Posts by bsder

Republican pol rips online piracy bill, defends Google

The wonder of redistricting ...

Californians yanked the redrawing of the district boundaries away from the legislature and gave it to a citizen elected committee.

Lots of previously heavily gerrymandered districts got cleaned up, and suddenly congresscritters who were safe now need to pay attention to the other side. The only districts that look kinda screwy to me are Bakersfield/Fresno, and I suspect that Federal rules might have driven that.

Issa now suddenly has a bunch of Democrats in his district that had been surgically removed before. I don't think he's in trouble, but his "red" (safe Republican) district is now quite a bit more "purple" (mixed Republican/Democrat). I suspect he's trying to position himself better toward independents.

And that's exactly what the redistricting was supposed to do--make candidates more responsive to the center.

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers

NIce hit piece.

Congratulations on your inflammatory headline. Hope you got paid well.

Okay, let's try some facts since they're so scarce in the original article:

1) BitTorrent wouldn't exist if we had useful upload speeds

Everybody seems to forget this one. BitTorrent wouldn't exist if we actually had a way of getting decent upload bandwidth. Unfortunately, I can't really buy this *at any feasible price* in the USA.

2) UDP for BitTorrent should have been the default to start

Arguably, BitTorrent should have been using UDP *in the first place*. Files are hashed/checksummed and packetized. Using TCP is a huge waste of retransmission and sequencing that BitTorrent completely discards. BitTorrent doesn't care if a packet gets tossed; it will just request a retransmit later anyway.

3) UDP is perfectly capable of being TCP-congestion friendly

It's called Datagram Congestion Control Protocol, it exists *today*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Congestion_Control_Protocol

If they have a brain, BitTorrent will eventually implement this simply because it's actually more efficient than almost any adhoc solution they'll come up with. Otherwise, they'll stumble around in the dark for a while until the come up with something equivalent.

4) TCP flow control is *already* broken with P2P

The main problem is that traffic isn't throttled by bandwidth but by TCP/IP flows. Consequently, BitTorrent users who open 14 gazillion TCP/IP connection are getting disproportionate bandwidth already. Properly, packets should be tossed out based upon total bandwidth usage by an aggregated endpoint, not by connection.

See: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1078

5) The ISP's brought this on themselves by *forging packets*.

Remember that little "bandwidth throttling" fiasco caused by sending RST packets? Yeah, that's called "forging packets" and the only way to stop it is to take over the entire connection process so that it becomes too computationally expensive to attempt. Generally, you even lay encryption over top of this so that you can really be sure that nobody can forge your packets. As a bonus, deep packet inspection becomes infeasible.

Did the ISP's really expect that this *wouldn't* happen? I'm surprised it took as long as it did.

6) The ISP's are hated because of their monopoly

Everybody hates the ISP's in the USA. It's a monopoly. They're in the pocket of big media. They want to monitor all their users to market the data. They're trying to interpose themselves between users and the internet to charge money. They fight anything that would actually result in useful speeds here in the USA. They sue local communities who try to lay in fiber. They only grudgingly increase traffic speeds when a competitor actually rolls into an area.

Pardon me if I don't weep while people extract every ounce of traffic from an ISP.

See how much better that was?

Of course, I've learned not to expect clear thinking from hack, faux-technogical, pseudo-journalists.

I don't know why I bother anymore.