Cable Industry Admits That Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Congestion

Data Caps not Due to Congestion!!!!

A month after one study called shenanigans on the cable industry’s repeated assertion that data caps and usage-based pricing are intended to relieve congestion, the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association has admitted as much.


NCTA president, and former FCC chair, Michael Powell recently told a Minority Media and Telecommunications Association audience that usage-based pricing isn’t about congestion, but “how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost.”

He said that charging more to customers who use the Internet the most “is a completely rational and acceptable process to figure out how to fairly allocate those costs among your consumers who are choosing the service and will pay you to recover those costs.”

Time Warner Cable recently announced its intentions to make its Essentials broadband service, which provides a $5 discount to customers who agree to stay below 5GB/month in data usage, available nationwide. Consumers voiced their concerns about the program (which really only offers about $1/month in savings when you factor in that you currently must rent a modem from TWC) because a $5 discount for customers who can only use 1/50 of the broadband of regular customers doesn’t seem to add up.

“If usage caps were about ‘fairness,’ carriers would offer the nation’s grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website,”writes DSL reports.com's Karl Bode. “Instead, what I most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like ‘fairness’ to you?”
As for Powell’s assertion that there is such a high fixed cost involved in setting up broadband networks, the December report from the New America Foundation claims that the overall cost of providing Internet service has decreased over the last five years, at the same time as user numbers have grown and the use of broadband-heavy applications like streaming video have become commonplace.

“Despite the substantial decrease in the cost of operating a network and transporting data, consumers have not seen a resulting decline in the cost of service,” wrote the NAF, “nor have many providers increased the usage caps to reflect the decline in costs for Internet connectivity.

Unlocking Cell Phones in U.S. to Become Illegal January 26

 

 

Librarian Of Congress's 90 day window ends Saturday

 

Unlocking Cell Phones in the United States will become illegal on January 26 due to the expiry of a 90-day window that deemed the practice legal.

During the October of 2012, the Librarian of Congress, which decides the exemptions to the anti-hacking law dubbed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), ruled that unlocking mobile phones would no longer be deemed legal in America.

However, it approved a 90-day window that allowed consumers to purchase a phone and unlock it without any legal repercussions. The window, though, comes to an end on January 26.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questions DMCA's right to determine who can unlock a phone. EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said: "Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide."

Unlocking a phone (not to be confused from jailbreaking -- a method to run additional software and instill modified code -- which remains legal) allows it to function on more than one carrier.

While the deadline will make it illegal to unlock cell phones in the U.S., carriers such as Verizon offer devices such as the iPhone 5 as an unlocked smartphone, while AT&T will unlock a handset when its contract has expired.

The War Against Internet Freedom

 

Aaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters

 

On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, "it was not an important failure".

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world. He was 26 when he died, but from the age of 14 he had been astonishing those of us who followed him on the internet. In 10 years he had accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime.

In the days following his death, the blogosphere resounded  with expressions of grief, sadness and loss not just from people who had worked with him, but also from those who only knew him from afar – the users of the things he helped to create (the RSS web feed, social news websites, the Creative Commons  copyright licences, for example), or those who had followed his scarily open and thoughtful blogging.

 

But in addition to the grief, there was real anger, because many people feel that Swartz had been hounded to his death by aggressive federal prosecutors. This view was most vividly expressed by his father at Aaron's funeral service in Chicago on Tuesday. "Aaron did not commit suicide," said Robert Swartz, "but was killed by the government. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government."

What lay behind this anger was United States v Aaron Swartz, a prosecution launched in Massachusetts, charging Swartz with "wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer". If convicted, he could have faced 35 years in prison and a $1m fine. The case stemmed from something he had done in furtherance of his belief that academic publications should be freely available. He had surreptitiously hooked up a laptop to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network and used it to download millions of articles from the JSTOR archive of academic publications.

 

Even those of us who shared his belief in open access thought this an unwise stunt. But what was truly astonishing – and troubling – was the vindictiveness of the prosecution, which went for Swartz as if he were a major cyber-criminal who was stealing valuable stuff for personal gain. "The outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron," wrote Lawrence Lessig , the distinguished lawyer who was also one of Swartz's mentors. "It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behaviour. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' – with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."

 

The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope's famous rhetorical question: "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" It would be possible to write off the Swartz prosecution (as some have done) as the action of a politically ambitious attorney general, but actually it fits a much more sinister pattern. It was clear that a decision had been made to make an example of this cheeky young hacker and in that sense this grotesque prosecution sits neatly alongside the treatment of Corporal Bradley Manning, not to mention the hysterical reaction of the US authorities to WikiLeaks.

What has happened, in fact, is that governments which since 9/11 have presided over the morphing of their democracies into national security states have realised that the internet represents a truly radical challenge to their authority, and they are absolutely determined to control it. They don't declare this as their intention, of course, but instead talk up "grave" threats – cybercrime, piracy and (of course) child pornography – as rationales for their action. But, in the end, this is now all about control. And if a few eggheads and hackers get crushed on the way well, that's too bad. RIP Aaron.

How to disable Java in your browser

 Seem to get a lot of E-mails on how to disable java, So here it is.

Chrome

Chrome will notify you before it downloads or runs Java content. I am  reasonably sure this will prevent security issues.
     
For further protection users can enter"about:plugins" in the address bar to enable and/or disable Java and other plugins. There is a single entry for Java identified as "Java TM" that can be disabled for complete protection in Chrome.

FireFox

Firefox plugin options can be located in "Tools - > Add-ons -> Plugins". There will be one or more Java entries: Examples include "Java Deployment Toolkit" and "Java Platform". I suggest disabling all Java related plugins to ensure your computer’s safety.
For more about Java on Firefox see Firefox’s support website.

Internet Explorer

If you are running versions 8, 9, or 10 you can use this method:

• Open your Internet Explorer
• Click the gear icon in the top right of the browser to open the settings menu
• Click on " Manage add-ons"
• In the left sidebar of the Manage Add-ons window that appears use the drop down box at the bottom to change to "All  add-ons".
• Select each add-on that begins with "Java(tm)" and use the " disable " button that appears at the bottom of the window above the close button

Alternatively Microsoft provides this knowledgebase article that is said to work for all Internet Explorer versions on all versions of Windows. Care should be taken when using this method since it involves editing the Windows registry.

Opera

To disable Java under Opera:

• Open your web browser
• Type "opera:plugins" in the address bar and press the Enter key
• Locate Java(TM) within the list (there may be several listed items)
• Click "Disable"

Safari

Visit http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5241 for more information.

Android & iOS

Your device does not natively support Java in the web browser.

Lynx

You’re probably good to go already.

Disable Java in your browser

 

Java is a plugin for web browsers that is installed on approximately 66% of all computers. However there are very few websites that still rely on the features that it provides, leaving those 66% of computers vulnerable to attack when the dated technology is exploited. This has unfortunately happened several times in the past few months.
     
Leaving Java enabled on your computer could allow hackers to take control of your computer and install and run programs without your permission.

As fewer and fewer sites actually rely on client side Java to power their online applications, and it now seems the risks of using Java greatly outweigh the benefits. The primary issue being that one critical level bug can exploit every operating system and every browser.
The only sure solution to eliminate this risk is to disable Java entirely in the browser, then selectively [and temporarily] enable it when necessary. White-listing functionality exists for most major browsers, which ensures that Java will operate only on websites that you truly trust.
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      My proposal:

• Run your browser(s) without Java for the next 90 days.
• Count how many times you miss it. (So far we are up to zero on 10 systems)
• Continue to move on with your life, knowing you’re safer on the web.

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The Roku Box

We are still under testing with these units. On a better note Time Warner is teaming up with Roku in mid spring . Later details to follow.