David Russeth

bigdealbooks.com

David Russeth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:04:52 -0000

Website bigdealbooks.com is currently under revision and reconstruction.

Thanks for visiting bigdealbooks.com. We've not reopened for business yet, but we are busy getting ready. We're a loose knit team of hard working, passionate people with a broad range of experience and interests. We're laying bricks of another sort and we're going to leave the place better than we found it, where we can (working on a novel data/web development platform that will improve the human condition, etc.)

We're hot on our new format and believe that bigdealbooks.com will bring a new community oriented and interactive way of bookselling and idea exchange -- those very qualities arguably imperiled by the vast sea change in publishing and conventional bookselling over recent years.

We aspire to offer another way of doing things with a category whose form is in some need of revalidation --

"The driving force of all of this is the acceleration of our culture. The old days of browsing, the old days of a person coming in for three or four hours on a Saturday and slowly meandering, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems they wanted, are pretty much over. If you go to the Strand or to Micawber Books today, it's a whole different gear, where society wants satisfaction and fulfillment now."

--Logan Fox, owner of Micawber Books, Princeton, N.J., in a New York Times story.

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Offices in Minneapolis, Madison (WI), and Chicago; walk-in retail space formerly located in Madison is currently undergoing relocation and reconstruction. Implicit to this major transition is deliberation on a strong, committed, and definitive local and regional identity in service to an esteemed universal audience.

If you're interested in being notified when we “open our doors,” please send us an e-email at:
contact@bigdealbooks.com

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Trade Commission

OnGuardOnline

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(Works registered and documents recorded by the USCO from 1/1/78 onward are online.)

Guide to Copyright at Vassar

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The Bill of Rights

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IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library

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OUT-LAW.com

Center for Information Technology Policy

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bigdealbooks.com

website is currently in revision . . .

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Analysis : FCC says no and winks yes at Comcast

David Russeth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:40:04 -0000

Buried in the FCC's Fat Comcast Ruling is Open Invitation to Corporate Filtering

source : WIRED

Originally published by David Kravets on August 20, 2008 | 3:53:43 PM

Using words like "misdirection," "obfuscation," "absurd" and "verbal gymnastics," the Federal Communications Commission released its formal decision Wednesday ordering Comcast to stop throttling BitTorrrent traffic, a practice the carrier has repeatedly denied performing.

Buried in the commission's vitriolic-filled 67-page decision -- which was announced three weeks ago and formalized in written form on Wednesday -- lurks an open invitation to internet service providers to filter content. In essence, the commission said carriers cannot discriminate against file sharing protocols, but they may act as a traffic cops and block illegal material and "transmissions that violate copyright law."

The commission on Wednesday reiterated that Comcast violated net neutrality rules when it blocked BitTorrent file transfers. In no uncertain terms, however, the commission endorsed throttling internet traffic.

Consider an excerpt of page 31 of the order (.pdf):

"We also note that because consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice, providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law. To the extent, however, that providers choose to utilize practices that are not application or content neutral, the risk to the open nature of the internet is particularly acute and the danger of network management practices being used to further anticompetitive ends is strong."

And if those words were not enough evidence of the FCC's endorsement of internet throttling, blocking, filtering – call it what you will, the written comments Wednesday from commission Chairman Kevin Martin drive home the point.

Martin said when the commission decides whether an internet carrier violated net neutrality rules, it "considers whether the network management practice is intended to distinguish between legal and illegal activity. The Commission’s network principles only recognize and protect user’s access to legal content. The sharing of illegal content, such as child pornography or content that does not have the appropriate copyright, is not protected by our principles. Similarly, applications that are intended to harm the network are not protected."

Still, network-level filtering technology isn't ready for prime time. It's emerging and being endorsed by Hollywood and internet carriers whose willingness to block content is already known.

Most of the nation's largest internet carriers, in a recent deal with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, have already removed from their servers web sites hosting child pornography and have begun filtering smut from Usenet news groups via hash-marking technology or shuttering the groups altogether.

What's more, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, digital filtering companies and AT&T said the climate was ripe "to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level."

Internet service provider AT&T has been discussing with technology companies, members of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America about "implementing digital fingerprinting techniques."

And in October, Google adopted a copyright filtering system for its popular YouTube video sharing site.

Sony and Universal have begun embedding their music downloads with watermarks that can easily be traced via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Microsoft is betting on watermarking's future -- last year winning a patent for a "stealthy audio watermarking" scheme called El Dorado.

The FCC's vision of net neutrality: throttling, blocking, filtering – call it what you will.

source : WIRED

Comcast update : FCC slaps the big wrist of

David Russeth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:30:51 -0000

The FCC on Comcast :

source : cnet news

Originally posted on August 2, 2008 10:37 AM PDT

by Charles Cooper

Let me see if I've got this right. Federal regulators determined on Friday that Comcast broke the law by slowing Internet traffic for subscribers using BitTorrent to swap large files with other people. But then the FCC decided it was enough to issue a press release declaring the victory of the rule of law and now it's time to move on.

Not a penny in fines was assessed and not the slightest penalty suggested.

(Credit: CNET News)OK. Post-Enron, post-Bear Stearns, post the subprime debacle, I'm long past being surprised by big corporations trying to cover their posteriors for posterity. But what's really amusing here is that Comcast thinks even this rap on the knuckles is undeserved.

"We believe that our network management choices were reasonable, wholly consistent with industry practices," a company spokeswoman said in a statement.

But this is less about Comcast's ham-handed ways and more about the absence of leadership in Washington. The Federal Communications Commission, a notoriously political institution, is being forced to figure out federal Internet policy on its own. Pulled and pushed in different directions, is it any wonder that the FCC decision comes off as inconsistent?

Critics correctly note that Congress still has not given the FCC explicit authority to decide Internet policy. Even as the FCC issued its decision, Chairman Kevin Martin went on record writing that while Comcast had no right to prioritize Internet traffic, it's fine to prioritize voice over IP:

We do not tell providers how to manage their networks. They might choose, for instance, to prioritize voice-over-IP calls. In analyzing whether Comcast violated federal policy when it blocked access to certain applications, we conduct a fact-specific inquiry into whether the management practice they used was reasonable. Based on many reasons, including the arbitrary nature of the blocking, the lack of relation to times of congestion or size of files, and the manner in which they hid their conduct from their subscribers, we conclude it was not.
We do not limit providers' efforts to stop congestion. We do say providers should disclose what they are doing to consumers.

So it's OK to put individual data packets under a magnifying glass? But in its group statement--which Martin presumably signed off on--the FCC approvingly cited MIT professor David Reed, a respected Internet notable, who believes "that "(n)either Deep Packet Inspection nor RST Injection"--Comcast uses both to manage its network--"are acceptable behavior."

This takes Emerson's apercu that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds to an extreme. Maybe the private sector can figure things out without confusing itself over regulation from bureaucrats. But they first need clear rules of the road to follow. Otherwise, expect more of the same.

source : cnet news

FCC addressing Comcast's unscrupulousness

David Russeth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:24:43 -0000

source : torrentfreak.com

Today [2.26.08] is an important day for network neutrality, as the FCC’s Broadband Network management hearing has been discussing Comcast’s attempt to slow down BitTorrent traffic. One of the panelists said Comcast uses “hacker techniques” to manage their network.

When we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds, we never expected that it would lead to a FCC hearing, but it did. Let’s hope it’s for the better.

The second half of today’s hearing (pdf link) started with a number of network and technological experts telling us about the Internet, its history, and its makeup. Of main contention was the line between acceptable, and unacceptable traffic management.

Wise things were said, and the panelists made some good points about the unfairness of the traffic management tools that Comcast uses. There was emphasis on the TCP reset, which means that a few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops.

Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP.

Daniel Weitzner, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group summed up bad traffic management with: “Maybe it’s a bit like the old adage about pornography ‘I know it when I see it’. In this case I know what Comcast is doing is in the camp of unreasonable. These are techniques that hackers would use to deny service to any application on the web, very similar in that regard. It might be interesting to hold a panel of security experts to talk about those kind of mechanisms, I’m certainly not one. But, forging data on the internet is probably outside of the realm of reasonable, and any standards body would deem it to be.”

However, one of the most succinct criticisms of Comcast’s actions came from Prof. David Reed, of MIT’s Media Lab, who suggested that any ISP that didn’t follow the standard solutions evolved over the last 30 years should not advertise themselves as an Internet provider, but instead as a company “offering selective access to portions of the net only”, a description many of Comcast’s customers will probably agree with.
The FCC questioner continued the panel discussion, and pointed out that one of the problems might be that there is no actual data on how busy the network was, something that, from his point of view, would be helpful in determining whether the TCP resets are a unreasonable form of network management or not.

One of the panelists (sorry, they all sound the same) immediately replied to this by pointing out that congestion was not important. He compared the TCP reset to a conversation between two people where a third party - who pretends to be one of the persons engaged in the conversation - says “Stop, this conversation is over”. He added: “I find it uncomfortable that someone in the middle is creating a message to you that appears to come from me, I have a lot of trouble with that.”

At the beginning of the hearing FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that they were willing to step in if needed. Let’s hope they will. Feel free to file a comment if you want to let the FCC know what you think of Comcast’s haxxor skills. A video of the hearing will be available within two days.

Stay tuned.

source : torrentfreak.com

Laocoon | 50 BC | Rome, Vatican Museum

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:41:28 -0000

Laocoon | 50 BC | Rome, Vatican Museum

Measuring Broadband Consumption

David Russeth — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 02:10:03 -0000

source : smallbusinesscomputing.com
written by by Joseph Moran
originally published on 8/5/2008

If you don't know how much "Internet" you use, it might be time to check. When it comes to most household resources, you usually pay for what you use. Run your lawn sprinkler or keep the lights on all day, for example, and you can rest assured it will be reflected on your next bill from the water or power utility.

That's not usually the case when it comes to Internet access — most of us pay the same fixed rate every month for our broadband connection, no matter how much (or how little) we actually use it.

But that may be about to change.

Say Hello to Usage Limits
As more and more of people take advantage of bandwidth-intensive Internet services and applications, there have been numerous reported incidents of customers having their Internet connections slowed considerably or even turned off after an ISP deemed their usage "excessive." Many ISPs have been floating the idea of moving to usage-based pricing — the more bandwidth you use, the more you pay — as their networks contend with an ever-increasing traffic load.

Some ISPs are already implementing usage-based pricing in test markets. This week, AT&T said that in October it would add a new price/performance structure for its broadband customers that notably would "clearly identify any limitations on the amount of usage that may apply to a customer's service plan." Whether you think usage-based pricing is justified or not (and reasonable arguments can be made either way) these developments suggest it may soon become the rule rather than the exception.

Therefore, now might be a good time to get a sense of how heavy or light your Internet usage is in the event you have to conform to usage limits in the future. Simply trying to guesstimate the amount you use will probably be way off the mark, but there are a few ways you may be able to measure it.

Measuring PC-Based Usage
One option is a utility called DU Meter, which installs on an XP or Vista PC and monitors its Internet connection, recording precisely how much data gets downloaded and uploaded (after all, uploading counts as access too). DU Meter makes it easy to track usage with reports that show hourly, daily, weekly or monthly consumption. It can also display statistics in chart form.

DU Meter is a very useful utility, but there are a couple of caveats. First, it's not free. Although you can download a fully functional version for a 30-day trial period, you'll need to ante up $24.95 to keep using it after that. Second, DU Meter can measure the bandwidth consumption only for the computer on which it's installed. A five-system license costs $50.

Measuring Overall Usage
It's important to remember that it's not just PCs that connect to the Internet these days; content downloaded to consumer electronic devices, like a game console or set-top box, also accounts for a large percentage of overall usage. Games can be as large as 1 GB, movie downloads usually exceed 1 GB, and HD movies are typically 4 GB to 5 GB in size.

Therefore, the ideal place to measure total Internet usage is at the router, since the data to or from any of your connected devices must pass through it. You can check to see if your router tracks data sent and received via the Internet by logging into its admin interface and finding an option labeled router status, connection statistics, or something similar. (Look for the entry marked WAN, or Wide Area Network, which represents your Internet connection.)

Although most routers track Internet usage, many report the information in terms of packets rather than bytes. Since packets can be different sizes, it's not a useful measurement. In this case, you may be able to update your router with third-party firmware like DD-WRT or Tomato, both of which include bandwidth monitoring. Tomato's compatibility is limited to a handful of Linksys and Buffalo routers (albeit common ones), while DD-WRT is compatible with a broader range of devices, including many from Belkin, D-Link and Netgear. You can find detailed compatibility lists at www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices and www.polarcloud.com/tomatofaq, respectively.

Unfortunately, neither DU Meter nor the router-based tools categorize Internet usage by type, so they will not tell you how much of your consumption is due to, say, downloading movies, backing up your data to an online server or using Skype. But at least knowing how much you're using overall will help you make an informed decision should your ISP decide to stop serving an all-you-can-eat bandwidth buffet.

Adapted from PracticallyNetworked.com, part of the EarthWeb.com Network.
source : smallbusinesscomputing.com

On July 24th (2008) scientists announced that they had solved a thirty-year-old mystery about the origins of colorful auroral displays. They said that the brilliant skylights are sparked by magnetic substorms that erupt tens of thousands of miles away in the Earth's magnetosphere. This satellite picture charts a particularly vivid example of the lights from 1997. | Photo : Nasa / GoddardSFC

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:29:08 -0000

On July 24th (2008) scientists announced that they had solved a thirty-year-old mystery about the origins of colorful auroral displays. They said that the brilliant skylights are sparked by magnetic substorms that erupt tens of thousands of miles away in the Earth's magnetosphere. This satellite picture charts a particularly vivid example of the lights from 1997. | Photo : Nasa / GoddardSFC

Lego reenactment of Monty Python scene

David Russeth — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 06:54:49 -0000

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Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:00:47 -0000

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Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:00:46 -0000