Politicians Are Stupid

If encryption were to be banned, wouldn't that kill e-commerce dead in its tracks? Would anyone be willing transmit their credit card information of a public network in the clear? Well, I suppose a few uninformed folks might do it once. I doubt they would do it a second time, after their information has been abused by some nefarious types.

And yet Pakistani government seems intent on banning encryption so that they can more easily snoop Internet traffic. What they apparently fail to realize is that this allows everyone to snoop the Internet traffic. Politicians are really stupid aren't they?

Trick Question

TekSavvy posted their interim rates for ADSL2+ service this week. The rates themselves are reasonable but the $99 activation fee is a shock. The fee applies even if you are already a TekSavvy customer!

As usual, it's Bell's fault. They asked for the fee in the interim tariff and the CRTC approved it. For this fee, you get two Bell service calls. One connects you up to the remote DSLAM. The other installs a dedicated jack for the service. Stated this way, the fee sounds reasonable. And, Bell is on the hook for any wiring faults.

All very reasonable, until you discover the fee is about three times what Bell charges its own customers for the same services. So, does this look like a competitive market to anyone? (By the way, that was the trick question.)

The Fish Stinks

The Canadian Broadcast Act exists to protect the Canadian broadcast industry (Bell, Rogers, Quebecor, et al) which is why the CRTC treats non-broadcast entities, such as consumer groups, like they do not matter. Those same companies are also the largest Canadian ISPs, who appear to be perfectly OK with the government's upcoming lawful access legislation.

Now ask yourself, why would the government change the Broadcast Act (or Telecommunications Act) to improve consumer choice or to enforce net neutrality, when the companies covered by those laws are happy to do the government's dirty work by spying on Canadians? The fish stinks from the head down.

Internet Censorship

It looks like the Australian government is trying to censor the Internet. Again! The largest ISPs are on board this time so I wonder what they got in return. Were they not opposed the last time?

The really sad part is that I can see this happening in Canada. We have just been lucky to avoid it. The Conservative Party has quite a few Reform Party crackpots left from when the parties merged and they would be the ones to contemplated censoring the Internet, "for the good of the people".

Faster Wholesale DSL

It looks like the wholesale ISPs are a little closer to getting faster DSL speeds now that the CRTC has ordered the ILECs to post interim tariffs. The tariffs will likely not be competitive but it was the only way to overcome the incumbent's stonewalling according TekSavvy's CEO, Rocky Gaudrault, who, I should add, is supposed to be on sabbatical and should not really be paying attention these matters. ^_^

Sender Policy Framework

The Sender Policy Framework is a simple and easy to use method to prevent email address spoofing. Of course, someone has to muddy the waters. Hotmail uses a protocol called Sender-ID, which looks an update to SPF ("spf2.0") but is in reality a competing experiment from Microsoft.

There are a number of problems with Sender-ID. The worst problem is that it expects certain email headers which may not be present in a legitimate email that follows the established standards. Microsoft refuses to address this problems and as a result, both SPF and Send-ID have stalled in the standardization process.

Sigh. Some things never change.

Kill The Messenger

Killing the messenger is rarely a useful tactic but that seemed to be the goal against WikiLeaks this past week. First Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off the S3 service. Then EveryDNS killed the WikiLeaks DNS service. Lastly, PayPal terminated the WikiLeaks donation account. These are all U.S. companies responding to pressure from elements in the U.S govenment. Of course, no one at the companies has the guts to admit that they censoring WikiLeaks. Instead they offer plausible, hand wavy explanations, coincidence be damned. All this backlash over some diplomats' gossip, most of which should never have been kept secret in the first place.

Of course, trying to kill the messenger on the Internet is like trying to trap a fly with a fishing net. Since the attacks against it have become too severe, WikiLeaks is finally mirroring the site on multiple servers, something many believe they ought to have done from the beginning.

[Updated 2010-12-06. Should be EveryDNS, not EasyDNS.]

Streisand Effect

In the pre-Internet days, if you wanted to prevent some information from being reported or distributed, you simply sued or threatened to sue. It worked almost all the time. In the age of Internet instant communication however, it almost always has the opposite effect. This is known as the Streisand Effect.

Perhaps in fifty years, people will stop suing to suppress information on the Internet because they will know that it doesn't work. However, I doubt that will happen. The problem is that lawyers get paid no matter what the outcome, and as long as this is true, no lawyer is going to advise a client against suing. Which basically ensures the Streisand Effect meme will be around forever.

Speed Matching

Yesterday the CRTC issued a ruling that requires Bell and other ILECs to offer wholesale ADSL speed matching to the independent ISPs. On the face of it, it looks like a big win for consumers, but I not convinced.

Although the higher speeds are great, the main problem is the independent ISPs would still be using the ILEC's Gateway Access Service (GAS), the aggregation infrastructure that connects wholesale ISPs to their customers. That means the connections are subject to throttling, deep pack inspection, usage based billing, and anything else that the ILEC can dream up. That actually makes it harder for the independent ISPs to differentiate themselves from the ILEC's Internet services. That's not good for consumers.

Some ISPs were asking for a new service (dubbed ADSL-CO) that would allow them to install their own DSLAMs into Central Offices, but the CRTC has ruled against this option, at least for now. This service couldn't offer the full range of speeds which would be limited by the customer's distance to the CO. There's no doubt that there are significant technical challenges for installing ISP equipment in COs. In addition, each CO needs a non-ILEC network back haul, which would have delayed wide spread deployment. The CRTC likely took these factors into consideration in its decision. But in the long term, it would have been good for consumers.

The ILECs would definitely have lost revenue with ADSL-CO since GAS would no longer be required. The CRTC has mandated that wholesale ISPs will pay a 10% surcharge on the tariffs for the higher speed to compensate the ILECs for the investments that they've made. So the ILECs are actually making more money with this decision! What a sweet deal! Not only that, the ILECs remain firmly in control of the ADSL market.

To me, it looks like the real winners are the ILECs, not the consumers.

Dialup

I'm pleasantly surprised that Blogger is usable on dialup. Why the heck am I on dialup? I'm using my backup account because TekSavvy is dealing an ARP DDOS attack as I write this, so the service is basically useless until they sort out the problem. Yes, that's a nineteen page (and counting) thread about the outage! That thread tells you everything about the type of customer TekSavvy has, i.e., lots of geeks. The fact that TekSavvy's CEO is posting in the thread at this hour tells you everything you need to know about the company.

The Internet Age

In the Internet age, why is the most successful Internet business model, one that was created over 200 hundred years ago? Google, Facebook, MySpace, and soon Twitter, all depend on advertising. The Internet age does add a few bonuses, though. It's much easier to keep track people who view your adds. Advertisers can even get the names of the people who view the ads.

Er, wait, that's doesn't sound right. Unfortunately, it has already happened. Sharing subscriber information with advertisers is nothing new (e.g., Airmiles), but there was a line which nobody dared to cross. The Internet age is an advertisers' wet dream and some have decided that anything goes. Unless you get caught.

Broadband Promises

So Ignatieff, our wannabe Prime Minister, is promising broadband for the whole country. Sounds great! Er, wait, he is only aiming for 1.5Mb/s! How did we suddenly return to 1998? Since new infrastructure will be needed in rural areas to support broadband, you might as well use the latest technology. Then there is the question of who is going build the infrastructure. If the the incumbents (Bell, Rogers, etc.) are left to themselves, they won't spend more than is necessary to meet the minimum speed, with no room for future growth. I get the feeling that Ignatieff hasn't put much thought into this, which makes it difficult to take seriously.

Trolling On The Wave

It's rather sad how quickly the Internet trolls force everyone to circle the wagons and become defensive. Wave is no exception. A moderated wave had to setup after a someone trashed the index wave for all the role playing games. I guess this a problem we are never going to out run as long as there is someone who doesn't want to share the commons.

Aussie Internet Filters Again

It seems that some people just can't give up on dumb ideas. The Australian Government wants to filter the Internet. Wow, nice to know Western democracies have so much in common with Communist China. Of course all the usual bogeymen are mentioned to justify the censorship. Think of the children!

Linking And Copyright

isoHunt decided to take the question of whether linking to copyright material on the World Wide Web is breaking copyright law. While it is good to see them going on the offense like this, I hope isoHunt has the wherewithal to pursue it to the end. They were already fighting the MPAA in a US court. Starting another case against the CRIA in a British Columbia court, sounds like it will be financially draining. Both the CRIA and MPAA have the backing of several multi-billion dollar companies, and their lawyer's are so very good a dragging out the proceedings. On the other hand, losing means isoHunt goes out of business anyway, so they really have no choice.

Unlike The Pirate Bay, isoHunt does not operate a tracker and only links to other tracker sites. In effect isoHunt is highly a specialized search engine. Very similar results can be found on Google with a filetype:torrent search filter. To a technical person such as myself, it seems improbable that isoHunt could lose, but the courts are more unpredictable places than I am accustomed to. The World Wide Web doesn't exist without linking. Just try to imagine that!

Throttling Counter Measures

I've been using multilink PPP to circumvent Bell's throttling since around May 2008. The purpose of multilink PPP is for combining PPP connections together into a logical bundle which aggregates the bandwidth of all the connections. This bundle inserts a 6 byte header into the packet data which is enough to fool the deep packet inspection that Bell uses to throttle connections. The best part is that multilink PPP works on a single link. It is well known that it would be easy for Bell to counter act multilink PPP on a single connection.

For the past few nights bittorrent looked like it was being throttled again. Oh, no! They finally figured it out, I thought. I checked the Teksavvy.com forum and others had noticed the problem, but there was no need to worry. The reason was a much less sinister. Teksavvy was having problems on a server and had turned off multilink PPP on that server. Sure enough, I was connected to that server. Taking a chance that I would find a different server, I reconnected. It worked and bittorrent speeds returned to normal.

This highlights a couple of issues. I'm now completely dependent on getting good speed from bittorrent. If Bell decides to counter act the multilink PPP, I would have to consider getting a second line. It shows how transparent Teksavvy is. Very few ISP would even consider discussing their network problems in a public forum.