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A Washington Post tech columnist says the proposed XM-Sirius deal would be bad for consumers because it would undercut competition. The two satellite radio providers are, he says, the only real competition against terrestrial radio because radio over wireless data services isn't up to snuff. But consider this: Total # of Sirius and XM subscribers: 12.5 million Total # of iPods sold: 88 million As a former satellite radio subscriber who now listens to radio podcasts on his iPod, I wonder whether the Post's tech columnist isn't a couple years behind the times.
In the case of satellite radio, more is at stake than the number of channels beamed down from orbit. Competition pushed Washington-based XM and New York-based Sirius to come up with innovations in pricing (Sirius's $500 lifetime subscription fee) and products (XM's Mini-Tuner plug-in module, which lets you use one account with multiple receivers). A merger undercuts the need for further innovation.
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Richard Bennett explains why "net neutrality" would be a step backwards for the deployment of innovative network services. He also makes the point that, so far as we know, it's basically unneeded.
In the name of opening up the Internet for big content, the 'Net Neutrality' bills criminalize good network management and business practices. Why can't we have more than one service class on the Internet?... If we're honest, we don't know how to regulate the internet at a technical level. But we should stop pretending it's a telephone network, and see how it handles packets. The 'net neutrality' lobby is saying all packets are equal - but that's unsound and even inconsistent with common carrier law. There's nothing to stop a transport offering different service levels for different prices. They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank - to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else's. But it's not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it's technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.
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It's a clever slogan, to be sure, but a slogan does not make an argument--especially when straightforward market economics and the status quo cut against it.
With the exception of Google's man in Washington DC, Vint Cerf (with whom Kahn developed TCP/IP), most of the senior engineers responsible for developing the packet switched internetworking of today oppose "Neutrality" legislation. Dave Farber, often called the grandfather of the internet, has been the most prominent critic. Engineers fear rash legislation would inhibit the ability of systems engineers to improve latency and jitter issues needed to move data at speed. "The internet is still pretty fragile today," said Kahn.
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Some tech-heads say the government should strongarm ISPs into providing unlimited, unfettered, unthrottled service to Internet users, no matter what the costs to the ISP or to its other customers. With this kind of regulation, which seems favored by the current FCC, consumers might face price hikes due to bandwidth-intensive services that they do not use themselves; higher prices for integrated services, such a VOIP or IPTV, that ISPs; and no quality-of-service guarantees for priority services, such as VOIP or real-time video. But Bram Cohen, creator of the popular and innovative Bittorrent p2p protocol, has a better solution:
Switch. Competition is the best thing for the consumer. If you'€™ve got a couple of options, try the alternatives. If you have no alternatives or both alternatives suck, call customer service. And call them a lot. It turns out that angry customers are more expensive to ISPs than providing unadulterated access to popular applications and websites.
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The market-driven pace of technological advancement and refinement never fails to amaze. Back in 1986-87, a 20-megabyte drive was the height of luxury. The latest drives are 52,428.8 times that size, a bit smaller, significantly faster, and significantly more reliable. And they're also less expensive, even in nominal terms. As the Journal notes, competition is what makes this happen.
Earlier this month, disk-drive maker Hitachi announced that it would soon be shipping a terabyte-capacity disk drive. Seagate, another big drive maker, quickly followed with its own announcement. A terabyte is 1,000 (actually, 1,024) gigabytes; the PC on your desk probably has 100 or so gigabytes in it; the biggest iPod nano has eight gigabytes. The new top-of-the-line terabyte drives are expected to cost around $400 at first -- in other words, what top-of-the-line disk drives have lately tended to cost, regardless of capacity.
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Mandatory license fees are a blight of the past. Why would they work any better today, asks TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.
Jenner wants the government to step in and save big labels. He?s calling for a mandatory monthly tax in the European Union on broadband Internet and mobile phones of around ?4/month that allows consumers to download and consume all the music they want without DRM.... Music industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of music they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate. There will only be competition for market share, with no attempt to build the size of market or serve less-popular niches. Forget labels building new brands and encouraging early artists to succeed - they’ll bleed existing big names for all they are worth and work hard to keep anything new - labels, artists, and songwriters - out of the market. New entrants just means more competition for a static amount of money. Collusion by existing players will run rampant.
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Link to a specific page of a PDF. Cool and useful.
This falls into the category of things I used to know, but forgot. Now arguably, there's a reason I forgot about it. You rarely (if ever) see PDF URLs ending with #page=6 in the wild. My feeling is that's because a PDF page is an arbitrary unit of content, and it usually won't precisely address the element you'd like to refer to.
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The Federal Communications Commission comes to Los Angeles today to kick off the newest installment of its controversial deliberations into loosening ownership restrictions on the broadcast industry. But, like many sequels, this one may have trouble matching the drama of the 2003 original.
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On July 31, President Bush announced his intention to nominate Susan Dudley as the next administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House Office of Management and Budget. In this position, Dudley would oversee federal regulatory initiatives to ensure their consistency with administration policy and compliance with federal law. Yet even before the nomination announcement, liberal activist and environmentalist groups began a concerted campaign to scuttle her nomination. Hurling smears and outright falsehoods, Dudley?s critics have sought to tar her as an ideological extremist whose confirmation threatens public health. Some activists have even commented on her personal life, suggesting the Dudley confirmation fight could be the next chapter in the politics of personal destruction.
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In the hacking community, this sort of thing is called "social engineering." While data are hard or impossible to come by, according to anecdotes, it is responsible for more security breaches than technology-based hacking--e.g., exploiting computer security vulnerabilities. The upshot? Technology-based security and privacy regulations may be costly and difficult to implement but, in the end, will almost certainly fail. No matter how foolproof the technology, the people using it are still, inevitably fallible.
People who obtain calling records often use a technique known as pretexting -- using a pretext, like masquerading as a customer, to get a company to disclose information. Their shady subculture has been getting renewed attention since the revelation last week that a subcontractor for an investigative firm working for Hewlett-Packard used pretexting to obtain the call records of company board members and reporters.
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This is a good thing. "Internet governance" in the U.S. means almost nothing, so far as end-users are concerned. With UN control, however, expect less liberal states to exert more control and expand the idea of 'governance' to encompass much more of online life.
Contrary to some reports, things are not about to change. After a meeting at the Commerce Department, Acting Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, John M.R. Kneuer, said that the existing arrangement was likely to continue, at least for another year. "There certainly are still strong arguments that there's more work to be done," said Kneuer.
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THE INTERNET AND DIGITAL technology have been both a blessing and a curse for the entertainment industry, opening new opportunities for selling music and video but also fueling rampant global piracy. To attack the latter problem, industry lobbyists are pressing Congress to adopt at least five different proposals that would give them more control over their works as they flow through new digital pipelines into living rooms and portable devices. But these measures, like the technologies they would affect, have a hard time distinguishing between illicit actions and legitimate ones.
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"As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS, blog and search engine under control," said Cai Wu, director of the Information Office of China's Cabinet, quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.
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Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to re-tackle the sticky issue of media ownership. This time, the agency plans to loosen some rules, allowing big media companies to expand. For instance, a newspaper will -- for the first time since 1975 -- probably be allowed to buy the most popular television station in the same city. But the times, technology and media marketplace have changed so much since the FCC began its ownership review last time, in 2002, that some of the same media giants that lobbied for changes before -- such as Tribune Co. -- may take little advantage of changes this time.
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A proposal to prevent Internet service providers from charging Web firms more for faster service to consumers failed yesterday to clear a Senate committee.
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