Internet

Review: Everything is Miscellaneous

/ Christopher Parsons

I recently received David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder and was excited. A great deal of my present work surrounds understanding metadata, and the implications that it has for the reconstitution of knowledge and reordering of political association. Imagine my surprise when I quickly found that Weinberger fails to perform a substantive investigation of the role of metadata in the reconstitution of knowledge and society, in book that emphasizes metadata’s role! At most, he skims the surface of what metadata can affect, glossing over specifics most of the time in favor of generalizations and limited references to Greek philosophers. After you’ve read the first 30-40 pages, the only thing you really have to look forward to are (a) a few interesting discussions about blogging, tagging, and the challenges in monetizing past modes of organizing data in comparison to digital metadata-based information-associations; (b) the end, when you can put the book away or give it to someone you aren’t terribly keen about.

While there are a handful of interesting parts in the book (in particular 2-3 pages on tagging data, and the beginning discussion between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order data might be a useful conceptual device) I was grossly unimpressed with it on the whole. For a better read and more useful investment of reading time, turn to Negroponte, Sunstein, Lessig, or even Erik Davis. Alternately, just go to Wired’s website and spend the couple hours reading the free articles there that you’d otherwise be spending reading this book. I can almost guarantee your time at Wired will be better spent.

How do I rate it? 1/5 stars.

Thoughts: Deep Packet Inspection and Copyright Protection

/ Christopher Parsons

In Lessig’s most recent book, Remix, he avoids directly endorsing any particular method of alleviating the issues with copyright infringement. Rather, he notes that there are models that have been proposed to alter how monies are collected for copyright holders. I want to briefly attend to the notion that file signatures can be used to identify particular copywritten works, and how deep packet inspection (DPI) could be used to facilitate this identification process.

The idea for using file signatures to track the movement of copywritten files goes like this: when you create a work that you want to have copywritten, the work is submitted to a body responsible for maintaining records on copywritten work. We can imagine that this could be national libraries. When the libraries receive the work, they create a unique signature, or hash code, for the copywritten work. This signature is stored in the national library’s database, and is known to the copyright holder as well. We can imagine a situation where we can choose what kind of signature we want copywritten work to have – there could be a full-stop copyright, a share-and-share alike non-commercial style copyright, and so forth. By breaking copyright up in this fashion, it would be possible to more granularly identify how content can and should be used.

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Comment: Virgin Takes Aim At BitTorrent

/ Christopher Parsons

In the US, Comcast is presently using what is referred to as ‘protocol agnostic’ filtering‘ – effectively, if you use the full amount of bandwidth that you are paying for for more than a few minutes, they decrease your available bandwidth for a while. This was, in part, a reaction to their sending RST packets to BitTorrent users – these packets would ‘kill’ connections that individuals had with other P2P users, but were also catching some other programs in the crossfire. What’s more, they were using a technique referred to as ‘packet forging’, which is involves changing packets in-stream. After a substantial amount of public criticism and backlash, Comcast stopped using their DPI equipment for this purpose and instead shifted to using them for protocol agnostic filtering.

Let’s turn to Virgin, who is currently implementing protocol agnostic filtering, but there are rumblings that the way that they’ve deployed it may not be the best solution to combatting what is perceived as the real problem: BitTorrent traffic. From a DSLreports article:

[A] customer on Virgin’s 10Mbps/512kbps “L” tier loses 75% of his throughput for five hours should he download more than 1200MB between 4 and 9PM. (Source)

There are several issues with this kind of agnostic filtering.

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Internet: Drowning in the Bits of UDP

/ Christopher Parsons

Over the past few months I’ve been watching news that is emerging from think tanks, independent researchers, and news analysts about the ‘dramatic’ increases in bandwidth usage in North America. In this post I’d like to pull together a host of sources on the recent use of the UDP protocol for transferring files, and how that relates to bandwidth scarcity. Over the next month or so, I’m hoping to put together some additional pieces on packet inspection, Enhanced Drives Licenses (EDLs), and more topical IT and privacy issues. But first, to UDP data traffic…

Peer-to-Peer and Link Points

This summer Bell Canada argued that they needed to use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to stem the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications during peak usage time, because P2P applications were causing congestion at major link points along Bell’s network. Bell’s practices became an issue when the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) filed a complaint with the CRTC; Bell’s traffic shaping was being applied to all traffic that ran along Bell’s ADSL lines, rather than being localized to Bell’s customer. CAIP lost their complaint, with the CRTC noting that Bell was not discriminating against CAIP customers. The CRTC decision did not, however, condone or authorize the legality of Bell’s use of DPI technologies to filter data traffic.

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Privacy: Available on Facebook for a cost (kinda)

/ Christopher Parsons

This comment isn’t likely to win me any privacy-friends, but…Facebook’s privacy settings are really pretty good. Yeah, I went there – no other social networking service (that is widely used) has such a granular group of privacy settings. Now, whether you want to say that the setting of these settings is a complicated process, or an onerous, one, or whatever is another issue entirely, and it’s not the issue I want to address right now.

Facebook has what are called ‘applications’, and these delightful little pieces of code let users play mini-games, bother their friends, put up listings of the books, movies, and models that they love at the moment, etc. In essence, they greatly increase “the social” in Facebook’s social networking garden (surely I can refer to “the social” and Facebook given the b0rg’s massive investment in Facebook). What people, such as myself, take issue with concerning these applications is that when my friend adds an application, the developer of the application tends to grab a bunch of my information along with my friend’s. I didn’t agree to have the application installed, and I have no say over whether or not it gets to take some of my information. The cost for my friend to install the application is one that I have to pay.

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Study: Stolen Web Content Sees More Traffic Than The Original

/ Christopher Parsons

is reporting that a recent study from Attributor Corp., a copyright enforcement company, shows that content that is stolen makes more money than the original content itself. I don’t find this terribly surprising, but the solution (hunting down copyright violations) seems to be a Sisyphean task; no matter how many take-down notices that you send out, when content is taken across international borders it’s almost impossible to easily take it down if you’re dealing with an uncooperative content host.

What’s the solution then? The study suggests that content owners need to find a better way of monetizing their assets – figure out how to generate more revenue (potentially by studying how the thieves do it) so that even if content is ‘stolen’ you’re still ahead of the game. The nice thing about this solution is that it recognizes that you can’t ever, really, stop copyright infringement online – the best you can do is learn to roll with it.

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