Tag Archives: Internet

CBC’s Spark and Search Engine

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CBC has been doing a fantastic job of making most of its programming available as podcasts. More recently, CBC has also upped their Internet cool factor by adding two excellent new shows: Spark and Search Engine.

Both of these shows cover the interaction of technology and the Internet with society in general. Topics range from intelligent and interesting discussion of the forthcoming Canadian copyright changes to the funeral of a main frame computer, and more recently the applicability of the publication ban laws in the presence of blogs and social networks sites such as Facebook.

What is really unique about Search Engine and Spark though is how far they go to integrate the show into the web; or maybe it’s the other way around. Both shows make extensive use of their websites for listener feedback and to look for new story ideas. If this doesn’t seem particularly novel take note of how much these shows try to integrate ‘blog culture’. Search Engine starts each episode with keywords like a blog post. All of the music used on Spark is Creative Commons licensed and linked from the show’s website. Most importantly both shows sound very personal. Almost like an audio version of a blog post at times.

On a final note, these are not geek shows. If you read blogs or publish your own or use Facebook regularly you are likely to get something out of each episode.

Social network privacy settings

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From How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time:

Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew study included an unexpected finding: Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.

If you are a teenager, restricting public access to your profile has the nice effect of restricting your parents access to your social network data. I suspect lots of teenagers have pictures from parties and other activities that they don’t want their parents to see. This makes me wonder how much the use of privacy controls by teenagers has to do with a desire for more privacy in a general sense versus hiding from mom and dad.

Teenagers are also much more under the control of other authority figures than most adults are. Teachers are a good example of this situation. It is dangerous to speak negatively about your teacher when there is no way to know that they are not following your online activities.

Monitoring how these same teenagers change their privacy settings as they mature and become more independent would be a very interesting study.

Things that NAT breaks

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Network address translation (NAT) has become so common on the Internet that many people consider it normal for their Internet access to use NAT. It may be common, but it is not how the Internet is supposed to work. A large amount of unnecessary complexity has to be added to applications to work around NAT.

For more information take a look at this list of things NAT breaks.

And just for the record, NAT is not a security device. This is the most common argument I hear when I try to tell people how much NAT complicates Internet software. For more information on NAT and security read this NANOG thread (the topic changes to security and NAT a few posts in).

The original network neutrality problem

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From History of the Public Switched Telephone Network:

  • 1884
    • AT&T is incorporated as a subsidiary of American Bell
    • Bell Telephone creates the first long distance connection from Boston to New York City
  • 1891
    • Almon Strowger receives patent for his automated electromechanical call switching device
      “No longer will my competitor steal all my business just because his wife is a BELL operator.”
  • 1899
    • AT&T buys out American Bell assets.
    • Cleyson Brown founds Bell System competitor Brown Telephone (eventually becomes Sprint)

Somehow that comment seems relevant given the current net neutrality debate.

A map of the Internet

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From Mapping the Internet:

The researchers’ results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.

Network neutrality: Where analogies fail

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I find it interesting that so much of the discussion surrounding net neutrality centers around analogies to other aspects of the modern world. A lot of these analogies are related to the transportation of goods. Courier companies such as UPS and Fedex as well as the highway network in general are the most common examples. In one of the first articles on net neutrality, Saving the Net, Doc Searls argues that the transport analogy is a major impediment to the pro-neutrality side and offers a competing analogy. This post is not about which analogy is better, it is about the problems which occur when using any analogy to discuss a complex topic.

It is easy to understand why people use analogies to discuss complex topics like net neutrality. By allowing knowledge and understanding from one area to be applied to something new, analogies are essentially a way of simplifying the world. Like any simplification, there is always some detail lost.

Analogy is a poor tool for reasoning, but a good analogy can be very effective in developing intuition.
— Barbara Simons and Jim Horning
(Communications of the ACM, Sept 2005, Inside Risks)

The very fact that analogies apply old information to new situations should give us pause in using analogy as a reasoning tool.

To see an example of this problem one only needs to examine what is perhaps the most common analogy used by the anti-neutrality folks. The analogy in question relates to the fact that UPS and other courier companies offer high priority service (overnight) as well as normal service without the negative consequences the pro-neutrality crowd fears.

In order for a courier company to begin to offer overnight package delivery, the company must add new capacity to its delivery operations. For example, a company that ships packages by truck will need to add aircraft to its operations to support cross-continent overnight delivery. Once these aircraft are in place it does not make economic sense to fly them lightly loaded. Instead, the courier company will begin to fill the remainder of the space in the planes with lower priority packages. This has the benefit of reducing the courier’s costs by reducing the number of trucks that are necessary. There is also another unintentional benefit. Although some customers have not paid for overnight delivery, the additional high speed capacity greatly increases the chance they will get that level of service anyway. As the volume of high priority packages grows, the courier’s overall operations must also grow in high priority capacity.

Compare the above situation to packet prioritization on the Internet. Unlike the courier company example, adding a high priority service does not require that the bandwidth provider add new capacity to its operations. There is no way to make light go faster. Packet prioritization simply gives the marked packets first crack at the existing capacity. Assuming the network is properly provisioned (not heavily loaded) the difference in service quality between high and low priority packets is very low, probably unnoticeable.

There is also the issue of reverse economic incentives. In order for customers who are paying for high priority service to notice an improvement the network must be congested. This creates the strange situation where allowing the network to become congested (not upgrading) could result in more customers paying for high priority service and thus increasing the bandwidth provider’s profits.

[Before anyone complains, I realize there are other aspects to network QoS such as number of hops in a path etc. I am not attempting to explain all aspects of network operations.]

On the surface, the analogy between high priority package shipment and high priority packet delivery seems like a good one. Upon closer examination, simple physical limitations show these two worlds to have very different operational characteristics and completely opposite unintentional side effects.

The point of this post is not to argue about the exact details of packet forwarding or courier company operations. The point is that centering the discussion about complex topics like network neutrality around analogies to other systems is foolish. The lost detail results in uninformed decisions.