But as far as I know states normally have the right to decide what the terms of doing business with them are,
State government is a big enough customer that they shouldn't be buying ISP services from the home ISP providers anyway. Nobody in state government should have a comcast.net email address.
Please stop spouting this nonsense. ISPs are not monopolies. When you can find 8 different companies all selling service in the same area, it isn't a natural, unnatural, or any other kind of monopoly.
What IS a natural monopoly are certain forms of delivery of ISP services. Cable and telco are natural monopolies. But since "ISP" and "cable" are not synonyms, the latter does not create a monopoly status on the former.
Whether Twitter is an official channel or not is irrelevant. If it is effective, and you are trying to recover from an error, by all means use it.
Read TFS. It says that officials were using it. The question was why the Governor didn't use it for a whole 17 minutes. OMG. Other officials were using it, and were almost certainly using the official twitter accounts that people who want to use twitter to get official warnings would be following. One should not expect to follow the Governor as the sole source of official warnings. That's just stupid.
and I don't follow the governor of my state, but for many people it would be effective.
The local city police have a twitter account and use it for stuff. I don' t know what stuff. After I set it up and found out how useless twitter was, I stopped looking at it. I went back a month ago and found it full of ads^H^H^Hpromoted tweets, so I left again after five minutes.
I know what many agencies have found from using social media to issue warnings about things. It's not really a good way to do it. The campus safety department or state police, I forget which, used the campus alert system to warn people to stay away from a nearby frat house because there were shots fired, and instead of staying away a lot of people went to gawk. Same with a gas line break a couple of months ago.
Apparently the big story here is this: though he couldn't do it, he thought he should have used Twitter, instead of the state's website or the directly contacting the news media
No, the story here was that when the news media ASKED him why he DIDN'T use Twitter, he told them he had forgotten his password. That doesn't say he wasn't communicating in other ways. It doesn't say that he thought that Twitter was the right way to communicate. It just deals with some allegedly horrific 17 minute gap "in the tape" of tweets where the Governor did not send a tweet when others were. Oh my God. The Governor didn't tweet. How awful! We could have all died!
It isn't the Governor's job to call all the media in such an event. There is a department of the government that has that job. In Oregon it is called the Oregon Office of Emergency Management (OOEM), which used to be just OEM. There is an entire Joint Operations Center intended to deal with such things, and state communications staff on-site 24/7, and the media are on speed-dial. I dare say, most of the media wouldn't recognize the voice of the Governor on the phone if they were married to him.
When you say "industry", are you referring to those who still broadcast old-fashioned signals to boxes that the cord-cutting generation doesn't use anymore?
In the US we have something called "freedom", which means you are free to not listen to most emergency notification systems. If you choose not to get weather alerts by not owning or using a NOAA weather radio with such features, you are free to do so. If you don't want to watch TV, ditto.
Kind of hard to "disseminate" information to the masses who tend to now recognize only two forms of communication; social media and internet streaming.
In the US, modern cell phones have an Emergency Alerts system. There are several options, like en/disabling Amber alerts, but you cannot disable the "Presidential Alert". It is hard not to notice your cellphone screeching at you.
This alert system is also in other countries. I know what the alerts sound like because one day my phone started doing it. It was a test of the Taiwan alert system, and my phone was an unlocked HTC that was intended for sale in Taiwan. As I recall, they use certain numerical codes, and I had just not shut them off.
You'd think that e.g. a president of the US could be bothered to carry the little card with him needed to authorize a nuclear strike should things go bad in a hurry.
It is more complicated than "the little card". It is called the
Nuclear Football and it does, indeed, travel with the President wherever he goes. He doesn't have to "be bothered" to carry it, there is someone assigned to do that.
More than a couple of people involved in getting that one right, and yet some recent residents couldn't be bothered.
Which ones might you be referring to? The fact that you don't see it every time the media shows the President waving to the crowd doesn't mean it isn't there. I would expect that nobody is keeping you briefed on where the football is because you don't have the clearance or a need to know.
Doing anything blindly is most likely a problem. But you just added that word -- previously it was just "commit". Those who have committed to the Democrat party so they can vote in Democrat primaries have not indicated that they are blindly following an agenda they are being fed by their controllers. Some of them, perhaps, are, but some of them are not. The act does not prove the cause, thus you have causality reversed.
But a frame is not on/of per frame. It is per pixel on a line.
Double buffering means that you do not display each pixel as it is calculated, you calculate them all and then switch the display to the that frame. Each frame is a complete set of pixels.
Becsue if you take two pixels next to each other, the framerate will be the same. Just one lights up a bit sooner than the other one.
That depends on the display, not the framerate nor the means of calculating when the next frame should be displayed.
Becsue if you take two pixels next to each other, the framerate will be the same.
Of course,
Just one lights up a bit sooner than the other one.
Irrelevant to knowing what that frame rate is or determining when the next frame of your video needs to be displayed.
My fear is that once cars are fully automated, cops will still claim you need to be sober to operate them,
Because the laws will still claim you need to be sober to operate them. Operating a motor vehicle, even a driverless one, will still be operating. It will take a change in the laws before you can be legally stoned or drunk while operating an AV. And that's only if the AV has no "cry for help" mode that requires a human to interact with it. You can expect that to be a clause in any DWI or DUII or whatever your state calls it.
The legacy reason has to do with the AC line frequency introducing hum bars in the video, and the thought was that it was better for the hum bar to roll through the image than to be stuck in one place, which might happen to be the vertical sync period (thus screwing up the sync).
The result of this was something called 'drop frame' so that video timing would match clock time. Time code for old B/W video at 30Hz would run from 0 through 29 frames and then roll over the second counter. From here:
Drop frame timecode was invented to compensate for the discrepancy between 29.97 and 30 fps. Every minute except each tenth minute, two timecode numbers are dropped from the timecode count. This drop frame mode of 30 fps timecode remains accurate compared to the actual time passed, with a strange side effect that two numbers each minute vanish from the count.
If you ever watch a video where they show the timecode, you can actually see this, if the time is ripe.
What this proposal does is ensure that the number you get is a whole number of flicks, so no approximations are necessary.
If you are working at 30Hz (not "30hz") and count in nanoseconds, you will be off by 0.333... ns per frame. That means 10ns per second. It would take 111,111,111.1 frames to be off by one frame. That's 3703703.7 seconds of video, or 42.8 continuous days of video. After 42.8 days of video, you will be off by one frame.
If you blink once during that 42.8 days, you will miss the one additional frame that has been inserted into your 30Hz video stream.
Given the extremely small errors for any frame rate if you use nanoseconds as the timebase, a simple stretch or compress of the rate for that tiny amount will be completely undetectable. The error in any "Flick" clock will vastly outweigh the error of using a simple nanosecond clock and "approximating".
but end users are much more tied to Linux than they are to a specific brand of x86_64 CPU that runs Linux.
End users are tied to both. I have a computer room full of servers that, right now, I don't need to worry about whether they are Intel or AMD. Linux runs on both. I can run them all with the same distribution, and when I update them I can update them all to the same distribution.
So, next week, Linus decides that Linux will no longer support Intel. Oops, now half of my servers get out of sync with the other half, because I cannot update half of them when I update the other half. I can't afford to throw away half of my servers just because someone I don't know decided that software he was in charge of won't run on them. And I can't really switch OS on the half that don't update well because that makes the situation even worse.
Of course he's not going to do it, but this is pointing out how stupid and dangerous to Linux making such a decision would be.
That aside, no, exercising one's First Amendment rights is NOT "aiding and abetting the enemy". Rather the opposite - suppressing one's First Amendment rights makes the suppressor the enemy....
False dichotomy. "Not exercising" is not the same as "suppressing". And yes, statements made under the guise or protection of the First Amendment can certainly be aiding and abetting the enemy. It depends on the statement and the situation. For example, using one's First Amendment rights to promote and support enemy combatants during a conflict, giving them moral support and confidence to continue their fight, resulting in the death of US service members, certainly is "aiding and abetting the enemy". The Constitution says you have the right to speak. It does not remove the consequences of that speech.
Actually, ideally...I wish we could. Or at least restrict voting to those who pay actual taxes, so as to make sure that everyone that votes has some "skin in the game".
I have said that specifically regarding tax measures for decades. I live in a college town, so we have a large number of people who are pleaded with to vote on matters that will not have any effect at all on them in an average of two years.
For example, should the city impose a tax on cellphone service to pay for the 911 center? If you are moving away in a year anyway, why not vote 'yes' just because it sounds good, and it won't impact you in a few months anyway?
What's worse are the property tax measures being voted on by people who own no taxable property, in addition to the transients who will move out of the property they are indirectly paying taxes on through rent in a short time.
I've also talked about extending that to "sin taxes" on things like cigarettes and alkeehol. If you don't drink or smoke and won't be paying those taxes, why should you get to vote on them?
Frankly I fail to see the intelligence of anyone who commits themselves to one party or the other. They are directly claiming that party allegiance is more important than critical thinking during elections.
You have cause and effect reversed. Identifying oneself as part of a group because you believe as they usually do does not mean that the identification is more important than the belief. There is nothing inherent in a voter saying "I am a democrat" that means it cannot or refuses to think about issues. It comes to the wrong answer because it starts from usually invalid assumptions, but that's different.
You're using the same failed logic that is applied to Dittoheads, because the assumption is that Rush tells them what to think and controls them, when the truth is that they already think that and agree with Rush.
Do you buy that double shot latte espresso from Starbucks because you like double shot latte espresso or because Starbucks told you to?
That would violate the core tenet of democracy - that the people be free to decide for themselves what's important.
The core tenet of democracy is that the people rule themselves. This has nothing to do with being free to decide for themselves what's important. For example, there are many tax measures that appear on the Oregon ballot through our initiative process, which is an example of democracy. Many of them, I believe, are completely ridiculous and some downright damaging. Many of them I do not think they are important, but my decision means nothing. Other people get to decide for me what is important, such as "is it important enough to the poor people in the state of Oregon to tax HEALTH CARE and health insurance, raising the costs for everyone, to pay for the few who need it?" I say no; tomorrow night we will find out what the people ruling themselves have to say.
And if as you claim these things are essential for a functional democracy, but the people don't want these things, then you've just proven that democracy is untenable.
No, you've proven that some people don't want democracy, which is a very different thing. Of course, nobody has ever claimed that democracy has no flaws, either.
It is not illegal to tell someone how to do something illegal or who they can contact to do something illegal.
You spent quite a bit of time roasting me for something I did not say. I said I understood what the argument is, not that it is correct or appropriate.
It's a classic case of someone's hubris blinding them to reality; they need Google a LOT more than Google needs them.
I somehow doubt that Playboy, Inc, needs Google (or boing boing) providing links to illegal copies of their work being posted on Imagur. I think I it is quite reasonable for Playboy to go after those who have done, or assisted in doing, that, and Playboy would not be harmed in any way by Google (or boing boing) taking down all links to that content.
I assume the legal argument is that boing boing NEW that the material it was pointing their readers to was an illegal copy, and thus boing boing was aiding the copyright infringement by advertising it on the behalf of the person who scanned and posted the images.
It would be like, I think, someone who told other people where to find the bootleggers so they could buy moonshine. I assume that this is a violation of the law, but maybe not. I mean, apparently, actual moonshining and bootlegging isn't since the feds seem incapable of watching the television show "Moonshiners" and identifying and arresting those who go on television moonshining and bootlegging. What better evidence do they need?
Maybe you should rtfa. The methodology used by the app depends on a university server replaying packet streams at a fixed rate,
Maybe you should read TFA. It says that this is how the professor determined the way that carriers are detecting data that can be throttled. TFA ALSO says that the app tests seven different streaming "apps". If it's going to one server using one app, it isn't testing seven. How do you claim you are testing "the Netflix app" if you aren't using the Netflix app talking to a Netflix server? Ditto YouTube, etc.
What he found is that by changing the metadata of the video's header -- but not the video itself -- it could be downloaded at much higher speeds. If he changed the metadata of other types of data (photos, for instance) to have the Netflix metadata, that data would be throttled by the telecom company when it was downloaded.
It's called "Binge On", and it is an open program run by T-Mobile to allow users to get zero-rated streaming data by allowing the speeds to be throttled for any participating source. Netflix participates. If you have Netflix metadata, T-Mobile will treat it like Netflix data and zero-rate it. If you change the data source to someone who doesn't participate, you'll get it at full speed -- and every byte counts.
Binge On is not a big dark secret.
"This means itâ(TM)s keyword related and not server or even content related."
Congratulations, he's just cracked the way that T-Mobile detects Binge On data. He hasn't proven a net neutrality violation.
What I'm wondering about, why is nobody concerned that his app is spying on user activity and sending data about what you are doing back to him? Because he promises that it is all "anonymized"? Really?
Which the professor provided for by having all the data stream from his own server.
And he caught T-Mobile's "BingeOn" service, based on a metadata item in a header. While TFA refers to BingeOn as limited to a few major streaming providers, it is actually an open program available to anyone who wants to apply. At that point their data becomes zero-rated.
In real life, of course, the source still has a great deal of control over how much data it sends, and "proving" that the speed from X is slower than the speed from Y is meaningless.
This kind of measurement tool is an awesome creation and we need more.
Yes. And then we need to educate the users so they know what they are actually measuring and, more important, what they are not. Sadly, even on/., that information is lacking.
and see what AT&T does to shape my traffic.
Thank you for proving my point. That is not one of the things you can measure with this app. You cannot differentiate between "AT&T shaping" and "source limited." If you connect to a website that has a 10Mb ethernet connection you're going to think that awful old AT&T must be "shaping" your traffic from them.
You can't even guarantee that seeing a difference between Wi-Fi speed and cellular speed is the fault of AT&T, so trying to claim any difference is proof of some nefarious activity is unsupported by the data.
Slashdot Mirror
But as far as I know states normally have the right to decide what the terms of doing business with them are,
State government is a big enough customer that they shouldn't be buying ISP services from the home ISP providers anyway. Nobody in state government should have a comcast.net email address.
ISPs are natural monopolies
Please stop spouting this nonsense. ISPs are not monopolies. When you can find 8 different companies all selling service in the same area, it isn't a natural, unnatural, or any other kind of monopoly.
What IS a natural monopoly are certain forms of delivery of ISP services. Cable and telco are natural monopolies. But since "ISP" and "cable" are not synonyms, the latter does not create a monopoly status on the former.
why don't you take every option you have to try to get the corrected message out there?
Officials were already doing that.
Whether Twitter is an official channel or not is irrelevant. If it is effective, and you are trying to recover from an error, by all means use it.
Read TFS. It says that officials were using it. The question was why the Governor didn't use it for a whole 17 minutes. OMG. Other officials were using it, and were almost certainly using the official twitter accounts that people who want to use twitter to get official warnings would be following. One should not expect to follow the Governor as the sole source of official warnings. That's just stupid.
and I don't follow the governor of my state, but for many people it would be effective.
The local city police have a twitter account and use it for stuff. I don' t know what stuff. After I set it up and found out how useless twitter was, I stopped looking at it. I went back a month ago and found it full of ads^H^H^Hpromoted tweets, so I left again after five minutes.
I know what many agencies have found from using social media to issue warnings about things. It's not really a good way to do it. The campus safety department or state police, I forget which, used the campus alert system to warn people to stay away from a nearby frat house because there were shots fired, and instead of staying away a lot of people went to gawk. Same with a gas line break a couple of months ago.
Apparently the big story here is this: though he couldn't do it, he thought he should have used Twitter, instead of the state's website or the directly contacting the news media
No, the story here was that when the news media ASKED him why he DIDN'T use Twitter, he told them he had forgotten his password. That doesn't say he wasn't communicating in other ways. It doesn't say that he thought that Twitter was the right way to communicate. It just deals with some allegedly horrific 17 minute gap "in the tape" of tweets where the Governor did not send a tweet when others were. Oh my God. The Governor didn't tweet. How awful! We could have all died!
It isn't the Governor's job to call all the media in such an event. There is a department of the government that has that job. In Oregon it is called the Oregon Office of Emergency Management (OOEM), which used to be just OEM. There is an entire Joint Operations Center intended to deal with such things, and state communications staff on-site 24/7, and the media are on speed-dial. I dare say, most of the media wouldn't recognize the voice of the Governor on the phone if they were married to him.
When you say "industry", are you referring to those who still broadcast old-fashioned signals to boxes that the cord-cutting generation doesn't use anymore?
In the US we have something called "freedom", which means you are free to not listen to most emergency notification systems. If you choose not to get weather alerts by not owning or using a NOAA weather radio with such features, you are free to do so. If you don't want to watch TV, ditto.
Kind of hard to "disseminate" information to the masses who tend to now recognize only two forms of communication; social media and internet streaming.
In the US, modern cell phones have an Emergency Alerts system. There are several options, like en/disabling Amber alerts, but you cannot disable the "Presidential Alert". It is hard not to notice your cellphone screeching at you.
This alert system is also in other countries. I know what the alerts sound like because one day my phone started doing it. It was a test of the Taiwan alert system, and my phone was an unlocked HTC that was intended for sale in Taiwan. As I recall, they use certain numerical codes, and I had just not shut them off.
You'd think that e.g. a president of the US could be bothered to carry the little card with him needed to authorize a nuclear strike should things go bad in a hurry.
It is more complicated than "the little card". It is called the Nuclear Football and it does, indeed, travel with the President wherever he goes. He doesn't have to "be bothered" to carry it, there is someone assigned to do that.
More than a couple of people involved in getting that one right, and yet some recent residents couldn't be bothered.
Which ones might you be referring to? The fact that you don't see it every time the media shows the President waving to the crowd doesn't mean it isn't there. I would expect that nobody is keeping you briefed on where the football is because you don't have the clearance or a need to know.
I don't find it odd that he would use Twitter to correct a bad announcement - in situations like that you want to get on as many channels as you can,
To paraphrase an old Internet axiom: "on twitter nobody knows you are a dog."
There is an official channel for issuing these warnings. Why would you trust someone on Twitter telling you that the official announcement was wrong?
"Dear, come down to the shelter, a nuke is on the way!"
"No, dear, @DaveIge38 on Twitter says it is a false alarm. I'm staying right he(&%@{{{{{
Committng blindly is the problem.
Doing anything blindly is most likely a problem. But you just added that word -- previously it was just "commit". Those who have committed to the Democrat party so they can vote in Democrat primaries have not indicated that they are blindly following an agenda they are being fed by their controllers. Some of them, perhaps, are, but some of them are not. The act does not prove the cause, thus you have causality reversed.
But a frame is not on/of per frame. It is per pixel on a line.
Double buffering means that you do not display each pixel as it is calculated, you calculate them all and then switch the display to the that frame. Each frame is a complete set of pixels.
Becsue if you take two pixels next to each other, the framerate will be the same. Just one lights up a bit sooner than the other one.
That depends on the display, not the framerate nor the means of calculating when the next frame should be displayed.
Becsue if you take two pixels next to each other, the framerate will be the same.
Of course,
Just one lights up a bit sooner than the other one.
Irrelevant to knowing what that frame rate is or determining when the next frame of your video needs to be displayed.
What happens then if I'm passed out drunk in a driverless Lyft?
What happens if you are passed out drunk in the back of a taxi today? Are you in any way considered to be the operator of the vehicle?
My fear is that once cars are fully automated, cops will still claim you need to be sober to operate them,
Because the laws will still claim you need to be sober to operate them. Operating a motor vehicle, even a driverless one, will still be operating. It will take a change in the laws before you can be legally stoned or drunk while operating an AV. And that's only if the AV has no "cry for help" mode that requires a human to interact with it. You can expect that to be a clause in any DWI or DUII or whatever your state calls it.
For legacy reasons,
The legacy reason has to do with the AC line frequency introducing hum bars in the video, and the thought was that it was better for the hum bar to roll through the image than to be stuck in one place, which might happen to be the vertical sync period (thus screwing up the sync).
The result of this was something called 'drop frame' so that video timing would match clock time. Time code for old B/W video at 30Hz would run from 0 through 29 frames and then roll over the second counter. From here:
Drop frame timecode was invented to compensate for the discrepancy between 29.97 and 30 fps. Every minute except each tenth minute, two timecode numbers are dropped from the timecode count. This drop frame mode of 30 fps timecode remains accurate compared to the actual time passed, with a strange side effect that two numbers each minute vanish from the count.
If you ever watch a video where they show the timecode, you can actually see this, if the time is ripe.
What this proposal does is ensure that the number you get is a whole number of flicks, so no approximations are necessary.
If you are working at 30Hz (not "30hz") and count in nanoseconds, you will be off by 0.333... ns per frame. That means 10ns per second. It would take 111,111,111.1 frames to be off by one frame. That's 3703703.7 seconds of video, or 42.8 continuous days of video. After 42.8 days of video, you will be off by one frame.
If you blink once during that 42.8 days, you will miss the one additional frame that has been inserted into your 30Hz video stream.
Given the extremely small errors for any frame rate if you use nanoseconds as the timebase, a simple stretch or compress of the rate for that tiny amount will be completely undetectable. The error in any "Flick" clock will vastly outweigh the error of using a simple nanosecond clock and "approximating".
We need "Flicks" exactly why, again?
but end users are much more tied to Linux than they are to a specific brand of x86_64 CPU that runs Linux.
End users are tied to both. I have a computer room full of servers that, right now, I don't need to worry about whether they are Intel or AMD. Linux runs on both. I can run them all with the same distribution, and when I update them I can update them all to the same distribution.
So, next week, Linus decides that Linux will no longer support Intel. Oops, now half of my servers get out of sync with the other half, because I cannot update half of them when I update the other half. I can't afford to throw away half of my servers just because someone I don't know decided that software he was in charge of won't run on them. And I can't really switch OS on the half that don't update well because that makes the situation even worse.
Of course he's not going to do it, but this is pointing out how stupid and dangerous to Linux making such a decision would be.
That aside, no, exercising one's First Amendment rights is NOT "aiding and abetting the enemy". Rather the opposite - suppressing one's First Amendment rights makes the suppressor the enemy....
False dichotomy. "Not exercising" is not the same as "suppressing". And yes, statements made under the guise or protection of the First Amendment can certainly be aiding and abetting the enemy. It depends on the statement and the situation. For example, using one's First Amendment rights to promote and support enemy combatants during a conflict, giving them moral support and confidence to continue their fight, resulting in the death of US service members, certainly is "aiding and abetting the enemy". The Constitution says you have the right to speak. It does not remove the consequences of that speech.
Actually, ideally...I wish we could. Or at least restrict voting to those who pay actual taxes, so as to make sure that everyone that votes has some "skin in the game".
I have said that specifically regarding tax measures for decades. I live in a college town, so we have a large number of people who are pleaded with to vote on matters that will not have any effect at all on them in an average of two years.
For example, should the city impose a tax on cellphone service to pay for the 911 center? If you are moving away in a year anyway, why not vote 'yes' just because it sounds good, and it won't impact you in a few months anyway?
What's worse are the property tax measures being voted on by people who own no taxable property, in addition to the transients who will move out of the property they are indirectly paying taxes on through rent in a short time.
I've also talked about extending that to "sin taxes" on things like cigarettes and alkeehol. If you don't drink or smoke and won't be paying those taxes, why should you get to vote on them?
Frankly I fail to see the intelligence of anyone who commits themselves to one party or the other. They are directly claiming that party allegiance is more important than critical thinking during elections.
You have cause and effect reversed. Identifying oneself as part of a group because you believe as they usually do does not mean that the identification is more important than the belief. There is nothing inherent in a voter saying "I am a democrat" that means it cannot or refuses to think about issues. It comes to the wrong answer because it starts from usually invalid assumptions, but that's different.
You're using the same failed logic that is applied to Dittoheads, because the assumption is that Rush tells them what to think and controls them, when the truth is that they already think that and agree with Rush.
Do you buy that double shot latte espresso from Starbucks because you like double shot latte espresso or because Starbucks told you to?
That would violate the core tenet of democracy - that the people be free to decide for themselves what's important.
The core tenet of democracy is that the people rule themselves. This has nothing to do with being free to decide for themselves what's important. For example, there are many tax measures that appear on the Oregon ballot through our initiative process, which is an example of democracy. Many of them, I believe, are completely ridiculous and some downright damaging. Many of them I do not think they are important, but my decision means nothing. Other people get to decide for me what is important, such as "is it important enough to the poor people in the state of Oregon to tax HEALTH CARE and health insurance, raising the costs for everyone, to pay for the few who need it?" I say no; tomorrow night we will find out what the people ruling themselves have to say.
And if as you claim these things are essential for a functional democracy, but the people don't want these things, then you've just proven that democracy is untenable.
No, you've proven that some people don't want democracy, which is a very different thing. Of course, nobody has ever claimed that democracy has no flaws, either.
It is not illegal to tell someone how to do something illegal or who they can contact to do something illegal.
You spent quite a bit of time roasting me for something I did not say. I said I understood what the argument is, not that it is correct or appropriate.
But a good rant is always cathartic, huh?
It's a classic case of someone's hubris blinding them to reality; they need Google a LOT more than Google needs them.
I somehow doubt that Playboy, Inc, needs Google (or boing boing) providing links to illegal copies of their work being posted on Imagur. I think I it is quite reasonable for Playboy to go after those who have done, or assisted in doing, that, and Playboy would not be harmed in any way by Google (or boing boing) taking down all links to that content.
I assume the legal argument is that boing boing NEW that the material it was pointing their readers to was an illegal copy, and thus boing boing was aiding the copyright infringement by advertising it on the behalf of the person who scanned and posted the images.
It would be like, I think, someone who told other people where to find the bootleggers so they could buy moonshine. I assume that this is a violation of the law, but maybe not. I mean, apparently, actual moonshining and bootlegging isn't since the feds seem incapable of watching the television show "Moonshiners" and identifying and arresting those who go on television moonshining and bootlegging. What better evidence do they need?
Maybe you should rtfa. The methodology used by the app depends on a university server replaying packet streams at a fixed rate,
Maybe you should read TFA. It says that this is how the professor determined the way that carriers are detecting data that can be throttled. TFA ALSO says that the app tests seven different streaming "apps". If it's going to one server using one app, it isn't testing seven. How do you claim you are testing "the Netflix app" if you aren't using the Netflix app talking to a Netflix server? Ditto YouTube, etc.
What he found is that by changing the metadata of the video's header -- but not the video itself -- it could be downloaded at much higher speeds. If he changed the metadata of other types of data (photos, for instance) to have the Netflix metadata, that data would be throttled by the telecom company when it was downloaded.
It's called "Binge On", and it is an open program run by T-Mobile to allow users to get zero-rated streaming data by allowing the speeds to be throttled for any participating source. Netflix participates. If you have Netflix metadata, T-Mobile will treat it like Netflix data and zero-rate it. If you change the data source to someone who doesn't participate, you'll get it at full speed -- and every byte counts.
Binge On is not a big dark secret.
"This means itâ(TM)s keyword related and not server or even content related."
Congratulations, he's just cracked the way that T-Mobile detects Binge On data. He hasn't proven a net neutrality violation.
What I'm wondering about, why is nobody concerned that his app is spying on user activity and sending data about what you are doing back to him? Because he promises that it is all "anonymized"? Really?
Which the professor provided for by having all the data stream from his own server.
And he caught T-Mobile's "BingeOn" service, based on a metadata item in a header. While TFA refers to BingeOn as limited to a few major streaming providers, it is actually an open program available to anyone who wants to apply. At that point their data becomes zero-rated.
In real life, of course, the source still has a great deal of control over how much data it sends, and "proving" that the speed from X is slower than the speed from Y is meaningless.
This kind of measurement tool is an awesome creation and we need more.
Yes. And then we need to educate the users so they know what they are actually measuring and, more important, what they are not. Sadly, even on /., that information is lacking.
and see what AT&T does to shape my traffic.
Thank you for proving my point. That is not one of the things you can measure with this app. You cannot differentiate between "AT&T shaping" and "source limited." If you connect to a website that has a 10Mb ethernet connection you're going to think that awful old AT&T must be "shaping" your traffic from them. You can't even guarantee that seeing a difference between Wi-Fi speed and cellular speed is the fault of AT&T, so trying to claim any difference is proof of some nefarious activity is unsupported by the data.