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Verizon and Rogers skirt rules on network neutrality versus Free’s innovative network

St. Arnand says:

They tried and failed with UBB. Now they are at it again with “speed boost” technologies.  The two technologies at question are Verizon’s “Turbo” service  and Roger’s “SpeedBoost”.  There are very few technical details, but it appears in the former case that users will be able to purchase additional instantaneous bandwidth to the detriment of other users on the same shared service.  Whether this will make a difference to actual throughput is another matter because the slow video may be due to server problems and not network congestion. And if you are in elevator with very poor connectivity, you will unlikely get any faster download speed, no matter how many times you press the turbo button. But will Verizon give you a credit if you don’t get the advertised speed boost?  I doubt it. Similarly the Rogers’ service, while still free, seems to imply faster speeds if they detect you are streaming a video, particularly from their own on-line service.  Will users who are not streaming video, but using other real time applications get the same benefit such as VoIP or Telepresence?  I doubt it.

I agree with his thrust that this kind of practice creates undue preference for certain kinds of content distribution over others. I would just note that (based on some people I’ve spoken to about Rogers’ practices) it seems like Rogers’ system temporarily ‘upgrades’ a person’s throughput capacity to try and get ‘bursty’ traffic to the end-user quickly, and to create a buffer for streaming media. Thus, if you subscribe to a 10 mbps service then you would temporarily go to a 15 mbps connection, and after those few seconds pass by you revert back to your 10 mbps speeds.

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Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy

Pretty well required reading at the moment if you’re interested in the consequences of Google integrating their own social products into their search results. I’d really recommend reading the whole thing but, if not, at least take a glance at Danny Sullivan’s takeaway:

 It’s not Google’s job to be sticking it to anyone with its search results. Those results are supposed to be showing what are the most relevant things for searchers out there. That’s how Google wins. That’s how Google sticks it to competitors, by not trying to play favorites in those results, nor by trying to punish people through them.

The Google+ suggestions are indeed search results, to me. Right now, they’re search results on who to follow on Google+. I think they could be better search results if they were who to follow on any social network, anywhere.

 

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DiskCrypt turns any laptop storage into a self-encrypted drive

An interesting product:

At CES, Singapore-based ST Electronics was showing off a new security device that can be installed in nearly any notebook computer to protect its data from prying eyes—Digisafe DiskCrypt, a hard-disk enclosure that turns any 1.8-inch micro-SATA device into removable and fully encrypted storage. The enclosure, which is the size of a 2.5″ drive, can be used as a drop-in replacement for existing drives.

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Before boot, DiskCrypt requires a USB dongle to be plugged in to pass the key, and it can also be optionally configured to require the user to enter a password for two-factor authentication. The hardware can handle up to150MBps of data throughput, so once it has been activated it’s completely transparent. ST Electronics’ deputy director Jimmy Neo claimed the encryption module has no impact on read/write performance.

All this is pretty standard for a self-encrypted drive. The main advantage of DiskCrypt is that it can be put into nearly any existing notebook. If there’s a drive failure, a need to move from hard disk to SSD—or just swap out the drive—the enclosure can be quickly opened and the storage device popped out. Separated from the encryption enclosure, the drive is practically the same as destroyed.

It will be important to test this against a hostile attacker, or situate it in a hostile general environment. There is a depressing history of encrypted storage solutions along these lines failing when confronted by a serious attacker. While the crypto itself might be secure, a side-channel attack (the most common means of subverting encryption schemes) could compromise the drive.

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Design > Functionality

This Porsche-version of the BlackBerry costs around $2000. It’s a rebranded/designed version of a BlackBerry 9900 and I really can’t understand the functional attraction of this ‘high end’ version of the $700 device. While it’s a striking visual presentation of the Blackberry, I just can’t get past the fact that the keys are layered in a manner that (by all accounts) offers a subpar typing experience compared to a ‘regular’ 9900. While the design is striking, industrial design also must aim for maximal functionality. In this respect that the Porsche-RIM combination seems to have failed in a visually striking manner.

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46% of Americans Say Tablets Will Replace Laptops

Per Mashable, 46% of Americans Say Tablets Will Replace Laptops. I think that the study, at least as presented, is overly blunt. I would bet that it isn’t that 46% of Americans would replace their laptops with tablets but that 46% of the tasks people perform on laptops will move to tablets. Further, I suspect that another healthy chunk of laptop-linked tasks will move to small, 3G connected, mobile devices.

What will be left to laptops? Long-form content production and more serious computational tasks.

 

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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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Ubuntu and TV

This is smart TV software done beautifully. It (seemingly) has more functionality than Apple TV and (looks to be) better integrated with movie purchasing services than Dlink’s Boxee Box. The problem with all smart TV devices remains their stability: I’m a geek, so I don’t mind occasionally reseting my Boxee Box or media centre and I accept that periodic crashes in the middle of a show or movie are the cost of early adoption.

Most people aren’t geeks. Most people won’t settle for sometimes crashing TVs. If Ubuntu doesn’t get that element right then everything else they do won’t matter one bit to the mainstream. Though us geeks will likely love it.

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Passwords: uniqueness, not complexity

Graham argues that there are three tiers of sites and that you should apply variable password policies to each tier. The key lesson is to have unique passwords across the tiers so that a tier 3 site being hacked doesn’t endanger your tier 1 sites. You probably want unique passwords for each tier 1 site.

At the first tier is your e-mail account. Since a hack of your e-mail account means hackers can reset passwords on all your other accounts, it would be terrible if that password were lost. This should both be very complex, as well as wholly unrelated to any other accounts.

At the second tier are important e-commerce sites, like Amazon.com, NewEgg,com, Apple.com, and so on. The major sites are unlikely to be hacked. You could probably share the same password for all these accounts.

At the third tier are the unimportant accounts, like StratFor, where it wouldn’t be catastrophic if your password were lost. Again, you could choose a third, simple password, like “passwd1234” for all these accounts. It’ll probably get stolen within a year, but who really cares?

While I agree, in part, I still think that a highly complex passphrase (not password) and a strong password daemon like 1 Password is probably the best approach for most people. That way you can enjoy strong, unique, passwords and generate new ones for each account you open.

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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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Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile

Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile:

T-Mobile UK are moving towards a mobile network which works (technically) in a very similar manner to the Great Firewall of China.

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Most people don’t run their own server. If you don’t, then you’re pretty screwed.

On a technical level, what T-Mobile is doing is pretty cool (assuming it is, in fact, the same techniques as China is using to attack TOR of late) but is otherwise pure evil. T-Mobile’s behaviours are a clear indication of why strong network neutrality rules are absolutely necessary: without regulations and punishments carriers will happily screw their customers if it might save, or make, the carriers a buck.