House speaker Nancy Pelosi playing the Nurse Ratched role in our One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Congress has completely lost her own grip on reality. A report on Chicago Boyz has her creating new rules forcing any member of the house to obtain her prior approval before postign any opinion on a blog, message board, twitter, etc.  Not only does this fly in the face of member’s right to freedom of speech, it pretty much voids any credibility Ms Pelosi has as a good steward of “net neutrality”.

 This was first reported to me by Congressman John Culberson (R-Tx) and I asked for approval to cite him and for any media links to this story. He provided the following link of regulations proposed by the Chair of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (PDF) Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) that was sent to Rep. Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Committee for Administration. The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted. It would be a very considerable error to assume that the House leadership intends to let dissenting Democratic members post any more freely than Republicans. (Chicago Boyz)

Any layman will understand that the imposition of such a rule is unconstitutional.  From a broader perspective, this demonstrates how completely out of touch and power drunk the Congressional leadership is. I hope there are enough wise people left in California to retire the Speaker in the upcoming election.

Someone at Google thinks that Bell Canada’s network management practices are violating Canadian law. This and other recent “network watchdog” efforts by searchzilla are leading some to speculate that the company is planning greater involvement in content distribution.

“Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use,” the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend.

“From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral.” (CBC)

So much of the discussion has been focused on file sharing that one of the biggest and still growing problems confronted by every netizen and enterprise is Spam. The unsolicited commercial message continues to run rampant clogging the systems and dogging the productivity of those who have to moderate it. While the RIAA and MPAA aren’t losing fortunes here, the real cost of Spam to all enterprise dwarfs the real or imagined cost of piracy. Don’t think it’s a serious challenge? This blog routinely receives as many as 1000 spam posts daily pitching the usual collection male enhancement drugs, biz opps, investment advice and porn. Fortunately, we have tools that filter most Spam, but real time that could be used productively is lost to dealing messages that get past the filters every day.

Bloggers like us are not alone in losing to Spammers. Craigs List, the popular free online classifieds site, is fighting an uphill battle against the spammers. In some categories, they are losing the fight.

Spam on Craigslist has been a minor nuisance for years. Not any more. This year, the spammers started winning and are taking over Craigslist. Here’s how they did it. Craigslist tries to stop spamming by checking for duplicate submissions. They check for excessive posts from a single IP address. They require users to register with a valid E-mail address. They added a CAPTCHA to stop automated posting tools. And users can flag postings they recognize as spam.

Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism.

Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist’s duplicate message detector. IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses. E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator (”Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?”) An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it.

More on The forgotten net traffic problem: Spam

Tony Werner, Comcast CTO says that his company will begin to manage heavy users during peak hours rather that protocols in this video interview with Cable Digitial News.

Obviously, if implemented, this will make a few who are most likely paying for higher level service tiers very unhappy. While efforts to more equitably manage existing capacity are understandable, they should not be done at the expense of creating more capacity. With new bandwidth intensive content and services coming daily the common user will consume more bits than last years heavy user very soon. Expanding capacity would be Comcast’s only option if we had real competition.

While the cable industry led by Comcast has slithered into the ambulance chaser never land of redefining language to fit questionable business practice, the studies we keep seeing say they are still blocking their subscribers’ traffic. This kind of up is down and wrong is right mumbo jumbo-ing of language is something the Telco’s have done gleefully for years. Never mind the hearings, they are just lawyer to lawyer double talk with a few members of the public mixed in for color on Cspan.

We can expect the bad behavior to continue as long as the duopoly’s two strongest competitors are named Slim and None.

Krishna Gummadi of the Institute told the Associated Press that the tests did conclusively show that Cox and/or Comcast were “blocking” P2P, because it’s possible that international carriers could be disrupting traffic as it made its way from the MSOs to the servers in Germany used to conduct the tests.

“To ensure the best possible online experience for our customers, Cox actively manages network traffic through a variety of methods including traffic prioritization and protocol filtering,” Cox said in its response to the AP.

The study, which based its findings on data retrieved from 8,175 volunteers who used a downloadable test tool, said most (573 of 599) U.S. “hosts” that observed “blocking” are located in Comcast- and Cox-run networks. In Singapore, all blocked hosts were connected via the StarHub network, according to the study. (Light Reading)

We always keep saying here at ThirdPipe that dump pipe is the ‘thing’. We usually get slapped for it by our peers. Everyone thinks that content is critical. No doubt it is, because our second rule is nobody buys dumb pipe just for pipe. But there is a rational consideration for our position. We find it interesting if our detractors were to consider the automotive model then they would be entirely upset that GM does not own Exxon. Like gas is THE content item for a car right? Yet the market sees an efficiency in that separation of the industry. We think it valid for the wire and wireless world as well.

Case in point is a guest article over at RCR that poses that very question. It also provides some very interesting back-of-napkin analysis to the concept. –

For the entirety of my career in the wireless space, I have always worked for a small company selling something to or through wireless network operators. As such, I have made a good number of friends who work at these various carriers. I have observed that the most reliable way to get their dander up is to casually insert into the middle of any conversation, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because you are eventually just going to be a dumb pipe anyway.” Then I sit back, sip my mojito and watch the ensuing rant. Fun times.

Last week I tried this with a friend of mine who works at a carrier, and he said, “I prefer to think of it as ‘an open marketplace of ideas and innovation.” This got me thinking. First off, my friend is absolutely correct: When cast in a slightly different light and without the derogatory descriptor, a “dumb pipe” has the potential to be a very good thing. Could a major wireless carrier flip a switch to full “dumb pipe” mode and in so doing, take massive operational cost out of their equation and increase their value overnight?

Now the EBITA bottom line difference is only $6m. But I think Mr. Conahan understates the case. Specifically I would rethink the G&A expense lines. Quite honestly it could be cut much further, like down to half. That would translate to another $500-600 flowing to the bottom. Done right the massive streamlining effect could be massive. If all you provide is transport your focus shifts to prevention of outages. In that mindset you can reduce staff even further as you get ahead of the top recurring problems.

Highly recommended reading to those who are employed in the belly of the beasts called telecom. Linky.

Not to say we told you so, but we did. At the close of the 700MHz auction we predicted Verizon, the winner of the “open access” C block, would begin to redefine what is meant by the word “open”. Immediately after the auction, certain members of Congress friendly to to the Verzion / AT&T cause began blaming Google for undermining the outcome of the auction. I know believe that this was positioning ploy for what is yet to come from the winner (Verizon). Now, consider:

After Google pressured the FCC to apply some winning “open access” rules (pdf) onto the 700Mhz spectrum, there was ample media and blogger speculation that the rules would usher in a new age of wireless competition. Under the din of celebration, I warned that some legal experts who actually read the conditions were noting they weren’t very enforceable, and that Verizon Wireless’s promises for open access were really just an effort to make device/application freedom and choice a premium, luxury tier. (Broadband Reports)

There’s more to keeping the web free and open than encouraging fierce competition between access providers and equally impartial treatment of traffic. Free and open also extends to software technologies that enable and extend our use of the net.

When it comes to software, we like free. Free insures quick adoption by those who have a compatible platform. Free and open is better, but in the case of the net, open is a necessity to insure continuous development, improvement, and availability to the broadest range of platforms.

According to Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot :

“proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over”…”So far, there has not been a problem,” Nitot said. “Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft’s discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe’s long-standing refusal to “provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users.” He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are “sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms.” (Cnet)

Adobe’s recent move to partly open Flash is an improvement, but does not go far enough. Closing software that is dominant also causes stagnation. Windows is a great example of that.

When you have a small number of competitors in a business, like the US has in the broadband access business, providers tend to create artificial scarcity and ration service. It’s almost a natural law. another one of those oddly natural laws is the 80 / 20 rule. 80% of users of any product will use 20% of a resource and 20% will use 80% of a resource. I matters not if it’s free refills on coffee, or the beer that is bought and paid for by the bottle, it holds true for both. It’s also true of bandwidth usage and should be expected by providers as a normal metric of their business.

Om Malik recently interviewed Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, a supplier of network-management and traffic-shaping tools to carriers. You would think he would naturally concur with the Comcast line that the majority of traffics is peer to peer, but his data includes some very unexpected numbers:

The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson’s data suggests otherwise:

• 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
• During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
• Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee. (GigaOm)

It would seem that the 80 / 20 rule also applies to P2P traffic. As for the bandwidth “hogs”, Telcos have been building network capacity using the 80 / 20 rule since the days of the rotary telephone. The cable guys should certainly understand this as well since they’ve also been fixed line voice providers for over a decade.

Providing bandwidth becomes exponentially cheaper every year, but it does require a commitment to invest proportionally in plant and equipment to keep up with increasing demand. If you have little competition it’s easier and cheaper to create scarcity and ration. The creation of mythology like networks being overwhelmed by illicit P2P traffic is part and parcel of creating the scarcity myth.

It appears that Comcast is not the only one play games with TCP resets on Torrents according to the blog Torrent Freak. Here be the list of expected offenders –

If you are interested there is a plug in you can use to determine what is happening to your Torrent traffic. It is clear that Comcast is the leader but they are not alone as the table indicates.