I already buy e-books and books from a couple of small publishers and individual authors.
The publishers don't have enough of a monopoly to kill them off and "enshittify" publishing (;-))

The bufferbloat folks proved that you don't have to have your call quality or gaming experience suffer if someone starts asking for tons of bandwidth. To oversimplify, the mongo download process is forced to compete fairly with the voip call, not just drown it out.

An ISP that doesn't use modern software is at moral hazard. They're tempted to rob Peter to pay Paul, exactly as we see <curses elided/> Telcos doing here.
At the same time, they need to legally use fq_codel and CAKE on their network, to do fair queuing (the fq in fc_codel).

For recent work in fixing bufferbloat within ISPs, see https://libreqos.io/, which I see as QOS done the right way, a way consistent with net neutrality.

One risk is that non-discriminatory bandwidth management (eg, the stuff the bufferbloat team does, like fq_codel and CAKE) will not be easy to distinguish from the discriminatory stuff that enables the ISP to demand kickback and/or being paid extra by the provider of the service. That would result in shitty service for everyone and, perversely, more motivation to pay the ISP to work around the rules.

Just FYI, the convention in letters to the editor is that when one asks rhetorical questions, the expected answer is "yes" (;-))

My letter to the editor, as published in the Globe and Miil]

Back in the 1990s the nerd community was challenged to make the entire world-wide web safe for children. We introduced the same kind of parental controls that cable television used. Parents could block their kids from visiting all pages with age-unsuitable content.

When I looked, we still had parental controls on phones, chromebooks and web browsers, and the claimed usage was around 81%.

But the new legislation requires the sites at the other end of the network make sure all their customers are of legal age. That's easy to do in the physical world: if you're a bouncer at a strip club, you can tell if a customer is a kid. Across the internet, no-one can even tell if you're a dog, much less a kid. Arguably, the only workable place for age controls is in the physical device that the parent gives to the child.

But that's not what is being asked for. What happened? Do parental controls no longer work? Have people forgotten about them? Or is this something else entirely?

Who benefits if more people get sick and/or die?

Quoting straight from bufferbloat.net at https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...

Take Control of Your Network: No one else (not your router manufacturer, nor your ISP) has a strong incentive to fix Bufferbloat. But once you take control, the network will stay fixed for all time, and you can adapt to changing practices at your ISP or other vendors.

• - Enable SQM settings if your router already has them.
• - Install an off-the-shelf router with SQM
• - Upgrade your current router.
  Install OpenWrt firmware (version 22.03 or newer). The Smart Queue Management guide tells how to configure the luci-app-sqm package. Or install suitable DD-WRT, Gargoyle or Tomato firmware, all of which support some kind of queue management based on FQ-CoDel and/or Cake.

Get advice from an interested lawyer, or a professor working on public policy problems.

The kind of software your schools are buying, sold as allowing them to meet one law, may be prohibited by another law. Or even the first (;-)).

This can make the school board, who are the people at risk of being sued, reconsider expensive products. Oh, and also reconsider / run away from anything suspiciously cheap, as those are the "proctoring" companies reselling your data to improve their bottom line.

Linux ships with fq_codel (fair queuing and control of delay) and CAKE, https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr..., courtesy of Dave Täht (/. user mtaht) and the bufferbloat team. They have been on fixing this for some years, plus fixing latency problem in wi-fi and for ISPs, https://libreqos.io/

The L4S RFC's section 5.2 reads as if it is aimed at improvements on top of fq_codel, and will take years to roll out (:-().

The Verge article treats it like it's something new and shiny (:-))

I've been following oxide for a while, and they're avoiding what my people currently have to deal with: racks and racks of power supplies, fans and cases, none of which contribute to actual computing.

Somewhere close to true mainframes (or perhaps M9000s), and way better than blades, where only_ some_ unneeded components are moved to the racks. PA customer once asked for racks and racks of two-socket machines. Using pairs of 32-socket machines saved approximate 1.3 Million dollars, US. No unneeded motherboards, ethernet cards, disk controllers, fans, power supplied or cases. Just lots and lots of chips in sockets, the one thing the customer needed. And not at all by accident, what we wanted to produce.

Regrettably for Mr Mouse, the following extension didn't happen, and one of his earlier lives is now in the public domain. If it doesn't cause too much trouble, he might agree to shortening copyright terms. Or, perhaps, he could seek a "design patent" (:-)) https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...

Is that the case in the 'States? And if so, in which states in particular?

In Canada, employers are told in no uncertain terms to specify that their proprietary code is "all rights reserved", because there's British case law that failing to do so puts it into the public domain. German companies say the same, so I suspect that may be the law in the EU as well as the British Commonwealth...

The authors can read the dictionary too: they are very aware of what that means

The serious cloud vendors lay out their own rack design, and save a lot of money from it. In a previous life, a Sun customer saved 1.3 million dollars by specifying four 32-socket, 64-core racks instead of a collection of 1u devices. Cases, power supply and fans, you see, don't make a hardware company much money. Chips and sockets do. My former boss has been tracking these folks with great interest: we used to work with them at Sun

People notice when they're posting articles from "News of the World" instead of the "Globe and Mail", and skip onwards.

(the first is a paper famous for publishing articles about subjects like Elvis' baby with a grey alien, while the second is the leading newspaper in Canada)