Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of backup media.
Yeah, the sneakernet is alive and well - for those who have the sneakers, the minivans and the backups. Which does nothing for the other 95% of the population.
The Economist article on Internet TV says all the right things. But never underestimate the ability of the incumbent broadband ISPs in North America to leverage their near-monopoly control of last-mile facilities.
In Canada, as well as the US, the incumbent telcos and cablecos have both the opportunity and motivation to use traffic-shaping, bandwidth caps and exhorbitant fees to discourage the use of the local loop for any service that threatens an established service of their own - especially video. Ever since the collapse of the content/carriage distinction, they've all been in a conflict of interest, fully sanctioned by the FCC and CRTC. You get to own the pipes plus you get to offer whatever content you like.
So don't be holding your breath about the ability of that "torrent" of startups to dislodge the likes of Comcast and Rogers. True, Time Warner Cable just lost a high-profile battle on bandwidth caps. And they retaliated by taking their DOCSIS 3.0 marbles and going home to sulk. Up here, Bell Canada has filed a tariff that would allow it to extend 60-gig caps beyond its own subs, to be applied to every DSL reseller it supplies in Ontario and Quebec. And this tariff is actually being given serious consideration, even though it's egregiously anti-competitive. Proving once again that non-facilities-based competition just doesn't work. Did I mention Bell owns Canada's leading satellite-TV provider, ExpressVu?
Sure, we're getting TV over the Web. And Canadians lead the world in consumption of online video. But fiber is the only viable way we'll ever get real hi-def TV running over the Web in North America, looking like it oughta. And the incumbents - with exceptions like FiOS - don't want to go near FTTH, because that would spell the end of the artificial bandwidth scarcity that keeps them in charge.
And that's why Bell's "response" is fronted by their head of regulatory affairs - whose role in life is to keep this entire discussion in so-called public hearings before a regulatory tribunal, the last place you'll ever find an actual member of the general public. Bell has survived for over a century in Canada by ensuring a) that nobody but economists, lawyers and policy wonks ever gets a word in edge-wise; and b) that even when ordered to play nice with new entrants (unbundling network for resale, etc), they will keep coming up with ingenious ways to drag their feet on progress. And they've succeeded brilliantly, partly because non-facilities-based competition doesn't work.
But what the telcos, and cablecos, really don't want, in Canada or the US, is for the great unwashed public to discover... FTTH! And that all the copper plant they're squeezing the last dollar out of (for DSL and DOCSIS) is part of a holding pattern to keep typical residential bandwidth down in the 5 Mbps vicinity. In other words, a scarce resource. What's this horsemanure about "uncontended interntet" and freakin T1 lines? That's where the ILECs want the debate to stay.
Meanwhile, anybody get a glimpse of the OECD Broadband Report released 2 weeks ago? The one that shows the US dropping - again - among the 30 member countries in BB rankings. And Canada coming up with one of the lowest FTTH scores on the planet. This debate's gotta move to a 3-to-5-year horizon - to a day when throttling is a non-issue, and the real issues resolve to whether residential pipes are still under the control of providers who lie through their teeth, never spend a dime on technical innovation and will fight to the death to own both the pipe and the content.
i'm the proud owner of a gaggle of.ca domains, going back to the days when they were administered as a labor of love out of the university of british columbia by one dedicated soul - John Demco. he was rewarded by having abuse heaped on him for being way too particular about whether applicants were stealing trademarks, or were otherwise out to make trouble. unsurprisingly, he was a volunteer working under the de facto authority of Jon Postel.
many Canadians, esp those in business, wanted a system more like.com, so anybody could get registered in 2 minutes flat - a great system until we had to endure years of cybersquatting, reverse-cybersquatting and the like. when CIRA took over 8 years ago, they had far more resources to throw at the.ca domain, yet have built a system very much in the spirit of the old one - fair, secure and extremely well administered. the decision to pull.ca data out of whois is just another step along that path.
why anybody is surprised or upset by this decision is a mystery to me. law enforcement officials everywhere will always be disappointed if they're not allowed to stick a probe up your ass to see what you've had for lunch. as for privacy on the Internet, it's long gone - in so many ways it's hard to count 'em.
if "officials" are pissed about CIRA, it ain't because they're pulling whois out from under them. it's because CIRA operates at arm's length from the government, which is a lot more than you say for ICANN and the Dept of Commerce.
i'm always happy to tell the tale of MS's FTC privacy bust in 2002. but there's a not so funny side to software vulnerabilities for the millions of poor slobs who aren't reading this thread, or any like it. i don't think the/. hardcore fully appreciate how skittish end-users have become about this stuff, esp since they can't tell fact from rumor, or javascript from egg nog (well, neither can i). step back and think about how the poor unwashed masses will feel when stories start circulating about some deadly hole, crack or loose gear in gmail.
the good news is that awareness and suspicion levels about software have gone way up in the last 18 months. the bad news is that skill and effort levels for dealing with this shit haven't gone anywhere. i get my read from the 3rd and 4th year undergrads i teach. smart as they may be, most are just beginning to sense that working on redmond's software may have a downside. the students in question were stunned recently when attachments created in Word were banned until further notice.
so what's the bottom line here? has google been getting too much whitewash? is the problem solved? should people be falling all over themselves to revive their hotmail accounts? can non-geeks ever find a realistic way to manage their software expectations?
disclaimer: we're doing several weeks this term on google. then vista's drm nightmare. i am not, however, prepared to disclose how many gmail invitations i sent out in 2006.
while we're on the subject of nonsense, this discussion started with a battle over "correlations" then made its way to "connections" - while everybody is apparently referring to "causality", a long stretch to a mere connection. and looking for one variable to point the finger at. if the piracy/cd sales bs isn't multifactorial, i don't know what is.
and speaking of over-simplifying the details (exactly what the labels want us to do), up here in the frozen north (canada), we've done one piece of math: it's the copyright collectives - most of them not working directly for either the fat cats or* the starving musicians - who are going to grab the lion's share of the revenue in an itunes world. as much as 40% of gross, split 8 or 9 ways. making up new kinds of rights and license fees for middlemen is what we call "copyright reform".
The whole problem with ICANN is reflected in many of the posts I'm reading here, divided over the usual baloney about whether it's good or bad and whether anybody else could have done a better job, bla bla. The Bushies have got you right where they want you - in the dark, as with everything else your government does (the smug tone is coming to you from Toronto,.ca).
It's easy to make a case that ICANN is dysfunctional because it's run by staff lawyers and held hostage by progressive sovereign states like China and Saudi Arabia. Or to make some opposing case. Or to wonder why they can't be more like the IETF. But none of that changes the fact that the whole campaign launched in 1998 was about the life-and-death importance of getting government the hell out of the Internet business and into the hands of the private sector, where it damn well belongs.
Phoney privatization was made possible by the secret deal cooked up by the then ICANN cabal and rarely discussed other party to the deal, the Ass't Sec of Commerce. You can call it a spade or not, but the Secretary got an effective veto over board decisions. This didn't come to light until the ".xxx" application was passed by the board - then mysteriously sank after Michael Gallagher wrote a polite letter to Vint Cerf saying, uh, I don't think so. The thousands of letters sent in to protest the application came mostly from a Bible-thumping, family values group of gay-bashers in... you got it, Texas! The Family Research Council, protecting Humanity from porn, homos and evolutionism.
Apart from the sorrowful sight of some pudding-faced, Beltway Bush lacky pushing around the, ahem, father of the Internet, ICANN is hiding a much deeper, more insidious case of political secrecy, cynicism and hypocrisy. Too bad that's not news around Washington any more. If only we could arrange to get Sen. Stevens over to the White House to convince them to stop worrying about TLDs and start worrying about how they're gonna make the Internet work like tubes instead of like a dumptruck.
Slashdot Mirror
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of backup media.
Yeah, the sneakernet is alive and well - for those who have the sneakers, the minivans and the backups. Which does nothing for the other 95% of the population.
The Economist article on Internet TV says all the right things. But never underestimate the ability of the incumbent broadband ISPs in North America to leverage their near-monopoly control of last-mile facilities. In Canada, as well as the US, the incumbent telcos and cablecos have both the opportunity and motivation to use traffic-shaping, bandwidth caps and exhorbitant fees to discourage the use of the local loop for any service that threatens an established service of their own - especially video. Ever since the collapse of the content/carriage distinction, they've all been in a conflict of interest, fully sanctioned by the FCC and CRTC. You get to own the pipes plus you get to offer whatever content you like. So don't be holding your breath about the ability of that "torrent" of startups to dislodge the likes of Comcast and Rogers. True, Time Warner Cable just lost a high-profile battle on bandwidth caps. And they retaliated by taking their DOCSIS 3.0 marbles and going home to sulk. Up here, Bell Canada has filed a tariff that would allow it to extend 60-gig caps beyond its own subs, to be applied to every DSL reseller it supplies in Ontario and Quebec. And this tariff is actually being given serious consideration, even though it's egregiously anti-competitive. Proving once again that non-facilities-based competition just doesn't work. Did I mention Bell owns Canada's leading satellite-TV provider, ExpressVu? Sure, we're getting TV over the Web. And Canadians lead the world in consumption of online video. But fiber is the only viable way we'll ever get real hi-def TV running over the Web in North America, looking like it oughta. And the incumbents - with exceptions like FiOS - don't want to go near FTTH, because that would spell the end of the artificial bandwidth scarcity that keeps them in charge.
And that's why Bell's "response" is fronted by their head of regulatory affairs - whose role in life is to keep this entire discussion in so-called public hearings before a regulatory tribunal, the last place you'll ever find an actual member of the general public. Bell has survived for over a century in Canada by ensuring a) that nobody but economists, lawyers and policy wonks ever gets a word in edge-wise; and b) that even when ordered to play nice with new entrants (unbundling network for resale, etc), they will keep coming up with ingenious ways to drag their feet on progress. And they've succeeded brilliantly, partly because non-facilities-based competition doesn't work. But what the telcos, and cablecos, really don't want, in Canada or the US, is for the great unwashed public to discover... FTTH! And that all the copper plant they're squeezing the last dollar out of (for DSL and DOCSIS) is part of a holding pattern to keep typical residential bandwidth down in the 5 Mbps vicinity. In other words, a scarce resource. What's this horsemanure about "uncontended interntet" and freakin T1 lines? That's where the ILECs want the debate to stay. Meanwhile, anybody get a glimpse of the OECD Broadband Report released 2 weeks ago? The one that shows the US dropping - again - among the 30 member countries in BB rankings. And Canada coming up with one of the lowest FTTH scores on the planet. This debate's gotta move to a 3-to-5-year horizon - to a day when throttling is a non-issue, and the real issues resolve to whether residential pipes are still under the control of providers who lie through their teeth, never spend a dime on technical innovation and will fight to the death to own both the pipe and the content.
i'm the proud owner of a gaggle of .ca domains, going back to the days when they were administered as a labor of love out of the university of british columbia by one dedicated soul - John Demco. he was rewarded by having abuse heaped on him for being way too particular about whether applicants were stealing trademarks, or were otherwise out to make trouble. unsurprisingly, he was a volunteer working under the de facto authority of Jon Postel.
many Canadians, esp those in business, wanted a system more like .com, so anybody could get registered in 2 minutes flat - a great system until we had to endure years of cybersquatting, reverse-cybersquatting and the like. when CIRA took over 8 years ago, they had far more resources to throw at the .ca domain, yet have built a system very much in the spirit of the old one - fair, secure and extremely well administered. the decision to pull .ca data out of whois is just another step along that path.
why anybody is surprised or upset by this decision is a mystery to me. law enforcement officials everywhere will always be disappointed if they're not allowed to stick a probe up your ass to see what you've had for lunch. as for privacy on the Internet, it's long gone - in so many ways it's hard to count 'em.
if "officials" are pissed about CIRA, it ain't because they're pulling whois out from under them. it's because CIRA operates at arm's length from the government, which is a lot more than you say for ICANN and the Dept of Commerce.
"We are lucky it was not Microsoft's Hotmail!"
/. hardcore fully appreciate how skittish end-users have become about this stuff, esp since they can't tell fact from rumor, or javascript from egg nog (well, neither can i). step back and think about how the poor unwashed masses will feel when stories start circulating about some deadly hole, crack or loose gear in gmail.
i'm always happy to tell the tale of MS's FTC privacy bust in 2002. but there's a not so funny side to software vulnerabilities for the millions of poor slobs who aren't reading this thread, or any like it. i don't think the
the good news is that awareness and suspicion levels about software have gone way up in the last 18 months. the bad news is that skill and effort levels for dealing with this shit haven't gone anywhere. i get my read from the 3rd and 4th year undergrads i teach. smart as they may be, most are just beginning to sense that working on redmond's software may have a downside. the students in question were stunned recently when attachments created in Word were banned until further notice.
so what's the bottom line here? has google been getting too much whitewash? is the problem solved? should people be falling all over themselves to revive their hotmail accounts? can non-geeks ever find a realistic way to manage their software expectations?
disclaimer: we're doing several weeks this term on google. then vista's drm nightmare. i am not, however, prepared to disclose how many gmail invitations i sent out in 2006.
while we're on the subject of nonsense, this discussion started with a battle over "correlations" then made its way to "connections" - while everybody is apparently referring to "causality", a long stretch to a mere connection. and looking for one variable to point the finger at. if the piracy/cd sales bs isn't multifactorial, i don't know what is.
and speaking of over-simplifying the details (exactly what the labels want us to do), up here in the frozen north (canada), we've done one piece of math: it's the copyright collectives - most of them not working directly for either the fat cats or* the starving musicians - who are going to grab the lion's share of the revenue in an itunes world. as much as 40% of gross, split 8 or 9 ways. making up new kinds of rights and license fees for middlemen is what we call "copyright reform".
The whole problem with ICANN is reflected in many of the posts I'm reading here, divided over the usual baloney about whether it's good or bad and whether anybody else could have done a better job, bla bla. The Bushies have got you right where they want you - in the dark, as with everything else your government does (the smug tone is coming to you from Toronto, .ca).
It's easy to make a case that ICANN is dysfunctional because it's run by staff lawyers and held hostage by progressive sovereign states like China and Saudi Arabia. Or to make some opposing case. Or to wonder why they can't be more like the IETF. But none of that changes the fact that the whole campaign launched in 1998 was about the life-and-death importance of getting government the hell out of the Internet business and into the hands of the private sector, where it damn well belongs.
Phoney privatization was made possible by the secret deal cooked up by the then ICANN cabal and rarely discussed other party to the deal, the Ass't Sec of Commerce. You can call it a spade or not, but the Secretary got an effective veto over board decisions. This didn't come to light until the ".xxx" application was passed by the board - then mysteriously sank after Michael Gallagher wrote a polite letter to Vint Cerf saying, uh, I don't think so. The thousands of letters sent in to protest the application came mostly from a Bible-thumping, family values group of gay-bashers in... you got it, Texas! The Family Research Council, protecting Humanity from porn, homos and evolutionism.
Apart from the sorrowful sight of some pudding-faced, Beltway Bush lacky pushing around the, ahem, father of the Internet, ICANN is hiding a much deeper, more insidious case of political secrecy, cynicism and hypocrisy. Too bad that's not news around Washington any more. If only we could arrange to get Sen. Stevens over to the White House to convince them to stop worrying about TLDs and start worrying about how they're gonna make the Internet work like tubes instead of like a dumptruck.