January 2008 Archives

The headlines are populist. Verizon Faces Largest-Ever Class Action, says BBR. People Take Fight to Verizon With Record $1 Billion Class Action Lawsuit says DailyTech.

Readers are more surprised by something else.

Here are two viral videos, one which we present, and one which is described. In the first, Senator Feingold summarizes the FISA debate. In the second, the Datamation blog takes a lighthearted look at AT&T censorship.

These fears are ongoing (see Don't Censor Pearl Jam).

All of this is possible only when the entire federal government, including the exeuctive, judiciary, and both houses of congress, ignores the Constitution's definition of privacy, the fourth amendment.

In addition to the home registry, sex offenders will, under a new proposal, also be listed in a New York State e-mail directory, a plan today announced by the state's Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo.

The law itself is called the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP).

My prediction: more spam for sex offenders. I don't feel sorry for them, however.

Another side effect: some theorists claim that the availability of porn reduces the incidence of violent crimes and rapes. While it is impossible to test that, we will now have a real life laboratory for the reverse. We will learn whether removing access to porn increases the chance of a repeat offence.

That's because one of the provisions will ban certain offenders from accessing pornographic materials.

ISPs will be relieved that they are not expected to spy on their subscribers. Social networking sites, however, will be expected to prevent anyone on a specific list from signing up.

The votes were close but the bills were blocked.

All too often we hear about an offer that seems too good to be true. When I heard about MagicJack on broadbandreports, I didn't believe it at first but decided to order it.

So far, it works as described, with minimal call quality issues. I hope I don't have to uninstall it because the software hides in Windows like spyware, but otherwise, no objections.

But then there's this website touting a wireless broadband MLM scheme. It looks fishy to me, but I have not yet researched it. The audio is . . . well worth listening to.

All too often, frauds hijack legitimate technology. Notoriously, public buses could have been electric had not the electric bus company of London been an elaborate financial fraud (see Who Killed the Electric Bus?). I hope that no company does the same disservice to this promising technology, discrediting a promising invention (see As SunRocket Dies, VoIP Providers Must Differentiate Themselves).

Telephony's blog notes that the auction may not raise enough money. Spectrum should not be sold; it should be leased. While de jure, the FCC provides rights for a limited term, all too often companies acquire de facto permanent ownership of the spectrum.

The dollar results are here on the FCC's website,

Rather than trying to change the auction to increase the number of bidders and raise a fixed dollar amount, the auction should allow companies to offer less money for a shorter term lease.

The latest music service is Songza, a website thought up by 23 year old Aza Raskin while in the shower (according to his blog) last November.

It works! But is it legal?

(H/T BoingBoing)

Beautiful cabling images on Royal Pingdom.

While there's no news yet, there's plenty of commentary.

Some are noting that the downturn in the stockmarket (hey, we finally admitted it's a recession) may limit the investor dollars available (this would be particularly painful for small companies).

Others are cynical about the auction's motives. The AP, no rabble rouser, calls the auction a payoff to TV stations for the move to digital. Red Herring has more nuanced doubts.

TMC warns that there are too few competitors.

And the answer, he says, is, "yes!"

Because the company's proposal to monitor all of its subscribers' internet activity would thereby make it legally rsponsible for the consequences if they break any laws.

ISPs definitely want to monitor this situation.

This just in from BoingBoing -- the attempt in Europe to make ISPs spy on their users has failed.

But one politician said the regulators promised to try to get this bad bill passed again in the future, saying that they, "will just have to bring this back before a more acquiescent Parliament."

When a regulator who tries to get a particular policy passed, that is often a sign of regulatory capture, IMO, especially when the policy is deeply unpopular and contravenes an organization's own rules.

Europe's privacy standards are the strictist, but one part of the European regulatorium wants to drop all that at the behest of the music industry, which in this case is represented (poorly) by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Quite an impressive device. The press release is c/o Steve Stroh, and the image comes from a user's blog:

Open Networks Today reports telco immunity it baaaack.

In his succinct article, Baller praises Connect Kentucky -- and asks for more information about it.

Baller has been arguing that we need a national broadband strategy for some time, but his hopes that politicians, regulators, and the monopolists can simply get together and work it all out seem naive to me.

It's official: Network Solutions is holding on to domains searched in its whois database, shocking behavior for a company with real responsibility for the internet.

The FCC has released the list of qualified bidders (.pdf) and also non-qualified bidders (.pdf).

Most of the press coverage focuses on the qualified list but we've recognized a few names on the non-qualified list (KeyOn, Mt.Vernon net, part15.org, and terranovanet) and will be trying to find out why these innovators didn't make the cut.

Then there's everybody's favorite mystery organization: the Office of Spectral Ecology. I have no information about them at this time, but I did try to e-mail the Ghost Busters.

In a follow up to a previous article, Carla Schroder at VoIP Planet writes (VoIPowering Your Office: Can You Trust Anyone? Part 2) that the Fonality people, who develop Trixbox, have apologized to the internet community and explained why their boxes send information back to the company.

Most importantly, the company apologized (far too many never do):

Why didn’t I know about it? Because we are idiots. More on that later.

and says the trixbox heartbeat collects the following data from the end user's computer:

1. IP Phone types and count
2. Useragent details (firmware version & MAC address)
3. OS version
4. RPMs installed
5. Info about cards, such as PSTN interface cards
6. Motherboard details such as manufacturer
7. Asterisk version
8. trixbox CE version
9. Registration Key, if the system is registered (see Heartbeat V2.0 above)

Also, the company has allowed users to disable this "feature" during the install.

All of this makes Fonality a useful case study for ISPs that make a mistake and need to make amends.

An in-depth report from Public Knowledge, quoting several notable sources and also claiming to be unable to quote others by name due to fear of the Bell company, says that the rural deployment initiative known as Connect Kentucky (now d.b.a Connected Nation) was cooked up by corrupt governor Ernie Fletcher and the local SBC.

Its current legislative priorities include a bill to "send as much as 35 percent of the telephone taxes consumer and business pay to the telephone companies instead of to the state."

The phone companies are so powerful that they can cut off the FBI -- even during an ongoing investigation.

Was the problem:

a) Poor FBI record keeping
b) Telco double billing
c) Triple entry book keeping at both the FBI and the telcos

?

Wired quotes a former FBI agent now working for the ACLU saying, "To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail."

I had thought that jailing Naccio for failing to comply with the warrantless wiretaps (as is suggested here) would have cowed the telcos but now I know -- nothing does.

Drew Robb writes, on Enterprise Storage Forum, that online storage providers are switching back from tape to disk. Tape appeared to provide massive amounts of storage, and better data integrity, but we've been hearing unsubstantiated horror stories about it for years.

The folks at VoIP Planet have the details of a PR disaster and privacy violation at Fonality / Trixbox.

_Especially_ if you're a small company, you need to trest customers right and not dismiss privacy concerns.

A new report in the Washington Post (H/T BoingBoing) says that Sears and ComScore are getting customers to opt into spyware.

Anti-spyware hero and Harvard professor Ben Edelman said that the company's rebuttal of his claims are, "exactly contrary to actual facts, as best I can tell," i.e., lies.

In his writeup of the spyware, Edelman lists numerous problems with the software's install process, including the inability to cancel it and the fact that it is not accurately described.

Far too many software upgrades (I'm not naming names here) continue to fail to add value. If you're irritated, the Great Capitalist Market has come up with a consumerist method of fighting back:

Buying stickers that say, "Now Slower and with More Bugs!"

(H/T BoingBoing)