Month: March 2003

Dave Weinberger’s Salon article claiming RF interference is a myth hasn’t gone over too well, according to Weinberger’s source, David Reed:

And of course, there are the usual angry letters that seem to think I’m claiming to have discovered the earth is flat, or that relativity is wrong (someone actually thought I was arguing that!)

Reed is most famous, perhaps, as one of the co-authors of the 1981 paper arguing for an architecture-neutral Internet. (If we’re going to start enumerating technical myths, I’d start with architecture neutrality; the Internet’s initial design wasn’t neutral, it was crippled with respect to real-time data transfer, but if you read this blog at all, you’ve seen that already.)

The weakest parts of Reed’s theories about RF signalling relate to non-informational sources of interference such as barriers, reflection, multipath, and entropy. Other than that, it’s a fine way to look at signalling in a vacuum, covering all the considerations that should be taken into account by the FCC the next time they deal with metaphysical policy.

Sometimes I think I could edit an entire blog devoted to nothing but debunking pseudo-technical BS.

TiVo and Replay were inspired by the servers created for video on demand trials in the mid-90s. These servers held massive libraries of movies and TV programming that could be served-up individually to customers, who could control them like videotapes with fast forward, rewind, pause, and that sort of thing. These servers were hard to build, because the server was located at the head end of a cable system far from the customer’s remote control, so moving the clicks up stream quickly was a challenge. Moving the video streams down to the customer’s set top box was also a challenge, because each box needed a separate feed, and the head-end typically serves 300 customers on a cable with about 100-200 channels of capacity.

The upstream challenge was solved by a deeply buffered, asynchronous API developed by my colleague Rich Rein and I for HP, and the downstream challenge by compressing the video stream into MPEG and decoding it in the set top box, enabling the cable system to squeeze multiple feeds into a single analog cable channel.

These technologies gave rise to PVRs like TiVo and Replay, which combined a pint-sized video server with a set top box, to digital cable and to digital satellite TV with pay-per-view. Each of these three technologies falls short of the entire set of features provided by the server trials, but each helps create market awareness of what’s possible with full-scale video servers and the right consumer equipment in the home.

Some of the companies who got their feet wet with the trials got distracted by the Internet bubble, and tried to shoehorn media onto its inadequate infrastructure, hoping that broadband would solve the delivery problem for them. Of course, it hasn’t, and the Internet has proven itself very resistant to progressive upgrade, even before our tech-topian Internet Amish started screaming that the Internet should never be upgraded for video delivery.

The solution for video content providers is to bypass the creaky, marginal Internet, and instead to roll out video servers on their cable systems. AOL/Time Warner is finally catching on, according to this piece in the New York Times:

The essence of AOL Time Warner’s Mystro TV is a technology that uses a cable system itself to provide viewers capabilities similar to computerized personal video recorders like TiVo: watching programs on their own schedules, with fast-forward and rewind. But it also lets networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials.

This technology has also been wrongly described as a “TiVo killer” by Boing-Boing, who doesn’t know better, and by Tim Oren, who really does. AOL/TW has no reason to fear TiVo – it’s a niche product, mainly owned people like me (I have two TiVos and a Replay), geeks who love gadgets and don’t mind bugs – not a mass market.

AOL/TW’s competition is Satellite TV, because it’s causing them to lose cable subscribers for the first time ever. DirecTV has a deal with TiVo that allows a specialized PVR to record the MPEG stream from the satellite direct to hard drive, with no loss of quality. Satellite has great economics, because new customers don’t require new infrastructure except in the home, and it doesn’t cost that much, at least compared to the cost of running cable in neighborhoods.

But the weakness of satellite TV is the lack of any ability to personalize services, because the same satellite serves everybody, and when its channel capacity is gone, it’s gone for good. Cable systems are isolated around head ends on the ground, and as long as the system can serve up customized feeds to all customers on each given head end, it can grow and scale nicely. So the logical way to provide customized services is with a server per head end and an MPEG decoder in each home, which is already there for people with digital cable.

The Mystro TV system takes just this approach, and it’s got one huge advantage over TiVo: access to a content library many times larger than anyone can ever have in his own home. AOL/TW can digitize all the stuff it owns onto the equivalent of DVDs. When you want to watch some movie from 1955 that you can’t get at Blockbuster, or first season of the West Wing, or last week’s Friends, your neighborhood video server plays it for you immediately if it’s on its multi-gigabyte RAID array. If not, it sends a message to New York which causes a robot to mount the DVD in the library and spool it down to your neighborhood server, probably on some of that dark fiber that’s all over the place. Then you watch it, and when your neighbors want to see it, it’s already there.

So they’ve got a larger library than your TiVo or your Blockbuster, a more personalized service than your satellite provider, and more reliable delivery than your Internet connection.

And you can keep using your Replay or stand-alone TiVo with it (perhaps in even more interesting ways, heh heh), so what’s not to like?

AOL is basically taking the advice I offered them a few weeks ago, so I’m not going to complain:

So maybe what AOL/Time-Warner needs to do is forget about the Internet and broadband, and get themselves some nice Tivo-type property to really make the synergy work. Then they can upgrade the book value of their “good will” instead of sending out bad vibes and like, bumming everybody out, you know.

Just send me my check, dudes.

This is from the University of Texas regarding the recent hacker break-in that resulted in the harvesting of 55,000 valid SSN’s.

Data Theft and Identity Protection

Am I Affected?
Is your SSN in the following ranges?
449-31-98xx – 450-91-24yy
451-12-32xx – 451-20-35yy
451-20-64xx – 452-20-40yy
If so, within these ranges, 55,200 people of the following types, including but not limited to:

Current students, faculty and staff of The University of Texas at Austin
Former students, faculty and staff of the University
Job applicants to the University
Retirees from the University

may be affected.
If you believe you are affected, please contact us.

Hollywood’s man in Washington, ultra-liberal machine boss Howard Berman, has apparently decided to drop the network vigilante bill that got so many web elves upset when it was introduced last year:

This week, however, Berman said he may not revive the measure. For one thing, copyright holders may not need extra protection to combat file-sharing piracy, he said. And though Berman wasn’t deterred by complaints from consumer advocates, the concerns voiced by Hollywood studios — among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill, given their active anti-piracy efforts online — suggested that Berman was climbing out on a limb by himself.

This bill, as you may recall, allowed copyright holders to invade file sharing computers and launch legal denial-of-service attacks in order to protect their intellectual property. Hollywood reached a consensus that the risk of liability from doing these things where they weren’t warranted outweighed the benefits.

The reaction to this bill underscored the confusion that reigns in the minds of many of our good tech-topians about the different business interests of telecom and Hollywood. The tech-topian tendency is to conflate telcos and Hollywood into a monolithic axis of evil, as they do in the World of Ends document that delivers a stern lecture to both on the (largely imaginary) differences between the Internet and the phone net. The organized opposition to the Berman bill (which Dave Winer wrongly attributed to co-sponsor Howard Coble) came from the telcos, especially Verizon, because they don’t want Hollywood messing with their Internet business.

In the real world, telcos and Hollywood have very different interests, of course.

Writing in the comments at Plastic Bag, Doc Searls explains the motivation for his “World of Ends” fantasy about the Internet:

I’ll admit to a political agenda for World of Ends, to the extent that we do want it to influence legislation and regulation (in a mostly libertarian direction, fwiw).

A question: Who among us here likes the DMCA? Who wants to see Hollywood tell Intel how to make its chips and Dell how to make its PCs? Who wants the telcos and cable companies to keep building out the “last mile” of the Net as an asymmetrical plumbing system biassed for entertainment? Who wants companies like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to continue making non-interoperable instant messaging systems (or longs for the days when email systems couldn’t send messages to each other)? Who wants to see the feds continue protecting the telcos, the record companies and other walking fossils from the new facts of market life in the far more connected world the Net has made? Who wants to see more, rather than less, federal regulation of wireless networking such as wi-fi? Who wants to see fewer frequency bands made available for free and open wireless networking?

Probably none of us.

Are we going to sit on our hands and watch quietly while Hollywood, the telcos, the cable companies, the media giants, Congress and regulators continue to treat the Net like something that needs more limitation, more regulation, more industrial protection? That’s what we’re up against here. And that’s what World of Ends is about.

As political agendas go, it’s not unreasonable, and I probably agree with more of it than I disagree with. But the question about the World of Ends document is whether it’s legitimate to promote a false picture of the Internet in order to advance a political agenda. I say this because the World of Ends doesn’t describe the Internet accurately, and in most respects it’s not even close. Some of the main problems:

* The Internet is not, and never has been, the simplest way to connect any A to any B. The simplest way to do this is connect A and B to a common hub and let that do the switching. The Internet is the most robust and scalable way to do this, but it’s far from being the simplest.

* Adding value to the Internet, which means such real-world developments as fatter pipes, doesn’t take value away from it, it increases its utility.

* Legislation should not prevent business people from making dumb decisions; the freedom to do dumb things is just as important as the freedom to do things judged smart by self-appointed critics of business strategy.

* The Internet did not reach a zenith of technical perfection in the 1980s. It’s a governed by a dynamic set of agreements, and as technology evolves, so will these agreements.

* All Internet traffic is not equal. Spam is not equal to personal mail, and illegal traffic, such as stolen CDs and kiddie porn, is not equal to legal traffic. It’s perfectly reasonable to filter or block nuisance or illegal traffic.

* It’s perfectly reasonable for the companies carrying the traffic on their proprietary links to charge as they see fit for the use of their networks. Presently, dialup Internet users are subsidized by telephone company customers who don’t use dial-up. Nobody deserves a free ride.

* You don’t get good policy on the foundation of a fabric of lies. This has been proven over and over again, so no matter how noble your cause, you aren’t entitled to promote it by misrepresenting reality.

The most amazing thing about the World of Ends is how dogmatic and authoritarian it is, dictating what protocols you can and can’t use, how much the telcos can charge, and what kind of residential services each of us must have. It’s profoundly anti-choice.