Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, is arguing that ISP content filtering is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Statute. That’s a five-year felony sentence for the ISP, and perhaps for any ISP network administrators who actually set up and performed the monitoring, because the statute personal and corporate responsibility.
This seems like a steep price to pay for monitoring traffic, throttling P2P apps and serving up highly targeted advertisements on web pages, but AT&T, Charter and Comcast seem willing to take the risk. Perhaps they are betting on amnesty from President McCain.
Verizon hasn’t implemented content filtering because of the legal issues. Read this article on Wired for more information.
Will video kill broadband?
According to another Wired article, ISPs and telecoms are growing more concerned about IPTV - television over the internet - as a potential showstopper. Content filtering a la Charter and Comcast is a good example of bad blocking by ISPs. Demand for Internet video keeps rising while bandwidth growth hasn’t kept pace.
If ISPs do get to use deep packet inspection (DPI) to insert their own ads in web pages, Google and other web advertisers may retaliate by using SSL to encrypt their web pages. That prevents content filtering, but the cost in the server farm may be worth the effort for Google.
The rank-and-file residential user may not like a slower, encrypted search engine, however. Jakob Nielsen pointed out in this BBC article that Internet users are becoming more aware of latency and search accuracy. Users want faster, more relevant search results so they can go straight to a web page without visiting the target site’s home page first. Users have alredy learned to ignore banner ads, according to Nielsen’s discussion in this 20 June 2007 Wall Street Journal article. Content filtering won’t help matters.
Image courtesy of bryankennedy through a Creative Commons license.
Related posts on billso.com
14 April 2008: Virgin Media CEO claims net neutrality is “bollocks”
Yesterday, the Honolulu Advertiser published an article about digital TV conversion. On 17 February 2009, US television stations will stop broadcasting analog television signals. On that date, anyone in the US who uses an antenna to receive their television signal on their analog television will need a digital converter box to receive broadcast signals. Cable and satellite subscribers have or will get converter boxes as part of their service agreement. All televisions manufactured for sale in the US after 1 March 2007 are required to have a digital tuner, so these models don’t need a converter box. The AP has an article with additional details.
I’ve discussed the FCC’s 700 mHz auction on 18 March 2008 and 30 January 2008. When the analog television channels are abandoned, AT&T, Verizon and other companies will use those frequencies for mobile phone and data services.
The US Department of Commerce has a web site with information on the DTV conversion, as does the FCC. Government regulators and consumer activists fear that cable and satellite companies will use digital television to scare up new subscribers. Another AP article states that Hispanics are the ethnic group most likely to lose television service after the conversion, even as the Federal government gives away several million coupons for digital converter boxes. Hawaii has a diverse population, and getting the message out in multiple languages will be challenging. I expect to see more articles in the local papers, especially in early 2009, even though the Advertiser claims that only 5.5% of the state’s television viewers rely on broadcast signals.
Digital TV converter boxes won’t turn an old analog set into a higher-definition TV, of course. These boxes have a digital TV tuner that passes its output to an analog TV on channel 3 or 4, like a video game console would do.
Yahoo reports that broadcasters will be required to run public service advertising, in an effort to notify viewers well before the cutover. The coupon request page uses reCAPTCHA – the same system I use to screen out spam comments on this blog.
From Lifehacker: an excellent list of 10 ways to gather, tie and otherwise control computer cables. Some of these tips can be used right away. Other tips require a bit of work. This video from the Lifehacker article is a brief how-to segment. Build your own cable charging station from a plastic box!
A desktop computer may have more cables connected for networks, printers, USB devices, keyboards and mice.
That mass of cables behind the desk becomes a dust magnet over time. Pet owners get the extra bonus of fur or hair clinging to the cables.
There’s always the fun of untangling a pile of cables. The first championship in competitive cable untangling or speedcabling was recently held, and here’s a web site with details and a video.
It’s not always a mess. Data centers and server rooms need to keep their cables labeled and neatly arranged. Royal Pingdom (via BoingBoing Gadgets) ran an article on 24 January 2008 about well-managed cables.
My usual solution for taming long cables is double-sided Velcro tape. There’s no adhesive – the hooks are one one side while the loops are on the other side. I usually keep a few strips in my drawer and my computer bag.
The power adapter dating game
There’s always the challenge of determining what each cable represents. I use labels or colored stickers to identify cables, especially power adapters. It’s a better solution than playing the “power adapter dating game” with a drawer full of adapters, plugging each in until a plug fits the power jack.
Even if the plug fits, it’s always a good idea to double check the voltage and amperage on the device and the adapter. Plugging a power adapter that is too powerful into a device may damage or destroy that device. It’s like plugging a car battery into a flashlight… boom!
Most people don’t understand electrical engineering, so it’s far easier to slap a written or printed label on the adapter in the first frenzied moments after unboxing. Write the same doodle or letters on two matching stickers. Put one sticker on the power adapter, and another on the device. As long as the stickers don’t fall off, it’s easy to match the device with its adapter.
From the DSL Reports and the Associated Press: cable television company Charter revealed that its IT staff deleted all stored mail messages for over 14,000 subscriber email accounts. Charter has over 2.5 million subscribers. The company blamed a flaw in its routine maintenance plan. Users who saved their messages using a mail client like Outlook and POP still have local backups. Seems to me that more email users rely on webmail clients, and they asseme their email provider or ISP is doing proper server-side maintenance.
Tech: E-mail is not dead yet according to the CEO of ReturnPath. His company is the official e-mail change of address contractor for the US Postal Service. They also help companies match old and new e-mail addresses. I usually get an e-mail or two every month with some marketer that wants to “reconnect” with me. And I almost always say “no”.
The only time I use Internet Explorer is when I do a Windows Update. Otherwise, I leave the security settings at High, so I can’t even fill out a form in IE. The cache and auto-complete options are disabled.
When Windows XP SP2 goes gold, I’ll install it. The beta is working well on my test box. In the meantime, I check Windows Update at least once a week on each box, and I’ve enabled automatic downloading of updates.
I use other web browsers like Firefox for my web browsing. Firefox is fast, free, and relatively safe. It also has some great extensions that add nice features.
Instead, I use Thunderbird as my primary e-mail client. It’s still in beta, but it works well. I can always use webmail clients when I’m away from my machines.
HTML in e-mail is a bad idea, and I do my best not to send out HTML formatted e-mail. I usually use plaintext, although Thunderbird’s default settings are still a bit strange.
I disable HTML formatting of incoming mail in my e-mail clients. I’ll miss your pretty formatting and bouncing smilies, but I’m less likely to load the webbugs and exploits that malware and spammers insert in messages.
I use SpamAssassin on my e-mail servers, and have added a block list from Bill Stearns. My SpamAssassin blocklist is here. Server-side blocking takes more time and skill to configure, but it’s a much better approach if you check your e-mail from several different computers. A client-side spam filter will only work on one computer.
I run software and hardware firewalls on my home computers. If you have DSL or a cable modem, and you don’t have a router or NAT box, you are living dangerously.
I use a free anti-virus program on all my computers, and do a deep virus scan every month. My virus scanner also checks incoming e-mails and their attachments.
The sad truth is that I’d have an easier time with security if I ran Linux on all of my computers. There just aren’t a lot of malware and virus threats on Linux boxes yet. I rarely have to do any security-related maintenance on my Linux boxes.
Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, is arguing that ISP content filtering is a violation of the Federal Wiretap Statute. That’s a five-year felony sentence for the ISP, and perhaps for any ISP network administrators who actually set up and performed the monitoring, because the statute personal and corporate responsibility.
