Technology

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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Update: Geolocation and Mobiles

/ Christopher Parsons

A few months ago I published a post on a product called Fire Eagle. As I then noted, Fire Eagle is an application that developers can integrate into their software suites, enabling users to identify and broadcast their geospatial location to others on the application’s network.

With the advent of the iPhone and other easy-to-use smart phones (typically read: not Windows Mobile devices), more and more people are wanting to find where they are using the built in mapping software. Moreover, advertisers are chomping at the bit to provide ads to individuals when they surf the web with their mobiles, personalizing the ads to customers’ interests and proximate geolocation. Unipier’s family of devices opens the door for cellular providers to begin this detailed level of geolocation, and it should be noted that Bell has begun to integrate Unipier devices into their network architecture.

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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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Comment: Media Attention to Blackberries In Mumbai

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

I need to begin this post, in an unambiguous fashion: I absolutely do not support the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that claimed the lives of hundreds, and injured many more.

Now that that disclaimer is out of the way….

How stupid is the media to have swallowed the nonsense concerning Blackberries that Indian and American security groups are spewing!?! I’m speaking about the apparent shock of Indian security forces that the individuals who launched the attacks in Mumbai used Blackberries to keep up-to-date about the effects of their actions. The Australian Sunday Mail, as an archetypical example, writes,

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Advertising: Targeting Your Ecosystem

/ Christopher Parsons

has recently put out a good piece, titled Online Ad Targeting: From ‘Maximize’ to ‘Optimize’. In it, Troiano effective notes that online advertisers aren’t making much money by bombarding their customers with irrelevant ads, and the attempts to use deep packet inspection technologies as NebuAd and Phorm strike potential customers as ‘creepy’. He suggests that advertisers adopt three principles:

  1. User control: Users should own and control their personal information. Period. It sounds like a novel idea, but when people have control over their own personal information and can choose to share it or not share it with whomever they want, that will make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
  2. Transparency: Offering an opt-out option is not enough. Any online entity that tracks or collects user data of any kind should be straightforward and alert users to its practices. It’s not wrong to target ads, but it is wrong to collect users’ personally identifiable information without their permission. If companies adhere to this level of transparency, the need for potentially stifling congressional control is significantly lessened.
  3. Trust: Offering users a high level of control over their information and requiring a high level of transparency from online publishers and retailers will result in mutual trust. Users will share certain information about themselves in return for something they want and companies will promise not to use their information in inappropriate ways. Building this kind of trust is not easy, but when achieved it will create a mutually beneficial relationship.


This makes sense to companies for two reasons:

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Thoughts – Study reminds us why we’re always fixing our parents’ PCs

/ Christopher Parsons

Ars Technica has a jaunty little piece that puts hard numbers to the statement, “computers are confusing when it comes time to fixing them!” Something to take away from it is that “almost half of adults said they needed someone to help them set up or learn how to use their gadgets.” This says a few things:

  1. Gadgets are way too complicated in many cases – sometimes people just want a phone, not a phone/mp3 player/web browser/GPS device.
  2. Gadgets are generally becoming less and less elegant – companies should take a page from Apple’s book, and start thinking about design aethetics while they are actually developing their technology.
  3. Gadget ‘protections’, especially those intended to mitigate surveillance and privacy concerns, are too deeply hidden. The GPS should come ‘off’ on a phone by default, with a clear set of instructions of how to turn it on appearing when you activate the device. At the same time, devices should have their instructions and information about functions of the phone within easy reach when using it – design a nice, easy way for people to ‘learn more’ about a feature without requiring a data plan to go online.
  4. People are buying things that they haven’t done much research one – this is a no-brainer; if they had spent time researching the gadget, they likely wouldn’t be having such a hard time understanding how it works.

So what do I take away from this? It is just another confirmation that consumers, far from being ’empowered’ by all of the features from their electronic toys, are in fact being disempowered by the technological sophistication of modern electronics and the incredibly poor methods that the industry has taken to teach people. I read, and so a manual is something that is helpful to me, but I’m (at this point) an aberrant. New times call for new methods of guiding people through the items that they’re purchasing.