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Some Big Providers To Quietly Begin Monitoring Users
The people who want control over the Internet are nothing if not persistent. They are quite capable of learning from their mistakes, too. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that they have licked their wounds and regathered their forces after the resounding defeat of SOPA. They’ve come up with a new scheme to protect their precious copyrights; a kinder, gentler version of SOPA that, while it enables spying, supposedly has education more in mind than punishment. Continue reading
Posted in News, Security
Tagged CAS, DMCA, file sharing, Net neutrality, peer-to-peer, privacy, Protect IP Act, SOPA
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The Fight over Copyright and Net Neutrality Will Shape the Net
The first battle over copyright on record was an actual physical battle. Around 560, Columba, an Irish monk, copied out a book of psalms, intending to keep it for himself. This was disputed by St. Finnian, owner of the original volume who had lent it to him to read. The saint was supported by the court which said that the reproduction rightfully belonged to him as sure as a calf does to its mother. It being the Dark Ages, there was nothing for it then but to fight it out. Columba’s side won the melee; in grief over the ensuing deaths, however, the monk left Ireland forever. During his lifelong exile, he founded the great monastery of Iona where the magnificent Book of Kells was later made, was the first known witness of the Loch Ness Monster, and ultimately became a saint, too, so it all worked out pretty well for him in the long run. A millennium and a half later, however, copyright conflicts are still being fought almost as viciously in the courts. But while modern media could not even be imagined by the scribes of old, the issues would be quite familiar. Now, as then, the greatest disagreements are often caused by the use of new technologies to do things previously impossible — be it with a goose-quill pen and parchment back then, or mouse and keyboard now. No rational person would disagree that artists should receive … Continue reading
Posted in Events, How the Net Works, News
Tagged DMCA, file sharing, Net neutrality, peer-to-peer, Protect IP Act, SOPA
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Super Speed, Internet TV, and Net Neutrality
There’s a little old lady in Sweden who can surf the Internet at the astonishing speed of 40 gigabits per second. Thanks to an experimental technique developed by her son Peter, Sigbritt Lothberg has the fastest home Internet connection anywhere on the planet. She could download an entire movie in less than 2 seconds, many thousands of times faster than with most residential connections. But she only uses it to read web-based newspapers. Those who watch movies and TV programs over the Net can only be envious at this point. Someday, incredible broadband speeds like Ms. Lothberg’s may be commonly available, but not any time soon. A consortium of leading research institutions called Internet2 is developing one of the fastest networks around. It blazes along at “only” 10 gigabits along the “Abilene backbone”, a mere quarter of her speed. Like the original Internet, these links are restricted to universities and research labs for crunching vast amounts of data, for applications in fields like particle physics and imaging. However, regional telephone and Internet access providers have not yet announced any plans for increasing home DSL speeds beyond the snail-like-in-comparison 10-20 megabits per second currently offered. For super-fast links between major hubs is just part of the problem. Delivering such speeds down into the home is another matter. Effectively using such speeds is yet another issue. Speed is one of the major hurdles in using the Internet to provide seamless video content, … Continue reading