Monthly Archives: February 2008

NY Times notices net neutrality issue

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So the FCC may force telcos and cable operators to “disclose” what they do with their customers’ traffic, whether they slow it down, as in the case of torrenting, or speed it up, as in the case of “premium access”. They already do this, mind you. It’s just that the FCC is going to force them to disclose that they do it.

Yawn.

I hope this doesn’t bring us closer to legislation. Point is, if Joe Customer gets pissed at his service provider because of such tactics, he’ll just leave that service provider. The market solves the problem. Too conservative an approach, you say?

What about all these people bandying about terms like ‘discrimination’ to evoke feelings of humanism in this matter? We’re talking about packets, here, not lives. There is no civil rights movement in the telecom industry, just a bunch of (ingenius and deserving) startups teaming with Google to prevent Bell and Warner from bluffing their admittedly very heavy upper hand and making things sticky for a few years while the Internet access market, dominated by the few and privileged, corrects itself and the SpeakEasy-type service providers rediscover the niche of “no-frills-no-penalties” access.
But the startups have got to know resorting to such cheap linguistics tactics is about as low as you can get. We’re not talking about discrimination on the basis of race or creed (things that actually matter). No, we’re talking about discrimination on the basis of acceptable use, and, yes, abuse. The access providers are well within their moral boundaries to massage traffic to suit their profit needs. And if their customers get pissed off about it, well, those customers will just leave.

If you go to one unconference this year, make it eComm 2008

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If warmer climates, radical change in the telecomm industry, or just beating the phone company pique your interest, then eComm 2008 is a must-attend event for you. As social media, realtime tagging, and wireless traffic costs trending toward zero are this year’s headlines, eComm is where you’ll want to go if you’d like to get a sneak peek at what folks will be talking about NEXT year.

Filling the role of O’Reilly’s now-defunct eTel conference, eComm is organized by luminary Lee Dryburgh, who’s done an admirable job lining up critical sponsorships like GigaOm, SixApart, and Voxbone.  But this is no ordinary business conference. It’s the impromptu coffee talks and sidebar discussions that make events like eComm so important. An idea is shared, a handshake happens, and a partnership is formed.  You could be witnessing the birth of the next Twitter, the next Google, or the next Facebook.

So get there–speakers from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and other clutch hitters will be in attendance. Critical mass has formed around the communications revolution. The masses want institutional and technological change. There’s a will. eComm is the way.  Get there.

A Way to Improve Time Machine

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A few months back I wrote for Download Squad that Time Machine, Apple’s new backup utility, was the single-best new feature of Leopard. And I still believe that. But it does have a few shortcomings. For example, it would be nice to set aside ‘quiet times’ when the automatic hourly backup can be programmed NOT to run.  For example, if I’m in the middle of a recording session and my USB 2.0 Maxtor drive starts Time Machining like crazy, it has a tendency to make my recording software (GarageBand and Logic Express) go a little haywire.  So I find myself going into Time Machine preferences and turning that magic switch to “off”.  Of course, I often forget to flip the magic switch back on again.

Gizmo’s “support” of MySpace leaves a lot to be desired

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Hats off to Gizmo Project. Gizmo5 lets me IM on four different networks from my mobile, with a unified buddy list and a consistent conversation view across all networks. Awesome. But the big to-do about MySpace support last week is really not that big a deal, now that I’ve actually tried it.

The way it works, the Gizmo backend server uses IM to collect your Myspace account information and then logs into your account, parses information out of your profile, and sends you text-based alerts when that information changes. Yeah, really–that’s about ALL there is to it. Oh, and it will forward MySpace IM messages to and from your phone. But you can’t browse your MySpace buddy list unless you want to send texts back and forth to the IM-based “agent” they’ve built.
Not exactly the kind of interactivity I was hoping for. Let’s hope version 2 is more fruitful.

The IPv6 conversion will be painstakingly slow (and resisted)

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PAT, NAT, firewalls, private networks. Routers, switches, layer 3.  I’ve read all this talk about how the ICANN’s adoption of IP version 6 addresses is going to be the harbinger of the global change to IP version 6.  My take?  Don’t count on it, at least not any time soon.

People drive old beat-up cars until they just won’t run any more. And 4 billion nodes is plenty, at least for a while.

Theory: Google’s ‘pump and dump’ spectrum scheme

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The FCC is auctioning off lower-frequency spectrum (700 mHz) to the highest bidder, and they’ve previously stated that if the reserve price was met, all potential buyers would have to allow open access to the network that gets built using the spectrum. That means, bring your own cell phone, your own laptop, your own whatever, without consequence to the preferences of the network operator. In essence, I like the FCC’s move.

Well the reserve price has been met. But by whom? Some say Google. Other say Google has no real interest in the spectrum, but has been submitting bids just to get the price over the reserve threshold and into the range where open access is required–because that benefits Google whether or not they own the spectrum license. It will be interesting to see who the winner is, and how they got there :)

Microhoo: a marriage of two web 1.0 icons?

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So Microsoft wants to own Yahoo.   Not exactly a wicked storm of excitement brewing in the web 2.0 world over that prospect, since neither firm has been especially innovative in the 2.0 movement. So what could we expect from this?

- A slow, multi-year put-down of Yahoo Messenger as users are transitioned over to Live services.

- A new ad-federation effort centered on Yahoo’s superior content services rather than on Microsoft’s lamer MSN-vintage stuff.

- A  further Windows-ization of Yahoo services. (Certain non-Windows OSs have always been excluded from parts of the Yahoo party.)

-  The Vista angle. The push for Vista will be aided by the mindshare Microsoft would gain vis a vis Yahoo’s content empire. Make a few things Vista-only, and the customers will come. Kind of reminds me of how Microsoft bought Bungie, a Mac developer who was designing a Mac game called Halo, and then promptly made their flagship project the killer app for the Xbox.

-  A bigger outlet for Facebook, since Yahoo’s got a slew of non-2.0 users to sell to, and Microsoft owns a sizable piece of Facebook.