A friend of mine recently commented on Net Neutrality (and specifically, the Verizon/Google collaboration). My thoughts on the matter are a bit long for a comment, so I thought I’d turn it into a full post.
Net Neutrality, at it’s most basic idea, is the idea that bits should be considered bits only – that bits shouldn’t be treated differently based on where they are from, where they are going, or what they are carrying. Now, any techie will tell you this is unreasonable – the very underlying technology that provides for the Internet violates this (Time To Live field in IP). And I’ve used quality of service (QoS) settings in my house to great effect, which would be verboten under such a regime. Ditto for network protection measures.
So it’s not about treating all bits the same. Fair enough, that was a simplification. The real fear regarding the issues of Net Neutrality is this: some people are worried about corporations cutting deals to lock out people from the Internet and it will become a gated community (usually with political connotations). Others are worried that the government will take control and turn the Internet into a political football and regulate away the dynamic nature of it. Depending on which you worry about more generally determines where you end up on the divide.
There are a couple of points I’d like to make here: First, we currently have de facto if not de jure Net Neutrality. No service provider I’ve had blocks me from going to the many sundry and controversial parts of the web. As such, arguments for Net Neutrality are based on a perceived threat, and not an actual one.
Second, the most likely means of Net Neutrality is through FCC oversight. In response to a point my friend made about with government oversight, at least “we can vote the bastards out”, the members of the FCC are appointed bureaucrats and not elected. In fact, I honestly couldn’t name any member of the FCC beyond Michael Powell, who (rather infamously) oversaw the FCC during the surge of decency complaints following Super Bowl XXXVIII. As such, the oversight of the FCC regarding the Internet would be controlled by people appointed to the position, and reflect the political winds of the time but insulated from voter retribution. Unless you believe your political ideology will rule from here on out, this should be a worry for you.
Third, consider the primary broadband provider in any given area – the cable provider. Sure, DSL exists, but it’s much narrower than cable. Cable is building on top of an infrastructure that allows it to provide TV and other services. This combined infrastructure gives it a much larger revenue stream than just broadband. And that revenue stream means that they are able to pursue the costs of meeting the regulatory requirements necessary to move into a given market.
Now, admittedly, my knowledge in the area of municipal telecom regulations is somewhat murky, but what I’ve read seems to backup my general belief that most corporate unseemliness is either enabled or caused by government regulation (and the manipulation thereof). For instance, a couple of years ago, the FCC forced a relaxation in the requirements for entry into the cable market. In ruling in favor of the FCC’s action, a US court noted, “For example, Verizon’s comments indicated that, of its 113 franchise negotiations pending as of March 2005, only ten resulted in franchise grants after one year.” Additionally, “[C]omments submitted by service provider Qwest indicated that it withdrew franchise applications in eight different regions due to economically burdensome build-out requirements.” (See here, pages 19 and 20).
Now, this situation has me a bit conflicted. On the one hand, as a big believer in federalism, I feel that it’s, as a general rule, proper to devolve authority to the lowest levels possible. But at the same time, when it’s the actions of the local community that make it too burdensome to enter into the market, I hardly feel it’s right to complain about the lack of competition.
These three points lead me to the conclusion that there is not a clear and present danger to the spirit of the Internet as it’s existed, that the granting to the government of additional oversight in the way the Internet is run brings with it new and unnecessary hazards, and that the best way to preserve de facto Net Neutrality is to further ease the regulatory and bureaucratic requirements on companies wishing to enter into the market.
By analyzing a public data set called the “Death Master File,” which contains SSNs and birth information for people who have died, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University discovered distinct patterns in how the numbers are assigned. In many cases, knowing the date and state of an individual’s birth was enough to predict a person’s SSN.
“With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003. With fewer than 1,000 attempts, they could identify the entire nine digits for 8.5 percent of the group.”
“A botnet can be programmed to try variations of a Social Security number to apply for an instant credit card,” Acquisti said. “In 60 seconds, these services tell you whether you are approved or not, so they can be abused to tell whether you’ve hit the right social security number.”
It also turns out that some SSNs are easier to predict than others. Because of the way numbers are assigned, younger people and those born in less populated states are more at risk, Acquisti said. Before 1988, many people didn’t apply for an SSN until they left for college or got their first job. But thanks to an anti-fraud effort in 1988 called the “Enumeration at Birth” initiative, parents started applying for their child’s number at birth, making it much easier to predict based on a person’s birthday.
BD+, the encryption scheme used for the most heavily protected Bluray discs, has been publicly broken by the guys on the Doom9 forums. It had been previously broken by the guys at SlySoft, makers of AnyDVD, but they had kept the method secret, as they were trying to make a commercial product of it. Now, however, we should see open-source Bluray decrypting software along the lines of DVDDecrypter begin to appear.
I just got a new laptop and was thinking about putting in a Solid State Drive (SSD), now that they seem to be affordable. There was a *huge* drop in price recently, with drives only costing half as much as they did a year before. It turns out this is due in large part to a change in technology – the shift from Single-Level Cell (SLC) technology to Multi-Level Cell (MLC) technology. The trade-off is that MLC drives live only about a 10th of the lifetime of SLC. Even so, it seem that for most people that is long enough (the rough rule of thumb seems to be 20GB/day of data being written for 5 years), and the result is twice the density at the same price.
But reports were coming in that these new drives seemed to really suck. Anandtech had a look at the problem while reviewing the new Intel SSD. Turns out that most of the SSD manufacturers are actually using the same parts, that is a Jmicron controller with Samsung memory, and there is a problem with that combination that results in *very* slow write times – so bad it’s actually worse than a normal drive and results in system instability.
OCZ, who used that combination with their Core series of SSD’s, seem to still be having teething problems, if one were to judge by the hoops people are jumping through in their forums to get everything working. Looks like good, affordable SSD is at least a year away (unless Intel does *way* better than expected).
I was looking for something to easily do HTML tooltips. It’s pretty easy to do using the :hover CSS element, but with the major cavet that IE6 doesn’t support it, which makes it nearly useless. But as luck would have it, I found a Javascript library called BoxOver that works better than anything I could have coded up, and all it needs is to be included somewhere in the page. Then all you need to do is include a little markup in the element you want the tooltip to appear with, and viola – really, really cool tooltips.
I just spent the last 4 hours ripping apart my entertainment center, tearing out obsolete wire runs, re-running wires I realized were originally poorly run, and running new lines. Originally, the entertainment center was pretty well designed, but where I thought the configuration was going to last 5 or more years, at least, ended up lasting less than 3 years. I’ve just replaced everything other than the Tivo and the TV, with the upgrade to the receiver, replacing my Pioneer VSX-516 with an Onkyo TX-SR606. It cost more than I spent on the Pioneer, but at under $400, shipped, I think it was a good deal – especially considering that it takes 4 HDMI signals and does 720p upconversion.
HDMI is the way to go, I’ve come to realize. It cuts the number of wires needed to run by at least 1/2, as you get a digital video AND audio signal along a single wire. Now I have my HTPC and my PS3 both going into the receiver, and an S-Video signal from the Tivo getting upconverted to 720p, and all sent to the TV via a single HDMI cable, as well as having the 5.1 speakers available.
I did encounter a problem with one of the speakers, who’s wall mounting came loose. Unfortunately, it didn’t want to cooperate and now there is a sizeable hole in the wall. My father thinks a longer screw could reach the wall in the back and would make a suitable mounting point, so hopefully it won’t turn into too much of a disaster.
Messing around with the speaker took at least half an hour, and by the time I had finished cleaning up, I was too tired to actually turn anything on and do any configuration. I guess that’s the task for tomorrow. Thank goodness for Logitech’s Harmony – should make the whole process easier. Can’t wait to give the whole thing a go.
I’ve encountered a number of computers recently that have had their Internet connect stop working recently. I tracked the problem down to ZoneAlarm, but when one of the computers at work also broke due to ZoneAlarm, I looked a little bit deeper. It turns out that a Microsoft Update pushed in mid-July that was designed to fix a DNS exploit is the culprit. The ZoneAlarm folks turned out an updated version pretty quickly, and all is well with your high-security settings again.
“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. ”
