Category: Networks

Demagogues Counterattack, Freedom Hangs in the Balance

While I was having fun demanding my own cables to everywhere, journalist Stephen Wellman of Information Week was making the same demand, for real:

I hate arguments that we as consumers are supposed to feel sorry for carriers when users start absorbing more bandwidth. Sorry, Comcast (and other service providers), get more bandwidth. Cable MSOs like Comcast tend to charge more than landline telecoms for their broadband, so why not spend some of that money on, you know, growing network capacity rather than on regulating a select group of users.

Jesus Christ. How are we ever going to have a dialog about the proper way to regulate the Internet while the tech press is full of idiots who think network bandwidth comes from Santa Claus? The simple fact is that no amount of additional bandwidth will satisfy the hogs: the more there is, the more they’ll use. Comcast understands this:

On another issue, [Comcast spokeswoman] Banse defended Comcast’s use of management technology, reported Friday by the Associated Press, to reduce the impact users of file-sharing networks, such as BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella, have on overall traffic on the cable company’s pipe. While these users make up a small percentage of Comcast’s subscriber base, they account for a large majority of the traffic, Banse said.

“There is the hyperbole and the reality of what we call excessive use,” Banse said. While 99.9% of Comcast customers get access to the Internet without interference, the 0.1% that fit into the category of excessive use have to be managed. “In the (course) of our management of that excessive use, we call the customers and offer them the commercial service,” she said.

Predictably, Dave Isenberg is shamelessly demagoguing this issue:

Furthermore, once unencumbered by the need to use their network to advantage their own applications, network operators would be free to discover what Odlyzko found and what Internet 2 discovered [.pdf] — that the best way to manage congestion is simply to build more capacity!

Isenberg is full of shit wrong on at least two levels: The Internet2 experiment was conducted with routers two generations older than the ones we have now, and it was confined to a well-behaved population of users, all subject to Terms of Use imposed by their universities.

Universities today routinely apply bandwidth limits on their internal networks, especially the wireless ones. I know this because I designed and implemented such a system. People want them because bandwidth is neither free nor infinite, and the Internet lacks a mechanism to ensure that it’s shared equitably.

Isenberg knows this as well, but he deliberately ignores it because he makes his living stirring up brainless conflict. The network neutrality issue has been on life support for the past year, and only by confusing network management with the suppression of free speech can people like Isenberg hope to collect any additional speaker’s fees from it.

FURTHERMORE, it’s not clear to me that Comcast is doing what the critics allege they’re doing. I’m a Comcast customer, and at this very moment I’m running the Linux version of BitTorrent (Azureus) successfully for both uploads and downloads, legal and illegal. Here’s a screen grab to prove it (click the little image for the full-size copy.)

Azureus Screen Grab

Unfortunate Internet regulation advocate Susan Crawford jumps aboard the Demagogue Train as well. That’s certainly no surprise, as Crawford wants to revive net neutrality and sees this as an opportunity. Here’s why she’s wrong:

Let’s posit that there’s a reasonable form of network management, which operates like this:

1) When demand for network bandwidth on shared facilities is low, every user gets as much as he wants.

2) When demand for network bandwidth exceeds supply, every user is allocated bandwidth equitably.

3) “Equitable” allocation means something like this: every user requesting less than the average per-user available bandwidth gets what he requests, and those who request more get additional bandwidth when it’s available.

That’s a reasonable algorithm implemented in a number of commercial systems today, and please note that’s it’s content- and viewpoint-neutral.

And also note that as a practical matter it’s only necessary to examine BitTorrent traffic on the typical ISP network to implement it, because (as a practical matter) all the excess demand for bandwidth comes from BitTorrent.

And also note that the slickest way to throttle BitTorrent is to limit the number of uploads a given user can offer, which is exactly what TCP Reset (RST flag) spoofing does.

Given all of that, is there anything to see here other than an ISP applying reasonable principles of network management by reasonable means?

Moral of the story: don’t believe everything Susan Crawford, Dave Isenberg, and their ilk tell you about the Internet. Much of it is made-up, and the rest is sensationalized.

Aliens Attack Internet, Democracy in Peril!

Our worst nightmare has come true: the Internet, the sacred font of all that is holy, true, and/or pornographic, has been taken over by Evil Fat Cat Media Barons (maybe from outer space, maybe from New Jersey). No more shiny city on a hill, no more promised land, no more yearning to breath free: the Internet is dead, and freedom with it.

The last nail in the Internet’s coffin was hammered by Comcast, one of the many cable TV operators to offer a little Internet access on the side. Intrepid reporters from the Associated Press have learned that Comcast prevents Jimmy, the pimply-faced teenager next door, from sharing his pirated copy of the Paris Hilton sex tape with the sundry users of BitTorrent who learned he had it on the Pirate Bay web site.

The sober apologists for the phone companies claim this is simply “reasonable network management,” but we shouldn’t be fooled. Throttling bandwidth hogs is a completely unreasonable use of the laws of physics to stifle dissent. How dare Comcast limit the bandwidth hogs to ensure the rest of us can do a little web surfing! They have an obligation under the public trust to provide each and every one of us with all the bandwidth we can possibly consume, at no increase in price.

If the laws of physics say that each upload on a shared cable takes bandwidth away from every user, I saw screw the laws of physics. Give me my own cable to connect to every web site on the world, for no additional cost. If the fundamental design of the Internet calls for my sharing thousands of cables with millions of people and being a gentleman about it, I say sometimes you have a burn an Internet in order to save it.

The noble champions of freedom by regulation at Save the Internet are on the case:

Cable and phone companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon should not be allowed to play gatekeeper over their consumers’ ability to send or receive legal content over the Internet. It is time for Congress to pass laws that protect free speech on all 21st century communications.

Thank God for Save the Internet, one of the few organizations brave enough to stand up for the rights of the Jimmy the bandwidth hog (if you don’t count its parent, Free Press, or its benefactor George Soros, or his favorite charity Moveon.org (can I still mention their name without being stifled by Google?), or its contributors at Google, or their fellow fat cats at eBay, or their employee Craig Newmark, or the Christian Coalition, or the abortion people, or Arianna Huffington, Markos Moulitsas, Matt Stoller, or about a million other valiant opportunists, hucksters, and know-nothings.)

The cause of unlimited bandwidth at no additional price is going to be a hard sell, a tough slog, and an uphill climb. Legislative override of laws of physics is in its infancy and previous efforts haven’t gone well. Pi insists on remaining a fraction despite the Ohio Legislature’s efforts to reduce it to 3. But without this principle, our democracy will surely die.

I know this because I read it on the Internet.

But seriously, people, Comcast isn’t undermining any significant principle of free expression, network engineering, or customer relations. They’re applying a clever solution to one of the great unsolved problems of packet-switched networks (of which the Internet is one), the ability of users to consume more than a fair share of limited resources. Cable TV networks are especially vulnerable to this problem, because their means of sharing upstream bandwidth is highly inefficient. They download really fast, because there’s only one transmitter in the download direction, but they upload really slowly, because your cable modem has to negotiate with all of your neighbors for permission to transmit each portion of a packet. The reports indicate that Comcast’s policing takes effect after a certain number of BitTorrent transfers is found to be active, and prevents new ones from starting.

This is not content-based or viewpoint-based discrimination, in fact it’s the furthest thing from it. It is usage-based discrimination, and as long as it’s governed by an assessment of active traffic streams in the upload direction, it’s actually a step forward for network freedom. The punk next door limits my free speech with his incessant BitTorrent traffic much more than Comcast does.

The thing that’s so sad – predictable, but still sad – about the hysterical over-reaction to Comcast’s network management practices is that the people who are actually being helped by them are the first to allege harm from them. In some sense, they do so out of ignorance, but in another their motives are self-serving: they raise money by scaring people, and nothing scares like the poorly-understood practices of network engineering.

The gap between sound technical practice and the needs of advocacy groups to work ordinary citizens into a snit is the worst legacy of the network neutrality movement.

High-value service alert

Here’s something to get the net neutrality movers excited: Level 3 Slashes CDN Prices

Level 3 Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT – message board) is lowering prices for content delivery network (CDN) services to match the same price customers pay for high-speed IP transport…

For now, the lower prices are for caching and downloading only. Level 3 hopes to have its streaming services ready by mid-November. That will allow the company to compete with Akamai, Limelight, and others not just for static and progressive media downloads, but for rich media streaming as well.

Isn’t this an example of a carrier leveraging its position as the handler of packets on the network to disadvantage competitors such as Akamai? The fact that the net result is lower prices to the consumer shouldn’t be lost amidst the irony about disadvantaging companies who sell disadvantage to other companies.

More on this later, but for now let’s not burden the Internet with too many restrictions on pricing and services, OK?

Anti-defamation provisions

I’ve criticized the critics of phone companies who banded together to promote the dubious cause of network neutrality, so it’s only fair for me to criticize the phone companies when they get out of line. The recent flap over AT&T and Verizon’s AUPs might be such an occasion. AT&T tells its customers not to smack-talk them:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.”

Now what’s up with that? Critics charge that this provision is activated by any negative opinion expressed against the phone company, to wit:

This effectively means that if you are an AT&T customer and the company believes that you have spoken negatively about them in, oh let’s say a blog post, they can cut off your service and you have no recourse. Apparently AT&T’s attitude is “either like it or lump it”.

Unfortunately, my criticism of the phone company will have to come on some other day, because it appears to me that the critics are way out of line once again. Remember this provision was drafted by a lawyer, and therefore its content has to be understood in terms of the legal meaning of its language, not the common-sense meaning. This AUP is, apparently, legal boilerplate that says you can’t use the AT&T network to slander or defame AT&T. Simple criticism, if it happens to be factual or the result of honest error, isn’t covered by this provision. Go check on the legal meaning of “damage to name or reputation” for some insight.

Words which on the face of them must injure the reputation of the person to whom they refer, are clearly defamatory, and, if false, are actionable without proof that any particular damage has followed from their use. Words, on the other hand which merely might tend to injure the reputation of another are prima facie not defamatory, and even though false are not actionable, unless as a matter of fact some appreciable injury has followed from their use…

If in any given case the words employed by the defendant have appreciably injured the plaintiff’s reputation, the plaintiff has suffered an injury which is actionable without proof of any other damage. Every man has an absolute right to have his person, his property, and his reputation preserved inviolate.

The way I read this is that you can’t damage a man’s or a company’s reputation simply by criticizing them; if you’re truthful, the issue is the deeds you’re describing, not the description. If you’re not truthful you still have to cause some damage to the target’s reputation to be afoul of the law. So I can talk smack about AT&T all day long so long as I don’t invent facts about them, and I can even make up facts about them as long as nobody pays any attention to me. And so can you.

AT&T is simply invoking slander and defamation law to its benefit and short-cutting the legal process. If this provision were removed from their AUP, they would still be protected by the law, but they would have to sue to assert the right. Is that what we want?

So once again we learn that we can’t believe everything we read on-line, a lesson that never seems to sink in.

See Seth for more on the subject.

Only on the Internet

From the annals of modern technology:

A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.

Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate…

“To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”

What can I say?

Cuban ruffles feathers

Mark Cuban is both entertaining and insightful, the latest example being his remarks on the dead and boring Internet:

A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

Cuban is right, of course, and even Om Malik (broadband cheerleader extraordinaire) admits as much:

But the bigger question Cuban is asking is whether the Internet’s infrastructure is sufficient to keep the innovation cycle moving forward. And the answer is no.

And why? Om quotes Nortel’s CTO:

John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel (NT), is of the same school of thought. “If you look at the progress made from 300-baud modems to 10-Gigabit Ethernet,” said Roese, “the cost per bit has declined by a factor of 22 million to one. But that isn’t reflected in the consumer Internet experience.”

The fault is in the asymmetric nature of the Internet. The downstream speeds are getting higher, but upstream speeds are still being controlled in a miserly fashion by ISPs, thus acting as a break for truly interactive applications.

An asymmetric Internet is good for disseminating information – after all pulling down information (or YouTube videos) moves packets in one direction. This is perhaps the point Cuban is trying to make when he says that the Internet is like a utility and therefore boring. Electricity, after-all, also works as a one-way service — it comes into our house and we use it for everything from stereos and air conditioners. Today’s Web and Internet applications are doing precisely the same on our desktops.

I don’t know that a symmetrical Internet is any less boring than the one we have, as it’s probably just harder to administer. Today we upload our videos to services like You Tube to asymmetrically distribute them, and I don’t see them getting more interesting if we distribute them directly from our homes and offices. Maybe somebody can explain that to me.

Has America’s Pimp Retired?

Craig’s List has drawn the attention of the Atlanta police as a hub for child prostitution, and amid the furor we learn that Craig has retired:

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin has called on a popular Web site to take responsibility for what she said is the company’s role in promoting child prostitution.

“Children are being marketed through craigslist,” Franklin said Tuesday during an update on the mayor’s “Dear John” campaign, a crackdown on the city’s child prostitution industry.

Craigslist, found on the Web at craigslist.org, may be best known as a bulletin board for people who want to sell a car, buy a home or meet people. But Atlanta vice officer Kelleita Thurman said Tuesday that craigslist and similar sites account for 85 percent of the sexual liaisons men arrange in Atlanta with boys and girls.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the company, Franklin said the site could do more to prevent itself from being used “as a means of promoting and enabling child prostitution.” She called on the site to revise its warning on pages for erotic services and personal ads and to remove postings that offer sexual services for sale, among other things.

Craigslist spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said in an e-mail that she and Chief Executive Officer Jim Buckmaster are in Europe and “neither of us are aware of such a letter so it would not be possible to comment about this.”

Company founder Craig Newmark, who also was mailed Franklin’s letter, no longer is involved in the company’s daily affairs and is traveling, Best said.

I assume Craig has resigned from the prostitution service in order to devote full time to promoting network neutrality, the second most dubious cause of 2006.

Roaming the afterlife

A dead Malaysian ran up a $218 trillion cell phone bill and people are mystified:

A Malaysian man who paid off a $23 wireless bill and disconnected his late father’s cell phone back in January has been stiffed for subsequent charges on the closed account, MSNBC has reported. Telekom Malaysia sent Yahaya Wahab a bill for 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit, or about $218 trillion, for charges to the account, along with a demand from the company’s debt collection agency that he settle the alleged debt within 10 days, or get a lawyer.

It’s actually very simple. Dead people can communicate with the living through the simple mechanism of Electronic Voice Phenomena, documented in the movie White Noise, by leaving recored messages. They’ve apparently figured out that cell phones are way cooler than voice recorders, and they’ve all been having a ball calling living friends and relatives and shooting the breeze. As these calls come from an area with exceptionally high roaming charges, the bill seems high, by living human standards. Which is just another example of what a limited perspective we have on stuff.

What is Wikipedia?

I hope this clears things up:

Wikipedia is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in which participants play editors of a hypothetical online encyclopedia, where they try to insert misinformation that they are randomly assigned when they create their accounts, while preventing contrary information from being entered by others. Players with similar misinformation to promote will generally form “guilds” in order to aid each other.

The source is a very rude little wiki, the Encyclopedia Dramatica.