This Month in Evil
Aug. 25th, 2010 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurI'm gradually catching up on my tech blogs from Pennsic. Remarkable the things one misses while away:
On the one hand, there's the Net Neutrality mess, as Google caves on a point they've been arguing as a matter of principle for ages, and the wireless providers using that as evidence that NN is a bad idea. They're saying it's a necessary compromise, not a business decision -- but really, this smells very much like inter-company horse-trading. It certainly fails the "appearance of impropriety" test to me.
Then, Google gets to be on the receiving side of (for my money) an even bigger evil: Oracle suing them for using Java in Android. The one silver lining here is that it might renew the well-deserved decline of Java. The language is old and creaky, and has long since been passed by better options, and now we're getting a great reminder that it is owned and patent-protected by a company that is happy to sue people using it. Time to move on to better things, and tell Oracle to f*** off.
On the good side, RIM (a company I usually pay little attention to) is coming down on the side of individual privacy, at least for their customers: they aren't giving backdoor access to countries that want to spy on their citizens. Surprisingly gutsy move, I have to say, and it's causing some middle-eastern countries to shut down Blackberry. But it makes a certain amount of business logic: corporate customers want that assurance of privacy, and it may be worth RIM losing some customers in more authoritarian states in order to reassure the ones elsewhere.
Still a week or two behind in my reading; it'll be interesting to see if there have been meaningful changes in any of these...
On the one hand, there's the Net Neutrality mess, as Google caves on a point they've been arguing as a matter of principle for ages, and the wireless providers using that as evidence that NN is a bad idea. They're saying it's a necessary compromise, not a business decision -- but really, this smells very much like inter-company horse-trading. It certainly fails the "appearance of impropriety" test to me.
Then, Google gets to be on the receiving side of (for my money) an even bigger evil: Oracle suing them for using Java in Android. The one silver lining here is that it might renew the well-deserved decline of Java. The language is old and creaky, and has long since been passed by better options, and now we're getting a great reminder that it is owned and patent-protected by a company that is happy to sue people using it. Time to move on to better things, and tell Oracle to f*** off.
On the good side, RIM (a company I usually pay little attention to) is coming down on the side of individual privacy, at least for their customers: they aren't giving backdoor access to countries that want to spy on their citizens. Surprisingly gutsy move, I have to say, and it's causing some middle-eastern countries to shut down Blackberry. But it makes a certain amount of business logic: corporate customers want that assurance of privacy, and it may be worth RIM losing some customers in more authoritarian states in order to reassure the ones elsewhere.
Still a week or two behind in my reading; it'll be interesting to see if there have been meaningful changes in any of these...
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-25 05:38 pm (UTC)It failed.
Now, it either backs away from the revenue or does business with them.
Guess what it did?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-25 06:03 pm (UTC)A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-25 07:26 pm (UTC)On net neutrality: It makes some sort of sense to me to prioritize small volume communications over large (so if the network has bandwidth = 100 units, and there are 50 people trying to send/receive 1 unit and 10 people trying to send/receive 100 units (each), then I would prioritize the 50 small and have the large packets take the remainder. But I'm not sure how feasible this is or what other implications this would have, do you? Also, are there any thoughts of doing something like the "smart" appliances (which will do a load of laundry (for example) when power is more available/cheaper) to allow users/machines to voluntarily deprioritize certain things (such as downloading software updates or TV guides/programs) on the networks?
Re: A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-25 07:40 pm (UTC)Do they? That would be disappointing, although I suppose not astonishing. The hard but inconsistent line does seem odd if that's true, although I suppose it could simply be based on how much their customers trust various governments.
It makes some sort of sense to me to prioritize small volume communications over large
I actually have no problem with prioritizing purely on the basis of size, or indeed almost any content-neutral mechanism. The real issue of NN is prioritization on the basis of *origin* (and more generally content, although discriminating based on origin is the likeliest abuse). Google's taken a appropriately solid stance on that historically (and they have good commercial reasons to do so), but it sounds like they're knuckling under now.
Also, are there any thoughts of doing something like the "smart" appliances
There are certainly some tools like that in place already. For example, it's not unusual to schedule big downloads like OS updates overnight. At the moment, though, I suspect end users don't do much of that because there is little economic incentive to do so, which can lead to a certain amount of tragedy of the commons. Such incentives could be created, but would be controversial.
I should note that I'm a relatively conservative economist when it comes to this sort of thing: in principle, I actually like the idea of metered pricing, where you are charged at least roughly based on how much traffic you generate. Properly implemented, that could provide this sort of incentive for responsible usage, as well as giving the ISPs better incentive to play fair with NN principles. But end users tend to get cranky about metered pricing, and it probably only works well within a strong regulatory framework (which the ISPs fight tooth and nail against, since it would reduce their ability to charge monopoly rents). So the odds of it being done right aren't good, and without those sort of price signals, end users don't have a lot of incentive to play nice.
Re: A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-25 08:32 pm (UTC)(As for RIM and NATO, if they are doing it I suspect it's because they're based in a NATO country and the Canadian Forces have more guns than RIM does. :-)
Re: A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-25 08:49 pm (UTC)(In principle, the best way to do the pricing signals would seem to be auction-based, where the price-per-bit goes up as congestion does. In practice, though, that's a hard sell to end users...)
Re: A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-26 01:57 pm (UTC)Re: A comment and a question
Date: 2010-08-26 02:25 pm (UTC)The analogy with electricity is imprecise in some important ways. In particular, at the local end you simply have corporate and consumer use on different systems, with totally different pricing structures. Indeed, as far as I can tell, certain consumers use a great deal *more* bandwidth than many companies, since one video stream is a lot more bits than many email accounts. So cable congestion is mainly about consumers vying for the bandwidth with each other. Whether this is actually a problem is an open question: the ISPs claim it is, but I gather that other studies imply that we're nowhere near filling the overbuilt pipes.
Where there clearly *is* a problem is wireless: with the rise of smartphones, we're overloading the poorly-designed infrastructure rather quickly. Hence, the wireless ISPs seem to be moving towards at least partially metered/tiered service despite consumer objection. I don't have much problem with that *provided* it's content-neutral. My gripe with the recent weakening in Google's stance is that they appear to be caving on precisely this point, which is a recipe for creating precisely the sort of walled gardens I don't want to see...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-25 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-25 08:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-25 09:37 pm (UTC)Also, if it was worth it to Google to go to all that trouble to have their own version, I somehow doubt this is a sign that Java is on its way out.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-26 12:34 am (UTC)Hahahahahahahah. (I don't like Java very much, but I like Oracle even less. They've started charging for *security patches* for Solaris. All versions.)