Category: Internet

US Broadband is Now So Bad……

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That even in the phony metrics commissioned by the US incumbent carriers, the United States is no longer in first place:

The United States has lost the top spot in Nokia Siemens Networks’ annual broadband development index, the Connectivity Scorecard, to Sweden.

The Connectivity Scorecard is, as Stacey Higginbotham reports for GigaOM, a favorite measure of the telecom industry, since it paints the America in a particularly favorable light.

It’s gotten so bad that even when using the bogus metrics favored our the telco incumbents who took billions in government dollars and gave us nothing, we still cannot win.

It’s time to stop bribing the monopolists, and start actually instituting real regulations that require real performance.

Its a Death Trap, It’s a Suicide Rap

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Rupert Murdoch has decided that Times of London and the Sunday Times will go behind a pay-wall.

I generally think that this is a bad idea since:

  • People haven’t paid for content from news publications for over a century, it’s been advertising supported, with the cover/subscription price covering only a portion of the actual cost of printing.
  • Putting general interest content behind a firewall tends to remove it from the Internet consciousness, which drives subscriptions and ad revenue down. (See the New York Times‘ abortive attempt with their OP/EDs)

That being said, I think that Murdoch’s plans go way beyond a simple pay-wall, and straight into crazy town, because, as the New York Post, a Murdoch publication that I would like to see vanish into pay-wall obscurity notes, observes, the Times of London won’t just be going behind a pay-wall, they will also lock out the search engines almost completely:

The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.

Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content. Critics say the move will make it tougher to attract new readers who discover content by searching the Web.

This isn’t just a misbegotten business plan, it’s an attempt to force payment for links, and it ain’t gonna work, at least not unless Murdoch can convince various legislatures to make linking illegal, a course of action that I find profoundly unlikely, since it essentially bans the web.

Apologies to Declan McCullagh

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In an earlier post, regarding an article where a quote:

“Don’t be silly,” McLaughlin responds. “No one’s backed away from anything. . . . Isn’t . . . the author of the article, an anti [net neutrality] zealot?”

I put 2 and 2 together, and got 5. I said that it was clearly CNET reporter Declan McCullagh.

Well, it was not Mr. McCullagh.

It was someone else, and here is (my best guess) his article.

It sounded as if was something that came from Mr. McCullagh, who is a somewhat-saner-than-Rand-Paul libertarian, but I was wrong.

I had an exchange with the author, Roger Parloff, who told me who the author was, and that he felt that naming the author would require space for a response, which would have crowded out other information in an article with a limited length.

Perhaps the solution here is for online articles from dead tree publications, Fortune Magazine in this case, would be better served by providing links under such circumstances.

It’s bloggy, but I’ve always been a fan of hyperlinks, or their old school predecessor, the footnote.

In any case, I was wrong, and I apologize to my reader(s) and Mr. McCullagh.

Journalists Protecting Their Own

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In an otherwise ordinary article about how former Googlers in the Obama White House continue to talk with current Googlers, we have the following exchange:

In January, for instance, Google’s vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” Vint Cerf anxiously wrote to McLaughlin about the worsening chances for net neutrality — the notion that Internet Service Providers should be barred from favoring their own content or from offering “fast-lane” services to premium-paying customers. “Has there been so much flack from the Hill that you guys feel a need to back away” from a commitment?, asked Cerf, attaching a CNET article by a well-credentialed business consultant who was advancing that thesis.

“Don’t be silly,” McLaughlin responds. “No one’s backed away from anything. . . . Isn’t . . . the author of the article, an anti [net neutrality] zealot?”

“Yes, he is,” Cerf wrote. “Just wanted to confirm he’s full of biased baloney.”

“Absolutely,” McLaughlin replied.

If you go through the article, you will never see that name of the journalist in question, Declan McCullagh, who was best described as a “Draw by crayon libertarian,” by the inestimable Andrew Orlowski of The Register.

I deduce it from the Clues, “CNET,” “anti [net neutrality] zealot,” and “Biased Baloney,” if you are familiar with McCullagh’s oeuvre.

What is almost certain is that if the principals in this story were talking about a statement by a lawyer given to over-the-top statements, (Geoff Feiger, for example) you would have seen the name in the story.

It’s not in this story, because it is seen as inappropriate for a journalist to call out another journalist by name, even in the context of a quote someone else.

This attitude is corrosive to journalism.

Lame, Even By Republican Standards

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Will Bunch notices that Pennsylvania State Attorney General, and Republican nominee for governor, Tom Corbett, has issued subpoenas to determine who is making nasty tweets and blog posts about him:

Corbett’s actions here look like one of the most stunning abuses of power I’ve seen in a while — not just in Pennsylvania but anywhere.

A blog focused on exposing the alleged “hypocrisy” of Attorney General Tom Corbett and the Twitter account associated with that blog could soon be enjoying a bounce in reader interest, thanks to a subpoena ordered by Corbett’s office earlier this month.

Corbett, who won a primary against Rep. Sam Rohrer Tuesday and will be the Republican nominee for governor in November, subpoenaed Twitter representatives to appear as grand jury witnesses to “testify and give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of Pennsylvania.”

The case could gain viral attention, since the subpoena calls into question the right to free speech, specifically from anonymous posters on the World Wide Web.

Maybe I’m missing some nuance here but at first blush it looks like the anonymous owners of these two Twitter accounts and blogs are doing nothing more than exercising their 1st Amendment rights of free speech to criticize Corbett’s public actions. If Corbett believes that he has been libelled by any of the blog or Twitter posts, he is within his rights to personally sue them (a difficult case for him to win, as a public figure). But that is a far different thing from using the power of the state and the grand jury.

Bunch further updates with a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story, where a they imply that the blogger/bloggers are a defendant in a case, but in a quick reading of the blog, there is no mention of the case, just a litany of accounts of unethical behavior by Mr. Corbett.

This is clearly an attempt at retaliation against critics.

Telecoms Set to Mount Astroturf Campaign Against Net Neutrality

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Think Progress is all over it:

This morning, representatives from various front groups launched a new coordinated campaign to kill net neutrality. Speaking on Capitol Hill, these front groups took turns decrying the evils of the principle of a fair and unbiased Internet. LULAC, which is funded by AT&T, called Net Neutrality “Obamacare for the Internet.” (LULAC was not present at the press conference. The Hispanic Leadership Fund, another group funded by the telecom industry and opposed to net neutrality, spoke at the event. We apologize for the error.) Americans for Prosperity — a corporate front group founded by oil billionaire David Koch but also funded by telecom interests — unveiled a new ad smearing net neutrality as a “government takeover” (the initial ad buy is $1.4 million dollars). And Grover Norquist, representing his “Americans for Tax Reform” corporate front group, said net neutrality is like what China does, “putting policemen on every corner, on the street or on the Internet.” Watch it:

(Strikout original)

And once again, Declan McCullagh,* who can be relied on to take any lie from a telco industry lobbyist represent them them as truth, had published a gotcha article claiming that it was just a bunch of college kids, only he missed the following facts that his lobbyist friend sources neglected to tell him:

  • The person running the web site is not a student. She is professional paid staff of an astroturf lobbying group.
  • She used a professional PR service to track the distribution of the story.
  • The “students” met with Norquist and His Evil Minions™.
  • Norquist and His Evil Minions™ have been parroting the terms from the presentation word for word.

Fundamentally, if you read something from McCullagh that might have to bear on his rather extreme libertarian views, find a 2nd source to verify.

When push comes to shove, he will put forward the Cato Institute line ahead of the truth.

*No link this time, you can find the link at the Think Progress rebuttal. Mccullagh is, as Andrew Orlowsky notes, a “Draw by crayon libertarian,”†and so he quotes uncritically industry-funded astroturf groups in his article.
†He is also the guy who created the, “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet,” myth, and he remains proud of that bit of hackery.

Software Design that is Bad Stupid Bordering on Criminal

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OK, my wife has a domain for her special education business, SEDRA, and it comes with email.

Yesterday evening, we started getting timeouts when trying to send mail. Receiving worked just fine.

We finally discovered that the registrar and host, HostMonster, had changed the configuration to prevent virus infected machines from spamming. They changed the port used from 25 to 26.

OK, no big deal, it took me 5 minutes talking with tech support to figure that one out.

Unfortunately, there appeared to be no way to change the port number in Eudora®.

So I used Microsoft Mail to change the port, and I could post from that, but not from Eudora®, because it was not available in the options.

Well, I thought that this was stupid, how can you not be able to change the SMTP port in an email program?

Obviously, we could go to a new client, but that would mean hand holding Sharon* through learning a new email client, something that I view with no small amount of dread. I hate being the family call to Bangalore.

So, I Google, figuring that there is probably a setting in the .ini file that I can tweak

What do I find? I find this:

Eudora for Windows

Eudora has chosen to hide the Port change option in version 6.0 and up, making it more difficult to make this change. If you have purchased Eudora, we would suggest contacting them about making this option available by default again. To enable changing ports:

  1. Navigate to your Eudora install directory.
  2. Look in the Eudora directory for the directory “extrastuff”.
  3. In this directory is a file named “esoteric.epi”. Drag (copy or move) this file into the main Eudora directory. There will now be options extra listed, including a Ports page.

[they neglect to mention that you have to restart Eudora here if it is already open]

To change the outgoing mail port from 25 to 26:

  1. Launch Eudora
  2. Drop down the Tools menu, and choose Options
  3. Click on Ports
  4. Change the port from 25 to 26
  5. Click OK
  6. Restart Eudora

So, they had scrupulously hidden these options, and required you to manually move a file in order to be able to access these options.

Not only that, this was not an oversight, it was a deliberate decision to change the program so that you had to do this, and they made this decision when ISPs are increasingly moving away from ports 110 (incoming) and 25 (outgoing) so as to deal with botnets.

I can understand putting this under “advanced”, and popping up a warning, as Firefox does with “about:config”, or perhaps requiring someone to set “advanced menu mode.” or somesuch but deliberately burying the features and requiring that someone track down this obscure fix which involves moving an extensions file to the home directory of the account is stupid.

Actually, it’s more than stupid, it’s stoopid, really, really, really stoopid.

This is a level of deliberately stoopid that makes Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein.

In any case, I found the fix, and I implemented it, and it works, but it took about 6 hours more than it should have.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

FCC to Reclassify Broadband Providers as Telecommunications

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A recent court decision said that the FCC lacked jurisdiction to regulate broadband providers regarding things like net neutrality,* because the Bush era reclassification of broadband as “information” rather than “telecommunications” services meant that they had no statutory authority.

It also meant that if they reclassify broadband as “telecommunications,” again this is a finding of fact, which gives them jurisdiction.

Well, the Chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, has now detailed plans to reverse this finding, which is a good thing, but he seems determined to find a “3rd way”, where he would use “forbearance,” basically not doing all that they could, to create a, “a light regulatory approach that would still encourage investment in broadband.”

I guess that Genachowski misses the point that the light touch doesn’t “encourage investment in broadband,” instead it creates a situation in which the incumbents use their resources to keep competitors out, not to improve service, which is why the US has the worst broadband penetration, and worst broadband performance, in the industrialized world.

If you want better broadband in the US, you need your foot on the neck of the cable companies and the baby Bells. Period, full stop.

*Sorry for linking to a Declan McCullagh story, it was the first that I found. He is, as Andrew Orlowsky notes, a “Draw by crayon libertarian,”†and so he quotes uncritically industry-funded astroturf groups in his article.
†He is also the guy who created the, “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet,” myth, and he remains proud of that bit of hackery.

Well, Here is a Blast from My Web Past

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Around 1995 0r so, I really do not recall when exactly, I decided that the web was just too useful for me to compete on utility, so I would compete on uselessness.

So I created, hand coded, because that was the way then, a web page dedicated to bad hair days.

Originally, it was just me, you’ve seen the picture, it’s in the right column, and Al (Einstein, that is, the patron saint of bad hair).

Well, I realized that not only did the Internet completely out-class me in useful things, but it completely outclassed me in useless things, so it never went that far.

That being said, I did add one other public figure, just 12 days before September 11, 2001, James Traficant, who had arguably the worst hair in the 200+ year history of Congress.

Mr. Traficant was subsequently tried and convicted for matters unrelated to his hair, corruption, and expelled from Congress.

Well, He’s back!!!!!!

After serving 7 years for bribery, he is running for his old seat as an independent in his old district in Youngstown, OH.

Same as it ever was……

I Wholeheartedly Approve

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Someone on DU related their experience with reporting someone threatening violence against Obama to the Secret Service: (Click for full size screen shot)

I called the Secret Service on a wingnut threatening Obama

Edited on Fri Apr-09-10 12:13 AM by Jack_Dawson

on his Facebook. “We need to take him OUT! BY ANY MEANS!” he said Friday night at 10:30 (one can only speculate whether alcohol played a factor).

I called my local SS field office on Saturday. Sent them screenshots. They followed up with him, and he mysteriously removed the OP. But that wasn’t good enough for the Secret Service. They called me again today to send them more screenshots – to see if he had redacted his comment. He had not.

Then about an hour ago, he posted this:

“I suggest REMOVING Obama from office through legal, lawful and Constitutional methods ONLY! I DO NOT AND WOULD NOT ADVOCATE VIOLENCE!

If you see / hear something similar, I suggest contacting your district office. They do follow up.

Indeed. There has been a lot of violent eliminationist rhetoric, and when it devolves to the point of being a specific threat, reporting it to the authorities is a civic duty.

I am not suggesting the sort of reaction that got Richard Humphreys 37 months in the clink for making “Burning Bush” jokes, but when speech becomes explicit threats, or an exhortation to specific violent action, it’s a problem.

Google Redirects Google.cn to Google.hk

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So, they have essentially shut down their Chinese search engine and are instead redirecting traffic to their Hong Kong domain:

Google has shut down its Google.cn site and is redirecting users to Google.com.hk, where it will offer uncensored Chinese-language search services. The company will maintain a research and development organization in China as well as a sales office, it announced Monday.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard,” Google said in a statement. “We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced–it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”

It’s the right thing to do, and, I think, the good long term business decision.

Obviously, the Chinese “Great Wall” firewall will still censor once you click on the links, but with Google.hk actually see the links.

Now, how about fixing your misbegotten auto-pagination “upgrade” on blogger?