Some sanity on network neutrality

PC World writes that the courts have ruled against the FCC for throttling BitTorrent connections:

The FCC lacked "any statutorily mandated responsibility" to enforce network neutrality rules, wrote Judge David Tatel.

As I wrote before, I didn't understand how the FCC had this authority:

Part of my curiosity is exactly how the FCC has the jurisdiction to do this. The last I heard, network neutrality was voted down in Congress. Did it come up again with no one noticing, or is the FCC just reaching again?

I want a neutral network, but I don't see much our governments can do to help. I'm glad to hear that at the very least, the FCC must await enabling legislation to do any of this nonsense. It means that U.S. agencies are still to some degree bound by law.

It's a good thing in this case, too. The FCC wanted to prevent Comcast from throttling traffic. How is this really going to work out profitably in the long run?

The problem is that plenty of throttling is not just acceptable, but a good idea. Eliminate the bad throttling, and lots of good will be thrown out, too. The clearest example is that the diagnostic packets used by ping and traceroute should surely be prioritized higher than packets carrying regular data. Another is that streaming video should likely get down prioritized so that it doesn't hog the whole pipe. Another is that any individual node that is spamming would be good to get throttled down. Another is that a large network might have some parts of its network better connected than others; to prevent the low-bandwidth areas from being clogged, they might want to throttle incoming data into the well-connected parts. There are really quite a lot of legitimate uses for throttling.

Those examples are all compelling and ordinary, but it gets worse when we consider possible future business models. For example, suppose an ISP of the future openly advertises that it prefers some traffic over others, e.g. that it allocates sufficient bandwidth for VOIP that there are never any glitches in a conversation held over their network. Such a company could provide a great service to the general public, but good luck getting it past an FCC that categorically disallows any form of throttling. Regulatory agencies tend to clamp down an industry to work the way it currently works; new ways of doing things can't get off the ground.

Again, though, I'm all for trying to make a more neutral network. It's just that the U.S. government is so terrible with everything computer that its solutions are worse than the problems. If I desperately had to think of something for our governments to do, I'd suggest looking into last-mile issues: decouple Internet service from the service of physically hooking up at the last mile.

IP-level neutrality is not the biggest issue, though. It's already pretty good. A far bigger concern is the constant race between walled gardens and open systems. It doesn't matter if you can send data to any IP, but the only IP that matters is Apple's. The best cure for that is for customers to pay attention to lock-in.

April Fool Picks

Cappuccino has solved the JavaScript memory management problem:

Lately, though, we’re beginning to realize that we didn’t quite go far enough. Memory issues have long plagued JavaScript developers. Because the garbage collector is opaque to the developer, and nothing like “finalize” is provided by the language, programmers often find themselves in situations where they are forced to hold on to an object reference for too long (or forever) creating a memory leak.

The Topeka search engine has some new auto suggests.

The Google Web Toolkit can now compile Quake for your browser.

The U.S.A. is leading the charge on transparent governance and on intellectual property.

Content carriers should not be liable

The liability held by content carriers is a long-simmering political battle that the general public would do well to be aware of. We face a clear choice between establishing some basic principles and rights versus turning over an increasingly important part of our lives to be divided up by moneyed interests.

A content carrier is any business that specializes in the delivery of information from one person to another. They include low-level delivery of data, such as Internet service, radio operators, and postal service. Increasingly, they include higher-level services that organize data, such as search engines (Google, Bing), video sharing (YouTube), special interest groups (meetup.com), and classified ads (Craigslist, ebay). All of these services share the property that the business transmitting or organizing the data has no affiliation with the people and organizations posting data into the service.

The question is as follows. If someone posts something illegal on any of these services, who is liable?

A simple example is that a contractor might bill a client for more than they advertised. A tree remover mass-mails an advertisement saying they will remove trees for $100/tree. You hire them, they remove a single tree, and then they tell you the bill is $200. This tree guy has just committed false advertising.

If that advertisement goes through the postal mail, then no one is liable for the false advertising except the tree guy. A laundry list of enabling companies is not liable at all:

• The company that xeroxed the fliers
  
• The company that made the copy machines used to make the copies
  
• The postmen who delivered the mail from the post office to each addressee
  
• The postal service itself
  
• The company that made the mailboxes
  
• The company that made the software he wrote the fliers with
  
• The company that made the computer that software runs on
  

Obvious, right? We punish the person who committed the crime.

Now consider the same situation if the communication is electronic. Suppose instead of a mass email, it was a web site that listed the false price. Look at all the different groups involved that someone or another is trying to make liable:

• The web site hosting the web page, for allowing the content to go up.
  
• The ISP of the guy who posted the bad advertisement, for failing to cut him off.
  
• The ISP of the web hosting service, for letting the web service stay online.
  
• The ISP of the individuals who encountered the web site, because they did not filter out the bogus site.
  

We should stick to our principles and say no to all of this nonsense. Content carriers should emphatically not be liable for policing the content. The police work easily overwhelms the work needed to do the job properly, thus shutting down advanced content carriers in their infancy. Just as bad, we end up with a society where everyone is the police, and they are all policing each other all the time. It's the electronic equivalent of having postal mail opened before it is delivered.

Charging the person who perfomed the crime is plenty. We don't sue the postman for carrying false advertising, and nor should we sue Craiglist when a "woman" turns out to be a transexual. Whenever it's not possible to catch the guy that actually did the crime, let's not waste our time going after the content carriers. They are bringing us into a new era of human society, and they can't do it if they also have to be a police force.

Control-key behavior for non-Qwerty layouts

I type with Dvorak, but I keep a Qwerty layout installed for when other people need to type on my computer. Normally this works well, but the one holdout is gnome-terminal. Today I found out that it's not a bug, but a feature:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/204202

What happens is that gnome-terminal, knowing better than I do what keyboard layout I would like to be using, switches back to the system default layout whenever control is pressed. When I press control-D, it switches me to Qwerty and generates control-S. There's no option. It insists on helping me no matter how much I would rather it didn't.

This was a really disappointing thing to learn. The situation is wrong on multiple levels:

• There is already an elaborate system in place to handle issues like this: the X keyboard layout, which maps keycodes to keysyms. It's the approach taken on Windows and Macs to this problem, and it works fine for X, too. Despite the existing solution, Gnome invents their own kludge that reinterprets what the layout layer already decided.
  
• There is no option for this behavior. It's pure "do what I mean", and if it guesses wrong, you're only recourse is not to use the app at all.
  
• There is a long list of complaining users on the bug log, and they are met by being told their use case is outnumbered so go away. This is not a good reaction to people who have totally normal setups that worked in previous versions of the system.
  
• No other apps do this annoying remap. Thus, even if I wanted it to happen, I would only get it in gnome-terminal. Thus, it doesn't even solve the problem for people who like this layout. People who like it still need to change their keyboard layout, anyway.
  

As far as I can tell, the solution that will be adopted is to adjust the heuristic. Count me underwhelmed. The whole feature should be scrapped, but instead it's being further refined. In short, I agree with Simon Kagedal's conclusion:

Personally I feel that the way (I think) Windows works would be the best, i.e. that the keymaps themselves contain the correct information on how modifiers should work...

Computer Engineer Barbie

From gizmodo:

This is actually wonderful. Barbie's had 124 careers since 1959, ranging from Stewardess to Paratrooper. Today she gets her 125th: computer engineer. You can tell she's smart 'cause she's got glasses, and reads nothing but binary.

I like the bluetooth headset.

They r true hero's

Ludacris writes:

These are the doctors who took my plane down 2 Haiti to deliver supplies & just landed.They r true hero's

Check out the linked photo. The two on the left have been working in a medical field clinic in Haiti. The one on the right is Kathryn Bolles, a friend of Fay's since childhood, who works for Save the Children.

Ludacris is telling the troof. These three have hardly slept since the earthquake struck.

Food science

Food science is the best kind. Check out John Weathers' double-blind test of.... Earl Gray teas. You don't need a lab coat to be a scientist. Study something you love and try to find out the truth.