You should complain about the entire industry, then. Because if all of Comcast's millions of subscribers tried to use all of their 16mbps stream at once, the Internet would explode. That's because no backbone is capable of supporting 16,000,000mbps.
The industry works based upon averages and the assumption that not everyone will be using the full 16 at a time. If you want guaranteed bandwidth, you have to pay a hell of a lot more than you are right now--enough that most people wouldn't be able to afford it (and meaning you pay even more because economies of scale stop working for the ISP.)
Yeah, I know everyone thinks "I pay for Xmbps, I should get Xmbps." Unfortunately, the world just doesn't work that way. And per the subscriber agreement, that's not what you're paying for anyway.
Actually, hot potato routing is subtly different. It means that if the best peer is saturated, it will send traffic out the next best peer. The effect is that packets (tend) to get shoved out faster. There's no buffering on the sending side, and most of the time, the destination gets the packet sooner. In theory, the next best peer could be so much worse that buffering would be better. In practice, this doesn't happen much.
It might be slightly more fair to always use the same paths, but it's way better for way more people to move packets faster.
But Comcast has a backbone, too. They provide business services, space in data centers, etc. They also happen to provide last mile service. Does the fact that they also provide last mile service mean that they can't refer to traffic ratios when negotiating peering agreements?
Do we know that for a fact? I am skeptical. Bandwidth usage globally is increasing, and the rate of increase is increasing, and it's only going to get worse. Every ISP in the world has to deal with this every day, every year, and so on.
Yes, and it's common to have interconnection agreements with other providers where the larger provider (the one sending more data) pays the smaller provider. This is SOP in the telecom industry.
If carrying Netflix is putting them in the red, why doesn't it do the same to small, local cable ISPs, who only have a few thousand customers?
Well right now, they have an agreement with Akamai. Akamai pays Comcast. Akamai streams Netflix. Netflix now wants to stream from L3. L3 needs to pay Comcast.
I can't speak for all providers, but this is not uncommon. Akamai pays my ISP, too, for essentially the same privilege (note that Akamai sends more than just Netflix--they also handle iTunes and other big content providers.)
I may be wrong, but I suspect it's not a matter of losing money carrying Netflix content, but simply a matter of corporate greed.
Well certainly Comcast could eat the costs. They are almost certainly capable of doing this. Just like Wal Mart could eat the cost of certain levels of shrinkage, and Microsoft could probably give VS2010 away for free and still make money overall. That doesn't mean that they should.
It's because of the longstanding practices in the telecom industry--that networks of relative size (measured in transmitted data) peer with each other for free, while networks of large size pay to transmit data to smaller networks (if they want a direct connection to that network.)
This is actually how the backbones have worked for almost as long as the Internet has been commercial. Normally if one peer thinks that they're getting the short end of the stick, they depeer and traffic has to route through less optimal paths (hopefully--occasionally there just isn't a route.) In this case, Comcast is making it a net neutrality issue by telling L3 that they will only block the CDN traffic.
Comcast should depeer or increase what they charge their customers. They shouldn't be blocking selectively. But the real bad guy here is actually L3.
Yes, the fact that they cut off only a particular part of the traffic from L3 is what makes it a Net Neutrality issue. However they were put into a very bad position by L3. They basically have three options:
1) Go against longstanding standard practices in the commercial Internet age whereby peers exchanging similar amounts of data don't pay, but connections to networks who exchange disproportionate amounts of data do have to pay. To do this, they would continue to peer with L3, despite the dramatic increase of throughput L3 will soon be pushing. This would very nice for L3, as it would mean that they are basically getting for free what most people would have to pay for anyway (yes, historically if you are pushing a lot of data to one of your peers, you have to pay them.)
2) Depeer from L3, which would at best mean that your connection to anything hosted by or attached to L3 would suffer dramatically as it took a much less direct route, and a route which probably has a lot of other people hanging off of it. At worst, it would mean that you lost connectivity to certain sites. This has happened before. Google Chrome has a bug which won't let me paste into Slashdot forms, so google "playing chicken isp depeering" and "sprint cogent depeering" for examples.
3) They can block only the content which is (now) causing the disproportionate interconnection, violating net neutrality but otherwise compromising on 1 and 2 above.
4) Tell their customers that they now have to pay $XX more per month. They probably have monopolies in most places, so the customers won't have much choice.
This really puts Comcast in a pretty bad position. Ostensibly, the agreement between Akamai and Comcast was there to help shoulder some of the costs of receiving the huge amounts of traffic that was being sent through Comcast's network. It's perfectly reasonable to expect L3 to pay similarly. Depeering would screw a lot of people, and just accepting the new traffic would cause Comcast to take a pretty big financial hit. The only reasonable solution (in my mind) is to increase what customers pay, but that just means that L3 (and other big CDNs) will learn that they can get away with bullying around other networks.
This is actually the reason that I support municipal and federal control over the American backbone of the Internet. Internet should be a commodity available to everyone. The politics of peering really screw things up.
This is really a very fine line. I tend to fall on your side, but only just.
What Comcast is trying to do is maintain the peering arrangement with L3 while not getting screwed by L3's sudden and massive increase in throughput. The solution was to block the cause of that sudden and massive increase in throughput. Depeering with L3 (the correct response if you subscribe to Net Neutrality) would likely cause as many or more problems for Comcast AND L3 customers, and for L3's other peers.
I'm certainly not saying that Comcast is acting selflessly in all of this, but I really think that it's L3 that is being the bully. Comcast added a wrong (which didn't make a right) in order to put a bandaid on the problem until L3 agrees to a commercial agreement for the now lopsided peering.
We've seen depeering before, and it usually screws a lot of people out of much of the Internet until one side or the other backs down.
The 360 appealed more to the traditional console crowd.
Well, for varying definitions of "traditional." I prefer the Wii because I like fun games, and FPS with horrible controls are not (imo) fun. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many Wii games feel very much like the classics I remember--sometimes because they are 2D (NSMBW, the new Donkey Kong) and sometimes because they capture the spirit of those games (Super Mario Bros Galaxy, Zelda.) No, I think that the Wii is more traditional, and that the Xbox (and later the 360) really broke out and found new ways to compete.
I think that the real appeal of the 360 was online play and FPS. Graphics almost certainly also enter into the equation, if the cries of 360 owners belittling Wii owners purchase decisions is any indication. Also, both the Xbox (mostly the 360) and the Wii managed to get into new markets. The 360 managed to get a lot of previously non-gamers to the table--people who had before looked down on gamers as nerds or geeks. The Wii, as you point out, managed to capture the casual gamer market quite well. And obviously, both Microsoft and Sony thought there was a future in motion-based controls, given the recent releases of the Kinect and the Move respectively.
There's a huge distinction between purposeful bricking and potential bricking due to a bad interaction between user-modifications and official updates. Nowhere does that say that the bricking is intentional. Apple is warning that an update may brick the phone, and that due to the jailbreak, it won't be covered under warranty.
There's been a lot of spin on that issue. I haven't seen any indication that the plan is to actually brick for jailbreaking. Continue to believe the FUD, though--doesn't bother me.
Nobody has a problem with Apple selling their product in a state they like. The problem is with Apple trying to assert control over how people use their product after they've sold it.
Only they're not even doing this. They just don't support jailbreaking. They don't try to stop people from jailbreaking, nor do they seem to be attempting to stop the jailbreak developers from releasing the tools.
What you're talking about is digital signing. What I was talking about was encryption. Both would work just fine to mitigate the problem (as I said.) The GP to my original post said nothing about encryption or signing, just "password protecting."
Neither approach solves the problem (as implied by my use of the word "mitigates."
It's the height of arrogance to assume that I didn't mean what I wrote.
This kind of problem can be significantly mitigated through the methods suggested by the GP, though. Encrypt the list of enabled plugins with a user password. Now other software may be able to add plugins, but they can't enable them. You could go farther and encrypt the entire plugin directory, but I think that's probably overkill.
Yeah, but that was practically a demo. I haven't tried Wii Punch Out--does it use a similar mechanic?
One of the things I really disliked about Wii Sports was that the motions you made only barely correlated with the motions your character could perform. Tennis is the best example of this--where you halt your swing determined what type of swing your character took (most people I knew tried to swing as though they were swinging a real tennis racket--which didn't work particularly well.) Most of those minigames had similar quirks.
Better, more precise motion might be useful. However I think that motion itself is vastly overrated. Between the difficulty with repeating the same motions precisely (the ability to do this separates the average person from sports players) and the difficulty of the Wii in interpreting your motions, I'll take discrete button presses any day.
Most of the really good Wii titles don't even use the Wii motion controls for anything more than a gimmick, though. Frequently, shaking could have been replaced with a simple button press (and that would have been far more accurate--I'm looking at you, New Super Mario Bros. Wii) Pointing at the screen gets quite a bit of use, at least since it's got a fairly obvious application (aiming in a FPS.)
The accelerometers were a gimmick, and I think that Nintendo knows it. It worked out for them--they did a good amount of business while in competition with two other giants. What I think Nintendo has proven in this generation is that 2D side-scrollers (or 2.5D or whatever) aren't dead and are actually quite popular, as long as the controls and gameplay are good.
I don't see much of a need to go HD, other than to finally get rid of the last holdout for analog input on my TV.
Ah, I guess I was hung up on the traditional meaning of the term (spoofing at the network layer) rather than essentially poisoning the tracker with a bad proxy address.
As someone who's had plenty of people raise objections to me (I happen to be firmly planted on the other side of the debate), I can tell you they almost always boil down to one or more of the following:
1) There's nothing wrong with sharing/copyright is bad 2) Sharing is only bad when companies do it (though I've had real trouble getting anyone to be able to justify why that is) 3) OK, sharing is bad/copyright is fine, but I still don't like companies suing people 4) I can't have whatever I want? No fair!
Although, I find with certain people arguing for points 1) and 2) that their arguments make significantly less sense if you assume they're not implicitly arguing for point 4). And by "certain people", I do not mean "all people". I can think of several people to whom this definitely did not apply.
1) I happen to think that copyright is broken, due to the Congress deciding to take something limited by the Constitution and making it effectively unlimited. I'm just this side of thinking that piracy could be a form of civil disobedience, but I think for most people, it's all a matter of (4).
2) I think that for a lot of people, this is just a populist argument. However, I know a number of people who make a good argument about the intent of the infringement. In my mind, there's a moral difference between taking something someone else has created and using it versus taking something someone else has created and reselling it (via incorporating it into a new product.) Since individuals downloading music rarely resell it (or at least those stories never hit the headlines), it's quite easy to perceive it merely as populism.
3) The power differential is astounding. Most companies legal retainers are a drop in the bucket, whereas most individuals hiring a lawyer would nearly bankrupt them. This is a problem with our legal system more than anything, but it's still a problem.
You 'steal' potential profit by not giving someone money or by interfering with their flow of profit. That means that if you decide not to buy a product from a store, for example, you'd be 'stealing' potential profit (you've 'harmed' the store because the store would have had more money if you would have given it to them). That means that you're 'stealing' potential profit whenever you decide to tell people who are about to buy a product not to buy it (and they decide not to) as the artists would have had more money if you hadn't done that.
The government doesn't guarantee artists money. They guarantee them a chance by allowing the artist control over distribution of their work.
Perhaps the harm is to society as a whole, for if artists weren't given this control, a fairly large portion of our culture likely wouldn't exist.
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You should complain about the entire industry, then. Because if all of Comcast's millions of subscribers tried to use all of their 16mbps stream at once, the Internet would explode. That's because no backbone is capable of supporting 16,000,000mbps.
The industry works based upon averages and the assumption that not everyone will be using the full 16 at a time. If you want guaranteed bandwidth, you have to pay a hell of a lot more than you are right now--enough that most people wouldn't be able to afford it (and meaning you pay even more because economies of scale stop working for the ISP.)
Yeah, I know everyone thinks "I pay for Xmbps, I should get Xmbps." Unfortunately, the world just doesn't work that way. And per the subscriber agreement, that's not what you're paying for anyway.
Actually, hot potato routing is subtly different. It means that if the best peer is saturated, it will send traffic out the next best peer. The effect is that packets (tend) to get shoved out faster. There's no buffering on the sending side, and most of the time, the destination gets the packet sooner. In theory, the next best peer could be so much worse that buffering would be better. In practice, this doesn't happen much.
It might be slightly more fair to always use the same paths, but it's way better for way more people to move packets faster.
But Comcast has a backbone, too. They provide business services, space in data centers, etc. They also happen to provide last mile service. Does the fact that they also provide last mile service mean that they can't refer to traffic ratios when negotiating peering agreements?
Yeah, but if you mention metered internet service or caps around here, everything explodes all around you and people start flaming.
Do we know that for a fact? I am skeptical. Bandwidth usage globally is increasing, and the rate of increase is increasing, and it's only going to get worse. Every ISP in the world has to deal with this every day, every year, and so on.
Yes, and it's common to have interconnection agreements with other providers where the larger provider (the one sending more data) pays the smaller provider. This is SOP in the telecom industry.
If carrying Netflix is putting them in the red, why doesn't it do the same to small, local cable ISPs, who only have a few thousand customers?
Well right now, they have an agreement with Akamai. Akamai pays Comcast. Akamai streams Netflix. Netflix now wants to stream from L3. L3 needs to pay Comcast.
I can't speak for all providers, but this is not uncommon. Akamai pays my ISP, too, for essentially the same privilege (note that Akamai sends more than just Netflix--they also handle iTunes and other big content providers.)
I may be wrong, but I suspect it's not a matter of losing money carrying Netflix content, but simply a matter of corporate greed.
Well certainly Comcast could eat the costs. They are almost certainly capable of doing this. Just like Wal Mart could eat the cost of certain levels of shrinkage, and Microsoft could probably give VS2010 away for free and still make money overall. That doesn't mean that they should.
It's because of the longstanding practices in the telecom industry--that networks of relative size (measured in transmitted data) peer with each other for free, while networks of large size pay to transmit data to smaller networks (if they want a direct connection to that network.)
This is actually how the backbones have worked for almost as long as the Internet has been commercial. Normally if one peer thinks that they're getting the short end of the stick, they depeer and traffic has to route through less optimal paths (hopefully--occasionally there just isn't a route.) In this case, Comcast is making it a net neutrality issue by telling L3 that they will only block the CDN traffic.
Comcast should depeer or increase what they charge their customers. They shouldn't be blocking selectively. But the real bad guy here is actually L3.
Yes, the fact that they cut off only a particular part of the traffic from L3 is what makes it a Net Neutrality issue. However they were put into a very bad position by L3. They basically have three options:
1) Go against longstanding standard practices in the commercial Internet age whereby peers exchanging similar amounts of data don't pay, but connections to networks who exchange disproportionate amounts of data do have to pay. To do this, they would continue to peer with L3, despite the dramatic increase of throughput L3 will soon be pushing. This would very nice for L3, as it would mean that they are basically getting for free what most people would have to pay for anyway (yes, historically if you are pushing a lot of data to one of your peers, you have to pay them.)
2) Depeer from L3, which would at best mean that your connection to anything hosted by or attached to L3 would suffer dramatically as it took a much less direct route, and a route which probably has a lot of other people hanging off of it. At worst, it would mean that you lost connectivity to certain sites. This has happened before. Google Chrome has a bug which won't let me paste into Slashdot forms, so google "playing chicken isp depeering" and "sprint cogent depeering" for examples.
3) They can block only the content which is (now) causing the disproportionate interconnection, violating net neutrality but otherwise compromising on 1 and 2 above.
4) Tell their customers that they now have to pay $XX more per month. They probably have monopolies in most places, so the customers won't have much choice.
This really puts Comcast in a pretty bad position. Ostensibly, the agreement between Akamai and Comcast was there to help shoulder some of the costs of receiving the huge amounts of traffic that was being sent through Comcast's network. It's perfectly reasonable to expect L3 to pay similarly. Depeering would screw a lot of people, and just accepting the new traffic would cause Comcast to take a pretty big financial hit. The only reasonable solution (in my mind) is to increase what customers pay, but that just means that L3 (and other big CDNs) will learn that they can get away with bullying around other networks.
This is actually the reason that I support municipal and federal control over the American backbone of the Internet. Internet should be a commodity available to everyone. The politics of peering really screw things up.
This is really a very fine line. I tend to fall on your side, but only just.
What Comcast is trying to do is maintain the peering arrangement with L3 while not getting screwed by L3's sudden and massive increase in throughput. The solution was to block the cause of that sudden and massive increase in throughput. Depeering with L3 (the correct response if you subscribe to Net Neutrality) would likely cause as many or more problems for Comcast AND L3 customers, and for L3's other peers.
I'm certainly not saying that Comcast is acting selflessly in all of this, but I really think that it's L3 that is being the bully. Comcast added a wrong (which didn't make a right) in order to put a bandaid on the problem until L3 agrees to a commercial agreement for the now lopsided peering.
We've seen depeering before, and it usually screws a lot of people out of much of the Internet until one side or the other backs down.
The 360 appealed more to the traditional console crowd.
Well, for varying definitions of "traditional." I prefer the Wii because I like fun games, and FPS with horrible controls are not (imo) fun. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many Wii games feel very much like the classics I remember--sometimes because they are 2D (NSMBW, the new Donkey Kong) and sometimes because they capture the spirit of those games (Super Mario Bros Galaxy, Zelda.) No, I think that the Wii is more traditional, and that the Xbox (and later the 360) really broke out and found new ways to compete.
I think that the real appeal of the 360 was online play and FPS. Graphics almost certainly also enter into the equation, if the cries of 360 owners belittling Wii owners purchase decisions is any indication. Also, both the Xbox (mostly the 360) and the Wii managed to get into new markets. The 360 managed to get a lot of previously non-gamers to the table--people who had before looked down on gamers as nerds or geeks. The Wii, as you point out, managed to capture the casual gamer market quite well. And obviously, both Microsoft and Sony thought there was a future in motion-based controls, given the recent releases of the Kinect and the Move respectively.
There's a huge distinction between purposeful bricking and potential bricking due to a bad interaction between user-modifications and official updates. Nowhere does that say that the bricking is intentional. Apple is warning that an update may brick the phone, and that due to the jailbreak, it won't be covered under warranty.
There's been a lot of spin on that issue. I haven't seen any indication that the plan is to actually brick for jailbreaking. Continue to believe the FUD, though--doesn't bother me.
Nobody has a problem with Apple selling their product in a state they like. The problem is with Apple trying to assert control over how people use their product after they've sold it.
Only they're not even doing this. They just don't support jailbreaking. They don't try to stop people from jailbreaking, nor do they seem to be attempting to stop the jailbreak developers from releasing the tools.
You think that was a temper tantrum? The Internet never ceases to amaze me.
Good day to you.
What you're talking about is digital signing. What I was talking about was encryption. Both would work just fine to mitigate the problem (as I said.) The GP to my original post said nothing about encryption or signing, just "password protecting."
Neither approach solves the problem (as implied by my use of the word "mitigates."
It's the height of arrogance to assume that I didn't mean what I wrote.
Turn off the computer right away. The key is stored INSIDE THE FILESYSTEM!
This kind of problem can be significantly mitigated through the methods suggested by the GP, though. Encrypt the list of enabled plugins with a user password. Now other software may be able to add plugins, but they can't enable them. You could go farther and encrypt the entire plugin directory, but I think that's probably overkill.
Yeah, but that was practically a demo. I haven't tried Wii Punch Out--does it use a similar mechanic?
One of the things I really disliked about Wii Sports was that the motions you made only barely correlated with the motions your character could perform. Tennis is the best example of this--where you halt your swing determined what type of swing your character took (most people I knew tried to swing as though they were swinging a real tennis racket--which didn't work particularly well.) Most of those minigames had similar quirks.
Better, more precise motion might be useful. However I think that motion itself is vastly overrated. Between the difficulty with repeating the same motions precisely (the ability to do this separates the average person from sports players) and the difficulty of the Wii in interpreting your motions, I'll take discrete button presses any day.
Most of the really good Wii titles don't even use the Wii motion controls for anything more than a gimmick, though. Frequently, shaking could have been replaced with a simple button press (and that would have been far more accurate--I'm looking at you, New Super Mario Bros. Wii) Pointing at the screen gets quite a bit of use, at least since it's got a fairly obvious application (aiming in a FPS.)
The accelerometers were a gimmick, and I think that Nintendo knows it. It worked out for them--they did a good amount of business while in competition with two other giants. What I think Nintendo has proven in this generation is that 2D side-scrollers (or 2.5D or whatever) aren't dead and are actually quite popular, as long as the controls and gameplay are good.
I don't see much of a need to go HD, other than to finally get rid of the last holdout for analog input on my TV.
Well part of the problem here is that copyright is now effectively infinite. If it was 24 years max, culture would clearly benefit.
Ah, I guess I was hung up on the traditional meaning of the term (spoofing at the network layer) rather than essentially poisoning the tracker with a bad proxy address.
It's the best system anyone has been able to implement.
As someone who's had plenty of people raise objections to me (I happen to be firmly planted on the other side of the debate), I can tell you they almost always boil down to one or more of the following:
1) There's nothing wrong with sharing/copyright is bad
2) Sharing is only bad when companies do it (though I've had real trouble getting anyone to be able to justify why that is)
3) OK, sharing is bad/copyright is fine, but I still don't like companies suing people
4) I can't have whatever I want? No fair!
Although, I find with certain people arguing for points 1) and 2) that their arguments make significantly less sense if you assume they're not implicitly arguing for point 4). And by "certain people", I do not mean "all people". I can think of several people to whom this definitely did not apply.
1) I happen to think that copyright is broken, due to the Congress deciding to take something limited by the Constitution and making it effectively unlimited. I'm just this side of thinking that piracy could be a form of civil disobedience, but I think for most people, it's all a matter of (4).
2) I think that for a lot of people, this is just a populist argument. However, I know a number of people who make a good argument about the intent of the infringement. In my mind, there's a moral difference between taking something someone else has created and using it versus taking something someone else has created and reselling it (via incorporating it into a new product.) Since individuals downloading music rarely resell it (or at least those stories never hit the headlines), it's quite easy to perceive it merely as populism.
3) The power differential is astounding. Most companies legal retainers are a drop in the bucket, whereas most individuals hiring a lawyer would nearly bankrupt them. This is a problem with our legal system more than anything, but it's still a problem.
4) Yeah.
It is in no way vigilantism. Or would you say that a person filing any other civil suit was vigilantism?
Can you explain which gathering method makes it trivial to spoof IP addresses?
You 'steal' potential profit by not giving someone money or by interfering with their flow of profit. That means that if you decide not to buy a product from a store, for example, you'd be 'stealing' potential profit (you've 'harmed' the store because the store would have had more money if you would have given it to them). That means that you're 'stealing' potential profit whenever you decide to tell people who are about to buy a product not to buy it (and they decide not to) as the artists would have had more money if you hadn't done that.
The government doesn't guarantee artists money. They guarantee them a chance by allowing the artist control over distribution of their work.
Perhaps the harm is to society as a whole, for if artists weren't given this control, a fairly large portion of our culture likely wouldn't exist.