It's a clever idea (like Comcast wanting Netflix to pay them for what Comcast's own customers pay them already).

Right now you have 15,000 paying customers. They are almost "captive" in the sense that they get Internet service without having to put any effort into it, so they will continue to be customers so long as you treat them fairly.

Your customers pay you to give them access to the whole Internet. If you remove parts of the net until someone else double-pays you for that same service, you'll find yourself on the wrong side of a Judge certifying a class-action suit against you for lots of fun things like breach of contract, tortious interference, and possibly material misrepresentation (not fraud - fraud isn't covered by E&I insurance).

Your safe bet if you wanted to do something this stupid is to give your 15,000 customers FREE Internet with the caveat that some sites may not be reachable unless the other side pays for it. This would be legal, but it won't be financially profitable.

So you can either retain a sustainable model where you're not getting sued, not extorting third parties, and making money, OR you can extort third parties and likely get sued OR you can move to a financially non-sustainable model.

As an IT director I guess your job is to figure out how to implement what the Directors wants. As anyone with half a brain I would recommend they make the selection from the choices above before spending a minute researching firewalls and private-dickhead-networks.

E

I'm sure Mr. Zuckerberg is aboard the first American Airlines flight from San Francisco to Tehran.
Oh wait, no Southwest flight goes to Tehran.

Surely he's booked on United Airlines. No, wait, they don't fly to Tehran either.

Looks like NONE of the US carriers go there. Is it because they don't like money? That can't be
right. Is it because they are shareholder driven and their shareholders are all either dirty jews
or clean jews or some combination of clean and dirty jews? That seems unlikely.

OH WAIT, I GOT IT!

IRAN IS A TERRORIST NATION, A SPONSOR OF TERRORIST GROUPS, CALLS THE US
THE GREAT SATAN AND WANTS TO DESTROY US AND ISRAEL TOO AND IS A HOTBED
OF RELIGIOUS CRAP THAT MAKES THE BIBLE BELT AND WASHINGTON DC LOOK LIKE
SECULAR NOOBS.

I guess they won't have Zuckerberg to demonize if he doesn't go there.

Perhaps they'll burn his effigy along with President Obama, the US Flag, and a fake
nuclear wessel.

Ehud
Tucson AZ US

Someone please forward the memo to microsoft. They can stop referencing BING as if it's a thing.
It's a DEAD thing.

[click here to have Bing translate this thing lol]

I read your list of achievements. Very nice.

In the next few projects focus on
- planning the programming before you do it, so you can explain your design decisions
and the inevitable tradeoffs to prevent people who come after you from trying to "fix"
what isn't broken.
- documenting what you did do so anyone can support your code

If you are fond of saying any of these:
- "Anyone who can read code can see what it does"
- "the obvious doesn't need documenting"
- "there were no tradeoffs"
- one day I will rewrite this to be better ...this would help you understand why you're unemployable.

University education is a good first step to something something complete.
Being a freshman is not a bonus nor a hindrance. Experience with github,
software RCS etc are all good. The keys are making choices before coding,
knowing and being able to explain those choices, and documenting them for
others to take the burdens of support off your inventive shoulders.

E

These concepts were part of the commercial Internet circa the early 1990s
and were part of the reason CIX was so successful. Then PAIX then others.

In time, Internet exchanges were themselves bogged down and companies
did private peering. Those who connected to like-quantity produders of
content did so for free (settlement-free peering). Those who were unequal
paid for transiting the network (paid transit).

That hasn't changed in 32 years. All that's changed is the up and down of
who provides more traffic where. The dominant player in each interconnection
point ALWAYS demanded transit, and often did so with the "wherever our
two networks meet" even if elsewhere it was not the dominant player.

Comcast could be made to behave, but Netflix blinked and paid them money.
Now others will as well.

This CAN BE FIXED BY REGULATION but not the kind people are thinking
of. No, not net neutrality. Rather the elimination of the cable-company
monopolies on entire swaths of subscribers. Eliminate the government-granted
access to rights-of-way, towers, utility poles, and infrastructure. Let them not
have a "sole franchise" but rather be one of many competing in the market.

Remove Comcast and their ilk from their high post as the monopolistic "owner"
of all these households by fiat, and having to compete to keep them, and instead
of throttling their peerings to make Netflix users (THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS)
suffer... they'll get peering with netflix.

More government regulation doesn't solve a market-driven problem. Removing the
government regulation harming free competition is the key.

E

To "invest" is to put money where value is.

Bitcoin is a concept. It has no value. People can trade, arbitrage, wield, barter, or exchange for it.
It still has no value.

Best fortune to all those making money with Bitcoin. For every one of you someone has lost
an almost equal amount. (originally mined bitcoins loss value 0 but it grows exponentially).

And as for the holdback bitcoins created and untouched -- that's why bitcoin will NEVER be a currency.
"Oh we invented this so we kept some for ourselves." Yeah, do that. And doom the coin.

E

LOL. No, it's not sensible and it goes against dozens of years of legal precedent.
It will be overtuned.

Actors do not have rights to the final work unless they were contractually given it,
none of which ever are.

While in some eutopia it would be great if revenge porn could be stopped, that's
an outlier case.

Imagine if you went to Paris and took a video of yourself at the EIffel Tower, but
some random Parisian who happened to be in the background got your video taken
down. That's not eutopian -- that's distopian.
Best,

E

No. She didn't win a lawsuit. All she "won" was an unconstitutional prior restraint against Youtube (google)
forcing them to remove the segment of the movie she's in.

The actual Kozinski ruling suggests that actors HAVE a copyright in the final work despite decades
of copyright law to the contrary.

Google has appealed. This will be decided back the way it should be (that actors don't magically get
copyright laws).

The case -- in case you want to read the facts instead of making them up -- is Garcia v Google.

E

Oh Nos!

This will surely help blackberry survive in the market!

Good job with those patents! Now nobody can have a working keyboard, not their
nonexistent client nor the iPhone people who could have used a Typo.

E

http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...

The Slashdot summary says "safety advocates." The first link says "safety advocates" but doesn't specify who those are.

WHO IS LOBBYING FOR A CELLPHONE BAN ON THE ROADS?

Please advise. My bet is the [required mandatory] insurance lobby.

E

I beg to differ.

Please provide a source cite to a statute that indicates the act of "downloading" (feel free to
massage as appropriate; I am not splitting hairs) is unlawful.

As for the lawyer cited, he isn't a very good lawyer: "Fighting a subpoena that attempts to reveal your identity is a waste of money because you will reveal your identity by fighting it."
Lawyers that give advice on the Internet are not creme de la creme. Lawyers that give incorrect advice less so.

E

The ruling is good. Let's enjoy that.

However, this is a HORRIBLE writeup. It suggests that "...IP-address evidence can't identify the person who actually downloaded the pirated file."

Under current US law:
1. There is no copyright infringement in downloading a file.
2. Files are. They just are. They are not "pirated files."
3. MAKING INFRINGING CONTENT AVAILABLE TO OTHERS is what is considered copyright infringement/distribution. THAT is why an IP address is important... if one SHARES and MAKES AVAILABLE A FILE. It takes a court to determine whether the actions constitute an actionable behavior.

I can't believe Torrentfreak got it wrong. At least they got the headline right. And this is a good ruling.
Hopefully fightcopyrighttrolls.com and dietrolldie.com won't make that mistake.

No, it would not transmit more than the flight data recorders. Those things store everything.
If there's something they don't store, it's added so they do.

To maintain a bitstream of sufficient width and density to share what the FDRs do for an
entire flight is beyond our available satellite uplink capacity even if cost were no factor.
Which it is.

At the end of all this the expenditure would save zero lives. It would prevent zero crashes.
It would just make investigations go quicker.

E

It would be nice to know where the plane is and why. However, crashes happen so infrequently
that spending billions of dollars and not preventing a single one -- merely accelerating the speed
at which we get the "black box" data is not worth it.

Everyone involved including the airline industry has decided that it's not worth the expense
to spend $100,000 per airplane as well as untold costs to maintain that, and pass the costs
onto your relatives.

I just did.

E