I am blocking his traffic. Law requires me to treat all incoming traffic equally, not giving preference to some traffic over other traffic.
Even if he doesn't win, the mere fact that he's got a case that would likely sound plausible to a not-very-technical judge means he can cost me a ton of money -- enough that it's not cost-effective to block his spam.
I can't comprehend which part of this isn't completely, totally, obvious. You advocate a law that no one can ever block traffic they don't like. Then you ask how this could affect people who block traffic they don't like.
Actually, a great deal of spam isn't illegal. Or if it is, it's only temporarily illegal. Some kinds of spam might be illegal because they're unauthorized access, but if it were illegal to not authorize them (because it isn't Net Neutral to unauthorize some accesses ut not others), then they wouldn't be illegal anymore...
But you're right, it may not be the best example. It's just the one that most jumps out at me as a case where I have been blocking or throttling traffic because it would cost too much to process it. I've been doing that for years, and now suddenly people are saying "oh, you should never be allowed to throttle traffic just because you think it's too expensive."
I tend to think of it as noise, but the fact is, by the offered definitions and categories, I am "censoring" the Internet.
This is why I don't take posts like that as evidence of having considered the issues; it's all buzzwords and sound bites without any connection to reality. It amazes me how quickly people who are outraged by incoherent sound bites from the RIAA and friends turn around and applaud incoherent sound bites that say "net neutrality" or "censorship" somewhere in them.
You're right, I'm on the side of the censors. I've been blocking spam aggressively on networks I run for over ten years, and I'm not planning to stop.
That's censoring. I am making the unilateral decision that people who send bulk quantities of email to harveste addresses are not valuable enough to get access to my network.
No one has yet given me a technical definition of network neutrality that allows me to block or filter spam.
The right to say "I don't want your content" or "I only want a trickle of your content" is a pretty important right. In fact, it's also a free speech issue -- one of the rights of free speech is freedom from compelled speech.
I want the right to refuse unwanted traffic, or traffic-shape it into oblivion. But that seems to be essentially incompatible with "net neutrality". Once I'm making judgements on whether I feel happy with the amount of traffic I get from a given source, I'm not being net neutral. But if I can't make those judgements, people drown in spam.
So go ahead. Offer a set of words that we could back as "net neutrality" which couldn't be used as the basis for lawsuit-based harassment of ISPs that block spam. Remember, you're proposing laws; you can't rely on any kind of common sense or sanity. If your words do not mean EXACTLY what you want, and have all the exceptions clearly encoded, you have probably made things worse rather than better.
Netflix is turning away a vanishingly small number of customers that would be very expensive to support.
But... Even if we stipulate to your claim, so what? The charge against them wasn't that we think they could make more money running their business a different way, but that they were "hypocritical". That's not been established.
Ultimately, I just don't care. Yes, I have a Linux box on which it might be sorta nice to run Netflix. The one I care about dual-boots to Windows. Mostly I watch it on my iPad, or my Mac, or my iPhone, or another laptop, or the Wii... Point is, I'm not really missing much from the lack of Linux support, so I'm a happy customer, even though I have a lot of Linux systems lying around the house.
The purpose of allowing them to use open source is that we want to give stuff away so other people can use it.
And we, too, can use that open source.
If the only way you'll give something away is if people agree that they are actually obligated to give something of equal value back, that's not actually giving something away at all. I don't release stuff as open source because I think it makes people owe me free stuff, I release stuff as open source because I believe it is the way in which I can maximize the value of my contributions.
I guess I just don't see the cause for outrage. It's a small market which is exceptionally hard to support due to the degree of fragmentation -- you can't just release a program "for Linux". And source code would create its own issues -- I'd guess a lot of the people who are licensing content to Netflix aren't about to license it for display in an open source player.
In the long run, having them come out and praise open source will probably do a fair bit of good for the cause, but I don't see this as something where "hypocrisy" is at issue. They're not demanding that other people release open source, they're just using open source products for the exact purposes they were released for.
It's actually pretty relevant for the forseeable future (say, as long as most of us having this conversation are likely to be alive). There is no realistic chance that discrimination and harassment will go away sooner than that. So until then, policies that promote a requirement that people use real names will be strongly discriminatory. And that will probably still be true centuries from now, even though the groups affected will, of course, change.
As to aliases... Read the fine print. Blizzard views using something that isn't the real name on your government ID as in and of itself a bannable offense.
It's not really the future. Being "the future" does not change human nature. People have been discriminating against and retaliating against other people for any and all reasons, including things like "being different", for thousands of years. It's not changing. And similarly, the importance of allowing people to participate in activities without having their "real names" disclosed will be with us for some time.
I'm biased, though. I live in a country which wouldn't exist if people hadn't been able to publish unpopular material under untraced pseudonyms.
I don't think it works that way generically. There are always going to be some people looking around to harass someone, and some people who have strong reasons not to use their legal names in some contexts. Yes, Blizzard has my legal name (though if they're honest about their privacy stuff, they shortly won't). That doesn't mean they've got permission to give it out to random strangers.
Blizzard told those of us who weren't cisgendered white males with tolerant jobs to go take a hike. Some of us took them at their word.
But back when Blizzard made that deal with Facebook, well. They've been really pushing the real names in game thing, and it's not something I like. They're also using real names on the new forums after all -- sure, they don't officially show them to other people, but they broadcast your real name in plain text with every page view, and they don't use encryption for it.
Which would be a really stupid thing to do if there were anyone interested in trying to phish WoW players.
Back before the ActiVision merger, Blizzard paid a fair bit of attention to security, and it was clearly the fault of idiot players when they got hacked. But back then, the people playing the game were the customers. Now, the people playing the game are the product, and Facebook are the customers.
So even though pretty much all the game mechanics changes to the game sound great, and are stuff I was really enthused about, I'm still out. Went to a game where global friending people doesn't use real names, and I'm happy.
The people who are upset about it left. I'm one of them. One of my best friends, with whom I used to play WoW, is a guy whose legal name is "Jessica". We do not want to use real names, but we wanted to be able to be friends across alts/factions/etc.
So we went to City of Heroes, which uses a global handle instead of real names, and we're happy.
You cannot seriously expect me to believe that they thought it would "minimize trolls".
They've been lying about this stuff from Day 1. And yes, I mean "lying" -- they have said things which they can't possibly have believed to be true, because they've said things which were mutually exclusive.
Note that they did, in fact, go live with new forums on which your real name is displayed, in theory only to you -- but it's sent in unencrypted http, so...
If you want to marry someone, "chances are" that person is of the opposite sex. If you want to marry someone, "chances are" that person has about the same skin color you do. If you have a job, "chances are" that you are physically present in an office with your coworkers every working day.
In the real world, people like to have "friends" in online games who may not be people they know in real life, or whose real names they know.
I'd view exercise as fixing what's broken, and a body that can stay healthy without it as being made so it doesn't break in the first place.
Is losing 20 years to dying young that much worse than losing 20 years to running and lifting weights instead of doing things that involve some kind of intellectual stimulation?
I was sad to hear that his death did not involve a banana peel, a wheelchair, and eight flights of stairs.
Re-watched Naked Gun last night. A very funny movie. The man really was brilliant. Also of interest to people who enjoyed it, "Repossessed", an Exorcist parody which uses the same actor that was the possessed girl in the original, and a few other similarly silly movies. Great use of sight gags and silly dialogue.
I think a lot of people underestimate the positive effects comedians have on our world. I've got a nasty cold, but while I was watching that movie, I was happy and not particularly bothered by the cold.
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They need to do traffic shaping because different kinds of traffic have different requirements. My netflix streaming video doesn't need much bandwidth, but suffers horribly if that bandwidth is too erratic. My torrent can use all the bandwidth there is, but I don't care whether it goes in fits and starts.
I wouldn't mind at all some kind of deal with a low "guaranteed" bandwidth amount (you can always get that much) and a high "maximum" bandwidth amount (which you may not get). But ultimately... As long as bandwidth is a finite resource, things like traffic-shaping, and blocking bad actors, are crucial.
Think about a DoS attack. Do you want your ISP to be able to block that traffic, rather than delivering it all down your pipe to your router so you can filter it yourself? I sure do. But by filtering a DoS attack, while not filtering my Usenet feed, they are not being "neutral".
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
Death threats against the vice president, breaking into his neighbor's wireless... But no, he didn't stop there. Child porn.
I wonder if some company that has a wireless security technology hired this guy to make their product look necessary.
By the time mail gets that far, it's already way too expensive. I want spam sources filtered early enough that it actually does some good for my bandwidth.
Woah there. Think it through a little more:
The ISP is the network, not the end point; my computer is the end point. But I want the ISP to filter mail, because if they don't, I can't actually use the internet, because their traffic is all tied up sending spam which I then filter.
Think about what happened to spam volumes when McColo went off line. Remember that?
Now imagine what happens if McColo can say "you can't stop peering with us, only actual end users are allowed to filter the email we send."
That's network neutrality. If the upstreams are allowed to say "come to think of it, we don't like how you use bandwidth", then we don't have network neutrality. If they're not, then McColo stays online, because they're buying bandwidth and using it.
Not all spam is email -- consider blog comments. :)
I don't see how much simpler or more obvious the example can be. I block spam. Net neutrality bill is passed. Spammer sues on the grounds that I am blocking his traffic. Law requires me to treat all incoming traffic equally, not giving preference to some traffic over other traffic.
Even if he doesn't win, the mere fact that he's got a case that would likely sound plausible to a not-very-technical judge means he can cost me a ton of money -- enough that it's not cost-effective to block his spam.
I can't comprehend which part of this isn't completely, totally, obvious. You advocate a law that no one can ever block traffic they don't like. Then you ask how this could affect people who block traffic they don't like.
Actually, a great deal of spam isn't illegal. Or if it is, it's only temporarily illegal. Some kinds of spam might be illegal because they're unauthorized access, but if it were illegal to not authorize them (because it isn't Net Neutral to unauthorize some accesses ut not others), then they wouldn't be illegal anymore...
But you're right, it may not be the best example. It's just the one that most jumps out at me as a case where I have been blocking or throttling traffic because it would cost too much to process it. I've been doing that for years, and now suddenly people are saying "oh, you should never be allowed to throttle traffic just because you think it's too expensive."
I tend to think of it as noise, but the fact is, by the offered definitions and categories, I am "censoring" the Internet.
This is why I don't take posts like that as evidence of having considered the issues; it's all buzzwords and sound bites without any connection to reality. It amazes me how quickly people who are outraged by incoherent sound bites from the RIAA and friends turn around and applaud incoherent sound bites that say "net neutrality" or "censorship" somewhere in them.
You're right, I'm on the side of the censors. I've been blocking spam aggressively on networks I run for over ten years, and I'm not planning to stop.
That's censoring. I am making the unilateral decision that people who send bulk quantities of email to harveste addresses are not valuable enough to get access to my network.
Cry me a river.
Look, I love the idea, but.
No one has yet given me a technical definition of network neutrality that allows me to block or filter spam.
The right to say "I don't want your content" or "I only want a trickle of your content" is a pretty important right. In fact, it's also a free speech issue -- one of the rights of free speech is freedom from compelled speech.
I want the right to refuse unwanted traffic, or traffic-shape it into oblivion. But that seems to be essentially incompatible with "net neutrality". Once I'm making judgements on whether I feel happy with the amount of traffic I get from a given source, I'm not being net neutral. But if I can't make those judgements, people drown in spam.
So go ahead. Offer a set of words that we could back as "net neutrality" which couldn't be used as the basis for lawsuit-based harassment of ISPs that block spam. Remember, you're proposing laws; you can't rely on any kind of common sense or sanity. If your words do not mean EXACTLY what you want, and have all the exceptions clearly encoded, you have probably made things worse rather than better.
Netflix is turning away a vanishingly small number of customers that would be very expensive to support.
But... Even if we stipulate to your claim, so what? The charge against them wasn't that we think they could make more money running their business a different way, but that they were "hypocritical". That's not been established.
Ultimately, I just don't care. Yes, I have a Linux box on which it might be sorta nice to run Netflix. The one I care about dual-boots to Windows. Mostly I watch it on my iPad, or my Mac, or my iPhone, or another laptop, or the Wii... Point is, I'm not really missing much from the lack of Linux support, so I'm a happy customer, even though I have a lot of Linux systems lying around the house.
The purpose of allowing them to use open source is that we want to give stuff away so other people can use it.
And we, too, can use that open source.
If the only way you'll give something away is if people agree that they are actually obligated to give something of equal value back, that's not actually giving something away at all. I don't release stuff as open source because I think it makes people owe me free stuff, I release stuff as open source because I believe it is the way in which I can maximize the value of my contributions.
I guess I just don't see the cause for outrage. It's a small market which is exceptionally hard to support due to the degree of fragmentation -- you can't just release a program "for Linux". And source code would create its own issues -- I'd guess a lot of the people who are licensing content to Netflix aren't about to license it for display in an open source player.
In the long run, having them come out and praise open source will probably do a fair bit of good for the cause, but I don't see this as something where "hypocrisy" is at issue. They're not demanding that other people release open source, they're just using open source products for the exact purposes they were released for.
It's actually pretty relevant for the forseeable future (say, as long as most of us having this conversation are likely to be alive). There is no realistic chance that discrimination and harassment will go away sooner than that. So until then, policies that promote a requirement that people use real names will be strongly discriminatory. And that will probably still be true centuries from now, even though the groups affected will, of course, change.
As to aliases... Read the fine print. Blizzard views using something that isn't the real name on your government ID as in and of itself a bannable offense.
It's not really the future. Being "the future" does not change human nature. People have been discriminating against and retaliating against other people for any and all reasons, including things like "being different", for thousands of years. It's not changing. And similarly, the importance of allowing people to participate in activities without having their "real names" disclosed will be with us for some time.
I'm biased, though. I live in a country which wouldn't exist if people hadn't been able to publish unpopular material under untraced pseudonyms.
I don't think it works that way generically. There are always going to be some people looking around to harass someone, and some people who have strong reasons not to use their legal names in some contexts. Yes, Blizzard has my legal name (though if they're honest about their privacy stuff, they shortly won't). That doesn't mean they've got permission to give it out to random strangers.
Blizzard told those of us who weren't cisgendered white males with tolerant jobs to go take a hike. Some of us took them at their word.
Whenever you type '!admin' all I see is '******'. Whereas, if I type 'hunter2', all you see is '*******'.
Please fix the title of this article, typos are annoying. Thank you.
But back when Blizzard made that deal with Facebook, well. They've been really pushing the real names in game thing, and it's not something I like. They're also using real names on the new forums after all -- sure, they don't officially show them to other people, but they broadcast your real name in plain text with every page view, and they don't use encryption for it.
Which would be a really stupid thing to do if there were anyone interested in trying to phish WoW players.
Back before the ActiVision merger, Blizzard paid a fair bit of attention to security, and it was clearly the fault of idiot players when they got hacked. But back then, the people playing the game were the customers. Now, the people playing the game are the product, and Facebook are the customers.
So even though pretty much all the game mechanics changes to the game sound great, and are stuff I was really enthused about, I'm still out. Went to a game where global friending people doesn't use real names, and I'm happy.
The people who are upset about it left. I'm one of them. One of my best friends, with whom I used to play WoW, is a guy whose legal name is "Jessica". We do not want to use real names, but we wanted to be able to be friends across alts/factions/etc.
So we went to City of Heroes, which uses a global handle instead of real names, and we're happy.
That's a very marginal defense of Real ID, since the pirmary purpose of a "friends" system would be to let you keep in touch across multiple alts.
You cannot seriously expect me to believe that they thought it would "minimize trolls".
They've been lying about this stuff from Day 1. And yes, I mean "lying" -- they have said things which they can't possibly have believed to be true, because they've said things which were mutually exclusive.
Note that they did, in fact, go live with new forums on which your real name is displayed, in theory only to you -- but it's sent in unencrypted http, so...
"Chances are" is a shitty way to design policy.
If you want to marry someone, "chances are" that person is of the opposite sex.
If you want to marry someone, "chances are" that person has about the same skin color you do.
If you have a job, "chances are" that you are physically present in an office with your coworkers every working day.
In the real world, people like to have "friends" in online games who may not be people they know in real life, or whose real names they know.
I'd view exercise as fixing what's broken, and a body that can stay healthy without it as being made so it doesn't break in the first place.
Is losing 20 years to dying young that much worse than losing 20 years to running and lifting weights instead of doing things that involve some kind of intellectual stimulation?
I was sad to hear that his death did not involve a banana peel, a wheelchair, and eight flights of stairs.
Re-watched Naked Gun last night. A very funny movie. The man really was brilliant. Also of interest to people who enjoyed it, "Repossessed", an Exorcist parody which uses the same actor that was the possessed girl in the original, and a few other similarly silly movies. Great use of sight gags and silly dialogue.
I think a lot of people underestimate the positive effects comedians have on our world. I've got a nasty cold, but while I was watching that movie, I was happy and not particularly bothered by the cold.
Uh, no. I'm a long-time gamer, I grew up with games, and game quality has been massively improving for the last thirty-some years.
Nostalgia is not an accurate representation of reality.