Internet Freedom Day

Internet Freedom Day

One year ago we defeated SOPA.
Today, celebrate your freedom of expression.
January 18th is #InternetFreedomDay
What’s something you love on the net that you’d never want to see censored?

There are lots of great things we can do to celebrate this very important anniversary of
beating SOPA one year ago today! Check out a few of them at:

www.InternetFreedomDay.net

and do what you can to
celebrate the one year anniversary of beating SOPA today!

And don’t forget: Aaron Swartz was instrumental in helping to beat SOPA!

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Not sure what it’s all about? Check out the following article:

The Day Wikipedia Went Dark - Boston Review

Many sites, including all of my websites went dark that day!

As was noted in the article:

The free Internet will rise or fall on the involvement and ingenuity of the people, not on courts or lawmakers.

Internet Freedom Day: Coming together a year after SOPA/PIPA – EFF.org

Internet Freedom Day: Celebrate SOPA/PIPA Victory One Year Later!

When Copyright Goes Bad

When Copyright Goes Bad

Info from the YouTube video page:

A film by Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch.

Suddenly, copyright rules no longer do what they are supposed to do. They have gone bad.

This is a film about how copyright has become one of the most important consumer issues of the digital age; why corporate lobbying risks criminalising the actions of hundreds of thousands of people; and what the future holds for the fight for fairer copyright laws.

When Copyright Goes Bad is an introduction to the renegotiation of copyright and is for anyone interested in how copyright is affecting consumers. It features some of the key players in the copyright debate, including:

Fred Von Lohmann – Electronic Frontier Foundation; Michael Geist – University of Ottawa Law School; Jim Killock – Open Rights Group; and Hank Shocklee – Co-founder of Public Enemy.

For more, visit http://www.A2Knetwork.org/film

Caps, Metered Billing and Tiered Access, Oh, My!

Here’s more on the big mess with Broadband carriers, caps, metered billing and tiered access!

Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road (InternetForEveryone.org):

In North Carolina alone, nearly 5 million residents don’t have high-speed Internet. According to a July 2007 study, 30 percent or more of the state’s population in 21 rural counties did not have high-speed Internet connectivity. In many cases, telephone and cable companies have refused to provide service to people living in the remote and rural areas of the state, while some people are simply priced out of buying expensive broadband service.

They aren’t the only areas, I hope InternetForEveryone.org comes to rural Southside/Hampton Roads, VA too. There are areas like the tiny depressed area of Dendron, VA where the only ‘broadband’ is via cellular Internet that is either capped at 5GB/mo, or ‘supposed’ unlimited that throttles you, and at times has speeds of less then dialup. Anyone who can’t afford the $59-$60/mo. is stuck on dialup or equally expensive satellite Internet with massive lag times. Unless you have enough money to pay for a Fractional T1 or a T1 that is. Have any of you priced those lately?

There are many rural areas still waiting for Cable/DSL in Sussex, Surry, Isle of Wight, Smithfield, and surrounding areas.

Those of us who are trying to run a small business in this economy are really having a struggle especially if your business depends on the Internet.

Wired Less: Disconnected in Urban America (InternetForEveryone.org):

For many Americans living in urban areas, high-speed Internet access remains elusive.

Much of the discussion about broadband expansion in the United States focuses on the rural areas that still lack this essential infrastructure. As we documented in our earlier report, Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road, residents in rural areas are struggling to live and work without high-speed Internet.

Even with these sad statistics, it’s nice to know there are some successes along the way.

Score the First Round for the Public (SaveTheInternet.org)

Today, I want to thank everyone involved in the grassroots movement that helped secure this first-round victory in the battle over broadband tiered pricing. Through the power of the people, together we were able to persuade Time Warner Cable to abandon its download-based tiered-billing plan in four markets: Rochester, N.Y., San Antonio, Texas, Austin, Texas, and Greensboro, N.C.

Even though we won this first fight together, there is still much to be done to ensure that download-based caps do not emerge elsewhere.

Internet Users Roar. Cable Giant Blinks. (SaveTheInternet.org)

Time Warner Cable on Thursday afternoon shelved its plan to impose excessive Internet fees against those who use the Web for more than email and basic surfing.

The cable giant backed down under intense public pressure that bubbled up from the grassroots and culminated in calls by leading politicians to end the price gouging.

Time Warner Cable had been testing new Internet use penalties on people in Beaumont, Texas, and planned later this year to launch trials in Rochester, N.Y.; Austin and San Antonio, Texas; and Greensboro, N.C. If successful, Time Warner Cable execs planned to impose this cost structure upon the company’s 8.4 million broadband subscribers in 32 states.

As posted in my earlier post today, there is much work to be done here. And we need to make sure we know what they are up to.

TWC to Customers: You Don’t Want Tiers, You Don’t Get Super-fast Broadband (GigaOM):

Updated: Well, I hope all of you who complained about Time Warner Cable’s plans for metered broadband are happy. Shortly after the cable company pulled its metered broadband trials, it’s also rethinking its deployment of super-fast broadband in San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Greensboro, N.C., and Rochester N.Y. Whiny citizens in those communities (including me) apparently don’t deserve super-fast broadband speeds of 50 Mbps unless it’s accompanies by tiers.

I really am sorry that you won’t get the super-fast broadband, but at least you already have Cable/DSL broadband!

Like one thing really has anything to do with the other…

And as one comment noted, moving to DOCSIS 3.0 is not a major cost when compared with the losses they will sustain when FiOS comes knocking.

NO CLEAN FEED – Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

NO CLEAN FEED – Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Help spread the word about the campaign by blogging about the filter, linking to nocleanfeed.com website, or including one of their buttons on your own site or blog.

If nothing else learn about what is going on in Australia … because Australia may just be the proving ground for a terrible worldwide or at least countrywide filtering system that may be coming to USA or wherever you live!

iTunes, DRM-Free, Rumors and Slapdown by Music Cartel

Well, there we have it. The music cartel’s playbook; pretend to talk about providing DRM-Free music, let the rumors fly, and then slap them down publicly so you think you have no other options. And all because they don’t get their way so they will take their marbles and go home.

One of these days, maybe the government will wake up and see they are being made the fool by copyright special interests. But then they didn’t see it with the banking cartels either. So don’t hold your breath.

If you are smart, get your music wherever you can that offers DRM-free music and don’t depend upon one specific place for it. There are quite a few places around to get DRM-free music. A few top ones at this time are Amazon MP3 which has an absolutely wonderful list of DRM-free musis and at great prices. Of course there are also places like eMusic as well. They still have a very nice selection even if it’s not as big as Amazon MP3. And so many more out there! Do your research. It’s well worth checking to be sure you are getting a good deal and NO DRM.

If you really want to see the big picture, don’t look at what’s happening today. Look at what’s happened before, AND what the music cartels (or banking cartels, or medical/pharmaceutical cartels, or any other corporate cartels) are doing now AND the direction they appear to be heading based on what they are doing. Then look at how the government has responded to the cartels’ special interest groups in Washington, and what it ended up costing you as a Citizen over time. Then you can begin to make an informed decision.

It’s this nation’s gotta have it now mentality that is destroying us. Few are willing to see the big picture and actually do something to help stop what is going on. They want ‘stuff’ too much.

We need to be brave and do without if that is the only way to make a stand on what is right and what is wrong in government or commerce. Do the right thing.

Yeah, I know with all the bailouts, it sure makes it hard to discern. But it can be done if you really want to know.

But I digress. There is no reason anyone should be willing to pay for defective, errr, DRM’d music that won’t play where you want to play it because of short sighted (can’t see beyond THEIR pocketbook) cartels.

And don’t forget the threats to people’s music by the powers that be if someone stops selling the DRM’d music (remember Walmart?) and they finally came around and kept the license servers up, but they told you to burn your music to CDs so you won’t have to depend on them because they are not keeping them up indefinitely. That’s what happens when you are locked into DRM’d music.

What do Microsoft and Apple have in common?

They apparently both have sold out to the entertainment cartels (movies, games, music, etc.) to prevent you from even making legitimate use of what you buy….meaning on the very computers and display hardware that you pay your hard earned money for!

The funny thing is, MacWorld is playing this up like it’s a good thing:

Apple didn’t just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks, the refreshed Macbook Air and 15-inch MacBook Pros replaces the DVI and mini-DVI interfaces found on older models. But is this another proprietary debacle like Apple’s failed Apple Display Connector (ADC) interface? No.

DisplayPort is, in fact, an open industry standard promoted by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), the same group that determines standard sizes for flat panel display mounts, for example. And Apple isn’t the only company supporting DisplayPort. HP, Philips, Samsung, Lenovo, AMD, Nvidia, Intel and many other companies have thrown their weight behind the standard, so we’ll be seeing a lot more DisplayPort-compatible devices in the coming years.

But at least MacWorld does at least try to list some of the downsides:

Unless you’re content with the infinitesimal selection of displays that work with DisplayPort right now, you’ll have to buy more gadgets to get your new Mac to work with a DVI or VGA display. You’re going to pay $29 for the privilege of getting such an adapter through the Apple Store. Unless you need a Dual-Link DVI adapter to hook up a Cinema HD Display or another 30-inch LCD panel, that is—that’ll set you back a full c-note, and you’ll be waiting four to five weeks for it, according to the online Apple Store.

What’s more, regardless of whether you buy Apple’s DisplayPort adapter or a third party’s (if you’re lucky enough to find one, that is), you’re going to mess up your desk with more boxes and wires getting that DVI or VGA display to work.

First Microsoft caved under the entertainment cartel’s unreasonable demands and turned Vista OS/hardware into Vista The Enabler. Now Apple’s newest hardware and OS on the new Aluminum laptop computers has turned into Leopard the Enabler … NOT enabling you as the owner of the harware, but enabling the entertainment cartels to say what you can and can’t do on your hardware with movies, music that you buy. And so many hardware companies have also caved!

All so Apple can make a few bucks in the iTunes Store??

Read it and weep:

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you

High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

So what you say? AppleTV already had this, did you know that? Maybe you want to educate yourself a bit, eh? HDCP, DPCP, DisplayPort Content Protection.

Arstechnica continues a little later in the article AFTER explaining one way in which a teacher has already been frustrated by unreasonable unintended consequences of not being able to play a movie on a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room’s Promethean system:

The technology in Apple’s MacBooks that prevents a seemingly arbitrary collection of iTunes Store files from being played on HDCP non-compliant devices is perhaps more accurately called DPCP, or DisplayPort Content Protection. As we’ve covered in the past, DisplayPort was designed as an open, extensible standard for computers that offers lower power consumption over DVI (especially in the Mini DisplayPort format that Apple uses on the new MacBooks). But more importantly, DisplayPort also beats DVI in the studios’ books by offering the option of 128-bit AES encrypted copy protection.

And folks at the Apple Support Forums are also complaining about this iTunes movie purchases will not play on external display – HDCP auth error:

Well, I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a storm over this one already but I expect there will be.

Just got a new MacBook last week and finally found a mini Display Port -> VGA adapter so i could use my 19″ external display. I rented a movie from the iTunes store yesterday and when I tried to play it on my external display, it gave me a warning/error that the display was ‘not an authorized HDCP display’ and it would not play. Plays fine on the small MacBook screen, just nothing external. To make it even worse, i tried all the movies that I have purchased from the iTunes store with the same result… NONE of them will play on anything but the MacBook’s small 13″ screen. This is crazy unacceptable.

Has anyone else run into this yet or have any ideas of something I may be overlooking in order to get purchased movies to play on an external display?

Yep…and I am sure there are many more that will find things they can’t do with what they bought.

Gawd, I hate it when I am right. I knew Apple would sell out to the entertainment cartels like Microsoft did.

Companies that are adopting or plan to adopt DisplayPort Content Protection in their hardware.

And as Wikipedia notes DisplayPort is basically just another standard — more of the same but different — like HDMI, it’s direct competitor:

DisplayPort is a competitor to the HDMI connector (with HDCP copy-protection), the de facto digital connection for high-definition consumer electronics devices. Another competitor is Unified Display Interface,[2] a low cost compatible alternative to HDMI and DVI. However, the main supporter of UDI, Intel Corporation, has stopped the development of the technology and now supports DisplayPort.

Yeah, that should help the new TVs, electronics devices and computers work together, eh?

Well, it looks like we add another set hardware that are never gonna be part of this ladies’ electronics gizmos … unfortunately.

Thanks for nothing Apple.

Sad.

The Moral Hazard of Regulation

The Moral Hazard of Regulation
By Congressman Ron Paul

Since the bailout bill passed, I have been frequently disturbed to hear “experts” wrongly blaming the free market for our recent economic problems and calling for more regulation. In fact, further regulation can only make things worse.

It is important to understand that regulators are not omniscient. It is not feasible for them to anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong with whatever industry or activity they are regulating. They are making their best guesses when formulating rules. It is often difficult for those being regulated to understand the many complex rules they are expected to follow. Very wealthy corporations hire attorneys who may discover a myriad of loopholes to exploit and render the spirit of the regulations null and void. For this reason, heavy regulation favors big business against those small businesses who cannot afford high-priced attorneys.

This is a must read.

THEY’RE BA-ACK!

They’re BA-ACK!

Big Media area at it again!

The NAB’s lobbyists are now trying to send scare mongering to Congress again! This time about White Spaces!

I thought you might be interested in joining the campaign to provide millions of Americans with high-speed Internet access.

Unless we speak out to the FCC, large broadcast companies will deny Internet service to millions who cannot access the information superhighway.

Please visit the URL below to check out what’s at stake and send a Halloween card to the FCC telling them not to back down to Big Media’s scare tactics:

https://secure.freepress.net/site/SPageServer?pagename=whitespaces

Many rural areas have no real options for broadband, or if they are lucky enough to have at least a 3G capable cellular tower near them, it’ll cost you $60/mo plus equipment and limitations on your monthly bandwidth. And that’s really the best option there is for rural areas if you are lucky enough to get a new tower put in your area.

Satellite Internet like Wild Blue, et al are just not ready for prime time for ALL types of Internet usage…particularly for businesses that work on the Internet or anyone making use of realtime things like audio streaming, ftp for more than a few files at a time, chat that doesn’t bump you off occasionally. The lag is just awful! We tried it out at a couple friends house … fine if all you do is browse and get email, but for more demanding needs, forget it.

We have been getting the run around from Verizon (on their DSL), as well as Cox Cable and Charter Cable about bringing their services into our small town. It’s like a dry county! It’s all around us, but no one will come into our little town with decent broadband!

They really have rural areas over a barrel service and price wise. It’s just not right.

Big data: Welcome to the petacentre

Cory Doctorow has done an awesome article for Nature.com on the absolutely huge and hugely expensive petacentres.

Here’s what he wrote in the email notification for the article:

I wrote a feature for this week’s issue of the journal *Nature* on “petascale” data-centers — giant data-centers used in scholarship and science, from Google to the Large Hadron Collider to the Human Genome and Thousand Genome projects to the Internet Archive. The issue is on stands now and also available free online. Yesterday, I popped into Nature’s offices in London and recorded a special podcast on the subject, too. This was one of the coolest writing assignments I’ve ever been on, pure sysadmin porn. It was worth doing just to see the the giant, Vader-cube tape-robots at CERN.

At this scale, memory has costs. It costs money — 168 million Swiss francs (US$150 million) for data management at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva. And it also has costs that are more physical. Every watt that you put into retrieving data and calculating with them comes out in heat, whether it be on a desktop or in a data centre; in the United States, the energy used by computers has more than doubled since 2000. Once you’re conducting petacalculations on petabytes, you’re into petaheat territory. Two floors of the Sanger data centre are devoted to cooling. The top one houses the current cooling system. The one below sits waiting for the day that the centre needs to double its cooling capacity. Both are sheathed in dramatic blue glass; the scientists call the building the Ice Cube.

The fallow cooling floor is matched in the compute centre below (these people all use ‘compute’ as an adjective). When Butcher was tasked with building the Sanger’s data farm he decided to implement a sort of crop rotation. A quarter of the data centre — 250 square metres — is empty, waiting for the day when the centre needs to upgrade to an entirely new generation of machines. When that day comes, Butcher and his team will set up in that empty space the yet-to-be-specified systems for power, cooling and the rest of it. Once the new centre is up, they’ll be able to shift operations from the obsolete old centre in sections, dismantling and rebuilding without a service interruption, leaving a new patch of the floor fallow — in anticipation of doing it all again in a distressingly short space of time.

The first rotation may come soon. Sequencing at the Sanger, and elsewhere, is getting faster at a dizzying pace — a pace made possible by the data storage facilities that are inflating to ever greater sizes. Take the human genome: the fact that there is now a reference genome sitting in digital storage brings a new generation of sequencing hardware into its own. The crib that the reference genome provides makes the task of adding together the tens of millions of short samples those machines produce a tractable one. It is what makes the 1000 Genomes Project, which the Sanger is undertaking in concert with the Beijing Genomics Institute in China and the US National Human Genome Research Institute, possible — and with it the project’s extraordinary aim of identifying every gene-variant present in at least 1% of Earth’s population.

Nature magazine:
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080903/full/455016a.html

Podcast:
http://nature.edgeboss.net/download/nature/nature/podcast/extras/big-data-2008-09-04.mp3?ewk13=1

Flickr photos from the research:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/sets/72157606675048531/

Cory did a great job on all of it; the article, the podcast and the Flickr! photo gallery!

Get a feeling for “…the relentless march from kilo to mega to giga to tera to peta to exa to zetta to yotta. The mad, inconceivable growth of computer performance and data storage is changing science, knowledge, surveillance, freedom, literacy, the arts — everything that can be represented as data, or built on those representations. And in doing so it is putting endless strain on the people and machines that store the exponentially growing wealth of data involved. I’ve set out to see how the system administrators, or sysadmins, at some of the biggest scientific data centres take that strain — and to get a sense of how it feels to work with some of the biggest, coolest IT toys on the planet.“

Never in known history has the ability to store so much data on so many people as well as the knowledge of mankind, marketing, banking — the intellectual data of the world could be stored like this. Awesome and scary at the same time. Hitler would have loved to have such capabilities during his reign….

Internet Speed Test | Speed Matters

Sigh…
And we have to pay as much or more than Cox and Charter Cable’s biggest pipe, and WAY more than Verizon ADSL (no matter what speed you get — except FiOS which will not be here till h*ll freezes over) to get that speed on Cellular Wireless and be limited monthly to a 5GB per month Cap.

But at least it’s better than Dialup at 3.6kbps-4.4kbps, eh?

Which, until recently, was all there was until the Cell tower was upgraded/added around here.

Speed Test

How fast are you? Take the speed test to see how your connection measures up.

Our 2007 Speed Matters report was a great success. We received front page coverage in USA Today and in publications across the country. We helped launch statewide broadband projects in Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. And the test results helped convice the Federal Communications Commission to change its definition of broadband so that they can collect data that is more meaningful – one of the major goals of our campaign.

Take the test today so that you are included in our 2008 report.

Learn more about the speed test.