Technology
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Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, calls for bill of rights for the web:
Berners-Lee has been an outspoken critic of the American and British spy agencies’ surveillance of citizens following the revelations by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed.
At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web, it’s going to be hard not to look back and regard Edward Snowden as instrumental a figure as Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf, and Robert Metcalfe.
(Via a student who pointed me in this direction through a Huffington Post article, which calls it a “Bill of Rights.” The original article from The Guardian (UK) refers to it as a “Magna Carta.” They translated it from English to English.)
There are many reasons to hate those K-Cup coffee machines. First, the machines are expensive. Second, the refills are expensive, and thus, the coffee it makes is also expensive. And for the elevated expense, you get coffee that tastes like crap krap.
One way to make being locked in to the K-Cup system more palatable is to use third-party refills that cost significantly less than those sold by Green Mountain.
But according to Techdirt, Keurig is aggressively combating the spread of cheaper refills.
In a lawsuit filed against Keurig by TreeHouse Foods, they claim Keurig has been busy striking exclusionary agreements with suppliers and distributors to lock competing products out of the market. What’s more, TreeHouse points out that Keurig is now developing a new version of their coffee maker that will incorporate the java-bean equivalent of DRM – so that only Keurig’s own coffee pods can be used in it.
The Keurig CEO has confirmed the new DRM-locked machine. He also called it a “game changer” presumably because instead of “giving away” the coffeemaker and charging for the refills, as you do in the established “razor-and-blades” model, Keurig intends to profit from the coffeemaker and the refills. This is how in bad CEO parlance, the “game” has been changed.
Of course, you can save yourself a ton of money and get better coffee at home with any number of coffee makers, like a Chemex or an Aeropress that don’t have DRM or even require electricity.
That’s truly game changing!
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
It’s been a busy month for those of us who love streaming video and are suspicious of the cable or telco companies that function as our broadband providers.
First, there was the announcement that Comcast is acquiring Time Warner Cable to increase its position as the largest provider of multichannel video and broadband Internet in the United States. Second, Netflix releasing the second season of House of Cards over President’s Day weekend led to some quality of service issues for Verizon customers in the Washington, DC area. It was such a popular story that it was the basis of a sales pitch for a Roku Streaming Media player, warning that the days of streaming video might be numbered. Third, over the weekend, a Comcast announced that it had struck an interconnection agreement with Netflix. All of this news comes within the context of a DC district court ruling that the FCC lacks the authority to enforce net neutrality rules over wired Internet service providers.
Dan Rayburn, who writes for the insightful Streaming Media blog, takes issue with the coverage of the Netflix-Comcast deal.
Many of these same people are also implying that because Netflix has to pay Comcast, consumers will foot the bill for this as Netflix will have to charge more for their service. This could not be further from the truth. Those stating this have no clue how Netflix delivers their content today or what costs they already incur. If they did, they would know this is not a new cost to Netflix, it’s simply paying a different provider, and it should be at a lower cost. It should actually be cheaper for Netflix to buy direct from Comcast, and they also get an SLA, which also improves quality and that’s a good thing.
Netflix and Comcast: Get a Room
I’m still trying to figure this out, but it appears that with this agreement, Netflix connects its own routers with Comcast’s. That obviates the need for Netflix to use and pay a third-party content delivery network, such as Cogent or Level3, to route its traffic directly to the ISP. Instead, Netflix will have a direct connection to the Comcast’s pipes and to its broadband customers.
One of the crazy facts about the Internet is that is very much like the telegraph network of a century and a half ago. Yes, both disrupted our conceptions of space and time, but they also share two technical details: both are based on a binary code, and both rely on relays for interconnection. Almost every single transaction you do on the Internet is converted to binary, grouped together as a stream, and then broken up into packets. It then goes through a series of routers that transit your packets to your intended destination. In the days of the telegraph, your message would transit from one telegraph office to another until it finally arrived at its final destination. Messages were priced according to length and distance because you were using up more resources than someone sending a short message to the next town.
A popular Internet service such as Netflix doesn’t have just one server to distribute all of its video content. It has dozens of them. They are located in places that are nearest to their customers. The aim is to minimize not only the distance each data packet has to travel but to also minimize the number of hops. Netflix contracts with companies that provide this service, each is known as a CDN. It appears that this deal merely cuts out the “middle man,” a third-party CDN that transits the data in this case, and allows Netflix connect directly to Comcast’s routers and have access to its customers all the way to the final mile without a third-party intermediary. Comcast subscribers should have a better experience streaming video from Netflix.
Is This Neutral?
With this deal, Netflix on Comcast will be better than Netflix on Verizon. Netflix on Comcast will also be better than another comparable video service (YouTube?) on Comcast that doesn’t have an interconnection agreement. But it should not impact upstart content providers. One of the major concerns of net neutrality is whether smaller players will have their traffic treated equal to the major players. In this case, it appears that the answer is no.
That argument however doesn’t consider Netflix’s size and its footprint on broadband networks. If it truly accounts for nearly a third of all Internet traffic in the US during primetime, it has few, if any, peers. Netflix has joined a new tier of Internet content providers, something like:
- Websites, blogs, and commercial services hosted on one server. If you’ve ever paid for a web hosting account, chances are you did this. You can get away with doing this because you are not serving much content and can stay within the bandwidth limits of your hosting plan. A dedicated server would be next option once you outgrow your shared hosting account.
- Websites, blogs, and commercial services hosted across different servers. Once a website becomes even more popular, it could outgrow that one server, and will have to shift its content across a number of servers. Many sites pay a CDN for the trouble of locating servers across different locations because it can be expensive— think rent and utility bills.
- Netflix. It is in a class by itself, connecting directly to the ISPs network. It has outgrown the third-party CDN model and struck a deal with the ISP itself. It is both a content provider and a Tier 2 network.
Again, I’m still trying to understand all of this, but it appears that net neutrality is still important even if it doesn’t apply to this case. Content providers in the first category above are safe because their volume of bandwidth is relatively low and won’t overwhelm ISP networks. Content providers in the second category should also be safe should they not overwhelm ISP networks. However, content distributors might have cause for concern if too many of their customers are like Netflix and begin overwhelming their peer networks. It’s just hard to determine what the line might be and how much it will cost to join this elite class of an upper-tier network. It’s also hard to predict if peer agreements effectively constitute preferential treatment.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Today’s Woot Daily Digest, a deal-at-a-time site owned by Amazon, sent out a special for a refurbished Roku 3 streaming media player. The copy caught my eye:
Get it now while Our Telecom Overlords still permit streaming video!
It’s certainly a timely message, although it might be too late.
My good friends at Queens College IT have started a blog on Tumblr with a series of well-meaning tips for students. The blog is a barely a few weeks old, but there are already a number of posts and links with titles heavy with clickbait-speak:
My favorite post on the blog is a link to “18 Tips for Emailing Your Professor,” an article on US News and World Report. Most of the tips are sound, but they should be considered guidelines for any professional correspondence, email or otherwise. For example, the article urges you to be mindful of your recipient: send it to the correct address, maintain a professional tone, check your spelling, avoid slang, use a proper salutation and closing, and keep it concise. Any boss, co-worker, or client will appreciate this as much as your professor.
But do we really need eighteen tips? Some of these tips unfairly caricature students and professors: not all students write in leetspeak and emoticons, and not all professors are technophobes. Most of my students are very cordial and professional with email. Likewise, even the oldest and stodgiest college professors have been using email for at least 20 years, and the younger ones have likely been using their entire professional lives. It’s 2014: most of us “get” email.
Aside from guidelines that apply to any professional correspondence, here are five tips for your professor when I’m your professor.
- Email me at the address I provided you. I use the university-issued address because I can ignore those accounts on weekends and after the semester ends. As part-time faculty, I should only correspond with you when the meter’s running.
- Email me from an address where I can identify you. AOL email addresses used to not include real names so I would see messages from greekchick69@aol.com. Make it easy to figure out who you are. If your email account doesn’t support real names, at least sign your message with your full name. Or get a different email provider.
- Use the subject line. I don’t understand why anyone wastes the subject line with “Hi Professor,” or “From Bryan.” Years ago, I read an article recommending you use the subject line as the message as much as possible. For example, ask me, “Can you meet on Wednesday at 5:30?” in the subject line and leave the message blank. That way, I can reply without even opening the message.
- Compose a New Message. Speaking of subject lines, it really bugs me when a message lands in my inbox with an old subject. That happens when someone replies to an old message instead of composing a new one. That not only messes with the threading feature of my email client, it also wastes the valuable subject line: the topic on this new message will be different than the old one. Composing a new email costs as much as replying to an old one, and who doesn’t prefer a shiny new message to an crusty old one?
- Don’t attach anything. Email attachments are the worst. But even worse are attachments in a proprietary format. The US News article pokes fun at .odt (Open Office) files, but those aren’t any worse than Word (.docx) or Pages files. It doesn’t matter because those files require specific programs to open. I’ll admit that with enough time and effort, I can open just about anything, but that’s a lot of wasted time. Sending a PDF will ensure that your document will look exactly as what you sent me. But instead of emailing me an attachment of any sort, print it and hand it to me. Or better yet, share it using a cloud service.
It’s possible that I’m asking too much. After all, I’m an unreasonable ogre. However, managing email is one of those things that has become less of a work tool than a obstacle to getting things done. Let’s all work to minimize its impact on our productivity.
Here’s what’s trending on Facebook today:
- Phillip Seymour Hoffman was found dead at his home at age 46.
- Woody Allen was publicly accused of sexual abuse twenty-one years ago by Dylan Farrow.
- The Super Bowl, between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos, is today in
New York New Jersey.
Who would have thought that two events from the film world would be bigger trending topics than the Super Bowl? And it isn’t Punxsutawney Phil.
An article from Farhad Manjoo, formerly of Slate and soon to be formerly of the Wall Street Journal, is making the rounds on the Internet. His point is simple:
Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
This is old news, and not just because the article appears to have been published three years ago. (See the update at the bottom of the page.)
It’s old news because I remember reading this back in 1997 or so, when I was in college and working at UCSB Extension on the tech support team.1 On a slow day, I skimmed through a book we had on the shelf, The Mac is Not a Typewriter. It didn’t necessarily change my life, but it had many lessons on how to compose a manuscript on a Mac, or any computer, that have stuck with me. One of the cardinal lessons was to only use a single space after a period, especially if you were using a proportional-width font. Although I don’t have a copy of the book, but if memory serves, it was because you needed two spaces on a typewriter to distinguish an abbreviation and a sentence.
For example:
New York City has many churches. St. Patrick's Cathedral is perhaps the best known.
Can you tell the difference between the end of the sentence “New York City has many churches” and the abbreviation for “Saint?” That’s why you needed to use two spaces after a period on a typewriter. Such is not the case on a computer.
There were a few other lessons that I recall from the Mac is Not a Typewriter:
- Watch for widows and orphans.
- Use smart quotes instead of straight ones.
- The differences between a hyphen, an en-dash, and a em-dash.
- Why underline when you can easily italicize?
The book appears to have been last updated in 2003. While that might seem like an eternity, a great deal of those lessons are still relevant today.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
I thought I had seen every possible genre of spam, but being evicted by email is a new one. It came to my iCloud email account, which could probably use some better spam protection.
Eviction Notification,
Please be advised that you are obliged to
vacate the living space you occupy until March 7, 2014, 11 a.m.
If you do not vacate it in the specified terms,
the court will have to assign the forcible eviction for April 27, 2014, 11 a.m.
If nobody is home we will not be responsible for safe keeping of your belongings.
Besides, if you fail to comply with the requirements of the court bailiff
you will be fined for up to 200 minimum wage amounts
with a subsequent doubling of the penalty amount
and can be made criminally or administratively liable.
The details of the circumstances that caused the judicial decision
of eviction are attached herewith.
Of course, there’s a fishy Zip file attached.
Starting this Friday, Queens College will be “upgrading” how we connect to the campus-wide WiFi network.
In an effort to improve wireless connectivity and availability, we are making changes to the campus wireless infrastructure architecture that will affect the way you connect. The wireless network we have been using, which carries the network name (also called SSID) qclan, will no longer be available.
Currently, we all connect to the network named qclan. This is an open network and requires no password. After connecting, you arrive at a “landing page” where you authenticate with your QC username and password. In the past, I suspected that the traffic between my computer and the WiFi network was unencrypted, but after becoming more attuned to digital security in the last year, I began to worry that anyone could sniff my packets.
Maybe the new “wireless infrastructure architecture” will address the lack of security between my computer and the network.
Nope.
New networks corresponding to your affiliation with the college will replace qclan: qc-faculty, qc-staff, qc-student, and qc-guest.
To access your particular wireless network:
- Select the network associated with your affiliation (qc-faculty, qc-staff, qc-student, or qc-guest) and connect.
- Enter WEP Key (password) 12345.
- Open a web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome).
- Queens College login screen will appear
- Log in using your Queens College ID (except guests, who should use their email address).
Wow, this is absolutely appalling. They haven’t made any real changes to the security of our network. They’ve only made it slightly more difficult to get connected. We now have to connect to the network that corresponds to our affiliation (no cheating, anyone) and then enter a “passcode” that everyone knows.
Introducing a shared key introduces some level of security but not much. First, WEP is a deprecated security algorithm: it was declared insecure by the WiFi Alliance in 2003. Second, if everyone knows the key, anyone can get in and someone can sniff the data between a computer and the network. This is the real-world equivalent of locking up your home but taping the keys to the front door. Third, that WEP key is #20 on the list of most popular, worst passwords and note that it’s not all that different from #1.
The only real authentication happens in the fourth and fifth steps outlined above. We open a webpage and enter our QC username and password to gain access to the wireless network. That would keep unaffiliated users from accessing the web, but it doesn’t keep our traffic secure: web authentication does not provide encryption. Instead, it acts like a firewall that blocks all ports except those necessary for DHCP, to get an IP address from the router, and DNS, to get establish a basic network connection.
If this seems like a familiar way for connecting to a wireless network, it’s because you’ve likely done that in a public place, like a Starbucks, a Marriott, or an airport lounge. These are places where you have little expectation of privacy because you’re usually just passing through, and it’s why so many road warriors use a VPN to secure their digital traffic.
But as faculty, staff, and students, we are not the public. This is our campus-only WiFi network. We regularly traffic in sensitive data, such as research documents and student records, but are relegated to the status of a guest, like customers at a coffee shop or transients at a hotel or an airport. What’s more appalling is that they’re not the only university that secures its network in a similar way.
I wrote the QC help desk with my concerns. I’ll update if I get a response.
Until a few months ago, I was a big fan of Reeder, Sivio Rizzi’s RSS client for Mac and iOS. The earlier iteration of those apps stopped working after Google shut down Reader last July. Once Google Reader was dead, I jumped to Feedbin as my new RSS reader, mostly because Rizzi’s Reeder for iPhone supported Feedbin.
As the summer days waned, Rizzi had not shipped new iPad or Mac versions of Reeder. Unwilling to read RSS feeds through a web browser, I searched for and discovered a couple of alternatives.
I chose these because they were well-received on their respective app stores and because both apps support Feedbin. They proved great apps for skimming my RSS feeds. I used Mr. Reader until September, when Rizzo shipped an updated version of Reeder for iOS. I gladly bought Reeder 2 and christened it my main RSS client. But then I started to miss some of the features of Mr. Reader, such as the collection of themes and fonts and even the bike-bell sound when it makes when my feeds were all updated. In an act of buyer’s remorse, I went back to Mr. Reader as my iPad RSS client.
On the Mac side, I stopped searching for news on Reeder for Mac, which, as of today, still has not been updated for the post–Google Reader era. Instead, I found another RSS client for the Mac: ReadKit. And I’m sticking to it.
Reeder was a great client for Google Reader, and after trying and buying way too many RSS apps, it was the only I loved to use. But months of waiting for updates made me receptive to some alternatives, and now I’m sticking with those.
