Disqus - Latest Comments for Brett Glass

Re: $99 for 500GB at Amazon (Scripting News)

Brett Glass — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:33:49 -0000

I waited until 1986, when prices came down a bit, to buy a 40 MB drive for $1500. This was so that I could build a fast (10 MHz!) 286 machine to run OS/2 1.0. I wrote a lot of software for that operating system.

However, most of what was published was written for MS-DOS in Turbo Pascal and published by Borland -- at the time a big technology leader. (Borland refused to port its compilers to OS/2, even though it would have been an easy port.)

Those were the days, eh?

Re: Where's your data? (Scripting News)

Brett Glass — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:40:40 -0000

Dave, if you want to recover the data from old CP/M disks I still have an old KayPro that runs Uniform. (Uniform was a sort of "Rosetta Stone" program which could translate between all of the old CP/M formats.) I keep that machine around because once every year or so someone asks me to salvage data from diskettes found in a basement, a safe deposit box, or an old filing cabinet.

The biggest challenge I've faced lately was to recover the data from a backup made by a backup product called "Fastback" onto old 5.25" IBM high density diskettes. It didn't use a format that anything else could read. I had to find a copy of the proprietary software, and a machine old enough to run the code (it had software timing loops that used counters that overflowed on t0o fast a machine), before I could lay hands on the data.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » “Cry [Censorship] and Let Slip the Dogs of [Regulation]!” - A Lesson in the Dangers of Googlephobia

Brett Glass — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:06:34 -0000

SQL injection is certainly a vulnerability of great concern in database-driven Web sites. However, in this case Google was blocking direct links to PDF documents. There was no opportunity for a reader to be infected by fetching the documents. This is clearly overzealous, even if in this case it was not deliberate censorship. After all, when you're off Google, you're essentially off the Net.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » “Cry [Censorship] and Let Slip the Dogs of [Regulation]!” - A Lesson in the Dangers of Googlephobia

Brett Glass — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:38:24 -0000

Berin:

Good points. It's worth noting, though, that while Google couldn't block access to those documents from the Net, it was blocking access to them via its search engine. Only a network-savvy user would have known that it was possible to manually cut the URL from Google's "warning" page and paste it into the browser's URL bar.

It seems to me that because the documents themselves were not infected, Google's claims that the documents "may harm your computer" were indeed irresponsible. Their system could have (and should have!) noted that the documents contained nothing malicious, rather than "turning off" access to many documents that were perfectly fine. Otherwise, there would be massive collateral damage if one page near the "top" of a deep Web site -- perhaps one that hosted pages for thousands of people or businesses -- happened to have a link to a single piece of malware.

As I've said many times, I believe that the only time government should intervene in network management or the operation of the Internet is when there is intentional anticompetitive behavior. If this had indeed turned out to be censorship, the public hue and cry would have been sufficient motivation for Google to change its ways. And I hope that this incident does prompt Google to block only pages or files which actually contain malware, and not perfectly fine, useful documents that happen to share part of a URL with a page that does.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » “Cry [Censorship] and Let Slip the Dogs of [Regulation]!” - A Lesson in the Dangers of Googlephobia

Brett Glass — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:11:41 -0000

If someone was intent upon fooling a malware detection system, he or she would likely not be detected in the first place. Also, it's very easy to scan PDFs for irregularities which would trigger the very few known vulnerabilities that have surfaced in PDF readers to date. I did, and everything on the PFF's site came up clean. If I can do it, a company that's professing to tell you whether Web objects are safe surely can as well. And such a company could easily arrange to scan from addresses that were not easily identifiable as belonging to it.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Our First Net Neutrality Law: Congrats to our Big Gov’t Opponents

Brett Glass — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:17:11 -0000

Adam, as a small businessperson directly affected by the ruling, I have less occasion to be sanguine or congratulatory. Free Press lied, and lied, and then lied again to obtain it. They ran an "astroturf" campaign (they spent $700,000 on their Internet agenda in 2007 alone) to deceive the public, the media, and government officials, and it is going to hurt free enterprise, small business, entrepreneurship, and broadband deployment.

I was one of the very few independent ISPs who spoke up in this matter. Most of my colleagues failed to recognize how much damage an adverse decision could do, or told me they were "too busy" fighting off anticompetitive practices by the telephone and cable companies. They trusted government to do the right thing, not realizing how much harm it could do or how likely it was, under the circumstances, to do the wrong thing. They are only now becoming aware of what this decision bodes.

At this juncture, no one knows the precise content of the FCC ruling. However, if (as is speculated) it attempts to turn a policy statement that was previously declared to be "nonbinding" into rules without the Commmission's normal rulemaking process, it will be arbitrary and capricious and a violation of due process -- and will justly be seen by the courts in this way. But in the meantime, capital for broadband deployment will dry up due to the uncertainty, and innovation and competition could well be extinguished. Because Commissioner Michael Copps has stated his intent to continue this pattern of arbitrary and capricious behavior, and will likely do so if the Democratic party gains more power in the fall election, we must encourage Comcast to fight the FCC's ruling. Given the recent decision in CBS v. Comcast, it is almost an open-and-shut case.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Radio Propagation and Frequency

Brett Glass — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:32:07 -0000

Several factors other than the r-squared law come into play when you send a wireless signal. The two most important are as follows. Firstly, there's atmospheric attenuation; the air absorbs some of the signal. Secondly, there's interference. The farther you are from the transmitter, the more noise your antenna will pick up trying to receive the signal from it. These, plus some other technical factors, can be compensated for by using an exponent larger than 2. A good rule of thumb for microwave transmission is to use an exponent of 3.5.

Re: Google not censoring PFF - or are they?

Brett Glass — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:24:49 -0000

Response to Richard's "UPDATE 2": Yes, it does seem more likely that Google is merely guilty of being irresponsible rather than of deliberate censorship.

But that irresponsibility deserves some attention. It's MUCH easier to tell which documents on a site contain malware than it is to determine whether a P2P stream is illegal or not! So, if Google et al are criticizing Comcast for using too heavy a hand in mitigating P2P, they should look in the mirror and ask earnestly if they are not even more guilty of the same sin of which they are accusing Comcast, Bell Canada, and other ISPs who are merely trying to manage their networks.

Re: Free Press doesn’t want you to read this

Brett Glass — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:26:19 -0000

Ironically, when I said, "no one is censoring the Internet," Free Press -- which had been making dire predictions of Internet censorship -- turned around and censored its blog. So, now I will have to amend that statement to read, "Comcast never censored the Internet -- but Free Press, a well funded lobbying group which is pushing for regulation of the Internet -- has."

Re: Free Press doesn’t want you to read this

Brett Glass — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:23:17 -0000

No one outside of Free Press itself knows for sure who is funding them. I do have an unconfirmed report that Free Press' biggest donor is the Ford Foundation. This is ironic because one of the Ford Foundation's key agendas is to promote democracy. (Regulating ISPs out of business, as Free Press's agenda would do, would obviously harm democracy by harming people's ability to get online, get informed, and participate.)

The situation is obfuscated by the fact that Free Press is really two groups: "Free Press" and the "Free Press Action Fund." (I'm not counting their other aliases, such as "Save the Internet" and "Internet for Everyone," because these are just Web sites and not actual organizations -- though they look, deceptively, like separate groups to the casual observer.)

Free Press is registered as a 501(c)(3) public charity, and the Free Press Action Fund is registered as a 501(c)(4) (a cateogory used by trade associations and lobbying groups). 501(c)(3) groups are very limited in their ability to lobby, so apparently many of them try to do an "end run" around this restriction by forming an affiliated 501(c)(4) that lobbies for the things they can't (or spends more on lobbying that they're allowed to). This defies the intent of Congress when it restricted the ability of 501(c)(3)s -- which can receive tax deductible contributions -- to lobby. But it is a loophole that many Washington lobbyists will probably continue to exploit until it is closed.

Fortunately, Federal law does make nonprofits' Forms 990 a matter of public record, so I've posted the Free Press Forms 990 for the year 2007 at http://brettglass.com/FreePress990.pdf and http://brettglass.com/FreePressAF990.pdf. Note that between the two corporations, they've spent more than $700,000 on lobbying on "network neutrality" and related issues! That's more than any small, independent ISP like ourselves -- or even a trade association consisting of all of us together -- could ever hope to raise. The forms give a better perspective on who is really David and who is Goliath here. Free Press, with millions in funding between its two corporations, is no small underdog!

Re: Let’s make data centers obsolete

Brett Glass — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:17:53 -0000

This isn't a good idea. Internet bandwidth is most expensive at the edges, and latency from there to other users at other edges is the longest. It's the worst place from which to serve up data. You want to do that from servers in the "middle" of the Net. What's more, the most scarce and valuable resource of the Internet is bandwidth near the edges. Building bandwidth out to those edges is MUCH more expensive than building a server farm... by many orders of magnitude.

Put the servers out there, and you'll raise the cost of broadband deployment and exhaust the resources that are already there. Anyone can buy space on a fast, cheap server at a server farm for far less than it costs to serve data from the edge. So, why don't the people who are running this project just do that? There's only one possible reason: they want to get users and ISPs to give them these resources for free. Which just doesn't wash. If use of these devices became widespread it would either drive up the cost of broadband tremendously or be banned from networks outright by businesses and ISPs. And deservedly so. It's a bad idea.

Re: Let’s make data centers obsolete

Brett Glass — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:21:28 -0000

Do you think for a minute that the makers of these boxes, or the content providers behind them, would settle for "scavenger class?" Especially when one of the things that motivates them to use P2P is that it hacks the net so as to take PRIORITY over other traffic? I don't think so. I think that their intent is to try to take as much bandwidth as they can, at the expense of ISPs, without paying for it.

Re: Let’s make data centers obsolete

Brett Glass — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:25:47 -0000

Richard, I do not think that the telcos -- which are [your company's] largest customers -- really care whether Google is the king of search or not. Yes, they could conceivably have been Google's competitors, but they've decided to sit that dance out. Nor do they really want their consumers to be using large amounts of bandwidth even if it IS low priority, because it still costs. And because, if history is any guide, many users won't accept the idea that the applications are low priority, will get impatient with them (because they want absolutely EVERYTHING to be instant), and want them to be high priority.

In any event, the bottom line is that shifting servers to the edge of the network is always a bad idea. It's not any more or less "democratic," because you can always feed the raw data to a server from the edge. But it doesn't make sense to distribute from the edges.

Re: Let’s make data centers obsolete

Brett Glass — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:09:01 -0000

Any content that originates at the edge can (and should be) sent to the middle for widespread distribution. It costs far too much, and involves too much latency and other overhead, to send it from the edge repeatedly.

Re: Network World on Martin’s rash order

Brett Glass — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:20:01 -0000

To be fair to Chairman Martin, we do not know yet what his proposed order said, or what modifications the other Commissioners have suggested. Just because Free Press, under its alias "Save the Internet", writes, "FCC hammers Comcast," this does not necessarily mean that is it what the FCC will really do. I certainly hope it doesn't, because even a lighthanded swat at a huge corporation like Comcast could be a huge blow to smaller and independent ISPs, depending upon the wording of the ruling. If the FCC is truly committed to rural broadband deployment and consumer choice, it wouldn't want to harm them. (It has already nearly destroyed about half by denying them any opportunity to gain access to licensed spectrum.)

It would be very foolish of the FCC to turn Michael Powell's raw and naive policy idea about allowing users to run the "applications of their choice" into a de facto rule without going through a public rule making process that could refine the language. Think about it: an "application" (a computer program) encodes behavior. And anyone at all can write one. So, insisting that anyone be able to run an application means that anyone can behave any way that he or she wants to -- no matter how destructively -- on the Internet. So, this requirement essentially means that no network provider can have an enforceable Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service. This is a recipe for disaster....

Re: David Sohn of CDT makes the right points

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:33:39 -0000

Alas, you cannot remove scarcity so long as you have an infinite (or nearly so) scarcity-creating mechanism: P2P. So long as content is free (even if it's free because it's pirated), people will download as much of it as they can. (Why not? There's zero marginal cost.) What's more, even if someone has his or her fill of free content, that person's computer will continue to saturate the pipes by sending it to others.If there's no penalty for doing that, more and more people will do it until any pipe is saturated. We have seen this in Japan, where 100 Mbps FTTH has not created a dent in resource exhaustion due to P2P.

In short, the problem is not any inherent scarcity but rather an artificially created one -- created by a mechanism that will always outpace the expansion of facilities.

Re: Let’s make data centers obsolete

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:42:46 -0000

Richard: Actually, it pays to "warehouse" it briefly even when it goes to a few people. When we send e-mail, for example, an upstream server "warehouses" the data long enough to distribute the copies to the individual recipients. It also protects against spam. (We all know what "any to any" connectivity did to the medium of e-mail until we got sensible and insisted that users transmit their mail through servers. If we hadn't done that, e-mail would already be completely useless.)

Scott: The fact is that a server across the country is almost certain to be "closer," network-wise, to someone on a different ISP in Texas than you are. And if you are only sending a few copies of something to a relative (Interesting how often P2Pers claim that this is what they're doing!), the impact of one file traveling a few extra miles is negligible compared to the impact of P2P. In fact, without the congestion caused by P2P, it'll get through a lot faster locally.

As for the location of the "middle": it consists of major Internet hubs, peering points, co-location centers, and backbone facilities. The Palo Alto Internet Exchange, located in an unassuming former telephone building on Ramona Street in downtown Palo Alto, California, is probably the most important of these.

Re: The future of P2P

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:46:59 -0000

By the way, one of the most disingenuous labels I've seen yet is the DCIA's characterization of P2P as "distributed computing." P2P nodes do no computing except a small amount to figure out how to redistribute data VERBATIM, with no processing whatsoever! And perhaps they invest a bit to see just how thoroughly they can saturate the pipes and how effectively they can rob bandwidth from more important uses.

Re: Network World on Martin’s rash order

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:57:38 -0000

I'm just hoping that Chairman Martin has the moxie to stand up to the moneied inside-the-Beltway lobbyists (such as Free Press, whose agenda would hurt the public interest) and do what's best for his actual constituency: the citizens of the United States. Do they need to be protected against anticompetitive actions by the telcos, cable companies, and backbone providers? Absolutely. In the absence of such activity, do they need the Internet to be micromanaged? Absolutely not. The only lynching here should be of the bogus lobbyists and their astroturfers.

Re: What’s good for Google is good for the Internet

Brett Glass — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:33:06 -0000

Not only is "deep packet inspection" a "scary" name -- it is a misleading one. Packets on the Internet are one-dimensional; they have no "depth." And one does not need to "dig deeper" to see any part of the packet; it's all of a piece. While the alarmists who -- for various selfish reasons -- claim that packets are like letters in envelopes, in fact they are more like postcards. The addressing information (which all routers must see) and the header information (which must be altered at each hop the packet takes) is no more visible than the payload, or data. Any device that can see one can see the rest.

It's ironic, too, that Google would be let off the hook when it not only scans packets but parses your e-mail looking for keywords that will be used to select advertising. If anything is invasive, this practice is; checking the packets to see if they are VoIP and prioritizing them appropriately is nothing by comparison.

Re: The future of P2P

Brett Glass — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:36:14 -0000

Unfortunately, P2P can never be as efficient as a simple, direct download -- which in turn can never be one millionth as efficient as a broadcast medium such as the airwaves. There is only one thing it's good at: hiding the source of pirated content. Which is why it was invented....

Re: Recommended reading

Brett Glass — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:43:34 -0000

Richard, thank you for citing my letter above. Ironically, I have already drafted a list of principles that could serve as the starting point for a set of rules such as the one you propose above -- and which include all of the points you've mentioned. See http://www.brettglass.com/principles.pdf for the document.

Re: Network World on Martin’s rash order

Brett Glass — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:08:53 -0000

Lessig isn't a Svengali who controls Free Press through Tim Wu. Lessig himself is listed as being on the Free Press Board of Directors. (See their Web site.) Nor does he control Kevin Martin, who certainly has the ability to think for himself.

Chairman Martin is obviously weighing pressure from Congresscritters (who, in a recent hearing, badgered him to admit that he needed legislative "assistance" to deal with Comcast's "evil" behavior), the opinions of his staff (staffers in DC have tremendous influence), and the opinions of his fellow Commissioners as well as his own ideas.

We can hope, at least, that Chairman Martin will not be influenced by inside-the-Beltway lobbyists, such as Free Press (which, according to its own Forms 990, spent more than $700,000 in 2007 alone on its various Internet agendas. (This includes their "Save the Internet" misinformation and astroturf campaign. I've spoken to quite a few people who used Free Press' "form letter machine" to send boilerplate comments to the FCC, and so far not one of them has known what Free Press' "network neutrality" agenda actually entails. They just responded to the group's warnings of unspecified "evil," assuming that since Comcast is a big corporation, it must be in the wrong.)

Since Free Press has convinced a few credulous lawmakers, and/or their staffers, that ISPs are acting in "evil" ways and that something must be done, it is the responsibility of the FCC as an expert agency to expose the misinformation and set the record straight. This is the best thing that Chairman Martin can do at this juncture.

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:24:26 -0000

Come to think of it, the "independent contractor" point also applies to Comcast. Comcast used an appliance manufactured by Sandvine. Is Comcast liable if the FCC does not like the way the appliances were programmed by Sandvine?

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:49:08 -0000

CBS knew that Timberlake and Jackson were going to perform a suggestive dance. They just didn't know the details.

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:54:00 -0000

...Oh, and they certainly didn't know that there would be an "astroturf uproar" about a half-second glimpse of a breast (covered by the equivalent of a pastie).

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:38:00 -0000

Sandvine might have the capability to work to spec for a very large order, but as I understand it this was their stock product.

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:17:16 -0000

In that case, we're in violent agreement. ;-)

By the way, you are absolutely right that Free Press "flooded the FCC with junk comments." The spam makes it extremely difficult to find the entries in the record which are not carbon copies created by Free Press' "astroturf" page.

What's more, I caught the names of a couple of local folks in the record and asked them why they'd signed on. They all said things like, "We can't let Comcast shut down the Internet!" and "Comcast is censoring the Internet!" Of course, Comcast is doing neither, and when I explained what was really happening -- and that the regulation Free Press is advocating would put me and other rural ISPs out of business -- they were sorry they'd signed on.

Re: Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

Brett Glass — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:20:48 -0000

P.S. -- Did the "wardrobe malfunction team" specify that they would NOT rip off their clothes? Yes, I know that for many viewers this was a bug, but for most of us -- who have seen human bodies before and are not shocked by them -- it was just mildly amusing to see them act out the lyrics.

Re: Does the FCC have the authority after all?

Brett Glass — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:19:12 -0000

Actually, the lawyers from Comcast have completely refuted Harold Feld's twisted and tenuous legal arguments. See

http://tinyurl.com/6y83yn

Comcast has also published a truly excellent filing exploding -- once again -- the falsehoods which Free Press has promugated about its network management practices. That one's at

http://tinyurl.com/695arh

and is probably the best thing it's written to date. (It's a shame that Comcast is finally waking up and making good filings only at the last minute.)

Re: Comcast sets the record straight

Brett Glass — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:41:25 -0000

Comcast should give a big bonus to the lawyer who wrote that document. It's the best they've ever published -- clear, concise, backed up by good citations and references, and free of the "attitude" that was present in some of the others. Will the FCC (particularly Commissioner Adelstein, who is surely the "swing" vote) listen? We can only hope. A ruling against Comcast would harm every broadband provider, but especially the smaller ones and the ones that are breaking new ground by covering previously unserved areas.

Re: Does the FCC have the authority after all?

Brett Glass — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:03:26 -0000

The statutory policy ays that the market for broadband services should be "unfettered by Federal and State regulation." Powell's policy statement (though it is nonbinding) would regulate ISPs' terms of service and thus contradicts the statute.

Re: Regulate first, ask questions later

Brett Glass — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:40:58 -0000

Alas, this is a victory AGAINST the Internet rather than FOR the Internet. The lobbyists who prompted this decision lied, and lied, and lied again…. The truth is that Comcast never censored the Internet one bit (not even the site of the lobbyists, who were slandering it) and was preserving quality of service in the face of attempted bandwidth hogging. Big corporations are often evil, but in this case Comcast was doing The Right Thing and deserved praise, not a penalty. (We need to encourage them when they do that, so that it happens more often.)

This decision is particularly troubling because it lets the nose of the regulatory camel into the Internet’s big tent. If you can tell ISPs that they can’t manage bandwidth, next you’ll be telling them what content to carry and not to carry. In fact, the FCC is already floating a proposal for censored public Internet. That’s the last thing we need.

Oh, and Free Press is continuing to censor postings I've made to its blog. So much for free, open media and political debate!

Re: Comcast sets the record straight

Brett Glass — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:45:13 -0000

A bunch of activity in the docket during the past few days.

Topolski, who seems now to be in the employ of the lobbying group Free Press (Gee, I wish I was a big money lobbyist with the cash to hire just one person, let alone dozens, to lobby in DC -- but instead I'm doing something productive with my life), has fired back, with a response that comes across as rather petulant and whiny, at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

The Nation Cable & Telecommunications Association (a cable providers' industry group) has filed a very good comment noting that every top tier university in the United States restricts or filters P2P; see http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi.... (And thank Heaven that the schools do it; research would grind to a halt if they did not.)

Free Press lawyer Marvin Ammori and MAP lawyer Harold Feld met with Kevin Martin's office and encouraged the FCC to stick it to Comcast.. (Gee, where do these two corporations -- actually, they're three corporations, because Free Press is composed of two corporations as a way of circumventing the tax code -- get the money for all of these lawyers? We small ISPs, as legitimate businesses with budgets, can't afford them.) See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

MediaCom points out that its own AUP also prohibits P2P and the operation of servers, and that this is appropriate and good for quality of service. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

Ammori visited with Commissioner Copps' office, undoubtedly providing unsolicited advice on how to strangle Comcast. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

The CWA chimes in to support Free Press, demonstrating that the entire issue is becoming polarized along party lines: Democrats and unions on one side, Republicans (except for Kevin Martin?) and corporations on the other. And the actual small ISPs like me who can provide competition? I don't get to speak to the Commissioners; I'm lucky if I can get a few minutes with their aides. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

A law firm hired by Comcast fires back with a brief refuting the recent submissions by the lobbying lawyers of MAP and Free Press. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

And so it goes. All that money flying about, and no one considering the actual issue of what's best for citizens. Well, about all I can do is go out and climb onto another rooftop (I'm installing for another rural resident this afternoon whom we've just freed from having to use dialup.) If the FCC won't let me and people like me make a difference (and if they regulate us, we won't be able to), they're hurting our country.

By the way, I was gratified today to see one single submission in the docket that wasn't from a lawyer, a paid lobbyint, or the Free Press astroturf "spam generator." It's from the host of this blog, Richard Bennett, at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

Re: A sad day for the Internet

Brett Glass — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:40:36 -0000

Today, I tried to "tune in" to the FCC's Webcast to watch the circus. But even though the machine was connected directly to my ISP's backbone and was unthrottled, I couldn't get the stream to work. RealPlayer (an application I don't like much anyway, because it's spyware) kept on saying, "Communicating..." but never showed me more than a still snapshot of the proceedings. And there was no audio.

I suspect that this was due to a lack of reasonable network management by the FCC as it streamed the meeting....