A Small Victory For Net Neutrality
The FCC has ruled that Comcast is violating internet rules in their continued effort to block BitTorrent traffic:
The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.
"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."
A lot of people hear BitTorrent and think of illegal file swapping. That is a reasonable concern, but there are also a lot of legitimate uses for BitTorrent and for Comcast to punish those legitimate users simply because some people use the technology for illegal purposes is wrong. Of course there are other problems presented here. A main one being the fact that a large portion of this country has no competition in deciding who their internet provider is. If they don't chose a company like Comcast, or any of the other giants, then they are stuck with dial-up internet, or one of the other, more costly, solutions, such as satellite internet.
Hopefully this will put us a step closer to getting some actual net neutrality legislation, something that is long over do.
And FOIST!!!
I'll be damned...a little ray of sunshine at last.
Just the other day I used Bittorrent to get a completely legitimate, free piece of software. It's often used for game distributables by publishers as well. It's a also a great way to share creations without having to spend a ridiculous amount of money for hosting and worrying about going over your bandwidth allowance.
I don't use Bittorrent for anything illegal and I still use it regularly. But really, Comcast doesn't care about that. It's just an excuse, a way to paint "evilness" over something that simply uses up a lot of bandwidth they want to share for. I'm sure they hate the protocol for legitimate means as much as they do for illegal ones.
Good going. No interference with the 'tubes.
And trickle down died. See http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/
Boy, Howdy! Absolutely we are in desperate need of competition for "last mile" service - that goes for phone service as well, where here in SoCal, the regional monopoly of service is still absolute for PacBell (now AT&T) and GTE (now Verizon).
In a major switch, Verizon now offers by far the best Internet service with FIOS, and its voice service is every bit AT&T's equal.
What's more, the price of a T1 line hasn't changed in 12 years! That is ridiculous!
DHSmd @ 5:
I'm not holding my breath on anyone else getting copper or fiber up into these here hills. I'm betting on wi-fi.
Comcast is my only choice for relatively cheap access at Cable to DSL speeds. DSL tends to be more expensive even without the inclusion of land line costs.
it is "over due", not "over do"
"overdue," even.
The Ron Paul people use BitTorrent to distribute videos for the various DVDs that we make.... There are lots of legal uses for BitTorrent.
This must be a typo or something- I find it hard to believe that any 'legitimate' uses exist for bitTorrents;)
A little good news, at last.
"Illegal file sharing" is buying into the linguistic framework of the RIAA and corporate media unwilling and unable to adapt to new media delivery systems.
BennyP @ 11:
A lot of linux distributions are distributed via torrent.
Some research centers also distribute some very large data sets in the same fashion.
And satellite internet is nothing to rave about. I checked into Hughesnet thinking they'd surely have lighutning speeds. But, no -- their async rates are about the same as DSL. Why? Because somewhere along the line, before the signal goes up to the satellite, it goes thru a phone line. For high up-and-down bandwidth cable is king in America. (Western Europe, by contrast, installed fiber-optic lines more than a decade ago)
Let's face it, Obama's voting for FISA was probably the best example of how he would vote years earlier on the Iraq War authorization. The subtle flip-flop, the noiseless caving in and subsequent pretending that nothing happened basically proves that Obama indeed IS a politician and WILL act on numerous occasions like one, even though he should be VERY GLAD he wasn't in Congress when the Iraq War was manufactured because there definitely would be one argument less to vote for him. Having said that, the "hard core, maniacal liberal far left" that has been “offended” by his FISA flip-flop will STILL vote for Obama, actually the left would even vote for his wife if she was running against McBush, because even she is more qualified than John McSame - the flip-flopping opportunist of the millennium, who's running only because there's no real talent on the right. So we can have this discussion in the media whether the pragmatic “far-left" will abandon Obama come the election day everyday until November, because at the end of the day, it will only help Obama. Nobody is abandoning the ship and 99.9999% of the Obama supporters are still voting for him. Pragmatism (electing an empty suit because the other is emptier) and responsibility (no more Bush and military adventurism in the oil-rich regions (mavericism) affecting your wallets will be the key words guiding the nation this time around, yet the MSM still thinks it’s naivety and stupidity. Oh well. Obama 08!!!
A computer is an augmentative prosthesis for the brain. The enhancement of the brain and mind, and of the speed and clarity of human communication, is a great value to the individual and society. We can solve problems for ourselves and others with ever greater effectiveness, thanks to these competitive solutions.
Where I live our telephone/cable/internet provider has an absolute monopoly and they block all bit torrent traffic. They are a co-op (all subscribers are part owners, which means we usually get a check for $15 or so back every year) so they get exemptions to many rules that regulate the industry. They don't allow any of the dial-ups to have a local phone number so AOL, NetZero or the like is not an option. It's either them or satellite.
Hooooooray for Net Neutrality! I feel like sharing some files right now! I'm gonna go re-seed my PDF of the Constitution, baby!
*Victory Lap*
The Dude @ 13:
...And now that usenet has been dropped by many major carriers- BitTorrnts are the only way I have of sending large files at all.
Illegal file swapping? Information is FREE! LOL!
Great! That means I can feed my pr0n addiction all the more easily!
The internet has rules? WTF?
"Overdue," not "over do"
(Y'know, just letting my inner pedant out for some air...)
Well, by golly. I was running a bittorrent upload last night and it was three times as fast as it usually is. I wondered what was going on :)
Tangled up TUBES!
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