CHRISdotTODD

Net Neutrality is continuing to get a lot press, so I have attempted to gather various sources of information that I have found and put it all here. Adam Livingstone of BBC Newsnight recently wrote an article, " BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers , " where he made several good points. First he starts with an analogy about driving your car down the road, and as you get closer to a place of business, your car begins to slow down. And if you turn around, it speeds back up. Later Mr. Livingstone puts a different twist on the analogy -- instead of losing speed going to the same store, when you go to a rival store, your car goes faster. From that perspective, as long as the speed to the first store is reasonable -- but it's not resonable to take my broadband speed and slow it down to dial up or worse. Mr Livingstone also introduced a new, interesting concept, Cachelogic, which is used to speed up content delivery in a P2P environment. I wont go into the details

By the time you read these, I will have gotten this problem fixed... I recieved a notice in my email that my Blog has been disabled to to suspecting that my blog is spam. This system has detected that your blog has characteristics that resemble spam. Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerly apologize for this erroneous result. Though I guess I can understand that spammers can consume a lot of bandwidth and storage, so a mechanism is required to protect against it, I find it hard to beleive that this blog fit into the suspicion category. Tell me, for the few who are reading this, does it feel like spam?

Have you heard of Skype? Now owned by eBay, Skype is a cheap or free way to make phone calls using the Internet as the transport ( VOIP ). Think of it as instant messaging, but with audio. Many Podcasters are using Skype to record interviews, as the quality is as good or better than recording a traditional phone call. (Right now I am in the process of trying different techniques for recording the Skype calls for use in Podcasts -- once I feel confident in my solution, I will post it here.) Cheap or free you ask? If you and the party you are calling have Skype installed on your computers, then the call is completely free. If you want to call a landline (a phone number - Skype calls this SkypeOut), from the U.S. and Canada to the U.S. and Canada, it is also free until the end of the year. The posted rates are $0.021 per minute after the end of the year. So if you like this service, and want to continue at no cost in 2007, you will need to convince you family and friends to put Skype on

Microsoft has made this rather confusing. If you support Windows with Internet Explorer or are a web application developer, read on; if not, skip to the last line . The way I read security Bulletin MS06-013 , the change has already been released, but a patch in IE is keeping it from being active. As quoted in the bulletin, "This Compatibility Patch will function until an Internet Explorer update is released as part of the June update cycle, at which time the changes to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls will be permanent." This is also taken from the bulletin: Some of the important modifications include the following: Security level for the Internet zone is set to High . This setting disables scripts, ActiveX controls, Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM), and file downloads. Automatic detection of intranet sites is disabled. This setting assigns all intranet Web sites and all Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths that are not explicitly listed in the Loc

I did some more research on Net Neutrality, and learned more about how big of an issue this is. The issue is that cable companies and telcos are pushing to charge more for premium services, such as video content. Further, they want to throttle back the bandwidth allocated to content not purchased or provided by them -- unless the content providers pay them for the bandwidth -- bandwidth they are already paying for. Consider this, content providers already pay for bandwidth every time someone downloads content off their servers -- this is how their network service provider collects revenue for services rendered. The cable and telephone companies want the content providers to pay them again for their content to travel over their network to your home or business, which you have already paid for too. Many folks also believe that without net neutrality, network discrimination would slow economic growth and innovation. Net Neutrality advocates include Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,

Are you aware of the changes to how the ActiveX Control works within IE? Most (possibly all --– I am not sure) IE plug-ins use ActiveX to load within the IE browser; and therefore if your site's user base is predominately IE user, which is true for most of us, this presents a potential big problem. If you are lucky, users will only have to double-click on controls instead of single click. (The first click is to activate the control, while the second is to use the control.) This is an exert from Microsoft's site, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912945/en-us : This update changes the way in which Internet Explorer handles some Web pages that use ActiveX controls. Examples of programs that use ActiveX controls include the following: Adobe Reader Apple QuickTime Player Macromedia Flash Microsoft Windows Media Player Real Networks RealPlayer Sun Java Virtual Machine You can download the update today from the same page to test for yourself -- I understand this will be pushed d

I found this article by David Passmore, Net Neutrality Technical Challenges , very interesting. David does a great job in presenting the issue, some based on his own experience as a customer of Cox Cable. For those of us who use the Internet for business and pleasure, you should really care about this subject, as we could get stuck with prohibitive pricing schemes -- in particular I fear this sort of thing for people trying to start their own business, where every penny is important. David came to this conclusion for solving the problem, "A solution that strikes the right balance between these conflicting interests will likely require a mix of business, technical and legislative/ regulatory developments." Though I think he is probably right, I sure worry about any solution that requires government intervention, as they too often follow the money.