Arghhggh. It's the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA. It's not the RIPA Act but the RIP Act. It makes it sound like a bad slasher film. "Coming to a cinema near you - the most talked about horror film of a decade.... It's the Ripper Act."
Back on topic; the Minister said:
"We are focusing on those parties directly affected by the changes to the extent that those parties would be subject to civil sanction or directly concerned with it, or are directly responsible, where lawful interception is taking place, for ensuring consent has been obtained for the interception"
So basically, they're talking to companies like BT, and Phorm, who broke the law in trialling deep packet inspection and altering (and recording) their web traffic without asking their customers permission. Companies they want to give the green light to, to use DPI to change how the internet works in the UK, throwing out network neutrality entirely, and relying on 'competition' in the UK to keep companies honest and not screw with customers traffic too badly for their own profit. The same competition that is now pushing 12, 18 or even 24 month minimum term contracts for broadband such that it's damn rare to find a 30-day rolling contract ISP any more.
Of course they don't want to talk to people affected by these changes, or about their right to privacy. There's money to made in the private sector, and that's who they want to talk to, to eliminate the parts of the RIP act that actually protect individual privacy, and stop their personal data being sold off to the highest bidder. Can't be having that, now can we!
It channeled hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayer to the military-industrial complex. Oh wait, you thought the interests of the US Government under George W. were for the good of the population?
Ah, but if microsoft gave away free connectivity to exchange in live mail or WM7, would the businesses pay a per-seat licence for office/outlook and a pc and windows for every single email account?
What, customers using their server software they paid for without paying a shit-ton more? That's theft! Piracy! Rape on the high seas! Hang that executive for even suggesting it!
The thing is, you don't actually *need* root on android anywhere as much as you do on the iphone.
You can install your own application APKs from outside the google market, with a simple tickbox option. That's how I installed angry birds, for example, before they finally put it on the google market.
You can install apps that replace core functions, such as the messaging, email or even the home screen(s) app, and they're even hosted on the official market.
Google doesn't use its veto power on the market to block anything it decides competes with its own functions, such as mail apps, or voip.
All of the above require root on an iphone; on android, they're open and available to all users. I have rooted my phone, and I use it to backup my ROM before flashing new leaked ones (I've had froyo for several months before it became officially available for my handset this week); and to replace the default battery icon with one which shows a percentage, as opposed to the non-root option of having the official icon plus a 2nd one showing the percentage. Samsung have locked down flashing unsigned custom kernels in an update; root allows me to reverse that also. None of these are of huge interest to the vast majority of ordinary android users.
Blame the handset maker and carrier for locking down the phone to block root - the vast majority are still trivial to root, though I'd wish more handset makers would follow the nexus one approach of making getting root a built in option. Android is still far more open than iOS.
We actually have an infrastructure system like this in the UK (ish). BT used to be a government owned utility company - the telephone company. It was sold off in the 90s. It's still required to provide universal service, i.e. a phone line for everyone.
BT Openreach owns, operates and maintains the physical cabling and telephone exchanges. Access to the customers exchange connection are leased out to ISPs at the same rate as BTs ISP arm, BT Internet, pay. Customers also pay for voice service and line rental to BT. We have a number of ISPs, small and large, who compete to provide internet access over BTs network - BT connect the customers to the ISPs own network, and the ISP handles the traffic from there. It's either ADSL1 in the older, small exchanges, or ADSL2+ over a new switched network that BT have been building out (slowly). There has been a lot of ISP consolidation of late, but there's still dozens and dozens of them, ranging from huge and cheap (and low quota) to tiny isp specialists that offer tailored packages for bandwidth.
ISPs also have the option called LLU, local loop unbundling. Here, the ISP puts their own equipment directly into the exchange, and hooks into their own back network, or lease it from BT. Either way, you're hooked in directly to a single ISPs equipment and network, but they all share the most expensive bit, the copper cable between your house and the exchange - the 'last mile', and pay BT openreach for access to it. In the bigger exchanges, you can have a half dozen different options to choose from. Given the rates to operate LLU kit are much lower for the ISP, they offer much better deals for customers to connect to it, though since there's the cost to put it in in the first place, they only do so in the larger exchanges.
There is similar competition to provide voice services over the BT or LLU network.
You forget the ISP business model; promise the moon on a stick, expect to only have to deliver a small balloon.
Kicking off the 10% that actually use their 'unlimited - fair use limit applies' account means they can delay that upgrade for another couple of years, as hey, grandma using email and facebook doesn't exactly strain the uplinks the way the rapidshare and bittorrent guys do.
And being told to do so by the government because that customer was accused of copyright infringement by an upstanding and honest company like ACS:Law, means they don't get sued by their customers for breach of contract! Marvellous, eh.
No, what the ISP objects to with the 3 strikes-style laws is it means they have to do more paperwork and hire more people to deal with it. If the copyright industry was bearing the costs, not the ISP, they'd kick heavy users off first chance they got.
That one's easy. They're terrified of losing control of your big TV with a remote in the living room. Ordinary viewers do not have a computer hooked up the TV, and a laptop is just too inconvenient to use for most.
The internet viewing streams are there to use hunched over your laptop or sat at your desk. It's not the 'premium' experience of the family sat on the sofa with an easy to use remote. The internet streams are based on that, and the revenue from that is relatively low.
Remember, you are not the customer - the advertiser is the customer, you're the product, and the TV program is just there to get your eyeballs on the adverts. Google TV threatens to bring the internet streaming model to the comfy sofa TV viewing for the masses, and is a direct threat to their broadcast business model.
Apple TV is a little different, as they get paid directly per episode 'bought' through itunes, and I imagine the profit margin on that is considerably higher than the adverts on the web-streaming model. It may even be higher than the traditional broadcast-advert model, and it works as apple users are used to paying through the nose for a slick experience. Ordinary users with a google box (or boxee box) streaming off of hulu etc? Not so much.
Though now I look at the price drops for fermi based nvidia cards; the 460 1GB is @ £150 and beats the 6850 handily, and the 470 @ £200 definitely out performs the 6870 at the same price. So on bang for buck, the fermi's definitely win this round! I imagine the prices will drop for the 68xx series, or they're going to take a bit of a kicking this time round.
Price wise, at least in sterling, the 6850 is the replacement for for 5830 @ £150 ish, and the 6870 replaces the 5850 @ £200. Mid-range cards with a moderate performance bump (and cooler and thus quieter).
As already stated, the 6900 series will be the high-end performance cards, though single gpu. Confusing, though not as bad as intel, yet!
My Galaxy S lasts 2 days between charges, 3 if I go a little easy on it (i.e. no 3d gaming, keeping the gps off). I use it constantly throughout the day, in small intervals. I have no modified power management, no app killer, though I am running unofficial beta froyo. The biggest thing that drains battery, by far, is the 4" amoled screen. Whack it up to full brightness, and yes, it'll slurp up your battery like a dog with a bowl of beer, so I usually run it at 20% or so unless I'm outside and need the light.
I love my thin, light fast handset that replaced my fat, heavy slow touch pro 2. You'll pry it from my cold dead hands etc. You can keep your battery heavy monster Sir; I'll stick to my thin, light phone that works for me just fine.
ACS:Law were using Norwich Pharmacal civil orders against the ISPs; there basically demand information relevant to a future court case from a third party, in this case the ISP. Sky broadband chose not to contest these court orders, and just supinely handed over the data. Nor did they notify their subscribers that such an order was taking place, so they could fight it if they chose.
In fact, ACS:Law were combining these requests into huge tranches of data - one such recent one was 25,000 BT Broadband IP addresses, expected to ID 15,000 subscribers.
Virgin and Talk Talk refused to go along with these orders without a fight - potentially forcing ACS:Law to do a Norwich Pharmacal order per individual IP, which would be ruinously expensive - so the leaked emails reveal that ACS:Law specifically did not target them.
So yes, it's true that Sky Broadband were under court order - but it was one they supinely accepted, with the IP addresses in bulk. Uncontested, the judge has little choice but to rubber-stamp the request from ACS:Law. Sky may not be at fault for the data breach (they hand the data over securely), but they certainly are for co-operating with ACS:Law, a known dodgy legalised extortion outfit, without even bothering to attempt to protect their customers.
ACS:Law is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for the way they go about their 'letters with menaces, demanding £495 or else' campaign; Crossley, their head solicitor, has been investigated twice before.
At the bottom of the fine article is a link to a previous benchmark they ran between opera 10.6, chrome 5, chromium 6, and firefox 4 beta 1.
In the sun spider test, Chromium 6 is fastest, opera second, and firefox 4 last - but the difference is fairly narrow, apart from firefox which is heavily beaten.
In the V8 test, chromium 6 beats all, and chrome 5 edges out opera. Firefox 4 again is beaten heavily.
Yes, jaegermonkey will make a big difference to mozilla performance - but given the rate chrome 6 is better than chrome 5 (and 6 was recently promoted to beta) it does seem likely that google will continue to outperform mozilla, even when jaegermonkey comes out.
Of course, this is rather the point of chrome - google uses AJAX heavily in its services (gmail, google docs, google apps etc etc) and if it wants to win at shifting the desktop away from local apps and into SaaS aka the cloud, then it needs a browser that can do that as fast as possible. Mozilla has a much broader set of goals - and of course a lot of legacy code to deal with.
Strictly speaking, Google pays a Megacorp International Internet (MII) for their bandwidth, and you, joe schlub the consumer, pays Comblast for your bandwidth. Simplifying massively, Comblast and MII have an arrangement by which traffic going from MII to comblast and vice versa is free, because it's roughly equal both ways. Both MII and comblast get paid for bit shifting over their infrastructure, and everybody is happy.
But Comblast looks at google's bit pot of money, and thinks "Hmm, I want some of that" - and despite having no relationship with google whatsoever, as google are MII's customer - decides to find some way of getting a cut of the action.
So they decide to slow down or block entirely google's traffic. So they can go to google, and say "pay us some money - even though you don't have anything to do with us - or we'll block your content from joe schlubb" and then they go to joe schlubb and say "pay us some more money for 'premium' service, or we'll block google. You only get 'basic' internet on YOUR package."
So Comblast is double dipping for the same bandwidth, from joe schlubb and google, and MII are just getting their usual cut from google. Now, when MII decides to start charging Comblast for transit from Joe Schlubb across their network well... it's brown, and the fan is spinning, and the whole system of ISP transit goes kablooey, and everybody loses except the middle men.
It's all about double-dipping for the same content. They want to charge home users per-byte for content travelling across their network - and ALSO charge 'popular' content providers a fee at the OTHER end of the pipe so their content will be admitted to go to the customer in the first place.
It's simple why, though. They see companies like google making money hand over fist by providing popular services; and despite them getting paid once by the end-user to transmit that data, they don't feel that their fees for bit-shifting are giving them enough profit - they want some of google's profit too, because hey, they're the middle man, and why shouldn't they get to charge both parties for the same transmission and get paid twice?
If net neutrality meant that they weren't going to get paid by *either* party, then yes, they might have a point about being required to carry the traffic anyway. Being 'forced' to carry the content their customers have already paid to have delivered? How the hell is making them live up to their side of the contract without pulling a mafia 'nice website, be a shame if anything happened to your customer base' unconstitutional?
Still; in the UK, the sender pays for phone calls, texts, MMS, etc, it's always free to receive. In the US, I understand both sender and receiver are charged for calls and texts on mobiles? So maybe there's a precedent for your telecoms providers double dipping.
And when 'buying' games means 'buying' them with massively intrusive DRM schemes that mean I'm actually just renting them for a period on a limited number of PCs? Schemes that are specifically designed to kill the legal 2nd-hand market.
No. I point blank refuse to reward such restrictions upon a paying customer with my money. Good games that are not DRM'd, or have a scheme that still allows resale? Them, I buy. The rest of 'em can happily go out of business as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, conditions will get worse - but it's a false economy. Stressed out devs working in bunker mode mentality, where the team environment is non-existent or outright toxic, where workers are treated as disposable cogs, doing unholy hours will not be doing their best work. You'll end up with a crap game riddled with bugs and savaged by the media and users alike.
Henry Ford proved that if you overwork your workers, the time spent fixing their mistakes from exhaustion takes more time than you gain from overworking them. He switched to a 6-day 8 hour per day working week (48 hours) and then a 40 hour week, and his productivity went through the roof and turnover dropped so far he stopped bothering to measure it.
Humans are not machines. They cannot work for extended periods without rest and support without the quality of their work dropping off heavily. This is not new science, it's been proven repeatedly for a century. Any company that does so is doing itself more harm than good.
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason
I know someone who bought a whole bunch of DS games, then found about flash cards, and downloaded the lot of them so he could play them all off a single sd card without having to carry around a regular sack of cartridges and constantly swap the things over. The ability to have save games stored to the card for all the games - so he and his wife could both have their own set of saves on games that have only one or two save slots - was just a bonus.
Just like DRM, when the pirates provide an easy to use, simple and more flexible product that's also much cheaper, and you insist on making your product more complex, bulky, far less practical and harder to use, you're doing it wrong.
Actually, part of the negotiations between the ISPs and the various rights agencies - that foundered, causing the government to introduce primary legislation as threatened - was the agencies wanting access to the DPI equipment logs already in use in ISPs for P2P throttling (i.e. sandvining), and for those not using it to have to fit it and use it for that purpose. As far as the agencies are concerned, it is the ISPs responsibility to police their network on behalf of the copyright industry. And the legislation was heavily influenced by the agencies; witness the Lords amendment for forcing ISPs to block 'infringing websites' - i.e. youtube - that was literally written by the BPI.
Where exactly did you think the agencies were going to get those logs to accuse people of infringement from? They're going to continue to use 3rd party agencies that monitor torrent streams, initially, but the legislation itself - as apart from the initial code of practise drawn up by Ofcom for the first stage which you describe - is pretty damn vague over what further technical measures can be introduced for both logging and cutting off connections, without further need to introduce primary legislation. It was only the Labour government's promise that any further discussion would occur at all in parliament, and now they're gone all we're left with is a very badly worded bit of legislation that was heavily influenced by the copyright agencies, a group who wanted to force all ISPs to put in DPI equipment and the final decision will not be Ofcom's, for sure.
Warning letters is only *the first step*, and more will be done if that doesn't solve the problem (which obviously it won't). As the legislation is drafted, there are much worse things in the pipeline in the next few years - including potentially making ISPs responsible for their customer's infringement if they don't take sufficient steps to monitor and kick them off the network, which is the situation I'm afraid of.
Let's also just gloss over the fact that making the line owner responsible for the civil offence (i.e. cutting off their service) without making any attempt to identify the actual infringer, or indeed provide solid evidence that an offence was even committed is drastically at odds with centuries of British jurisprudence.
You know, I'd thought I'd actually try it out for myself with a rough and ready test. I have an ISP that gives me multiple real IP addresses, so I stuck my PC on the DMZ with a real IP, and tested each of the DNS servers as the sole DNS server in windows, without using either my local dnsmasq local cache or the one on my router. Obviously, I flushed windows own DNS cache between each ping test. The results are below, make of them what you will.
I also tested all DNS providers with both primary and secondary servers; since the 2ndary servers always gave me the same IP address as the primary, they're not included. Ping times are a simple 0DP average of two sets of 10 pings (and there were no odd spikes, with my connection otherwise idle)
First though, the response times of the DNS servers themselves, average uncached - tested using GRC's DNSBench. aaisp is my own ISP, BT is a large ISP in my country, 4.2.2.3 is one which I'm using at the moment, having previously tested it as fastest.
google (8.8.8.8): 156ms opendns (208.67.222.222): 176 ms aaisp (217.169.20.20): 115 ms BT (194.72.9.34): 71ms level 3 (4.2.2.3): 95ms
Then, testing which CDN server each DNS server sends me to, and the ping times of those servers - I used the same CDN DNS names as the article;
First, cdn.thaindia.com (internap):
google resolves as 64.7.222.130, ping 167ms opendns resolves as 77.242.194.130, ping 15ms (!) aaisp resolves as 64.20.60.99, ping 82 ms BT resolves as 64.20.60.106, ping 81ms level 3 resolves as 64.20.60.106, ping 81ms
Then profile.ak.fbcdn.net (akamai):
google resolves it as 92,122,217,75, ping 22ms opendns resolves as 195.59.150.152, ping 15ms aaisp resolves as 92.122,208.106, ping 13ms BT resolves as 88.221.94.242, ping 14ms level 3 resolves as 195.59.150.144, ping 15 ms
However you slice it, google's public DNS is a bad choice for me. Longer to resolve addresses, and it sends me to non-optimal CDN servers. OpenDNS is a mixed bag; slower resolution than the rest, but sends me to easily the most optimal cdn.thaindia.com server (shame about the redirected NXDOMAIN problem). Yet BT are the fastest DNS resolver of all, and still return decent results. Go figure; I thought they'd be overloaded and well, crap.
I'm definitely going to have to further testing for my own personal use, using whole page rendering on my favourite sites to see what is actually the best option for me personally, as DNS resolver speed clearly isn't the whole story in this CDN world.
But if you look at TFA, that doesn't actually work in practise - looking at, for example, the swedish EC2 host pinging - internap: using local DNS gives a ping of 36.3, opendns is 40 and googledns is 189! akamai: local dns resolved IP pings at 13.2, opendms at 51.7 and googledns at 36.
In both cases, using local DNS gives a substantially faster responding server with both CDN networks tested, presumably one that is physically closer to the testing machine. Using google DNS and open DNS both result in getting less optimal servers for the actual content; so any saving in DNS resolution itself is lost due to the CDN giving you the actual website content from a sub-optimal location; especially if you're pulling down lots of different bits of content.
It's an interesting enough result that I'm going to reinvestigate using my ISP DNS for my dnsmasq local cache server (or at least one hosted in my own country), and compare total page rendering time for the sites I visit often, rather than just DNS resolution times, given how many large sites use akamai and the like these days.
Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law
Well that's because you probably are; the laws about driving and copyright are so rediculously broad - and lightly enforced - that you're breaking the law most of the time, but simply aren't prosecuted for it until you appear on someones radar.
What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing' then put you on a list, then hand that list over to the major label music industry to decide if they're going to take civil action against you. So not only am I having my privacy massively infringed by my own ISP, I'm paying them to do it, and act as enforcer and bearer of all the costs as evidence gatherer for another industry entirely - one I happen to be boycotting.
Thanks a bunch ex-labour government for pushing that little law through at the last minute without debate.
That it's 250GB today, but it'll be lower tomorrow - our quotas started out higher too; it was only a couple of years ago that you could find 300GB quota ISPs. Now the one I'm on reduced the quota from 100GB to 50GB last month and there's hardly anywhere left to go for ADSL1 customers who don't have competitors in the local exchanges (around 30% of the country).
Most of them that have quotas don't give you any method of knowing how much you've used either, until you get a threatening email for being an 'excessive user'. Hell, some of the mainstream ones, like BT or pipex, don't even tell you what the quota IS; they just top slice the heaviest customers and kick them off, and charge *them* for breach of contract.
It's an utter joke, and the regulator is quite happy for it to carry on, because us excessive users are clearly only pirates and ne'er-do-wells, so who gives a toss?
So beware. Do what you can to get proper regulation involved before it all turns to crap like it has this side of the pond.
Absolutely, it's the 99% of the lawyers that give the rest a bad name...
Seriously though, it's not that often that criminal lawyers (most of the ones you list) annoy me, though I have contempt for the one that threatened Gary McKinnon with the eventual death penalty if he didn't stop fighting extradition, for example - and there's AMPLE examples of prosecutions that should never have happened.
Many civil lawyers, especially those that work for large firms or on class action suits are simply parasites on society though. It's not like we can even avoid them - they insert themselves into everything, from drafting the worst parts of the Digital Economy Bill, to the impenetrable legal 'contracts' that come with everything these days to sending threatening letters to if they don't pay up right now, threatening sanctions that aren't even in the law, based on virtually no evidence that itself is frequently wrong - and have admitted that it is a profitable business, as of *course* no-one would ever pay up in confusion or fear or to just make it go away, they *must* be guilty, so we shall do more of it!
And oddly enough, many politicians started out as lawyers. So they start with using obscure, badly written and vague laws to beat down competitors and exploit the customers; then going into the legislature, where they draft obscure, badly written and vague laws to supposedly tackle one thing, and end up having loopholes big enough for a truck-driving tax avoidance expert to drive though.
Are all lawyers worthless? Of course not. Do they have a similar level of worthless people doing worthless* jobs as say, estate agents, advertising executives and telesales people? Oh, yes.
*worthless to you, me, and the general good of society. I'm sure they're worth quite a bit in financial terms to the lawyer in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Arghhggh. It's the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA. It's not the RIPA Act but the RIP Act. It makes it sound like a bad slasher film. "Coming to a cinema near you - the most talked about horror film of a decade.... It's the Ripper Act."
Back on topic; the Minister said:
"We are focusing on those parties directly affected by the changes to the extent that those parties would be subject to civil sanction or directly concerned with it, or are directly responsible, where lawful interception is taking place, for ensuring consent has been obtained for the interception"
So basically, they're talking to companies like BT, and Phorm, who broke the law in trialling deep packet inspection and altering (and recording) their web traffic without asking their customers permission. Companies they want to give the green light to, to use DPI to change how the internet works in the UK, throwing out network neutrality entirely, and relying on 'competition' in the UK to keep companies honest and not screw with customers traffic too badly for their own profit. The same competition that is now pushing 12, 18 or even 24 month minimum term contracts for broadband such that it's damn rare to find a 30-day rolling contract ISP any more.
Of course they don't want to talk to people affected by these changes, or about their right to privacy. There's money to made in the private sector, and that's who they want to talk to, to eliminate the parts of the RIP act that actually protect individual privacy, and stop their personal data being sold off to the highest bidder. Can't be having that, now can we!
It channeled hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayer to the military-industrial complex. Oh wait, you thought the interests of the US Government under George W. were for the good of the population?
I dunno, do you get raped by the other inmates in Chinese prisons?
Ah, but if microsoft gave away free connectivity to exchange in live mail or WM7, would the businesses pay a per-seat licence for office/outlook and a pc and windows for every single email account?
What, customers using their server software they paid for without paying a shit-ton more? That's theft! Piracy! Rape on the high seas! Hang that executive for even suggesting it!
The thing is, you don't actually *need* root on android anywhere as much as you do on the iphone.
You can install your own application APKs from outside the google market, with a simple tickbox option. That's how I installed angry birds, for example, before they finally put it on the google market.
You can install apps that replace core functions, such as the messaging, email or even the home screen(s) app, and they're even hosted on the official market.
Google doesn't use its veto power on the market to block anything it decides competes with its own functions, such as mail apps, or voip.
All of the above require root on an iphone; on android, they're open and available to all users. I have rooted my phone, and I use it to backup my ROM before flashing new leaked ones (I've had froyo for several months before it became officially available for my handset this week); and to replace the default battery icon with one which shows a percentage, as opposed to the non-root option of having the official icon plus a 2nd one showing the percentage. Samsung have locked down flashing unsigned custom kernels in an update; root allows me to reverse that also. None of these are of huge interest to the vast majority of ordinary android users.
Blame the handset maker and carrier for locking down the phone to block root - the vast majority are still trivial to root, though I'd wish more handset makers would follow the nexus one approach of making getting root a built in option. Android is still far more open than iOS.
We actually have an infrastructure system like this in the UK (ish). BT used to be a government owned utility company - the telephone company. It was sold off in the 90s. It's still required to provide universal service, i.e. a phone line for everyone.
BT Openreach owns, operates and maintains the physical cabling and telephone exchanges. Access to the customers exchange connection are leased out to ISPs at the same rate as BTs ISP arm, BT Internet, pay. Customers also pay for voice service and line rental to BT. We have a number of ISPs, small and large, who compete to provide internet access over BTs network - BT connect the customers to the ISPs own network, and the ISP handles the traffic from there. It's either ADSL1 in the older, small exchanges, or ADSL2+ over a new switched network that BT have been building out (slowly). There has been a lot of ISP consolidation of late, but there's still dozens and dozens of them, ranging from huge and cheap (and low quota) to tiny isp specialists that offer tailored packages for bandwidth.
ISPs also have the option called LLU, local loop unbundling. Here, the ISP puts their own equipment directly into the exchange, and hooks into their own back network, or lease it from BT. Either way, you're hooked in directly to a single ISPs equipment and network, but they all share the most expensive bit, the copper cable between your house and the exchange - the 'last mile', and pay BT openreach for access to it. In the bigger exchanges, you can have a half dozen different options to choose from. Given the rates to operate LLU kit are much lower for the ISP, they offer much better deals for customers to connect to it, though since there's the cost to put it in in the first place, they only do so in the larger exchanges.
There is similar competition to provide voice services over the BT or LLU network.
You forget the ISP business model; promise the moon on a stick, expect to only have to deliver a small balloon.
Kicking off the 10% that actually use their 'unlimited - fair use limit applies' account means they can delay that upgrade for another couple of years, as hey, grandma using email and facebook doesn't exactly strain the uplinks the way the rapidshare and bittorrent guys do.
And being told to do so by the government because that customer was accused of copyright infringement by an upstanding and honest company like ACS:Law, means they don't get sued by their customers for breach of contract! Marvellous, eh.
No, what the ISP objects to with the 3 strikes-style laws is it means they have to do more paperwork and hire more people to deal with it. If the copyright industry was bearing the costs, not the ISP, they'd kick heavy users off first chance they got.
That one's easy. They're terrified of losing control of your big TV with a remote in the living room. Ordinary viewers do not have a computer hooked up the TV, and a laptop is just too inconvenient to use for most.
The internet viewing streams are there to use hunched over your laptop or sat at your desk. It's not the 'premium' experience of the family sat on the sofa with an easy to use remote. The internet streams are based on that, and the revenue from that is relatively low.
Remember, you are not the customer - the advertiser is the customer, you're the product, and the TV program is just there to get your eyeballs on the adverts. Google TV threatens to bring the internet streaming model to the comfy sofa TV viewing for the masses, and is a direct threat to their broadcast business model.
Apple TV is a little different, as they get paid directly per episode 'bought' through itunes, and I imagine the profit margin on that is considerably higher than the adverts on the web-streaming model. It may even be higher than the traditional broadcast-advert model, and it works as apple users are used to paying through the nose for a slick experience. Ordinary users with a google box (or boxee box) streaming off of hulu etc? Not so much.
Though now I look at the price drops for fermi based nvidia cards; the 460 1GB is @ £150 and beats the 6850 handily, and the 470 @ £200 definitely out performs the 6870 at the same price. So on bang for buck, the fermi's definitely win this round! I imagine the prices will drop for the 68xx series, or they're going to take a bit of a kicking this time round.
Price wise, at least in sterling, the 6850 is the replacement for for 5830 @ £150 ish, and the 6870 replaces the 5850 @ £200. Mid-range cards with a moderate performance bump (and cooler and thus quieter).
As already stated, the 6900 series will be the high-end performance cards, though single gpu. Confusing, though not as bad as intel, yet!
My Galaxy S lasts 2 days between charges, 3 if I go a little easy on it (i.e. no 3d gaming, keeping the gps off). I use it constantly throughout the day, in small intervals. I have no modified power management, no app killer, though I am running unofficial beta froyo. The biggest thing that drains battery, by far, is the 4" amoled screen. Whack it up to full brightness, and yes, it'll slurp up your battery like a dog with a bowl of beer, so I usually run it at 20% or so unless I'm outside and need the light.
I love my thin, light fast handset that replaced my fat, heavy slow touch pro 2. You'll pry it from my cold dead hands etc. You can keep your battery heavy monster Sir; I'll stick to my thin, light phone that works for me just fine.
ACS:Law were using Norwich Pharmacal civil orders against the ISPs; there basically demand information relevant to a future court case from a third party, in this case the ISP. Sky broadband chose not to contest these court orders, and just supinely handed over the data. Nor did they notify their subscribers that such an order was taking place, so they could fight it if they chose.
In fact, ACS:Law were combining these requests into huge tranches of data - one such recent one was 25,000 BT Broadband IP addresses, expected to ID 15,000 subscribers.
Virgin and Talk Talk refused to go along with these orders without a fight - potentially forcing ACS:Law to do a Norwich Pharmacal order per individual IP, which would be ruinously expensive - so the leaked emails reveal that ACS:Law specifically did not target them.
So yes, it's true that Sky Broadband were under court order - but it was one they supinely accepted, with the IP addresses in bulk. Uncontested, the judge has little choice but to rubber-stamp the request from ACS:Law. Sky may not be at fault for the data breach (they hand the data over securely), but they certainly are for co-operating with ACS:Law, a known dodgy legalised extortion outfit, without even bothering to attempt to protect their customers.
ACS:Law is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for the way they go about their 'letters with menaces, demanding £495 or else' campaign; Crossley, their head solicitor, has been investigated twice before.
At the bottom of the fine article is a link to a previous benchmark they ran between opera 10.6, chrome 5, chromium 6, and firefox 4 beta 1.
In the sun spider test, Chromium 6 is fastest, opera second, and firefox 4 last - but the difference is fairly narrow, apart from firefox which is heavily beaten.
In the V8 test, chromium 6 beats all, and chrome 5 edges out opera. Firefox 4 again is beaten heavily.
Yes, jaegermonkey will make a big difference to mozilla performance - but given the rate chrome 6 is better than chrome 5 (and 6 was recently promoted to beta) it does seem likely that google will continue to outperform mozilla, even when jaegermonkey comes out.
Of course, this is rather the point of chrome - google uses AJAX heavily in its services (gmail, google docs, google apps etc etc) and if it wants to win at shifting the desktop away from local apps and into SaaS aka the cloud, then it needs a browser that can do that as fast as possible. Mozilla has a much broader set of goals - and of course a lot of legacy code to deal with.
Strictly speaking, Google pays a Megacorp International Internet (MII) for their bandwidth, and you, joe schlub the consumer, pays Comblast for your bandwidth. Simplifying massively, Comblast and MII have an arrangement by which traffic going from MII to comblast and vice versa is free, because it's roughly equal both ways. Both MII and comblast get paid for bit shifting over their infrastructure, and everybody is happy.
But Comblast looks at google's bit pot of money, and thinks "Hmm, I want some of that" - and despite having no relationship with google whatsoever, as google are MII's customer - decides to find some way of getting a cut of the action.
So they decide to slow down or block entirely google's traffic. So they can go to google, and say "pay us some money - even though you don't have anything to do with us - or we'll block your content from joe schlubb" and then they go to joe schlubb and say "pay us some more money for 'premium' service, or we'll block google. You only get 'basic' internet on YOUR package."
So Comblast is double dipping for the same bandwidth, from joe schlubb and google, and MII are just getting their usual cut from google. Now, when MII decides to start charging Comblast for transit from Joe Schlubb across their network well... it's brown, and the fan is spinning, and the whole system of ISP transit goes kablooey, and everybody loses except the middle men.
It's all about double-dipping for the same content. They want to charge home users per-byte for content travelling across their network - and ALSO charge 'popular' content providers a fee at the OTHER end of the pipe so their content will be admitted to go to the customer in the first place.
It's simple why, though. They see companies like google making money hand over fist by providing popular services; and despite them getting paid once by the end-user to transmit that data, they don't feel that their fees for bit-shifting are giving them enough profit - they want some of google's profit too, because hey, they're the middle man, and why shouldn't they get to charge both parties for the same transmission and get paid twice?
If net neutrality meant that they weren't going to get paid by *either* party, then yes, they might have a point about being required to carry the traffic anyway. Being 'forced' to carry the content their customers have already paid to have delivered? How the hell is making them live up to their side of the contract without pulling a mafia 'nice website, be a shame if anything happened to your customer base' unconstitutional?
Still; in the UK, the sender pays for phone calls, texts, MMS, etc, it's always free to receive. In the US, I understand both sender and receiver are charged for calls and texts on mobiles? So maybe there's a precedent for your telecoms providers double dipping.
And when 'buying' games means 'buying' them with massively intrusive DRM schemes that mean I'm actually just renting them for a period on a limited number of PCs? Schemes that are specifically designed to kill the legal 2nd-hand market.
No. I point blank refuse to reward such restrictions upon a paying customer with my money. Good games that are not DRM'd, or have a scheme that still allows resale? Them, I buy. The rest of 'em can happily go out of business as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, conditions will get worse - but it's a false economy. Stressed out devs working in bunker mode mentality, where the team environment is non-existent or outright toxic, where workers are treated as disposable cogs, doing unholy hours will not be doing their best work. You'll end up with a crap game riddled with bugs and savaged by the media and users alike.
Henry Ford proved that if you overwork your workers, the time spent fixing their mistakes from exhaustion takes more time than you gain from overworking them. He switched to a 6-day 8 hour per day working week (48 hours) and then a 40 hour week, and his productivity went through the roof and turnover dropped so far he stopped bothering to measure it.
Humans are not machines. They cannot work for extended periods without rest and support without the quality of their work dropping off heavily. This is not new science, it's been proven repeatedly for a century. Any company that does so is doing itself more harm than good.
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason
I know someone who bought a whole bunch of DS games, then found about flash cards, and downloaded the lot of them so he could play them all off a single sd card without having to carry around a regular sack of cartridges and constantly swap the things over. The ability to have save games stored to the card for all the games - so he and his wife could both have their own set of saves on games that have only one or two save slots - was just a bonus.
Just like DRM, when the pirates provide an easy to use, simple and more flexible product that's also much cheaper, and you insist on making your product more complex, bulky, far less practical and harder to use, you're doing it wrong.
Actually, part of the negotiations between the ISPs and the various rights agencies - that foundered, causing the government to introduce primary legislation as threatened - was the agencies wanting access to the DPI equipment logs already in use in ISPs for P2P throttling (i.e. sandvining), and for those not using it to have to fit it and use it for that purpose. As far as the agencies are concerned, it is the ISPs responsibility to police their network on behalf of the copyright industry. And the legislation was heavily influenced by the agencies; witness the Lords amendment for forcing ISPs to block 'infringing websites' - i.e. youtube - that was literally written by the BPI.
Where exactly did you think the agencies were going to get those logs to accuse people of infringement from? They're going to continue to use 3rd party agencies that monitor torrent streams, initially, but the legislation itself - as apart from the initial code of practise drawn up by Ofcom for the first stage which you describe - is pretty damn vague over what further technical measures can be introduced for both logging and cutting off connections, without further need to introduce primary legislation. It was only the Labour government's promise that any further discussion would occur at all in parliament, and now they're gone all we're left with is a very badly worded bit of legislation that was heavily influenced by the copyright agencies, a group who wanted to force all ISPs to put in DPI equipment and the final decision will not be Ofcom's, for sure.
Warning letters is only *the first step*, and more will be done if that doesn't solve the problem (which obviously it won't). As the legislation is drafted, there are much worse things in the pipeline in the next few years - including potentially making ISPs responsible for their customer's infringement if they don't take sufficient steps to monitor and kick them off the network, which is the situation I'm afraid of.
Let's also just gloss over the fact that making the line owner responsible for the civil offence (i.e. cutting off their service) without making any attempt to identify the actual infringer, or indeed provide solid evidence that an offence was even committed is drastically at odds with centuries of British jurisprudence.
You know, I'd thought I'd actually try it out for myself with a rough and ready test. I have an ISP that gives me multiple real IP addresses, so I stuck my PC on the DMZ with a real IP, and tested each of the DNS servers as the sole DNS server in windows, without using either my local dnsmasq local cache or the one on my router. Obviously, I flushed windows own DNS cache between each ping test. The results are below, make of them what you will.
I also tested all DNS providers with both primary and secondary servers; since the 2ndary servers always gave me the same IP address as the primary, they're not included. Ping times are a simple 0DP average of two sets of 10 pings (and there were no odd spikes, with my connection otherwise idle)
First though, the response times of the DNS servers themselves, average uncached - tested using GRC's DNSBench.
aaisp is my own ISP, BT is a large ISP in my country, 4.2.2.3 is one which I'm using at the moment, having previously tested it as fastest.
google (8.8.8.8): 156ms
opendns (208.67.222.222): 176 ms
aaisp (217.169.20.20): 115 ms
BT (194.72.9.34): 71ms
level 3 (4.2.2.3): 95ms
Then, testing which CDN server each DNS server sends me to, and the ping times of those servers - I used the same CDN DNS names as the article;
First, cdn.thaindia.com (internap):
google resolves as 64.7.222.130, ping 167ms
opendns resolves as 77.242.194.130, ping 15ms (!)
aaisp resolves as 64.20.60.99, ping 82 ms
BT resolves as 64.20.60.106, ping 81ms
level 3 resolves as 64.20.60.106, ping 81ms
Then profile.ak.fbcdn.net (akamai):
google resolves it as 92,122,217,75, ping 22ms
opendns resolves as 195.59.150.152, ping 15ms
aaisp resolves as 92.122,208.106, ping 13ms
BT resolves as 88.221.94.242, ping 14ms
level 3 resolves as 195.59.150.144, ping 15 ms
However you slice it, google's public DNS is a bad choice for me. Longer to resolve addresses, and it sends me to non-optimal CDN servers. OpenDNS is a mixed bag; slower resolution than the rest, but sends me to easily the most optimal cdn.thaindia.com server (shame about the redirected NXDOMAIN problem). Yet BT are the fastest DNS resolver of all, and still return decent results. Go figure; I thought they'd be overloaded and well, crap.
I'm definitely going to have to further testing for my own personal use, using whole page rendering on my favourite sites to see what is actually the best option for me personally, as DNS resolver speed clearly isn't the whole story in this CDN world.
But if you look at TFA, that doesn't actually work in practise - looking at, for example, the swedish EC2 host pinging -
internap:
using local DNS gives a ping of 36.3, opendns is 40 and googledns is 189!
akamai:
local dns resolved IP pings at 13.2, opendms at 51.7 and googledns at 36.
In both cases, using local DNS gives a substantially faster responding server with both CDN networks tested, presumably one that is physically closer to the testing machine. Using google DNS and open DNS both result in getting less optimal servers for the actual content; so any saving in DNS resolution itself is lost due to the CDN giving you the actual website content from a sub-optimal location; especially if you're pulling down lots of different bits of content.
It's an interesting enough result that I'm going to reinvestigate using my ISP DNS for my dnsmasq local cache server (or at least one hosted in my own country), and compare total page rendering time for the sites I visit often, rather than just DNS resolution times, given how many large sites use akamai and the like these days.
Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law
Well that's because you probably are; the laws about driving and copyright are so rediculously broad - and lightly enforced - that you're breaking the law most of the time, but simply aren't prosecuted for it until you appear on someones radar.
What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing' then put you on a list, then hand that list over to the major label music industry to decide if they're going to take civil action against you. So not only am I having my privacy massively infringed by my own ISP, I'm paying them to do it, and act as enforcer and bearer of all the costs as evidence gatherer for another industry entirely - one I happen to be boycotting.
Thanks a bunch ex-labour government for pushing that little law through at the last minute without debate.
That it's 250GB today, but it'll be lower tomorrow - our quotas started out higher too; it was only a couple of years ago that you could find 300GB quota ISPs. Now the one I'm on reduced the quota from 100GB to 50GB last month and there's hardly anywhere left to go for ADSL1 customers who don't have competitors in the local exchanges (around 30% of the country).
Most of them that have quotas don't give you any method of knowing how much you've used either, until you get a threatening email for being an 'excessive user'. Hell, some of the mainstream ones, like BT or pipex, don't even tell you what the quota IS; they just top slice the heaviest customers and kick them off, and charge *them* for breach of contract.
It's an utter joke, and the regulator is quite happy for it to carry on, because us excessive users are clearly only pirates and ne'er-do-wells, so who gives a toss?
So beware. Do what you can to get proper regulation involved before it all turns to crap like it has this side of the pond.
Absolutely, it's the 99% of the lawyers that give the rest a bad name...
Seriously though, it's not that often that criminal lawyers (most of the ones you list) annoy me, though I have contempt for the one that threatened Gary McKinnon with the eventual death penalty if he didn't stop fighting extradition, for example - and there's AMPLE examples of prosecutions that should never have happened.
Many civil lawyers, especially those that work for large firms or on class action suits are simply parasites on society though. It's not like we can even avoid them - they insert themselves into everything, from drafting the worst parts of the Digital Economy Bill, to the impenetrable legal 'contracts' that come with everything these days to sending threatening letters to if they don't pay up right now, threatening sanctions that aren't even in the law, based on virtually no evidence that itself is frequently wrong - and have admitted that it is a profitable business, as of *course* no-one would ever pay up in confusion or fear or to just make it go away, they *must* be guilty, so we shall do more of it!
And oddly enough, many politicians started out as lawyers. So they start with using obscure, badly written and vague laws to beat down competitors and exploit the customers; then going into the legislature, where they draft obscure, badly written and vague laws to supposedly tackle one thing, and end up having loopholes big enough for a truck-driving tax avoidance expert to drive though.
Are all lawyers worthless? Of course not. Do they have a similar level of worthless people doing worthless* jobs as say, estate agents, advertising executives and telesales people? Oh, yes.
*worthless to you, me, and the general good of society. I'm sure they're worth quite a bit in financial terms to the lawyer in question.
The correct term for Ubisoft games is 'Crippleware'.