Category: Writing

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Sprint: We Don’t Throttle Postpaid Users (Though We Reserve the Right To Kick Users Off Network)

As noted by DSL Reports:

Sprint does have terms and conditions which prohibit certain types of data use that may impair other customers’ usage or harm or interfere with the network. At yesterday’s investor conference, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was referring to Sprint’s right to terminate service of data abusers who violate Sprint’s terms and conditions. Customers who abuse our network by violating the terms and conditions will be contacted by Sprint in an effort to have the customer change their usage to comply with their subscriber agreement. Customers who do not change their usage and remain in violation of the terms and conditions may be subject to actions reserved by Sprint, including but not limited to termination. Consistent with our advertising, engaging in such uses will not result in throttling for customers on unlimited data-included plans for phones.

This was how in the late 90s, early 2000s, ISPs dealt with their ‘heavy users’ (aka ‘early adopters). You’d typically get a semi-threatening phone call, with the person on the other end refusing to actually say “we have a cap of X amount of data per month” while simultaneously suggesting that your usage was at an (unspoken) amount that “was unfair to other customers.”

Only once, in many phone calls, did the person on the other end come clean. My account had escalated to a VP of the company and, surprisingly, the VP called me rather than give the case to a flunky. I think he was just curious to talk to someone who used amongst the most bandwidth in the country (I was 9th heaviest user on a ADSL connection for two months straight). He spelled out that no, I wasn’t really being “unfair to other customers” in the sense that I was consuming all the available bandwidth – the usual trope that was trotted out – but that I was being “unfair” in the sense that my level of data usage was so high that the data transit costs associated with my account were incredibly unprofitable for the company. I think they had to line up something like 150 other accounts against mine to be revenue neutral! The call was good though: I got a one hour lesson in the costs of data transit and a request – not demand – that I either reduce my consumption below a certain aggregate amount per 3 months or else I’d have to find a new carrier. I ended up sticking with them; while I wasn’t happy with complying with the request, it was by far fairer than any agreement I’d have gotten with one of the large ISPs.

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Harsher data protection sanctions are coming [but will they matter?]

Fleischer:

I regularly hear people claim that there’s not enough legal enforcement of privacy. In some places, as a matter of practice, that may well be true. But there is no shortage of overlapping authorities with the power to bring or adjudicate privacy claims. Curiously, in privacy circles, most of the focus is on the enforcement actions of the DPAs. But in practice, the DPAs are just one of many different authorities who can and do bring privacy enforcement actions. And the trend is clearly going up, both in terms of the numbers of laws that can be violated, in terms of the severity of sanctions, in terms of the numbers of complaints that are brought, and in terms of the breadth of authorities who are involved in enforcing privacy.

Fleischer is Google’s chief privacy counsel, so he’s got a pretty good eye for what’s coming at Google (and other large data collectors and processors). I wonder, however, about the actual effectiveness of the legal challenges he refers to: Canada’s privacy law didn’t stop Streetview from coming into Canada but instead mediated some of its most invasive characteristics. Similar things can be said about powerful network surveillance apparatuses that are deployed by Canadian ISPs. My worry is less that large companies will be whacked with large fines, but that the regulation will serve to legitimize a lot of practices that legally are acceptable without being according with our social norms.

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Writing

PlayBook Browser UI Blunders

On the whole, I really like my PlayBook. That said, there are certain UI decisions that make absolutely no sense and are in desperate need of being cleaned up. One example: the URL bar in the default browser.

Landscape Mode

The UI makes loads of sense here. No major issues, though the decision to have the history icon (counter-clockwise circle) dead beside the refresh icon (at the end of the URL bar) is a boneheaded given the imprecision of the touch interface.

Portrait Mode

Note that to get the full browser options in the second portrait screenshot, you need to slide your finger along the favourite icon to reveal the other options. This is not an intuitive decision. Note that, with the poor precision of the touch controls, having the history button beside the refresh button is an even worse decision in portrait mode than when in landscape.

Truly WTF Decision

Note that in all the above screenshots there is a medal-like icon to the left of the URL. Tapping it brings up the below screen.
99.99999% of the world will have no clue what this means. For those of us that do it’s confusing: I’ve had the browser tell me on multiple occasions that the certificate is invalid when I know that not to be the case. I get that certificate awareness is a security plus but it’s done so poorly here that it’s (at best) effectively meaningless.
Now, are these huge issues? No, of course not. Are they signs of an unpolished OS release? Most definitely. Hopefully they’ll be improved upon in the 2.0 release of the PlayBook OS.
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Is Silicon Valley too smart for its own good?

While Agrawal’s article argues that those in Silicon Valley are developing for people who’re as saturated as they are, I think that he’s really missing what makes the Valley what it is. For decades, we’ve seen interesting ideas and products come out of California that are absolute flops. They’re not flops because the products are necessarily bad but  because the deliverables don’t identify a real problem or offer a real solution. That’s not a bad thing, and critiques along grounds of ‘flops’ (and crafting products for the future, rather than the past) misses what’s important about the Valley’s function as a thought incubator: ideas are crafted and honed, underlying principles and technical challenges are ironed out, and eventually some bits and pieces of “failed” ideas and products tend to be integrated into the future’s successful product lines.

Innovative development, much like scholarly work, is often intellectually exciting and vibrant while lacking a direct market output. It’s because we can test, experiment, and play that cool things ultimately come out of the ether. If we demand that most, or all, of Silicon Valley’s (and academia’s) projects meet existing problems, and avoid dreamlike solutions to undefined issues, we’re going to see a lot less interesting and novel things that (seemingly) pop out of nowhere.

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Why Mobile Carriers are a Threat to Us All

Paul Thurrott reports that Microsoft is no longer guaranteeing that mobile updates will be delivered to end-users and will no longer give guidance about when/if those updates will come.

I suspect that Microsoft’s actions are the result of carriers not caring one lick about security and actively opposing performance updates to “old” phones. Carriers aren’t themselves affected by security deficiencies that they are largely responsible for prolonging, and if new cool features are automatically provided in a smartphone update then the customer is less likely to rush out and buy a new phone with the same features. Carriers need to be held accountable: if they know there are security updates and refuse to let them go out to customers, then customers’ contracts should be broken with those same carriers. If customers experience actual harms, then the carriers should be legally – and financially – liable.

Microsoft, and the other mobile OS vendors, need to realize that the most important customer base is the people buying phones, not the device manufacturers or carriers. The latter two groups are important, yes, but if Microsoft can’t convince end-customers to pick up their phones and be happy about the choice a few months later then Microsoft is going to turn into an Android-like OS manufacturer. We already have one too many of those.

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Writing

E-Snooped Upon

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews states that the government’s proposed lawful access legislation is on a par with a phonebook linking phone numbers to a residential address. This is highly misleading (The Poop On E-Snoop – letters, Dec. 3).

Anyone can look up information in the phonebook, but they cannot compel Rogers or Bell to turn over “phone record” data that the government is after. The minister has not noted that his proposal would expand “phone records” from three items (name, address, telephone number) to 11. We are familiar with what those three items mean, but how many can decode the mysterious acronyms of digital and mobile communications: the IP address, the MIN, the SPIN, the ESN, the IMEI, the IMSI, the SIM? The minister isn’t talking about phone records, but about giving authorities access to a range of identifiers that tell a great deal about our personal lives. So, can we please have a debate about the Internet instead of one about “phonebooks”?

Colin Bennett, Christopher Parsons, “E-snooped upon”
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Links Writing

Tracking Your Every Move: ‘Enhancing’ Driver’s Licenses at the Cost of Privacy | Dissident Voice

The potential for ubiquitous surveillance that emerges with Enhanced Drivers Licenses (EDLs) could only be imagined by the Stasi in Communist East Germany, but is a genuinely looming specter for contemporary North American democracies. Provincial and state governments in North America are proposing to ‘enhance’ driver’s licenses in coming years by including a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips in them. These ‘enhanced’ licenses emit unique identifiers and will be optional when they are first available to the public, though they will be required to enter the United States using a driver’s license beginning in July 2009. The proposed Enhanced Driver’s Licenses (EDLs) are intended to be associated with border security, but are also accompanied with concerns linked to individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy.

An early piece I wrote on enhanced drivers licenses.