Andrew Cuomo attacks ISPs

In case you have not heard but New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, eldest son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, is on a rampage and he is beating his drum very loudly. What he is drumming up support over is his perseverance to get rid of child pornography. Do not misunderstand me, child pornography is a disgusting and heinous act committed by some very sick individuals. But the way some ISP’s are going about helping him eliminate child pornography is flawed.

The way ISP’s are going about doing this in New York is by eliminating the entire ‘alt’ hierarchy from the newsgroups. But the newsgroups contain thousands of discussion groups that are used by millions of people around the world. These were home to discussions before the web even. Some discussion groups go by sci.math, rec.motorcycles and even comp.os.linux, but there are many, many more. I’m sure if you perform a simple search you would find at least one thread for every programming language you can think of and more. Other highly popular languages like C++, Java and C# have multiple discussion groups dedicated to them.

Furthermore, Cuomo’s strong-arm tactics backs ISP’s into the corner over this issue. If they do not support it then they could be considered as supporting child pornography, which is complete preposterous. Currently Cuomo has turned his attention to Comcast, to which a two-page letter was sent and was received by Comcast on Monday. It threatened ‘legal action’ on child pornography grounds within five days if Comcast executives failed to agree to a certain set of rules that was devised by Cuomo. Also in the letter he states that he wants Comcast and other broadband providers to “volunteer” to take actions to “surgically directed” only at child pornography and “not at any protected content.”

If this were true, it would not be a bad thing. It would actually be a very commendable thing. However his tactics have already led ISP’s such as Time Warner Cable to kill some 100,000 discussions groups. If you are a conspiracy theorist, then here is something to feed your mind. Among the groups that got the ax were talk.politics and misc.activism.progressive. Another ISP that joined his crusade, Verizon, deleted presumably ‘unlawful’ discussion groups which included us.military, ny.politics, alt.society.labor-unions, and even alt.politics.democrats.

Cuomo had a response of, “I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry.” I liken that to burning down an entire library because one obscene book happens to be found on a shelf.

Cuomo even praised AOL for agreeing to help “eliminate access to child pornography newsgroups” but failed to mention they actually eliminated all newsgroups back in January 2005. Before Cuomo’s rush to action.

However, Comcast does not even run or host its own newsgroup servers. Rather, it outsources it to a company in Texas. The chairman and native Texan that runs the company labeled it as “fascist crap, ignorant” and “we welcome the New York attorney general to the battle of child pornography.”

Comcast is not passive in the child porn fight. It helped to organize an industry-wide agreement with a number of attorneys general. It was good enough for the National Association of Attorney but was not enough for New York and not enough for Cuomo. Comcast is a very small presence in New York State at about one half of one percent. The only reason they have that much is because it serves communities in Pennsylvania and Connecticut that happen to spill over into NY. It has been dominated by Verizon and Time Warner.

But Cuomo wants these broadband providers to sign what he calls a ‘code of conduct,’ which conveniently has not been made public.

Now step back and look at this in another way. Look at it from the point of view of the constitution. This could be an infringement on the first amendment’s write of free speech. Any governmental efforts at censorship must be narrowly focused. Censoring 100,000 newsgroups because some 80 newsgroups may have illegal images would fail that test. The courts have ruled that if a government official delivers a credible threat of prosecution, that target can ask a judge to clear stuff up through a declaratory judgment. However it’s a catch-22. Comcast, like its rivals, seem to be unwilling to confront a state attorney general fearing that they will claim that they are merely trying to protect the children and that these companies are sympathetic to child pornographers.

A spokesman said that Comcast’s attorneys are evaluating this request and that they may enter into some sort of agreement with New York which could substantially similar to agreements announced with AT&T and AOL recently.

What could this mean in the long term? It could encourage more attorneys general to play net censor, especially if the attorneys general come to view broadband providers as submissive, off the books sources of revenue. It appears that Cuomo is doing just that since his press release said Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint will pay over $1.1 million to fund further efforts by the attorney general’s office and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to remove child porn from the internet.

It’s either a shakedown racket or a heavily veiled attempt to get rid of pirated software on newsgroups. That is if you can find any that isn’t actually spyware or virus ridden decoys. But these companies know that Cuomo can cause them millions in legal bills and public relations damage. They are basically paying for protection like right out of the Sopranos. A soldier comes in and says ‘nice business you have here. It would be a terrible shame if something happened to it.’ But this seems to be fine for a New York attorney general, but it would be extortion for a private-sector lawyer.

Constitution Schmonstitution

Thank you congress. Thank you very much for helping to further shred the Constitution of the United States.

If you do not know what I'm talking about then you should be ashamed of yourself. But, recently is came to light that Bush's administration had been authorizing illegal wiretaps behind the back of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) courts. These courts were put in place after Nixon and the Watergate scandal where they were illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee. So Bush has been going around these courts so they did not have to get court orders, in a secret court, to wiretap Americans.

The telecommunications companies went along with these blatantly illegal requests. However, the legislation passed today, July 9th, 2008 and is expected to be signed into law quickly, will provide retroactive immunity to these telecommunication companies. Effectively ending what lawsuits are pending against them and sealing any information away from public scrutiny.

The vote passed the Senate by a vote of 69-28 with Democratic majority leader Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, among others, voting against the measure. Much to many of Obama's followers dismay, he voted in favor of the legislation after vowing on more than one occasion that he would filibuster the measure if needed. This debated sparked the formation of the group "Get FISA Right" on his social network. This is the largest user-created group in his social network by a large margin and they plan to continue exerting lots of pressure on him in the coming months.

Apparently Obama's thoughts of change does not seem to be much different than Bush's direction. I think Obama, Bush and McCain all could benefit from reading Ron Paul's 'The Revolution: A Manifesto'. Heck, if they would read it I will lend them my copy.

Is Deregulation of the Cable Industry good for the consumer?

The Cable industry has argued that government regulation will hold them back from giving the customer better services. Deregulation has been very good for the cable companies. It has let to much, MUCH higher prices. Up until 1984, local governments kept cable prices in check. But their deregulation has led to price hike after price hike (excluding 1993-1996 when the rates were briefly regulated).

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the doors to deregulation and yet more price hikes. Since the Act was passed, cable rates have increased by 59% which is nearly three times the rate of inflation. So we have the problem of high prices, low competition and horrid customer service. While smaller operators actually improved their scores, larger companies continued to lose ground according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. In the words of Dr. Claes Fornell who heads the study, Comcast set "an all-time low for the largest cable provider in the country." She also said, "there seems to be an element of monopoly-like pricing in the cable industry."

After Congress' deregulation of the cable industry worked so well, is it not fair of them to call for the government to stay completely away from network management and any net neutrality issues? But to cable's credit, it at least provided a real alternative to DSL and also put pressure on telco companies with VoIP service.

Cable has built a broadband infrastructure that, while not cheap or particularly fast when compared to other leading countries, reaches many Americans and in most cases are capable of faster speeds than DSL (DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades which are beginning should see more significant speed gains over DSL in the next few years). All of this without government regulation.

But looking at some recent FCC oversight hearings on network management which focused on practices at Comcast. Its easy to see how important it is to have some sort of public-interest regulator looking over the shoulders of these companies. The internet has become a key resource quick to rival water, heat and electricity as a utility. So such issues are a bit more than some puny private sector dispute.

While new laws and increased regulation may not prove a necessity to keep the internet healthy in the US, it would still be a shame if Congress and regulators like the FCC were so company minded that oversight was a mere formality and enforcement was toothless. This is not a desire by some to involve government in every private sector dispute, but more of a recognition that internet access in a low-competition marketplace is a bit too important than to have total self-regulation.

Like I read, if you think of it as wolves and chicken coops. When the chickens in the chicken coop are the most innovative chickens in the world, where it is a place of near magical scope and a wide variety of egg shapes and colors are laid by the chickens. Any good farmer would at least pay someone to watch the coop with a shotgun to keep the wolves at bay.

More iPhones and a documentary

iPhone

More information has come out from AT&T about the iPhone release and plans. While I'm not going to dig into the plans for the phone itself, I just want to reiterate the pricing of the phone itself for customers.

Steve Jobs was very quick and loud to announce the 'low price' of the iPhone. Well the prices for the 8GB and 16GB iPhones will different depending on where you fit in. I will be giving the prices in 8GB/16GB format so I don't have to reiterate myself each time.

So, to get an iPhone 3G without any contract at all, you will have to pay $599/$699. For customers who are not 'upgrade eligible' you will have to pay $399/$499. Finally, for customers who are 'upgrade eligible', opening a new account or adding a line will be paying $199/$299 for the iPhone. I do not have any sources that explicitly say that iPhone users will be 'upgrade eligible' when the iPhone 3G is released, but many are touting that they will be. Only time will tell about that for certain. Typically, a customer is 'upgrade eligible' when their contract has expired. Which I would expect AT&T to be money hungry enough to do just that because Apple fanboys would still be willing to pay that premium just to have the iPhone 3G.

Don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very nice piece of technology and it is starting to have a real impact on mobile phone industry. The multi-touch interface and web browsing capabilities were very innovative. I have qualms about the multi-touch because I have large fingers and had problems typing with the on-screen keys. Plus the lack of feedback when touching the keys or numbers was not very user friendly. LG has the Voyager, which has a touch interface with feedback whenever a touch button is activated, which is very nice.

However, the blackberry still seems to be the corporate phone of choice by many companies. Be it the features it has, the pricing of the phones or their possible avoidance of certain mobile carriers (*cough* AT&T *cough*). Holding a blackberry is very nice and I do very well using the qwerty keypad even with my large fingers.

I want to see the reviews of the iPhone 3G after 2 or 3 months of use by an impartial judge. Even then I will still probably be using my LG 8300 phone because its cheap, good, and has excellent signal.

Voting Documentary

Someone twittered a link to a video online, that originally aired on HBO, being shown at freedomdocumentaries.org called 'hacking democracy' about electronic voting. Its a long video at one hour twenty-one minutes, but something very interesting to watch. They visit a company in Huntsville, Alabama and go through the trash from Diebold (completely legal).