Feedback on Net Neutrality Due Friday
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Citizens have until Friday to sway government regulators on net neutrality, the principle that ISPs should treat all packets of internet data equally.
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The U.S. Congress still needs to deal with network neutrality, and supporters in Congress are willing to block any legislation favored by broadband providers until the issue is resolved, a leading Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday.
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But 8Mbit/s could happen...theoretically The Ofcom Consumer Panel has called on regulators to pull their fingers out and demand that ISPs are more honest with us about the limitations of broadband.â¦
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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After tossing Wi-Fi start-up bids for exclusive control of fallow spectrum, federal regulators want public input on how to proceed. Will a new fight over "open access" rules emerge?
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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California passes Wi-Fi user protection bill; AT&T eyes municipal deals. Plus: The mobile Internet--are we there yet?
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'Power to the people. And us.' Just after Comcast copped to throttling P2P traffic, a new net neutrality bill appeared on Capitol Hill.â¦
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Tell us how you see the RIAA's attack on the mild reforms in the Fair Use Act. Is the organization protecting consumers? In GadgetLab.
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Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is. The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down. Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.  Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?
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It seems  PubSub.com is offering a bounty  on an HTTP Delta implementation of RFC 3229.  This seems in response to the current meme  of RSS and Atom syndication bloat.   First off this is certainly *very* generous of them.  I'd like to see this happen more.  Good for you guys!  I myself  have thought that HTTP Deltas were a viable solution but I was wrong.  Of course most people aren't familiar with HTTP deltas.  Eseentially what an HTTP delta enables is a client/server differential protocol that can exchange a patch from the server to the client.  The client is then patched and it will then have the updated version without having to transfer the *entire* document again.  For example say you ...
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Bandwidth providers said they expected India's Internet service to be back to about 80 percent of its usual speed by the end of Friday
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Gabe: I'm pretty frustrated with the Dunder Mifflin Infinity ARG. The site functionality is just trash. The biggest offense is the piece of shit forum they've got. It's the one way for the whole branch to talk together and it's absolute crap. Also I still can't hire new employees. There's almost 1500 people waiting to join the Spokane branch but trying to hire anymore than two at a time breaks the site for me. I contacted tech support last week and never heard back. A couple people have suggested that the website being shitty is on purpose. I don't know if I'm ready to believe it's all some ironic joke. What I do know is that interacting with their game is frustrating and I'm not sure I want to bother with it anymore.
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Agency seeks public comment as first step in deciding how far Internet service providers can go before they transcend "reasonable network management" and run afoul of federal policy.
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By Simon Fluendy, Financial Mail on Sunday, London  Dec. 10--A crackdown on broadband internet providers after a torrent of  consumer complaints about poor service will be announced this week.
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Jupiter lights the way Efforts to get the net neutrality bandwagon rolling in the UK continue, with new predictions that ISPs are set to charge content providers for faster loading.â¦
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Competition may not fix problems with broadband speed and cost in the United States, because of the high cost of entry into the market, the leader of a technology think tank said Friday.Many policymakers in Washington, D.C., call for competition to cure issues with broadband value and build-out, but they don&#39;t recognize that the cost of building out competing networks may make broadband a natural monopoly or duopoly, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).&quot;It&#39;s a mistake for policymakers to assume that if they simply &#39;push the competition lever,&#39; all the problems with broadband policy will be solved,&quot; wrote Atkinson, in an ITIF paper. &quot;The bottom line is that if policymakers want to maximize not only societal welfare but also consumer welfare, they must balance the push for more competition with the need to maintain and create an efficient broadband industry structure.&quot;Atkinson and some other speakers at an ITIF broadband policy forum argued that the United States may need more broadband regulations to achieve higher speeds and lower prices. Atkinson suggested a balance between competition and regulations that would mandate open pipes and create stronger enforcement of consumer protection and antitrust laws.Not everyone agreed that more regulation was appropriate. The suggestion that broadband is a natural monopoly or duopoly &quot;as an economist gives me the willies,&quot; said John Mayo, professor of economics, business and public policy at Georgetown University.A government-supported monopoly in the traditional telephone market didn&#39;t work, Mayo said. He recalled an old Bell Atlantic billboard saying something to the effect of, &quot;We don&#39;t sell you what you think you want; we sell you what we know you need.&quot;Broadband is still a relatively new technology and the broadband business model is still evolving, Mayo said. The industry doesn&#39;t need government regulation while it&#39;s still developing.Other speakers complained that U.S. residents get&#160;lower speeds&#160;for&#160;higher prices&#160;than many residents of Europe and the Far East. But Mayo noted that prices have been falling. &quot;No matter how you measure it ... it&#39;s more affordable today than it&#39;s ever been,&quot; he said.Speakers at the forum noted that broadband policy is becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. This month, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, outlined a broadband policy that would include tax incentives for broadband carriers to move into rural and other underserved areas. Clinton also called for public and private partnerships to help roll out broadband and for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to develop better data about where broadband is available.Several other candidates have talked about broadband as well, including Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, noted Jonathan Sallet, a partner in the Washington communications firm, the Glover Park Group.But many policymakers in Washington have recently taken a hands-off approach to broadband, thinking &quot;let&#39;s create a neutral platform and just let stuff happen,&quot; added Steven Weber, a professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley. But just letting stuff happen isn&#39;t working to push broadband in many sectors, including health care, he said.&quot;I don&#39;t think that argument is completely adequate to most people,&quot; he said.