internet

One of the great things about the open-source movement—besides giving us free software, like a full-fledged operating system for PCs, an Office Suite of productivity applications and an email client that syncs with Exchange servers—is that other programmers can use the code for free themselves to splinter off new and interesting side-projects.

"Traffic Shaping" sounds innocuous enough, right? It's just an Internet Service Provider's attempt ...to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency, and/or bandwidth by delaying data packets.

In layman's terms, traffic shaping allows an ISP (such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time-Warner or other DSL/Cable company), to throttle down the speed of non-critical Internet data (emails) in favor of giving priority to more time-sensitive data (VoIP audio, video, etc) so there's less stuttering and delay. It's intended to improve the Internet experience for customers.

Only 1% of the Internet contains pornographic material. So climb down off your high-horses, dirty-minded people. There's not as much mud down here as you think.

Net Neutrality (the way I define it anyway), is critical to the future of transparency in news, politics, and every other form of information.

The ability of Telcos and Cable Companies to "packet-shape" (decide which data gets through, and which doesn't) lies at the heart of the issue. Imagine if the current ruling political party, the Neo-cons, were able to "convince" AT&T to "lose" certain packets related to a damaging scandal (say, warrant-less NSA wire-tapping). What would happen then?

No one would ever know about it. Don't kid yourself, it could happen. The technology already exists.

And that is simply too much control in the hands of too few greedy, corruptible politicians and CEOs. It would spell the end of the free press (at least online), and possibly the end of democracy as we know it (or knew it, rather).

Thanks to the volunteer-based Mozilla Foundation, new types of web applications have spawned from its free, standards-compliant code-base.

For example, there's the variation of Firefox that I am writing this blog entry with, named Flock. It's got blogging software built right into the browser. Plus, you can add your Flickr photos with drag-n-drop. And a bunch of other features I haven't figured out yet.

Another fun app that is still being worked on is called Songbird. It's a promising "iTunes clone" that is also free and open-source.

Blogged with Flock

So today I read that Cox Interactive is blocking access to Craigslist because Cox offers its own classified ad website. Sounds minor, but it's a harbinger of things to come if we don't somehow police Internet Service Providers like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, et al.

Apple just introduced the new MacBook, its replacement for the iBook series of laptops. Priced from $1,000 to $1,500, the MacBook looks like the perfect consumer laptop computer. It's got everything you could need already built in. And it's using the Intel Core Duo chip so you can dual-boot it with, Heaven forbid, Windows. Looks to be another home run for the folks in Cupertino. Nice work. I just hope it will outlast its 12-month warranty period (unlike my recently deceased iPod Photo—I made it under warranty by a mere 3 days!). Little help, Steve...?