If I had a scanner
I’d scan it in the morning
I’d scan it in the evening
All over that land…

(I do have a picture of Anne Galloway’s ear somewhere around here, a picture taken at the University of Chicago, the tutor was there, he’ll vouch for the provenance… a picture which I will be happy to share if I can only find it.)

David Weinberger reports on an effort called StopBadWare.org that collates information on bad-ware distribution and — through a partnership with Google — pops you out on a warning page when you attempt to click through to a badWare site from a Google search… a little something to protect you before you get suckt into downloading something bad for your computer.

What is BadWare?

Current BadWare reports.

I ran a few searches on the baddies and didn’t get the pop-up from Google…. duhh, I wonder if that is because I block pop-ups. More will be revealed…

you in the black tie the valet knotted in the parking lot
after the Internet instructions failed.

- from “Our Flowers” by Barbara Ras

The 2006 Wikimedia Foundation conference will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend. Betsy Devine’s contribution is titled Schrödinger’s Wiki: The quantum challenge of media attention. I was reminded of the conference while sorting mail upon our return from BlogHer. Tucked in among the dead tree solicitations for credit card accounts, the local Shopper-Stopper weekly advertisements, and two expensive catalogs from each of several bourgeois retail outlets were periodicals to which we subscribe - Science, The New Yorker, Newsweek (remarkable mostly for its arch spelling of “Hizbullah.”) The sorting of course slowed when last week’s New Yorker surfaced. Important cartoons there were in there to read. Paging through, I ran across a Wikipedia article that caught my attention and I commend it to you.

Ken Camp points to a Business Week story titled “The Phone Companies Still Don’t Get It”, and he links further to Bob Frankston and Martin Geddes who have a parable to tell. Bob Frankston trips happily down the sidewalk of metaphor, describing the ridiculous nature of the productized net and carefully sidestepping regulatory issues. In fact, if Bob likes anything less than monopolistic controls that push services rather than connectivity, it is “the regulatorium.”

Ken sums up an important aspect of Bob’s story thusly:

…we’ve created an environment where the FCC acts as a governmental arms of the telecommunications industry. Their role has been, regardless of what they say, to protect the telcos revenue streams and help ensure the illusion of free and open competition while guaranteeing the telcos can keep selling the same black hole to the public over and over, time and again.

Okay, gents, I’m with you up to here. But there’s something missing. Bob’s view of “the regulatorium” is totally skewed. Martin is a self professed libertarian whose perspective on the role of government is narrowed by a stupendous naivete! His naivete is dressed in a brilliantly verbal kaleidoscope of technically well-informed illusions though. Martin says,

There are so many blocking options, ways of setting aside reserved capacity, creating gateways, proxies, and private subnets. How about special peering agreements, unusual terms of service, locked-down edge devices supplied by the telco, different price policies, router queueing algorithms, topologies, hard-to-change defaults and settings, varying network symmetry and private IP address ranges. Good business for consultants like me in helping them evade the rules, but bad for the public.

To which I can only add, “Well, duhhh…”

All of us agree that the FCC generally isn’t useful in assuring (insert whatever you care about here). With the pirates in charge there’s no such thing as a free market or a fair market. States have also gone the lazy way of Judge Green. By tearing down the monopoly, we thought we could eliminate the need to regulate public services in the communications market because a free market would stimulate competition, innovation, and growth. That worked for a while. But more recently the monopoly found its way back to dominance and control, and our “regulatorium” has long since been tamed, defanged, declawed, neutered.

What we should be looking for is an answer to control of the monopoly, reassertion of a public service oriented regulatorium that will turn the tables on the greedballs. But the sexy Ayn Rand economics of the cold war has grown like a tumor on the body politic. People who should be able clearly to see the answer in policy formation, constructive regulation, and fair enforcement are looking for a roll in the sack with Dagny Taggart.

Greg Palast, a neutral and fair-minded middle of the road observer of modern culture, shared some good information on energy regulation yesterday. (Thanks to Tom for the link). Palast observes,

In the old, pre-Ken [Lay] days of regulation, my fellow economists used to complain about something called the Averch-Johnson Effect. The A-J Effect was the result of regulations which gave companies incentives to gold plate the electricity system, making it way TOO reliable. Too much cash was spent on keeping the lights on.

Well, gone are the days of the A-J effect. The gold-plating is gone — but not the gold. Under regulation, power sellers were limited by law to a profit of about 9%, what the law called a just and reasonable return. Now, the profits can be — and are — unreasonable, unjust and just out of sight.

Public infrastructure requires community focus. Whether you’re talking pavement, energy generation and distribution, communications, water supplies, or waste management, it is foolish to permit monopolistic practices to disguise themselves as free enterprise and squeeze excess profits from a degraded service environment in the name of some kind of ideological purity around the ideal form of capitalism. We have to start from the bottom up assuring adequate local and state regulation of services, through statutes that reform the Public Service Commisions, the Public Utilities Commissions, through enabling municipal code updates that mandate equal access and cap profits. We need to wrest control from the monopolies again.

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/308_order_on_mtns_to_dismiss.pdf

Judge Walker moved the EFF versus the government and the telco monopoly forward. The so called state secrets privilege didn’t hold.

Everyone says that Robert is just a prince of a fellow. So when I read his opener, “I just did a speaking gig at Microsoft. Spoke to Nestle executives from around the world. Nice group of folks,” I naturally assumed that he’s had his head buried so far up the ass of technology that he hasn’t heard the news about certain multinational corporations and their cynical and rapacious greed.

It’s not just about the infant formula and the cash flow issues and the understimulated moms who are left with no alternative to formula feeding and an increasing infant mortality rate. Naturally, this is a story that can’t be lived down and the corporation should be broken up and asset values returned to the shareholders as a lesson regarding multinational corporate ethics. But there’s no international court to adjudicate that, no real hope for social justice. So we watch Nestle and try to curb their monstrous greed wherever we encounter it. And that “nice group of folks” line is bullshit. They, the so-called “nice executives from all over the world” are rapacious, greedy mother-fuckers or they wouldn’t have risen that high in the food chain at one of the most thoughtless and cruel corporations in the world.

Nestles corporate support of African slave labor in chocolate production should be enough to make any thinking, caring person turn his or her back on the nice-guy corporate execs, or spit on their shoes, or something.

Our local experience with Nestle/Perrier had to do with their corporate policies around illegal extraction of groundwater. We had to struggle for years to get these jerks to back-off their plans to dry up our aquifers in Wisconsin for their shareholders’ profits. Sadly, they moved on to Michigan and are now doing their best to suck that state dry.

RB never fails to crack me up.  Read the latest here…

At root, the network neutrality/anti-regulation debate represents an attempt to introduce something that’s beyond best effort packet delivery (e.g., premium QoS); if we build fast, overprovisioned, architecturally clean best effort packet networks, QoS should satisfy no need and deliver no discernable benefit.

Thus, if we have fast, overprovisioned, architecturally clean best effort packet networks, the whole network neutrality/anti-regulation debate becomes effectively moot.
Joe St. Sauver

Joe St. Sauver’s talk at the Northwest Academic Computing Conference contains a lot of what people need to know about what we are calling “Network Neutrality.”

Focusing on Network Convergence (elimination of costly redundant separate networks for voice, video and data) as a desirable goal, Joe illustrates that under-provisioning bandwidth and over-complicating network architectures such as offering QoS or implementing ATM are the leading threats to convergence (with over-regulation close behind).

Joe draws a line between the ad hoc consumer market and the managed enterprise market and alows as how convergence is desirable and happening in both markets.

It would be interesting to see how the dinosaurs and the telco shills encounter Joe’s argument.   Let’s ask Richard Bennett!  (And while we have his attention let’s annoy him with Kristoff’s hippily illustrated presentation, “Tripping on QoS“).