Obama Desperate

Posted by Richard Bennett

In a desperate attempt to find an issue that might excite Democratic primary voters enough to overlook his youth and inexperience, Obama pledges Net Neutrality, Ewok Safety (The Register)

Asked whether he’d “re-instate Net Neutrality” as “the Law of the Land”, trailing Presidential Candidate Barack Obama told an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa pledged that yes, [...]

The Internet’s Big Idea

Posted by Richard Bennett

Because of current events, it strikes me that we need to review the fundamental idea that the Internet was based on, packet switching. This goes back to the dawn of time in the 1960s, before any corporations were involved, and is the pure essence of the thing. Only by understanding the basic idea can we [...]

A Rather Shoddy Analysis

Posted by Richard Bennett

Former head of AT&T’s dial-up Internet access service Tom Evslin has jumped into the Comcast pile-on, in a particularly disappointing manner. While I’m not surprised when non-technical people like professor of media law Susan Crawford, media regulator Craig Aaron of Free Press/Save the Internet, or lawyer Harold Feld make a hash of the fundamentals of [...]

Traffic Shaping and Net Neutrality: Good Versus Evil

Posted by Richard Bennett

Brian Boyko, editor of Network Performance Daily, has written one the better and more thoughtful essays on net neutrality:

See, at the core of Network Neutrality issues are appliances or programs which conduct traffic shaping. In traffic shaping, some packets are prioritized, others are held back. This prioritization can be done on the basis of content [...]

United States Patent: 7239626

Posted by Richard Bennett

I was issued a patent recently, United States Patent: 7239626. It’s a clever little way to tightly synchronize clocks in a wireless network. My co-inventors, Srini Kandala and John Kowalski, do this sort of thing all the time.
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Congressman to Conspiracy Nut: Let the Market Work!

Posted by Richard Bennett

Chris Soghoian is claiming that Congressmen Rick Boucher wants to slap some regulations on Comcast for engaging in Admission Control. Not so:
[Soghoian] asked Boucher what he would do if Comcast stuck to its guns and kept discriminating against BitTorrent. In particular, [Soghoian] asked him if he would propose legislation compelling the company to treat all [...]

TLF Podcast on the Comcast Kerfuffle

Posted by Richard Bennett

Stop everything and cruise on down to Technology Liberation Front so you can listen to this stellar podcast on the Comcast Kerfuffle:

Two networking experts join us in the podcast this week to discuss exactly what Comcast is doing and its implications for public policy. The experts are Ed Felten, professor of computer science and public [...]

Correcting the Record on Comcast

Posted by Richard Bennett

Cynthia Brumfield tries to set the record straight on the wild claims about Comcast, noting some back-pedalling by the AP reporter who carried the net neutrality water on this story:

Svensson’s follow-up article, however, retreats from the notion that Comcast “blocks” P2P uploading. Instead, Comcast “delays” P2P uploads, Svensson now writes, a nuance that the Comcast [...]

Ed Felten’s Alternate Internet

Posted by Richard Bennett

Professor Ed Felten tells Comcast to stay after class and clean erasers:

There are well-established mechanisms for dealing with traffic congestion on the Internet. Networks are supposed to respond to congestion by dropping packets; endpoint computers notice that their packets are being dropped and respond by slowing their transmissions, thus relieving the congestion. The idea sounds [...]

Alien Brain Stimulation

Posted by Richard Bennett

This editorial in the WSJ explains the mechanism of alien attack on our freedoms:

Bless Ed Markey, the House telecom subcommittee chairman, but it didn’t enter his head unaided to hold up an iPhone at a hearing last week and — like the ape in the movie “2001″ — ponder why he shouldn’t use it with [...]