It’s been an exciting week for Internet advocacy in the United States. To put it in crude, succinct, and kinda androcentric-and-infantilizing terms, the Federal Communications Commission grew a pair and ruled to…
regulate ISPs as a Title II Common Carrier instead of a Title I Information Service Provider.
prohibit restrictions against community broadband, such as those in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina, where they get faster and cheaper Internet access than in New York City.
Everyone has gone gaga over the first ruling, but I think the second one is just as crucial. Why? If net neutrality is “Obamacare for the Internet,” community broadband is the “public option” we didn’t get with the Affordable Care Act. It subjects commercial ISPs to competition that is primarily concerned with serving its citizens rather than enriching its shareholders.
The commercial ISPs have complained that if they were subject to Title II common carriage regulation, they would be less inclined to invest in their infrastructure. They would be less likely to expand access, and they would be less likely to increase broadband speeds in the coming years. In other words, they would act like a telecommunications monopoly with little incentive to improve their product. Guess what? They already behave that way.
Most of the country lacks access to viable broadband. For many of those who do have access, they face a Hobson choice when selecting Internet service providers. As for average broadband speeds, at 11.5 Mbps, the United States is hardly in the lead. We rank somewhere between Taiwan (9.5 Mbps) and Singapore (12.2 Mbps) among Asian nations and between Israel (11.4 Mbps) and Finland (11.7 Mbps) among EMEA nations.1
Throughout the twentieth century, AT&T, the telephone monopoly in the US, improved the technology to connect local and long-distance calls more efficiently, but the end-product was more or less unchanged for seven decades. AT&T held a monopoly over US telephone service beginning in 1913, under the Kingsbury Commitment, until 1984, when it was forced to fragment and sell its local exchanges into seven regional Baby Bells. In that time, there were very few functional improvements to the telephone receiver.
A very old AT&T phone from the 1930s.
A phone that would be a common sight in the United States.
Comparing two receivers—one from the 1930s and one from the 1980s—it’s hard to tell what specific improvements there were. Both receivers consisted of a dial and a corded handset, and you could have one in any color you wanted… as long as you wanted black. Why was there no speakerphone? Where is the touchtone keypad? Why couldn’t someone put a call on hold or mute the receiver? If someone missed a call, why couldn’t the phone indicate so with a notification? And, why could someone not walk around any further than the length of the receiver’s cord?
The Carterphone from the late 1960s allowed telephone users to bypass the telephone cord.
The key reason why AT&T did not innovate and improve its product for the consumer was not because it was closely regulated as a utility and that it had to provide universal access, it was because it was a monopoly and no had little incentive to innovate. It was not until the 1980s that consumers were finally able to connect foreign attachments to their telephones, such as answering machines and modems, purchase their own phones, including cordless and touchtone devices, and choose their own long-distance telephone provider and calling plan.
Touchtone “dialing” finally arrives in the 1980s. Was that really so hard?
In other words, with viable competition in underserved markets, commercial ISPs will be forced to, in the words of countless entrepreneurial free-marketeers, “innovate or die.”
Updated because the new WordPress for iOS app turned my Markdown into HTML. Yuck.
As a man of a certain age, I have been an active Internet user for over twenty years, beginning with email and USENET. I have also been using the graphical web since about late 1995 or early 1996, around the time I figured out how to set up a dialup SLIP connection at home. As someone initially intimidated by computers, getting my Quadra on the Internet via a phone line—without a commercial service like AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve—was an initial step in becoming the lonely, over-inquisitive technophile that I am today.
Over that time, I have collected (and lost) a bunch of web bookmarks. We all have. In my days of doing desktop support, my users bemoaned getting a new computer because they feared losing their documents, which we diligently transferred, and their bookmarks, which we also migrated to their new browser.1 Each user’s bookmark collection was like a box of digital heirlooms.
Some of my own bookmarks are really, really old. They have migrated from one browser to another—Netscape to Internet Explorer to Safari—and outlasted about a half-dozen Macs, starting with a PowerMac G3. Over the weekend, I was typing some address in the Safari web location bar. After a few keystrokes, the auto-complete feature suggested something long-forgotten, though kinda-familiar: The Standpipe Gallery at http://standpipegallery.com. Don’t bother following that link because it’s dead. In fact, after clicking through my other bookmarks, especially those dating from when I still organized them into folders, very few sites still exist today. That was kinda depressing.
A fun resource, probably where I looked up the term “grass widow”
Dead
I’d go on, listing more of them, but I already feel old and sad enough without plunging any further. At one time, my bookmark collection, and the sites collected therein, meant something to me. They either provided some utility, some insight, or even a laugh, but now, years later, they’re gone. And had I not impulsively followed one of them, they would all have been forgotten, too.
There’s some truth to the claim that the Internet never forgets, a fact that makes me think twice before I post something here. But there’s something else that’s also true about us and our digital artifacts. Someday, we will all be dead. And once our domain registrations expire and our hosting plans don’t renew, our web sites will be dead, too. Just like us.
As for the Standpipe Gallery that initially piqued my curiosity and triggered this post, I figured out that it was a gallery founded by Alison Pierz, the wife of a grad-school colleague. Much like the website, the gallery no longer exists. However, there’s an “archive” available of the work shown there over the years. It survives as a Facebook page.
If I remember correctly, for a time, there was even some issue with browser lock-in. Your Netscape bookmarks would not easily transfer to Internet Explorer, or vice-versa, or maybe, I’m just making that up. ↩
Yesterday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal article criticizing television networks for speeding up movies and television episodes to squeeze in more time for commercials. While an informed first-impression might react in horror at such a practice, I argued that it’s no big whoop for two reasons.
TV broadcasts and in-class screenings are, at best, proxies for the original work. No one should expect these viewings to be the canonical version of a film or a first-run broadcast.
Whereas time and pacing might be crucial for some films, speeding up a film by 2-4% doesn’t really matter for other works. An educated expert in film history and aesthetics like me should be able to determine when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
All of this was before I had read Marco Arment’s defense of letting people listen to podcasts at whatever speed he/she wants, published on Tuesday. He has an interest in the matter because he developed Overcast), a popular podcatching app for iOS. One of the unique features of that app is Smart Speed, which allows listeners to skip moments of silence to reduce the overall listening time of the program. In his nuanced argument, he distinguishes between certain podcasts, where timing and pauses are essential, and other podcasts where it is less relevant. He notes:
Podcasts (and video) are impossible to skim effectively, but we can vary our listening speed. Just as not every article is worth reading slowly and completely, not every podcast is This American Life. Even most episodes of This American Life aren’t as timing-sensitive as the Mike Daisey retraction. Some podcasts are painstakingly crafted, artistic “storytelling” shows, but most aren’t, by far.
The same is true for most feature films and television programs. There are some works where pace and tempo absolutely matter and others where it does not. As I wrote yesterday, I would never speed up a Hitchcock or Maya Deren film—or an episode of The Wire—because speed and tempo absolutely matters in those works. The same is true for even less artistic works, but it takes a trained and experienced viewer to know when it does matter. For example, in college, a well-respected film professor—I won’t say who—confessed that she “skimmed” certain silent films at double speed because, in her expert opinion, the time saved outweighed the original intent of some long-dead hack studio filmmaker making five films a week (my words, not hers).
One of the unique aspects of Overcast is its approach to reducing listening time. Most other podcatching apps simply allow listeners to speed up playback. For example, Downcast for iOS allows listeners to audition a podcast at 1.5x and 2.0x speed.1 I have used Downcast for years but never used its 1.5x/2.0x feature because it altered the pitch to such a degree that l simply couldn’t enjoy the content. Smart Speed in Overcast, on the other hand, is a compromise. It retains the same pitch, a crucial aspect of sonic fidelity, but also allows listeners to “skim” the content. Reducing the moments of silence might be terrible for a chilling interview on 60 Minutes, but it might not matter as much for a group of journalists discussing the television industry, despite the fact that both are excellent, informative, and well-produced programs.
You can be doctrinal about screening and auditioning things at their original speed, but as with everything good and holy in this world, it is more complicated than you might have initially thought. That’s why we have to make our own decisions about balancing our precious time, in-class discussion (or advertising minutes), and the integrity of a work.
The above links to the iTunes store are affiliate links.
Remember, that I have only sped up fewer than ten screening and only at 1.02x–1.04x. ↩
Next Thursday will be a big day for telecommunications policy in the United States. The FCC is scheduled to vote on whether it will reclassify broadband Internet service as a common-carrier utility (Title II) instead of its current destination as an information service (Title I). Classifying broadband as a utility would allow the FCC to enforce regulations aimed at prohibiting discriminatory and preferential treatment of Internet traffic. In short, under Title II, the FCC could institute and enforce net neutrality rules for an open Internet.
Because these rules threaten the status quo of telecommunications companies, particularly the MVPD (“cable companies”) that dominate the broadband market in the United States, there is an offensive designed to turn public opinion against net neutrality.
One unexpected place for this anti–net neutrality discourse came from the FCC itself. Earlier today, the FCC posted a press release on its website titled “What People Are Saying About President’s Plan to Regulate The Internet.” The document is a selection of quotes that oppose net neutrality, characterizing it as a regulatory burden on the innovative broadband industry.
According to some veteran communication lawyers who monitor the FCC, it is unprecedented for the FCC to release a preemptive, partisan position, such as this one, especially since this is a collage of quotes rather than an actual announcement. Press releases are intended to give news agencies content to reproduce or adapt for their publications. By releasing a series of quotes without any background, this release could serve as the basis for anti–net neutrality news articles, in the coming days, on the eve this potentially historic vote. This is especially troubling since, under the banner of the FCC, it sounds like a quasi official endorsement of these positions. Moreover, the title of the release includes references to “people,” giving the position a folksy, common-sense tone, and to the “president’s plan to regulate the Internet,” which not only sounds like a top-down executive decision but also a push to impose burdensome regulations on “our Internet.”
If this language–of President Obama threatening free-enterprise with regulation–sounds like a tired-old Republican talking point, that’s because opposing net neutrality is a tired old Republican position.
The FCC has five commissioners, each is appointed by the president. In order to ensure some political balance, no more than three commissioners can be from the president’s political party. The source of the press release referenced above is Brendan Carr, a staffer for Commissioner Ajit Pai. Commissioner Pai is one of the two FCC Republican-party commissioners and a net-neutrality opponent.
Even former chairman Robert McDowell (yes, another Republican) has chimed in comparing Obama’s push for net neutrality to the actions of Saudi and Russian dictators. Throughout his seven-year tenure at the FCC, he dogmatically opposed communications policies like net neutrality, universal access, and reviving the Fairness Doctrine. It’s nice to see he has been keeping busy since stepping down from the Commission in 2013.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve last lived with a dog—a small Tibetan Spaniel named Capella—but I think I know what a corporate lapdog looks like.
Update: The press release now indicates that it was issued from the office of Commissioner Ajit Pai.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping piece of legislation passed in 1998, prohibits the circumvention of copyright controls, known as Technological Protection Measures (TPM). The aim of this prohibition is to prevent users from defeating TPMs to infringe on copyright. There are various measures in place, especially as newer media technologies emerged since 2000, and cracking them is not only difficult, it is actually illegal, even if you don’t infringe on any specific copyrights.
Every three years, the Librarian of Congress decides which uses are non-infringing and permits specific exemptions to the anti-circumvention provision. I first became involved with this triennial review on the eve of the 2006 rule-making process. At the time, media scholars and teaching faculty were legally hamstrung in extracting short clips and screen captures from copy-protected DVDs for teaching film and television classes at a college or university level. DVDs offered a better source than a film print or a videocassette for two major reasons: efficiency and fidelity.
DVDs offered a convenient package for us to extract clips and frame grabs. With a DVD, we would use a computer’s optical drive to extract clips. We could easily skip to a scene and take what we needed in a short amount of time. In the few times I took frame enlargements from a 16mm print, the process could take as little as a few days but would often take over a week. It would also be expensive because I had to buy 35mm film, pay to have it processed and printed. With a DVD, I could grab what I needed in a matter of minutes at almost no cost.
DVDs offered higher fidelity than what was available on videocassette and on some film prints. Not only does a DVD offer many more lines of resolution than a videocassette or look better than a beat-up film print, extracting a clip or a frame is an entirely digital process. We don’t have to resort to an analog conversion and the attendant generation loss. The image would look as sharp as it did on the DVD.
Moreover, the EFF (aka the “good guys”) have filed several briefs on behalf advocating for additional exemptions. Most of these exemptions account for emerging technologies that seemed fantastic fifteen years ago at the dawn of the millennium but are very real today. Some of the exemptions the EFF is seeking to secure include:
Accessing onboard computers on vehicles for research and repair.
Creating video remixes from locked videos on disks and from streaming sites to upload onto video sharing sites.
Jailbreaking phones and tablets.
Modifying video games so that they need not “phone home” to an authorization server when the server is offline.
While it is cumbersome to constantly reapply for these exemptions, it is important to continually update our laws. They should not only keep up with new emerging technologies, but also with our own ever-evolving culture.
We may have been exempt before then, but I was a scofflaw in this regard in 2006. ↩
I also learned that my birth is closer to World War II than it is to today. Or put another way: New Wave is chronologically closer to Big Band than it is to anything released today.
To most everyone I know, email is an intrinsic part of modern life, but it’s one that overwhelms us daily. As a result, there’s a lot of good advice for managing email. Back in “the day,” it used to be pretty easy to manage email when you had to sit at a computer, dial-in to a modem pool, connect to the “information superhighway“, and download your email to read it offline.1 It really was like checking a postal box: you did it on your time, only about once a day, and it didn’t overwhelm us.
But, of course, that’s not how we check email today. Email is always with us, and some of us are always on it. People in advertising and public relations, for example, seem to respond within nanoseconds to any message I send, and they get grumpy when I don’t reply for several minutes. That’s probably why the people I know in those fields seem perpetually burned out. Living and working that way would burn me out too because I get a decent volume of email. I would struggle to get any actual work done if I had to treat email like a telephone conversation without moments of silence. That’s why I turn off any notification alerts, push, and in some cases, even the unread-message badge in my mail client.
Fortunately, my work is of the nature where no one expects an immediate response over email. A few hours or even a day in responding is acceptable. Part of it is, I suspect, because in academic environments, stocked with aging faculty who refuse to retire, our institutional culture considers it a miracle that the old-school professors even check their email in the first place. A timely response is treated like a bonus.
That is why I’m advocating for a dedicated email appliance. I currently have four devices where I can check email, and at least one of those is always with me. Not only is the ability to check email always there, so is the temptation. And guess what? I check it constantly, even if I don’t have to. But if email were offloaded to a dedicated appliance or device, I would only check it when I had access to it.
Think about how you use an appliance or a single-purpose device. For example, you may own a dishwasher or a toenail clipper, and you probably use those regularly. But because you don’t have always those one-trick ponies with you, you’re not constantly washing your dishes or clipping your toenails (or at least you shouldn’t be). You wait to do those things, even if you have always have dishes to wash and regularly have a bothersome nail to clip. At the same, you probably don’t neglect the essential duties of washing dishes or trimming your nails. You just do it when you have the necessary tools and when it’s an opportune time. Email should be the same.
Getting an “email appliance” doesn’t require you to buy any new hardware, and you probably don’t even have to add or remove any software. All you have to do is treat email as something you do at a good place and certainly at the right time:
Is it time to write a paper? Shut down all your other apps, maybe turn off WiFI, and write.
Is it time for class? Shut down all your other apps, definitely turn off WiFI, and take notes.
Is it time to prepare a spreadsheet? Ingest your data and start writing some VLOOKUPs and SUMIFs.
Is it time to manage your task list? Yes, do that, and then get back to work.
Is it time to check email? Yes, go ahead. Quit all your other apps, do your email, and only do your email.
By putting email at the end of this list, I’m not suggesting that email should be last thing you do when you have nothing else to do. (Sitting a bar and drinking by yourself is the last thing you should do after you’ve exhausted all other responsibilities and possible activities.)2 Instead, think of email as a thing you do, like washing dishes and trimming your nails, not a thing you always do.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
One of the least heralded features of iOS 8 is QuickType, often known as “Auto-Complete”. Instead of rudely correcting your misspellings like Auto Correct, QuickType suggests three possibilities for what you might want to type next: the more keys you press, the more precise the suggestion. On rare occasions, it doesn’t suggest what you want to type and you must type the entire word. But a more common occurrence is that you get the next word you were going to type with one or two key presses. While you could probably type the word faster than reviewing and accepting the appropriate suggestion, QuickType saves a significant amount of screen-tapping.
Somewhere in between those two situations is when you can just accept the first suggestion without any input. The results can be amusing. Although sentences composed this way appear grammatically correct, they are semantically nonsensical. When the featured debuted last fall, the world saw a Twitter account of these amusing missives and even a song composed using only QuickType.
Last night, a friend and I wrote to each other using only QuickType suggestions. It made no sense but was amusing nonetheless.
She began:
The fact that the company said the government of national security and stability in the world is full of people who are not in a row
Look at the end of the best thing
To which I replied:
The fact I can get it right away with the best of the year and I don’t think that I have a great way of the year.
To which she replied:
Thanks to my mom
I love the new version of a sudden urge
I’m at a time when you are so
To which I replied:
I’m at a time when you are not
To which she replied:
The fact I can see it
The only thing that would have to go back and I don’t think that I have a great way of the day
And I then wrote:
No more. I’m at a time when you are not in my room for a long way in hell
I have no idea how I feel so good
And she concluded:
Ok so I have a good idea but I can’t even get the hang of the year
You really have to appreciate the things computers say. Reads like we had a few, doesn’t it?
A little more than ten years ago, a fake image from a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics went “viral” before that word meant what it means today. It featured a model of what we imagined that they thought a personal computer would look like fifty years later in 2004.
Whereas in 1954, a personal computer from The Future could have been room-sized and featured a steering wheel, in 2004, I was probably looking at this vision of The Future using a 15-inch Powerbook notebook that fit on (and overheated) my lap. It was a nice chuckle, especially because in 1954 this was probably the smallest anyone could imagine a computer getting.
From what I understand, no one imagined computers getting very small because they were powered by diodes. In 1954, the concept of a diode, or vacuum tube, was hardly state of the art in the 1950s. It dated back to the turn-of-the-century design by John Ambrose Fleming. The tubes were positively enormous and a digital computer required many diodes to work. They required a lot of power and generated a lot of heat. That’s why computers were so damn big and probably wouldn’t have been possible without the advent of air conditioning.
U.S. Army Photo. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Personal computers escaped the fate of that Popular Mechanics image and its diode-powered mainframe predecessors because they would be powered by microprocessors invented in the early 1970s. If my eighth-grade computer teacher was right, a lightbulb-sized diode would be replaced by a silicon transistor that was smaller than a grain of sand.
Let that sink in: something the size of a lightbulb was replaced by something smaller than a grain of sand.
Those microprocessors would be able to power a microcomputer, and forty years ago this week, they would power the first personal microcomputer: the Altair 8800.
What would the Altair 8800 do? From a consumer’s perspective, it did not do much. You could flip switches, and it would return the output with blinking lights. But from a computer nerd’s perspective, it gave you the chance to not only use a computer for as long as you wanted, but it was also one you could use in your own home. 1 It must have felt like you could do anything.
Watching the Home Brew Computer Club in this video, I am reminded of brewing coffee with an Aeropress. No one seems satisfied with the default method way of using it, and you had to figure out a better way to use the damn thing. And everyone has.
Seamless and Amazon Fresh are a direct result of this development. ↩
I’m guessing this tech entrepreneur dropped out of college because that’s how they roll.
A few weeks ago, at the Jacob Javitts Center, one of every New Yorker’s least favorite favorite places to go in Manhattan, technology website Engadget staged the 2014 Expand Expo. It’s the poor man’s Tech Crunch Disrupt. The expo included a number of half-baked projects, more suitable for Kickstater, and a few very well-realized products, such as a personal LTE hotspot that is very reasonably priced. And there were a ton of virtual reality games, none of which seemed all that interesting.
One of the better products I saw there was the Pour Steady. It makes five cups of pourover coffee at a time. The brewer goes through all the steps of making a proper pourover, including wetting the filter, allowing the grounds to bloom, and pausing between each pour allowing hot water to thoroughly pass through the grounds.
It’s just another startup innovation that promises to deprecate human labor.
Update: Some of Pour Steady’s creators actually did finish their college degrees. Juan regrets the error.
The Pew Research Center for Internet and American Life has published a quiz on Internet technology. The Center administered the quiz in September to a “nationally representative” sample in September 2014 and published a report based on those findings.
Today, they released the twelve-question quiz to the public. If you can spare a few moments, take the quiz yourself and see how you do.
I correctly answered 10 of the 12 questions. These are the are the ones I missed:
In my head, Moore’s Law was that the speed of computers processor would double approximately every eighteen months, or so. But I suppose that increase in speed is made possible due to cramming more transistors onto a chip.
I’m attributing this to a good, old-fashioned brain fart. I knew that Mark Zuckerberg went to Harvard and started Facebook there. After all, I saw the movie! But, for whatever reason, I answered MIT.
