Archive for: March 2008

Mar 27: Comcast and BitTorrent today issued a joint press-release where they announced a collaborative effort to move beyond the current ‘reset spoofing‘ hooha. While Comcast will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is “protocol agnostic”, BitTorrent agreed to develop fresh “optimizations” that will promoted as application standards.

Both BitTorrent and Comcast expressed the view that these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention.

26 March 2008: Today is the world’s first Document Freedom Day. The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation. Roughly 200 teams from more than 60 countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness for Document Freedom and Open Standards. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

In a new report from the Aspen Institute Professor Philip Weiser of the University of Colorado at Boulder offers a series of specific and concrete policy recommendations for expanding access, affordability, and adoption of broadband in the United States.

Mar 19: New York Governor David A. Paterson announced that nine public/private sector partnerships will be the first recipients of grants from the New York State Council for Universal Broadband. The funds are targeted to help promote the research, design and implementation of innovative solutions to create affordable broadband Internet access for underserved urban and rural communities throughout the state.

Amongst the recipients were an initiative to bring broadband over power lines (BPL) to Onondaga County and a program to bring a year’s free access to residents of the Mount Hope community housing project in the Bronx.

The Federal Communications Commission announced a public En Banc hearing to be held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California on Thursday, April 17, 2008. The Commission will hear from expert panelists regarding broadband network management practices and Internet-related issues. The hearing scheduled at Stanford University is the second such hearing on broadband network management practices and Internet-related issues to be held by the FCC and follows a similar hearing held at Harvard Law School last month.

In the current P2P world, torrenters and the like are discovering that a recent Windows-update – included in XP service pack 3, and Vista – alters the tcpip.sys file that governs Windows tcp behavior to limit users to just 10 ‘half open‘ connections at any one time. This could be a response to the concerns raised by cable ISP’s like Comcast that’s DOCSIS-based networks break down when clients use over-multitudinous connections. Needless to say, as the word spreads, workarounds to undo MS’s changes are proliferating.

A Mar 17 article in BetaNews notes the aptly-timed announcement that, for the forthcoming Windows 7, Microsoft is contemplating adding such features as metered connections, distributed hash tables, and something called ‘green P2P’. The article notes that Windows Vista already includes an IPv6-based P2P-enabling technology known as Teredo.

As part of the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium Charlie Reis of the University of Washington will today talk about the increasing practice of intermediaries messing with web content between server & client, and ways to proscribe such. He will also talk about browser security, focusing on the deficiencies of today’s web as an application platform.

The talk, which takes place from 4:15-5:30 PST will be webcast live and thereafter be available on demand.

The Internet Society’s Board of Trustees will meet this weekend during IETF71 in Philadelphia. (agenda)

There is a board book that contains many interesting reports.

Today the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force will hold a Hearing on Net Neutrality and Free Speech on the Internet at 2pm. The hearing will be webcast live. (RealVideo)

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), in cooperation with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), is conducting a survey to gather data regarding the current and future use of IPv6 throughout the ARIN Region. All organizations in the ARIN region are encouraged to participate in this survey in an effort to establish a comprehensive view of present IPv6 penetration and future plans of IPv6 deployment.

An InternetNews article reports on comments concerning net neutrality by FCC chairman Kevin Martin during an address at “Legal Futures” – a Stanford Law School event – last week.

On January 29 2008, as part of their Tech Talks series, Google had a conference on the topic of IPv6. Video has now been posted on YouTube.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society have posted a video of a talk at Harvard on Feb 28 by Clay Shirky, author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ – a new book about the effect of the Internet on group interaction. Shirky’s eruditely outlined theme is that, in ways that are only just becoming apparent, the Internet is revolutionizing the entire human endeavor.

Vint Cerf addressed current challenges to Internet development in a conference call with the ISOC Advisory Council on Feb 20 2007. Audio has now been posted which can be either streamed or downloaded. It runs just under an hour.

The New York Broadband Advisory Committee held its fourth Public Hearing on Monday Mar 3rd 2008 at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. ISOC-NY videotaped the meeting and the audio has been posted on the ISOC-NY wiki.

The hearing was attended by Senator Larry Pressler – author of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, amongst other things, established the E-Rate system.