MOST attempts to send email currently are spam which is blocked by an ISP of one kind or another. The spam you see is spam that got through, the 1% that wasn't blocked. For instance, right now if you try to send email through the network of Germany's largest ISP (DTAG), to and from rtfa@gmail.com, the ISP won't allow that - and shouldn't. Only gmail servers should be sending email from @gmail.com.
> Certainly gmail can filter the e-mails you receive.
Google can prevent spam sent to your @gmail.com address, but Comcast has to deliver spam to your @comcast.com address? I guess we'll all be forced to use web mail.
> Right, the pipes aren't allowed to distinguish between the two types of e-mail. It'd be very hard to write a law that allowed that without breaking net neutrality
And if a law is passed that doesn't distinguish them WELL, it's going to create significant problems. As in the most-used network security measures will be affected (firewalls consider the source) , spam, routing optimizations, hell even basic protocols required for a network to function at all discriminate by source - STP to prevent switch loops, EIGRP, OSPF, and BGP would be required to accept poisoned routes (not allowed to trust some sources more than others). Maybe half of all network administration that's beyond "Networking 101" considers, in some way, the source of the traffic.
> But DDOS, pretty much by definition, is something an ISP cannot detect, let alone prevent. After all, it looks like a bunch of individually innocuous requests.
If DDOS attacks couldn't be detected and stopped, whitehouse.gov would be down ALL THE TIME. There's always somebody trying to attack it. 99.98% of the time the site is up because the defenders are winning. They can be detected and prevented, and they are. You say "by definition", I believe you're thinking of one very specific type of DDOS, and also assuming that the defenders are pretty stupid. You're thinking of naive flooding attacks. Not all DDOS looks like legit traffic. Also, in the types in which a single request looks like it could be legit, that doesn't mean you can't notice a swarm of identical requests from known botnet. As an example of the first, an attack I invented would have easily taken down wikipedia and other major sites. It involved sending a DNS request from a source other than the source in the ip header. The ISP *closest* to the source could detect the attack and block it because it"knows which networks that endpoint has routes for. For example, a cable modem can't actually route traffic for other public networks. Therefore they could detect that it was a bogus packet. The recipient can't tell, but the ISP can, because the ISP knows it has no routes to the claimed IP.
For requests that otherwise appear legit, even floods can often be detected. A request for/signup.asp from a person using IE6 on Mac might be legit. 10 million simultaneous requests for/signup.asp from 100,000 people using IE6 on Mac? Not legit. Those of us who have been defending networks for 20 years aren't stupid. Well some of us aren't. Sometimes the bad guys get ahead for an hour or two, but you'll notice that for DDOS attacks the good guys almost always end up winning - we find a way to block them.
>It depends on what you mean by spam blocking. I don't see how it would be against any net neutrality operation.
Net neutrality means traffic from all sources are treated equally. Emails from well-known farms are not treated differently than emails from your boss.
While reasonable people can make reasonable interpretations of a neutrality *policy*, there's little room for reasonableness when the *law* says "traffic from all sources must be treated equally". One NN bill introduced in the US house of representatives was about that simple - it was very clear, and no exception was made for spam, DOS attacks, etc.
> > (b) uses, without consent, an existing, canceled or revoked access device;
> Neither canceled nor revoked
It sounds like service was cancelled when the bill wasn't paid, but in any event it's certainly an EXISTING access device. The law says "existing, cancelled, or revoked", and it is certainly existing.
> "an unauthorized, false, or fictitious name, identification, telephone number, or access device"
And that device is not authorized to be using their network. It's an unauthorized access device.
More to the point, judges are not in fact robots, nor are they dictionaries. Any human, including a judge, can see that there is a law against taking services without permission and without paying for them, and can see that he took services without permission and without paying for them. Trying to play word games will only annoy the judge, not persuade them.
Sure does. It seems our thinking isn't as far apart as I first thought.
> That's the fear. That someone will dominate the space super effectively.
I guess that's where we differ a bit. I think millions of pages of laws is already too much, so I'd prefer to err on the side of fewer laws rather than more. We're not too good at predicting the future, so I'd rather wait and see what happens and address things as needed, rather than being quite so proactive, making big laws based on the fear of what might happen. That also makes illegal a lot of good things that might have happened, and makes existing good things questionably legal (blocking spam would be illegal under one net neutrality proposal.)
That sucks about the DNS. Good thing you have options available, options that are free.
Let me give a very specific example. Suppose you are sending five packets, which we'll call A B C D E. You've just sent A and B, which will each have 25ms latency. Packet C can be delivered in only 5ms. Do you want it delivered in 5ms, or should it be delayed, so it takes 25ms like A and B?
The right answer is "it depends". For gaming, you want low latency, deliver packet C as soon as possible. For downloads and Netflix, you don't care. For VoIP, you want packet C delayed; you want to make sure it's not delivered faster than the other packets.
Why do you want to slow down VoIP packets if needed to have consistent latency? Suppose those packets represent your voice actually saying the alphabet. If C is faster than An B, and D, the person on the other end will hear: C A B... D E. Faster packets change what you said.
That's one example, there are other cases when the three are incompatible, and many more where you you can gain alot of the one you care about by giving up a little of one you don't care about. So it's helpful to know what's important to you. That's even within a single stream - when I'm running both Netflix and ssh, I have more complex priorities. I want to reserve a very low bandwidth at low latency for the ssh, and a specific medium bandwidth for Netflix, but don't care about latency for Netflix. That may well mean that Netflix should be routed over the Cogent backbone and ssh should be routed over Level3.
I think I'm clear on what you're saying now. Newflix could NOT offer free delivery, paying the extra cost of getting their service to you. (Unless they paid for everyone's high-speed connection to everywhere, which is a ridiculous proposition.)
I'm curious, do you want to make Amazon's free delivery illegal? How about Amazon Prime TWO DAY delivery - their packages arrive faster than other companies, because they pay to have it delivered faster. Should that be illegal?
If I buy a car and the dealer includes free oil changes for a year, they are paying for something that the customer would normally pay for. Do you think that should be illegal? What if they throw a gift card for $100 of free gas - they've bought the gas from Exxon and I get it free with the car.
These issues aren't cut and dry to me. I have X GBs included in my phone data plan. If Youtube wants to pay the extra cost for me, so I'm not charged for watching Youtube, I'm not sure that's a bad deal for me.
>> Newflix, a new company wanting to compete with Netflix, might say "rather than our customers paying for a higher priced plan in order watch our service all night, we would like to pay the extra cost and subscribers with even the el-cheapo internet plan can use our service, because we'll pay the extra cost direct to Verizon."
> nothing in a net neutral world that stops Newflix from doing what you're suggesting. What the net neutral world is stopping is Newflix paying for that different tier to appear only if they are connecting to Newflix.
Why the hell would Newflix pay to upgrade my service for me to watch Youtube? Obviously they'd only want to subsidize the cost of using their service, not a competing service.
You're right for a purely theoretical internet out of a textbook (though a very old one, using hubs rather than switches). A theoretical internet in which traffic on each link is consistent rather the peaky (no cable modems involved for sure), there is way more bandwidth available than is ever used, there;s no redundancy, meaning each packet takes the exact same path, and there are no buffers anywhere.
In the real world, we want our connections to be cheap, reliable, and fast. We want redundant, load balanced connections. Which means different packets take different paths - jitter even in a underused network. In the real world, we don't use just 10% of the available bandwidth, that would cost ten times as much. For lowest cost to users, ideally ISPs build links that aren not saturated 99% of the time, the 1% busiest times some will get saturated. Buffers are everywhere - every single connection point is a store-and-forward switch, not a hub.
> On the other hand what if I don't want to flag any content as lower priority but 'want it all' delivered at the highest rate or the advertised rate.
There are three different measures of connection quality, each important to different applications. For torrent, you want max bandwidth, you want to transfer as much as possible every ten minutes. For voip, you only need 64Kbps, but the main thing is that the latency be consistent. That's called jitter. You don't want 5ms latency on one packet and 25ms on another, because they would arrive out of order, and it would sound like you said "uto of roedr".
For Netflix, you want a consistent X Mbps, with the same amount of MBs transferred every ten seconds. You don't mind if it's fast for one second, then slow for one second - Netflix buffers. (Cable modems naturally do exactly this, fast-slow-fast-slow-fast-slow. Good for Netflix, bad for gaming and voip.)
The engineers at the ISP know about this stuff, and can control their network to give best results - low bandwidth low jitter for voip, high bandwidth high latency high jitter for downloads, medium bandwidth high latency medium jitter for streaming video, low latency high jitter for gaming, etc.
> You can already set your torrent client to self throttle. The ISP does not need to do it for you, and should not be in the position or business of doing it for you.
You can reduce the *bandwidth* of the torrent or whatever between you and the ISP. You can't do crap about how it's treated for the other 99% of the route, currently. And reducing the torrent bandwidth isn't actually what you want. You're hoping that reducing the torrent bandwidth will have the side-effect of reducing the jitter or at least the latency of your voip traffic. That is by no means guaranted.
There are three different measures of connection quality, each important to different applications. For torrent, you want max bandwidth, you want to transfer as much as possible every ten minutes. For voip, you only need 64Kbps, but the main thing is that the latency be consistent. That's called jitter. You don't want 5ms latency on one packet and 25ms on another, because they would arrive out of order, and it would sound like you said "uto of roedr".
For Netflix, you want a consistent X Mbps, with the same amount of MBs transferred every ten seconds. You don't mind if it's fast for one second, then slow for one second - Netflix buffers.
The engineers at the ISP know about this stuff, and can control their network to give best results - low bandwidth low jitter for voip, high bandwidth high latency high jitter for downloads, medium bandwidth high latency medium jitter for streaming video, low latency high jitter for gaming, etc.
> Is there a reason you can't pay the true cost up front, instead of giving up privacy?
Perhaps you missed this: >> If you prefer to pay for your phone in cash at the time of purchase, you can buy an iPhone for $650. Apple makes money when you buy your phone.
> Could it be that Google is an advertising company, and makes far more money over time through third-party sales of your location data to sleazy marketers?
Not quite. They are an advertising company, NOT a marketing data broker. They don't do "third-party sales of your data to sleazy marketers" because that would be giving up the cow; they'd rather sell the milk. Google sells ad placements (called Adwords), they do not sell the data, the data is their treasure.
I just read the paper. They have some ideas about implementing QOS (quality of service), but as others have said, nothing they've presented actually has anything to do with the real issues around net neutrality.
One well-known offering related to network neutrality went like this:
If the user allows videos to play at a lower resolution (which is much lower bandwidth), the service provider would make that bandwidth free, it would be exempt from mobile data caps.
A mechanism for the user to choose which traffic is free doesn't do the trick because the offer is an EXCHANGE. The ISP is offering the video bandwidth for free IN EXCHANGE for the user accepting lower resolution.
Newflix, a new company wanting to compete with Netflix, might say "rather than our customers paying for a higher priced plan in order watch our service all night, we would like to pay the extra cost and subscribers with even the el-cheapo internet plan can use our service, because we'll pay the extra cost direct to Verizon." It doesn't work to have the subscriber say "I want xvideos.com to to be zero-rated", because xvideos.com" isn't offering to pay the difference, Newflix is.
And yes of course these kinds of deals can also turn out to be bad for the consumer; they can also be good. Personally I'm on a cheap mobile plan, it costs very little and after the first X GBs each month, it's throttled slower. My phone is small, so 480p Youtube is fine for me. I would *like* to have the option of zero-rating youtube videos in exchange for watching them at 480p.
> They made their money when I bought the goddamn phone.
No, no they didn't. Google doesn't charge money for Android. That's why you can get an Android phone for $15. They made nothing when you bought your phone. They make money while you use your phone.
If you prefer to pay for your phone in cash at the time of purchase, you can buy an iPhone for $650. Apple makes money when you buy your phone.
Of course, the iPhone also tracks you by default, but by paying $650 you can turn location tracking off. Well you can turn it off completely on Android too, but anyway, no Google didn't make money when you bought your phone. The store you bought it from made money, the company that made the phone made money, hell even Microsoft made money, not so much Google.
>Personal computers had been around for several years, eg the Apple II since 1978
DOS was released in 1980, two years after the Apple II. Today, the PC is about 38 years old. In 1980, the PC was about two years old. I call that "new".
That's true, I haven't seen many good arguments either way.
> (ICANN says it's "non profit" but so was our Major League Football association for a long time
TEAMS in the NFL make money. The NFL *league office* doesn't make money, so it has no income taxes to pay (almost none, anyway).
The league office is not and never was a 501(c)(3) *charity*. It was a 501(c)(6) business league, an organization which does not itself make money, but exists to help other (tax-paying) businesses make money.
Microsoft wished Windows 8 was a tablet OS. The point of a tablet rather than a desktop is that a tablet is convenient to pick up and do something real quick, rather than walking upstairs to the PC and powering it on. A tablet should be lightweight and it should turn on in milliseconds, not boot like a desktop. Windows 8 took 8,000% longer to turn on than Android, and required 1,500% more disk space. It was/is a desktop OS, with crappy "tablet" UI plastered on the front.
Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall. They are struggling to GIVE AWAY Windows. Worldwide device shipments for 2015, per Gartner:
Android Linux 54.16% iOS/OS X 12.37% Windows 11.79% Other (mostly *nix) 21.66%
The massive decline of Windows matches with the decline of the old-fashioned desktop, 90% of which run Windows. Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior may have assisted in locking out competitors in that segment, as did Apple's choice not to compete by selling their OS, other than bundled with their hardware. Any advantage from the illegal behavior could not, however, overcome the flexibility of Linux vs the single-purpose design of Windows, which works well only on a disk-based full sized desktop.
I understood GPs post to mean the other way around. All the "San Francisco will be underwater in 20 years" stuff. It sours people on any other claims about global warming, even if"it might be based on more objective research. Then a few years ago well-known leaders of the global warming thing admitted they had intentionally exaggerated. That sort of thing seeds doubt in ANY global warming claims. You read "San Francisco will be underwater by 2010", then when 2010 comes around and San Francisco is still there, it's easy to say "I don't believe that global warming crap."
It's the same as telling lies about Trump (or Hillary), when the lie becomes known, it looks like anti-Trump people are just a bunch of liars. Better to tell the truth about what you don't like about them - there is plenty of bad things about both that are TRUE.
Re global warming, from my research, it seems that there is a real thing called climate change, and then there's the hype. Saint Nick was a real guy, and politicians are selling Santa Claus.
You're not entirely wrong, there is no COMPELLING reason for the AVERAGE user to switch, no "killer app" in either case. There are certainly benefits to Linux, and presumably also to Windows phone, but no "must have" for most users. (Except"for"the huge one I'll describe below.) I strongly prefer Linux, but I'm not the average user.
That said: > Both operating systems are at the low end of the single digits in usage share
Windows phone hasn't even managed "low single digits", it's at less than 1%.
One reason Windows had much larger market share on desktops than Linux is that Unix/Linux was designed for the client-server network OS model and expanded from there, while Microsoft DOS/Windows specialized in the desktop, the local disk-based OS rather than network based. There os a resaon it was orginally named Disk Operating System, for Personal Computers - it was specialized for that new role. Microsoft continued to specialize in that role, while Linux is used in 99% of supercomputers, in 4MB routers, and everything in between.
In the late nineties, people began switching back to client-server, and a few years ago most purchasers switched from desktops to handhelds. Those are the "must haves", the killer apps for that caused people to switch from Windows to Linux - Linux machines fit in your pocket, and people want that. Linux is better at making stuff available on the internet, and people want that.
Linux wasn't used a lot on the desktop, and Ford didn't sell many buggy whips. People DID leave Windows, and they didn't take it's 80 pound hardware with them.
Actually most of the text, as finally passed into law, was written in 1997 largely by a bunch of people who mostly worked for themselves, a couple guys who did web hosting, a photographer or two, some "bloggers" (the word blogger didn't exist yet), etc. Most web sites at the time were run by one or two people, and most hosting companies were 1-6 people. There were a total of maybe 10 spiders crawling the web, none of them hunting for copyright violations. Anyway there was a pretty good cross section of people involved with the web commenting on the DMCA drafts. A few hundred of us submitted thousands of changes to the original draft, so I'd say that at more half of the text is now stuff we submitted.
Have a read of the law. The relevant portion, the bit people normally mean when they say "DMCA" is only a few pages: https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
You'll notice it clearly lays out a specific procedure for web hosting companies, a similar procedure tailored for ISPs, and another similar procedure for search engines and directories. Notice the counter-notice part - they have to put the content back up if the respondent says "no, it's not infringing". Notice that the complainant is required to specify exactly which URLs they are talking about and other details - they aren't allowed to just say "that site has some of my pictures on it". You've probably already noticed what it does NOT included - appropriate penalties for recklessly sending a notice.
It was written in 1997, Google didn't yet exist as a company. At the time, it appeared that directories like Yahoo and DMOZ would beat spider-based search engines, though Altavista, HotBot, and Excite were obviously too big to just disappear. We didn't predict the 100% fully-automated complaints. We figured that in the rare case someone sent a completely crap complaint, the recipient would take five minutes to send a counter-notice, then maybe sue the guy who sent the complaint. Obviously it's time for an update, it's become quite obvious that a penalty is needed for recklessly sending automated notices. We didn't know that in 1997, there were no automated notices.
You don't often see THAT on Slashdot. Normally we fight to the death to defend whatever we first thought, no matter how clear it is that we're wrong.:)
Actually to my memory that's the second time anybody on Slashdot has been adult enough to simply acknowledge a correction, and the other time it was me in need of correction. I read a summary as implying that a probe was several light-seconds from earth when in fact it was several light-minutes away.
> Google is hosting _links_ not the infringing material. It is not clear
It wasn't clear until DMCA. DMCA has a section titled "Information Location Tools" it's specically for search engines and indexes.
There is also a section for web hosting companies, who store the material, and a separate section for ISPs, who don't. It even explicitly talks about caching by ISPs. Other than missing appropriate penalties for recklessly sending inaccurate notices, the DMCA is pretty darn well written, specifying in detail a required procedure that is appropriate for each type of service provider and is designed to be fair to both sides. That's because many of us who were active when it was written carefully reviewed each draft and suggested changes to the bill before it was passed. The one thing that went wrong is that we thought normal civil suits, along with counter-notices, would be sufficient to keep reckless notices under control. That's been a problem, but other than that it does have the sections needed for search engines, for ISPs, for web hosts, etc and leaves little ambiguity. Rather than leaving the details up to regulators or courts to figure out later, we made sure the required procedures were clearly spelled out in the law before it was passed.
> No. If you send a counter notice, Google has to ask Warner Brothers "are you sure this specific link is infringing?", and if WB says "Yes" then the link stays down and you have to take it to a judge.
I'll copy-paste the actual text of the law for you so you can read it for yourself. The complainant (Warner Brothers) has to "take it to a judge". Here's the exact text of the statute:
replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs said "People who want porn can buy an Android phone." Thanks for the suggestion, Steve, I think I will.
MOST attempts to send email currently are spam which is blocked by an ISP of one kind or another. The spam you see is spam that got through, the 1% that wasn't blocked.
For instance, right now if you try to send email through the network of Germany's largest ISP (DTAG), to and from rtfa@gmail.com, the ISP won't allow that - and shouldn't. Only gmail servers should be sending email from @gmail.com.
> Certainly gmail can filter the e-mails you receive.
Google can prevent spam sent to your @gmail.com address, but Comcast has to deliver spam to your @comcast.com address? I guess we'll all be forced to use web mail.
> Right, the pipes aren't allowed to distinguish between the two types of e-mail. It'd be very hard to write a law that allowed that without breaking net neutrality
And if a law is passed that doesn't distinguish them WELL, it's going to create significant problems. As in the most-used network security measures will be affected (firewalls consider the source) , spam, routing optimizations, hell even basic protocols required for a network to function at all discriminate by source - STP to prevent switch loops, EIGRP, OSPF, and BGP would be required to accept poisoned routes (not allowed to trust some sources more than others). Maybe half of all network administration that's beyond "Networking 101" considers, in some way, the source of the traffic.
> But DDOS, pretty much by definition, is something an ISP cannot detect, let alone prevent. After all, it looks like a bunch of individually innocuous requests.
If DDOS attacks couldn't be detected and stopped, whitehouse.gov would be down ALL THE TIME. There's always somebody trying to attack it. 99.98% of the time the site is up because the defenders are winning.
They can be detected and prevented, and they are. You say "by definition", I believe you're thinking of one very specific type of DDOS, and also assuming that the defenders are pretty stupid. You're thinking of naive flooding attacks. Not all DDOS looks like legit traffic. Also, in the types in which a single request looks like it could be legit, that doesn't mean you can't notice a swarm of identical requests from known botnet. As an example of the first, an attack I invented would have easily taken down wikipedia and other major sites. It involved sending a DNS request from a source other than the source in the ip header. The ISP *closest* to the source could detect the attack and block it because it"knows which networks that endpoint has routes for. For example, a cable modem can't actually route traffic for other public networks. Therefore they could detect that it was a bogus packet. The recipient can't tell, but the ISP can, because the ISP knows it has no routes to the claimed IP.
For requests that otherwise appear legit, even floods can often be detected. A request for /signup.asp from a person using IE6 on Mac might be legit. 10 million simultaneous requests for /signup.asp from 100,000 people using IE6 on Mac? Not legit. Those of us who have been defending networks for 20 years aren't stupid. Well some of us aren't. Sometimes the bad guys get ahead for an hour or two, but you'll notice that for DDOS attacks the good guys almost always end up winning - we find a way to block them.
>It depends on what you mean by spam blocking. I don't see how it would be against any net neutrality operation.
Net neutrality means traffic from all sources are treated equally. Emails from well-known farms are not treated differently than emails from your boss.
While reasonable people can make reasonable interpretations of a neutrality *policy*, there's little room for reasonableness when the *law* says "traffic from all sources must be treated equally". One NN bill introduced in the US house of representatives was about that simple - it was very clear, and no exception was made for spam, DOS attacks, etc.
> > (b) uses, without consent, an existing, canceled or revoked access device;
> Neither canceled nor revoked
It sounds like service was cancelled when the bill wasn't paid, but in any event it's certainly an EXISTING access device. The law says "existing, cancelled, or revoked", and it is certainly existing.
> "an unauthorized, false, or fictitious name, identification, telephone number, or access device"
And that device is not authorized to be using their network. It's an unauthorized access device.
More to the point, judges are not in fact robots, nor are they dictionaries. Any human, including a judge, can see that there is a law against taking services without permission and without paying for them, and can see that he took services without permission and without paying for them. Trying to play word games will only annoy the judge, not persuade them.
> Does that make sense?
Sure does. It seems our thinking isn't as far apart as I first thought.
> That's the fear. That someone will dominate the space super effectively.
I guess that's where we differ a bit. I think millions of pages of laws is already too much, so I'd prefer to err on the side of fewer laws rather than more. We're not too good at predicting the future, so I'd rather wait and see what happens and address things as needed, rather than being quite so proactive, making big laws based on the fear of what might happen. That also makes illegal a lot of good things that might have happened, and makes existing good things questionably legal (blocking spam would be illegal under one net neutrality proposal.)
That sucks about the DNS. Good thing you have options available, options that are free.
Let me give a very specific example. Suppose you are sending five packets, which we'll call A B C D E. You've just sent A and B, which will each have 25ms latency. Packet C can be delivered in only 5ms. Do you want it delivered in 5ms, or should it be delayed, so it takes 25ms like A and B?
The right answer is "it depends". For gaming, you want low latency, deliver packet C as soon as possible. For downloads and Netflix, you don't care. For VoIP, you want packet C delayed; you want to make sure it's not delivered faster than the other packets.
Why do you want to slow down VoIP packets if needed to have consistent latency? Suppose those packets represent your voice actually saying the alphabet. If C is faster than An B, and D, the person on the other end will hear: ... D E. Faster packets change what you said.
C A B
That's one example, there are other cases when the three are incompatible, and many more where you you can gain alot of the one you care about by giving up a little of one you don't care about. So it's helpful to know what's important to you. That's even within a single stream - when I'm running both Netflix and ssh, I have more complex priorities. I want to reserve a very low bandwidth at low latency for the ssh, and a specific medium bandwidth for Netflix, but don't care about latency for Netflix. That may well mean that Netflix should be routed over the Cogent backbone and ssh should be routed over Level3.
I think I'm clear on what you're saying now. Newflix could NOT offer free delivery, paying the extra cost of getting their service to you. (Unless they paid for everyone's high-speed connection to everywhere, which is a ridiculous proposition.)
I'm curious, do you want to make Amazon's free delivery illegal? How about Amazon Prime TWO DAY delivery - their packages arrive faster than other companies, because they pay to have it delivered faster. Should that be illegal?
If I buy a car and the dealer includes free oil changes for a year, they are paying for something that the customer would normally pay for. Do you think that should be illegal? What if they throw a gift card for $100 of free gas - they've bought the gas from Exxon and I get it free with the car.
These issues aren't cut and dry to me. I have X GBs included in my phone data plan. If Youtube wants to pay the extra cost for me, so I'm not charged for watching Youtube, I'm not sure that's a bad deal for me.
>> Newflix, a new company wanting to compete with Netflix, might say "rather than our customers paying for a higher priced plan in order watch our service all night, we would like to pay the extra cost and subscribers with even the el-cheapo internet plan can use our service, because we'll pay the extra cost direct to Verizon."
> nothing in a net neutral world that stops Newflix from doing what you're suggesting. What the net neutral world is stopping is Newflix paying for that different tier to appear only if they are connecting to Newflix.
Why the hell would Newflix pay to upgrade my service for me to watch Youtube? Obviously they'd only want to subsidize the cost of using their service, not a competing service.
You're right for a purely theoretical internet out of a textbook (though a very old one, using hubs rather than switches). A theoretical internet in which traffic on each link is consistent rather the peaky (no cable modems involved for sure), there is way more bandwidth available than is ever used, there;s no redundancy, meaning each packet takes the exact same path, and there are no buffers anywhere.
In the real world, we want our connections to be cheap, reliable, and fast. We want redundant, load balanced connections. Which means different packets take different paths - jitter even in a underused network. In the real world, we don't use just 10% of the available bandwidth, that would cost ten times as much. For lowest cost to users, ideally ISPs build links that aren not saturated 99% of the time, the 1% busiest times some will get saturated. Buffers are everywhere - every single connection point is a store-and-forward switch, not a hub.
> On the other hand what if I don't want to flag any content as lower priority but 'want it all' delivered at the highest rate or the advertised rate.
There are three different measures of connection quality, each important to different applications. For torrent, you want max bandwidth, you want to transfer as much as possible every ten minutes. For voip, you only need 64Kbps, but the main thing is that the latency be consistent. That's called jitter. You don't want 5ms latency on one packet and 25ms on another, because they would arrive out of order, and it would sound like you said "uto of roedr".
For Netflix, you want a consistent X Mbps, with the same amount of MBs transferred every ten seconds. You don't mind if it's fast for one second, then slow for one second - Netflix buffers. (Cable modems naturally do exactly this, fast-slow-fast-slow-fast-slow. Good for Netflix, bad for gaming and voip.)
The engineers at the ISP know about this stuff, and can control their network to give best results - low bandwidth low jitter for voip, high bandwidth high latency high jitter for downloads, medium bandwidth high latency medium jitter for streaming video, low latency high jitter for gaming, etc.
> You can already set your torrent client to self throttle. The ISP does not need to do it for you, and should not be in the position or business of doing it for you.
You can reduce the *bandwidth* of the torrent or whatever between you and the ISP. You can't do crap about how it's treated for the other 99% of the route, currently. And reducing the torrent bandwidth isn't actually what you want. You're hoping that reducing the torrent bandwidth will have the side-effect of reducing the jitter or at least the latency of your voip traffic. That is by no means guaranted.
There are three different measures of connection quality, each important to different applications. For torrent, you want max bandwidth, you want to transfer as much as possible every ten minutes. For voip, you only need 64Kbps, but the main thing is that the latency be consistent. That's called jitter. You don't want 5ms latency on one packet and 25ms on another, because they would arrive out of order, and it would sound like you said "uto of roedr".
For Netflix, you want a consistent X Mbps, with the same amount of MBs transferred every ten seconds. You don't mind if it's fast for one second, then slow for one second - Netflix buffers.
The engineers at the ISP know about this stuff, and can control their network to give best results - low bandwidth low jitter for voip, high bandwidth high latency high jitter for downloads, medium bandwidth high latency medium jitter for streaming video, low latency high jitter for gaming, etc.
> Is there a reason you can't pay the true cost up front, instead of giving up privacy?
Perhaps you missed this:
>> If you prefer to pay for your phone in cash at the time of purchase, you can buy an iPhone for $650. Apple makes money when you buy your phone.
> Could it be that Google is an advertising company, and makes far more money over time through third-party sales of your location data to sleazy marketers?
Not quite. They are an advertising company, NOT a marketing data broker. They don't do "third-party sales of your data to sleazy marketers" because that would be giving up the cow; they'd rather sell the milk. Google sells ad placements (called Adwords), they do not sell the data, the data is their treasure.
I just read the paper. They have some ideas about implementing QOS (quality of service), but as others have said, nothing they've presented actually has anything to do with the real issues around net neutrality.
One well-known offering related to network neutrality went like this:
If the user allows videos to play at a lower resolution (which is much lower bandwidth), the service provider would make that bandwidth free, it would be exempt from mobile data caps.
A mechanism for the user to choose which traffic is free doesn't do the trick because the offer is an EXCHANGE. The ISP is offering the video bandwidth for free IN EXCHANGE for the user accepting lower resolution.
Newflix, a new company wanting to compete with Netflix, might say "rather than our customers paying for a higher priced plan in order watch our service all night, we would like to pay the extra cost and subscribers with even the el-cheapo internet plan can use our service, because we'll pay the extra cost direct to Verizon." It doesn't work to have the subscriber say "I want xvideos.com to to be zero-rated", because xvideos.com" isn't offering to pay the difference, Newflix is.
And yes of course these kinds of deals can also turn out to be bad for the consumer; they can also be good. Personally I'm on a cheap mobile plan, it costs very little and after the first X GBs each month, it's throttled slower. My phone is small, so 480p Youtube is fine for me. I would *like* to have the option of zero-rating youtube videos in exchange for watching them at 480p.
> don't put the new phone in the back pocket.
You'd prefer the explosion to be in your FRONT pocket?
Some day you'll get out of mom's basement and you'll finally have a use for what's in front.
> They made their money when I bought the goddamn phone.
No, no they didn't. Google doesn't charge money for Android. That's why you can get an Android phone for $15. They made nothing when you bought your phone. They make money while you use your phone.
If you prefer to pay for your phone in cash at the time of purchase, you can buy an iPhone for $650. Apple makes money when you buy your phone.
Of course, the iPhone also tracks you by default, but by paying $650 you can turn location tracking off. Well you can turn it off completely on Android too, but anyway, no Google didn't make money when you bought your phone. The store you bought it from made money, the company that made the phone made money, hell even Microsoft made money, not so much Google.
>Personal computers had been around for several years, eg the Apple II since 1978
DOS was released in 1980, two years after the Apple II. Today, the PC is about 38 years old. In 1980, the PC was about two years old. I call that "new".
That's true, I haven't seen many good arguments either way.
> (ICANN says it's "non profit" but so was our Major League Football association for a long time
TEAMS in the NFL make money. The NFL *league office* doesn't make money, so it has no income taxes to pay (almost none, anyway).
The league office is not and never was a 501(c)(3) *charity*. It was a 501(c)(6) business league, an organization which does not itself make money, but exists to help other (tax-paying) businesses make money.
>> which works *well* only on ...
Microsoft wished Windows 8 was a tablet OS. The point of a tablet rather than a desktop is that a tablet is convenient to pick up and do something real quick, rather than walking upstairs to the PC and powering it on. A tablet should be lightweight and it should turn on in milliseconds, not boot like a desktop. Windows 8 took 8,000% longer to turn on than Android, and required 1,500% more disk space. It was/is a desktop OS, with crappy "tablet" UI plastered on the front.
Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall. They are struggling to GIVE AWAY Windows. Worldwide device shipments for 2015, per Gartner:
Android Linux 54.16%
iOS/OS X 12.37%
Windows 11.79%
Other (mostly *nix) 21.66%
The massive decline of Windows matches with the decline of the old-fashioned desktop, 90% of which run Windows. Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior may have assisted in locking out competitors in that segment, as did Apple's choice not to compete by selling their OS, other than bundled with their hardware. Any advantage from the illegal behavior could not, however, overcome the flexibility of Linux vs the single-purpose design of Windows, which works well only on a disk-based full sized desktop.
I understood GPs post to mean the other way around. All the "San Francisco will be underwater in 20 years" stuff. It sours people on any other claims about global warming, even if"it might be based on more objective research. Then a few years ago well-known leaders of the global warming thing admitted they had intentionally exaggerated. That sort of thing seeds doubt in ANY global warming claims. You read "San Francisco will be underwater by 2010", then when 2010 comes around and San Francisco is still there, it's easy to say "I don't believe that global warming crap."
It's the same as telling lies about Trump (or Hillary), when the lie becomes known, it looks like anti-Trump people are just a bunch of liars. Better to tell the truth about what you don't like about them - there is plenty of bad things about both that are TRUE.
Re global warming, from my research, it seems that there is a real thing called climate change, and then there's the hype. Saint Nick was a real guy, and politicians are selling Santa Claus.
You're not entirely wrong, there is no COMPELLING reason for the AVERAGE user to switch, no "killer app" in either case. There are certainly benefits to Linux, and presumably also to Windows phone, but no "must have" for most users. (Except"for"the huge one I'll describe below.) I strongly prefer Linux, but I'm not the average user.
That said:
> Both operating systems are at the low end of the single digits in usage share
Windows phone hasn't even managed "low single digits", it's at less than 1%.
One reason Windows had much larger market share on desktops than Linux is that Unix/Linux was designed for the client-server network OS model and expanded from there, while Microsoft DOS/Windows specialized in the desktop, the local disk-based OS rather than network based. There os a resaon it was orginally named Disk Operating System, for Personal Computers - it was specialized for that new role. Microsoft continued to specialize in that role, while Linux is used in 99% of supercomputers, in 4MB routers, and everything in between.
In the late nineties, people began switching back to client-server, and a few years ago most purchasers switched from desktops to handhelds. Those are the "must haves", the killer apps for that caused people to switch from Windows to Linux - Linux machines fit in your pocket, and people want that. Linux is better at making stuff available on the internet, and people want that.
Linux wasn't used a lot on the desktop, and Ford didn't sell many buggy whips. People DID leave Windows, and they didn't take it's 80 pound hardware with them.
Actually most of the text, as finally passed into law, was written in 1997 largely by a bunch of people who mostly worked for themselves, a couple guys who did web hosting, a photographer or two, some "bloggers" (the word blogger didn't exist yet), etc. Most web sites at the time were run by one or two people, and most hosting companies were 1-6 people. There were a total of maybe 10 spiders crawling the web, none of them hunting for copyright violations. Anyway there was a pretty good cross section of people involved with the web commenting on the DMCA drafts. A few hundred of us submitted thousands of changes to the original draft, so I'd say that at more half of the text is now stuff we submitted.
Have a read of the law. The relevant portion, the bit people normally mean when they say "DMCA" is only a few pages:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
You'll notice it clearly lays out a specific procedure for web hosting companies, a similar procedure tailored for ISPs, and another similar procedure for search engines and directories. Notice the counter-notice part - they have to put the content back up if the respondent says "no, it's not infringing". Notice that the complainant is required to specify exactly which URLs they are talking about and other details - they aren't allowed to just say "that site has some of my pictures on it". You've probably already noticed what it does NOT included - appropriate penalties for recklessly sending a notice.
It was written in 1997, Google didn't yet exist as a company. At the time, it appeared that directories like Yahoo and DMOZ would beat spider-based search engines, though Altavista, HotBot, and Excite were obviously too big to just disappear. We didn't predict the 100% fully-automated complaints. We figured that in the rare case someone sent a completely crap complaint, the recipient would take five minutes to send a counter-notice, then maybe sue the guy who sent the complaint. Obviously it's time for an update, it's become quite obvious that a penalty is needed for recklessly sending automated notices. We didn't know that in 1997, there were no automated notices.
> Sorry, you are right.
You don't often see THAT on Slashdot. Normally we fight to the death to defend whatever we first thought, no matter how clear it is that we're wrong. :)
Actually to my memory that's the second time anybody on Slashdot has been adult enough to simply acknowledge a correction, and the other time it was me in need of correction. I read a summary as implying that a probe was several light-seconds from earth when in fact it was several light-minutes away.
> Google is hosting _links_ not the infringing material. It is not clear
It wasn't clear until DMCA. DMCA has a section titled "Information Location Tools" it's specically for search engines and indexes.
There is also a section for web hosting companies, who store the material, and a separate section for ISPs, who don't. It even explicitly talks about caching by ISPs. Other than missing appropriate penalties for recklessly sending inaccurate notices, the DMCA is pretty darn well written, specifying in detail a required procedure that is appropriate for each type of service provider and is designed to be fair to both sides. That's because many of us who were active when it was written carefully reviewed each draft and suggested changes to the bill before it was passed. The one thing that went wrong is that we thought normal civil suits, along with counter-notices, would be sufficient to keep reckless notices under control. That's been a problem, but other than that it does have the sections needed for search engines, for ISPs, for web hosts, etc and leaves little ambiguity. Rather than leaving the details up to regulators or courts to figure out later, we made sure the required procedures were clearly spelled out in the law before it was passed.
> No. If you send a counter notice, Google has to ask Warner Brothers "are you sure this specific link is infringing?", and if WB says "Yes" then the link stays down and you have to take it to a judge.
I'll copy-paste the actual text of the law for you so you can read it for yourself. The complainant (Warner Brothers) has to "take it to a judge". Here's the exact text of the statute:
replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...