Vint Cerf and Co. sic the world on Comcast Beware, Comcast. Here comes the Net Neutrality Squad. Earlier this week, an ad hoc collection of tech gurus - including internet founding father Vint Cerf, programming pioneer David Farber, and security specialist Bruce Schneier - announced a new plan to mobilize everyday net users in the fight against nefarious ISPs. Dubbed …
Sure, maybe they do have the legal right to throttle whatever they want since they are the service providers. However, whatever filtering, throttling, or redirecting of traffic, packets, or data occurs as the direct result of the ISP's equipment or network infrastructure should be open and freely available information. The fact they are covering it up makes this that much worse since neither of these companies have the best reputation amongst those of us that fall outside of the senior citizen/clueless user club.
Since this throttling thing has been brought to light, I have had random problems with vonage, staying connected to my work SSL VPN, and usenet stalls when downloading large binaries. I hate these idiots!
I'd like to clarify a point in this story that unfortunately may be confusing as written, at least the version I'm currently reading. NNSquad is specifically *not* pushing neutrality legislation issues. The whole point of the project is to gather, analyze, and publicize useful data. As I told the author of the piece, it may turn out that this data will convince policymakers that neutrality legislation is needed, but that is by no means a given and the project does not have the goal of legislation. In fact, the project signatories represent a range of views on the desirability or undesirability of such legislation.
First collect the data, and then the chips will fall where they may.
I thought it important to make this clear. Thanks very much.
Lauren Weinstein
Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility
"We want to develop tools that will help users evaluate what's going on and report it back to us - tools that will be widely deployed and easy to use. And then we'll analyze all this information and report it publicly."
Lauren,
What could be a Better Beta than to continue Transparent Open Discourse/Intercourse in a Place just like here.
The temptation to abuse what is sent privately [report it back to us] is far too strong to be healthy and it is surely proven to be so, given the rampant and rabid abuse and deliberate misdirection/interception/copying of information which is sent electronically, it must be much better to have development steps clearly shown even as they are being made or proposed steps, decided as less than worthy, discarded as slippery slopes to hidden agendas and snake oil ambiguity.
In much the same way as the SETI program works, how about millions of internet users donating CPU cycles over an immense voluntary botnet that could send Comcast and Verizon a few million "messages"? Obviously they would have to be properly spoofed, say coming from their chairmans own PC would be appropriate. Perhaps a few disgruntled Verizon and Comcast employees would be willing to help out the cause. I'm sure SOMEONE knows where the system backdoors are.
Anyone know where to find Comcasts DNS servers? I imagine it would only take a couple of days of this for them to capitulate when every page a customer loads say "The Society for the Punishment of Interfering Service Providers" has hijacked your "Windows Experience" until such time as Comcast or Verizon agree to stop playing games with the internet."
Also, has anyone noticed similar issues with Time Warner/Roadrunner service? I haven't heard them mentioned here.
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