Links:
Net Neutrality: Obama backs Net-Neutrality. Rogers’ traffic-shaping messes up email. Michael Geist’s online petition.
Italy’s “geriatric attack” on blogging: The Times Online summarizes the story. Paolo Attivissmo’s blog. Beppe Grillo’s blog.
Magic vs. the Internet: a few of the many “spoiler” sites. A Wikipedia dispute over open-source magic. Prof.Christine Corcos’ Law & Magic Blog. Jacob Loshin of Yale Law’s paper on how magicians innovate without IP protection.
Music:
DJ Drinks- The Mono Sessions
Tyas- The Man Who Walks
Tyas- David’s Day Out
Brennan Nicks- Child’s Play
Search Engine is your open source to all the surprising and significant ways the Internet is transforming our world. Join us each week for a look at politics and culture through the lens of the Net. It's radio that predicts the present.
Host Jesse Brown
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Comments
Net Neutrality
I would like to take this opportunity to say I very much enjoy your show. On occasion you seem to gloss over some of the finer details. This became quite apparent in your introduction to net neutrality.
Traffic shaping in amongst itself is not a bad thing. It allows your VoIP calls the be jitter free and your email to work quickly while you download the latest Debian DVD set. As the Internet evolves traffic shaping will likely become more vital to everybody's daily enjoyment of the Internet.
Net neutrality and traffic shaping can easily coexist. What is vital of traffic shaping is that it only temporarily prioritize and/or delay the information if favour of time vital tasks.
What Comcast has been accused of doing goes boyond traffic shaping. They are taking advantage of the TCP Negative Acknowledge (NAK) transmission.
Think of a Bit Torrent peer connection as sending mail to your girlfriend. You expect her to respond, you write back, and so on. Comcast is in effect your girlfriend's ex sending you a letter with her signature telling you to never write again.
They are interfering with the data fraudulently sending data as somebody else disrupt your communication.
Thus far I have not heard accusations of this occurring in Canada though Net Neutrality is still of utmost importance and the violations of this by some ISPs only highlight this.
Keep up the great work.
Joel
Posted by: Joel Brunetti | November 5, 2007 02:23 AM
Thank you Jesse for talking about net neutrality issues in Canada. While we hear a lot about this topic in the US, most people don't know and understand net neutrality and don't even know it also affects us here. Your explanation was simple but complete enough with good examples.
Hopefully someone will take this issue at heart the way Barack Obama currently does in the US.
Love the podcast, keep it up!
Posted by: George | November 5, 2007 06:12 PM
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