More Net Neutrality News...

According to Digital Society's George Ou, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch is misleading the public about Verizon Wireless supposedly blocking OpenDNS servers.  

I went to a Verizon Wireless store and tested a netbook with built-in Verizon 3G access.  I successfully queried an OpenDNS server using the “nslookup” command proving that Verizon Wireless was not blocking access to OpenDNS.   I also bought a 2-year contract with free MiFi device and tested it on my own computer from home and OpenDNS still works perfectly fine.

So what is Ulevitch complaining about?  According to Ou, the bigger threat and alternative to OpenDNS is Google DNS which is a faster DNS service.  "So it’s Google that Mr. Ulevitch should be concerned about and not some imaginary blocking at Verizon Wireless."


Moral of the story:  Never assume that one perspective reveals the truth.  
Who is telling the truth here?  Is there a way to test the assumption behind OpenDNS claims without going to Verizon and seeing if you can log on to OpenDNS?  In other words, why believe George Ou and Digital Society?


In other net neutrality news, Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT) announced on Nov. 11 that "it has been selected to serve as a primary content delivery network (CDN) provider for Netflix, Inc. to support the company’s streaming functionality and to support storage for the entire Netflix library of content."  Then, a week later, Comcast informed Level 3 that it would, for the first time, charge Level 3 a fee to reach Comcast’s customers who had requested any content carried by Level 3.  Read on...

OpenDNS: We're being blocked, FCC should act on net neutrality

As the Federal Communications Commission grapples with the timing of a net neutrality vote and Republican lawmakers demand the agency drop it, companies like OpenDNS fear the issue is getting mired in politics.

And that could crush startups like them, says OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch. He says the San Francisco domain name service is already being blocked by Verizon Wireless. He fears other Internet service providers trying to compete with it could do the same. update: A Verizon Wireless spokeswoman said Monday its network engineers "see no issue from our end."

Since it launched with a couple million dollars in angel investment four years ago, OpenDNS has attracted 20 million customers – consumers and businesses such as Staples, Century 21 and Fuji Film – who prefer the service’s domain name look-up service to that of their Internet service provider. Why? Ulevitch says the company is able to more quickly translate Web page addresses like www.washingtonpost.com to The Post’s IP address to serve up the site to users. Its fail rate is zero, compared with ISPs, he says. Check out a review of OpenDNS by the New York Times’ David Pogue for more details on how the service works.

Turns out, Ulevitch said in a recent phone interview, that carriers such as Verizon Wireless, Comcast and Time Warner cable have caught on to the value of their service. Open DNS is able to collect a lot of data about users and their Web surfing habits to serve up targeted ads for users who volunteer to have that information tracked.

The FCC won’t say what its plans are for net neutrality. Many analysts and experts outside the agency are betting on a vote in December. Even if FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski puts the proposed regulation on its agenda for vote in December, the agency has to grapple with its questionable authority over broadband providers.

“There are some cable and phone companies out there that want to decide which apps you should get on your phone, which Internet sites you should look at, and what online videos you can download," a FCC official said in a statement after Republican House members criticized a proposal by Genachowski. "That’s regulating the Internet and that’s what the FCC is trying to stop.”

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

In today's Sunday New York Times, the front page article continues the discussion about how brains are affected by young people who are constantly distracted by computers and cellphones, and the  constant stream of stimuli they offer.

There are two concerns or tensions mentioned in the article.  One is that students' brains are still developing and can become more easily habituated to constantly switching tasks.  This makes it harder for them to be less able to sustain attention.  The result is that it may be harder to focus and thereby affect learning.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

Another side of the debate is that educators and parents are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. "Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory."

 Woodside High School is one example.  The principal, David Reilly, 37, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says, creating a new set of social types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.

The article then goes on to showcase a number of these social types.

• Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She is getting 3 Bs on her progress report, which she blames on her texting and then forgetting to do her homework.
• Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”  Read on... (but it's a long article, so show the researchers they are wrong about the ability to focus - consider it our own little experiment).

How China swallowed 15% of 'Net traffic for 18 minutes

A number of sources, including this report in Ars Technica on 11/18/10, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a 300+ page report (PDF) today and provided the US Congress with a detailed overview of what's been happening in China—including a curious incident in which 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic suddenly passed through Chinese servers on the way to its destination.

Here's how the Commission describes the incident, which took place earlier this year:

For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed US and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet’s destinations through servers located in China. This incident affected traffic to and from US government (‘‘.gov’’) and military (‘‘.mil’’) sites, including those for the Senate, the army, the navy, the marine corps, the air force, the office of secretary of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many others. Certain commercial websites were also affected, such as those for Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM.

The culprit here was "IP hijacking," a well-known routing problem in a worldwide system based largely on trust. Routers rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to puzzle out the best route between two IP addresses; when one party advertises incorrect routing information, routers across the globe can be convinced to send traffic on geographically absurd paths.

Here's a transcript and audio from NPR, which shows the real security dangers of this hijacking, that China telecom denies.  Briefly, Dmitri Alperovitch, the vice president of threat research for the cyber security firm McAfee, points out that, the security risk is quite significant. Certainly all this data could've been eavesdropped on and wire-tapped. It could've been also modified in flight and the recipient of that data could've been presented with something totally different. Also, a lot of the - what are known as VPNs, virtual private networks, traverse the Internet and are encrypted with these mechanisms that can be broken. You can indeed gain access to private networks of organizations through this hijacking method.

Nice, right?  There is more, read on...

Pirate-slaying censorship bill gets unanimous support

As of about 12 hours ago, ArsTechnica reported that Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.  COICA allows the US Attorney General to target "Internet sites dedicated to infringing activities" both inside and outside the country, obtaining a court-ordered injunction against them if they have "no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than" sharing copyrighted files without authorization.  Such schemes usually run up against the distributed anarchy of the Internet, but COICA will try to hammer sites located in other countries by leaning on key supporting players that are based in the US. Should a judge agree that a website is "dedicated to infringing activities," that site will face a host of tough penalties that go beyond mere site censorship:

The US government can (1) blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, (2) ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and (3) forbid online ad networks from working with the site.

And who do you think would be thrilled with this ruling?

Immediately following the ruling, Public Knowledge Proposes Changes To ‘Misleading and Abusive’ Copyright Practices

For Immediate Release: 

November 18, 2010

Copyright owners are engaging in ‘misleading and abusive’ practices that are unfair to consumers, Public Knowledge said today in the third part of its Copyright Reform Act (CRA) project. The project was established to analyze problems with, and suggest solutions to, copyright law.

In the report, “Copyright Abuse and Notice,” PK said “Misleading copyright warning notices are so pervasive today that the average consumer is likely to take them for granted.” Those range from notices on works which have been part of the public domain for years, including by William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, to today’s warnings issued by the National Football League which “completely disregards copyright law.”

Some Criminals Just Aren't Smart

I found these news articles amusing, and just had to share them. The first news story is about an 18 year old who broke into a home, and later was caught because on one of the computers inside the home he had logged into, and never logged out of, MySpace. I wonder if a Facebook user would be so forgetful? Though perhaps he didn't remember to log out because he was a little high on drugs--the police did find marijuana on a table inside the home.

The second news story is about another burglar who got caught because he dropped his cell phone in the house he was burglarizing. What I found funny is that this guy realized his mistake, and tried to cover it up by texting his own phone (which by the time he texted it, was in police posession). I guess he thought he could fool the police by texting the phone and demanding its return, as though someone had stolen it. Why was he using the phone inside the home at all? Well, apparently he didn't have a flashlight, and so he was using the phone's display to illuminate the interior of the home.

In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade schools.

But efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.   Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

Is it any wonder, then, that with parents and clergy making such fierce claims against teaching about diverse family structures, there isn't constant bullying by their kids?


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