No ethical hacker would ever work for the DHS.

Indeed; nearly every flight I take from Austin ends up connecting through Dallas. It's a 35 minute flight and I'm usually in the airport about 2 hours beforehand. I'd love to just skip that leg. I don't know if it would save me money, but a Dallas/Waco/Austin/San Antonio route, with a Houston/San Antonio, or Houston/Austin connection might make me interested.

Come to think of it, I have never been to Dallas, or Waco, or Houston, except the two times I drove from the East coast to move to Austin. I might visit Houston more if I didn't have to drive 4 hours to get there, and drive 4 hours back, you know? It'd still be 8 hours out of my weekend, but I can work on my book on the train, browse the Internet on my phone, all sorts of good stuff.

That's it, in a nutshell.

The RIAA has sued people it knows to be innocent, engaged in barratry, has tried to stifle long-term technology to preserve dying business models.

On the supply side of music, has been the bane of recording artists in music and movies for years - Prince changed his name to that weird symbol not only to be provocative, but also to get out of bad record contracts.

On the demand side of music, it was pretty clear even early on that piracy didn't hurt music sales. In fact, CD sales were going UP until the PR backlash from suing customers, coinciding with legal digital downloads and a down economy. What was happening was that Napster was exposing people to more music - different music - and indie artists.

They hated Napster not because it cut into their sales, but because people no longer relied on the radio to find out what new music was playing, meaning that talented artists didn't have to sign with the RIAA's labels. It was a threat to their cartel, not to their bottom line.

So, long story short, no matter what you think about the Pirate Bay or whether what they were doing was taking money away from artists or whatever -- they were Robin Hood.

They took from the evil and rich, and gave to the poor and smart. They did it while thumbing their nose at the Sheriff of Nottingham.

That's why they're loved and adored on places like Slashdot.

I think that bandwidth caps are a bad idea for other reasons, but the pricing is insane. I typically use 300GB/mo, mostly because I'm sending and receiving revisions of large HD video files. If the offer was for 200GB/mo for $60, plus $0.25/GB, I'd be cool with paying $25 more than someone under that cap. That to me doesn't seem unreasonable. (It's not -fair- for technical reasons of congestion and the nature of bandwidth, but at least they're not charging me an arm and a leg.) But considering that TW gets broadband wholesale at an estimated $0.10/GB, charging a 1000% markup is just obscene.

I interviewed Alex Dudley, VP of PR for Time Warner Cable at Network Performance Daily on this. I tried to be impartial, but as I mention in the intro, this would raise my bill 500%, and would be a 1000% markup from Time Warnerâ(TM)s wholesale rate, and as TW is a monopoly in my apartment complex, the net effect is that Iâ(TM)m getting kicked out of my home when the billing goes live, so the interview gets heated at points. FTA:

NPD: I was wondering if you ever considered this⦠tracking the high-end users, and⦠only when the line is congested⦠throttling back their service using QoS priorities. Giving them--

Dudley: Thatâ(TM)s exactly what Comcast did about a year ago, and it caused a complete outrage and the FCC hauled them before the committee and told them they had to stop doing it.

NPD: Actually, I covered that. That's actually the result that Comcast applied after the FCC asked them to choose a different system . You're talking about the Sandvine stuff that was sending forged RST packets and the issue there was that the RST packets looked like they had come from the sender itself, which was essentially kind of a classic " Man In The Middle" attack . A kind of a fraudulent thing.

-------------

Dudley: â¦because of consumers that are using amounts like this, what we're seeing is a need for network expansion. â¦We figure⦠the top 25% of users use 100 times more network bandwidth than the bottom 25%.

NPD: Well that's just standard bell curves.

Dudley: Iâ(TM)m sorry?

NPD: Well, when you put any system on a graph like that⦠because of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle or whatever it's called, when you put something on the bell curve, of course the top 25 are going to use the most bandwidth because they're the top 25â¦.

Previously, I wrote on how bandwidth caps have a chilling effect on Internet participatory culture.

>> The man handed over a videotape of the blast, Albers said. As of Sunday night, he had not been arrested or charged with a crime. No one was injured.

----

That's a bad example, even by the strawman standards you set.

But here's the thing - you can get away with a hell of a lot if you - and this is the key point - ask nicely.

Going to the local police force and telling them: "We'd like to go down to X Quarry and blow up Y pounds of Z explosive. We're wondering what kind of permits and paperwork would be needed, and we were wondering if you had any advice on how to ensure safety."

is not the same as:

"I think I'll blow up my truck today!"

Oh, the poster is a clever one.

He probably KNEW the answer: "Consult a Lawyer" or "Take it down" or "Put it on Wikileaks."

But what he wanted was to get the word out about the absurdity of the test itself.

And, thanks to Slashdot, we now know a little bit more about this stupid test, we now know what the first 75 questions are, we now know that the company that makes it are trying to keep it a secret, and we now know why they are.

In short, this was a hail-mary pass for the Streistand Effect that connected. Good play, sir!

The way I view it is that it's -exactly- like someone leaking Scientology's OT3 papers.

Both are ridiculous. Both rely on secrecy so that the general public doesn't know how ridiculous it is. If the general public knew how ridiculous it is, it'd be discredited immediately. Therefore, the test manufacturers have to hide behind copyright law.

Legally, I have no answers for you. Morally, as a journalist, this absolutely, positively falls under "The Public's Right To Know."

I'll call up the local major metro paper if they have one and ask if they'd be willing to help you out with this, as I'm sure their lawyers deal with questions like these all the time.

Bandwidth caps, or Pay As You Go is a horrible idea.

All Internet connections are merely the transfer of little positively and negatively charged electrical bits which stream down the wire. The limitations are not in the availability of the resource but in the capacity of distribution. We are not, in other words, "running out of bandwidth" like we run out of oil, run out of water, or run out of diapers.

What is limited is the capacity of the "pipe." To strain a metaphor, you could push Lake Michigan through a coffee stirring straw, but it would take a very, very long time.

Any pay-as-you-go plan has a fatal flaw - it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to bill people for the data they are downloading because data is not the limited resource!

What is limited is the capacity of the ISP's infrastructure at any particular moment in time, so it would be saner to limit the usage of the pipeline at a particular time.

But wait a minute! ISPs already do this - I know that my Internet connection at home is capped at a certain speed. In fact I could get a faster speed simply by asking for it and paying a premium - no delay nor needed infrastructure upgrades. Just cash.

So the move to a pay-as-you-go plan seems, to be at best a case of solving the wrong problem, and at worst a case of "double dipping" by making people pay for data and bandwidth. (If there are network slowdowns, charging people per-gigabyte won't help much if people are still downloading that gigabyte at the same time of the day, after all.)

Okay, you've got oversubscription. Here's what you do:

1) Be open and transparent with your users. Send out an e-mail, plain english, no legalese, no bull, explaining that you're currently oversubscribed, and that you are taking the following measures.

2) Implement a QoS policy that only takes effect at those times of the day when the line is congested.

3) During congestion times, provide higher QoS for customers who have, over the past 12 hour time period, used the least amount of bandwidth. During this time, someone downloading tons of BitTorrent traffic (or Linux distros via FTP) will probably see a reduction in speeds - but the information will not be blocked, and the download will complete. On the other hand, someone sending an e-mail with pictures, gaming, or chatting on Skype (all relatively low-bandwidth uses) will probably not notice a slowdown.

What this means is that:

      1. There will be no changes to packet priority when the line is not congested.

      2. The system identifies those users who are using the most bandwidth at that moment in time.

      3. It places a lower priority to the packets of those heavy users. So, in an overcongested pipe, the large file downloader (FTP or BitTorrent) will have to suffer reduced speeds at higher latency (though they will still be able to get the data) while the e-mail/web/gaming/voip user will likely not see reduced throughput or increased latency.

This is a platform, application, and protocol agnostic method of choosing who will have service reduced during times of congestion. It attacks the limited resource â" bandwidth â" without attacking the unlimited resource of data. It only takes effect during times of peak usage.

It is, in other words, a moral way to solve oversubscription problems until you can increase your capacity.

We've covered this issue extensively at networkperformancedaily.com - do a search on the site for "pay as you go" if you're interested in more detail.

It did kind of creep me out. My local Circuit City only opened about 9 months ago. The first day I stopped in, I decided to browse, to see what they offered and what the prices were, etc. Hey, new store, maybe they have something Best Buy didn't.

In every goddamn department, I was bothered by someone asking me if they could help me, and if I'm finding everything alright. I expected it the first time - but after about six times with six different staff members, I actually complained to the manager about it.

"We're just trying to be helpful."

I now know what I'm finding so distasteful about it - when I was browsing, I was interested in looking at what they had, and my concentration was on browsing. My concentration got interrupted every time I was interrupted; "Can I help you" only helps when you're looking for a specific product.

I'll second you on "Prices high."

By the time I checked in, the store was sparse as hell. However, everything - even with the discounts - was about the same price as I could get from Best Buy, down the street. I actually looked up the price of the big stack of HDTVs they were selling - you're trying to sell me a $1400 TV for $1500, claiming that you're doing me a favor by marking it down from $2200?

Good Riddance.

Call me when they have a motor made from liquid video...