Neither Tavis Ormandy nor Google have a good track record when it comes to pragmatic security. Google's business model is incompatible with proper security. Chances are that you know Tavis from him being arrogant on project zero so everyone who runs old versions of something, like all the millions of insecure android handsets, can get owned by script kiddies. People have been listing alternatives, but the whole point of giving something like gmail away for free is so there won't be any real alternatives. It isn't like it is going to make a difference either way, since Google's position in the market mean most people won't switch.
> Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era.
Maybe. Or it might be that social liberalism, at least in its current form, isn't that nice. Social liberalism compared to something like social democracy, or even various forms of "capitalism", takes the position that favorable rules are what grants you personal freedom. But it seemingly turns out that a lot of the things we care about exists in the practical realm. Having spent some, but fortunately not a lot of, time in oppressive countries it is always disappointing when you get back to the west and realize that overall it is still remarkably similar.
A lot of people don't use the Internet that much. $50-$100 is expensive for receiving e-mail, looking at news and some videos. Fiber deployment might very well stall in a lot of countries because of this.
Yes, it isn't particularly hard to figure out why they are throttling. Video services especially will take up all the bandwidth when they can and then annoy people when it inevitably gets downgraded again. For most people "speed" is "does my video load" and "does this file complete fast", not "4k everywhere". This should be fairly obvious for anyone who have even shared a connection with a couple of people. And unfortunately the Internet is lacking in support of adaptive anything.
4K video is about 25MBit. If I have a faster than 25Mbit internet connection I should be able to watch 4K video. This should be fairly obvious. Oversubscription is the responsibility of the ISP and it is not an excuse.
Wireless is pretty cheap compared to wired, because you don’t need the wires and laying the wires is the expensive part.
If you can’t give people 25Mbit connections with your wireless technology, don’t sell them 25MBit connections.
But coincidentally typically the stuff where the ISPs have all these terribly difficult problems are the services that refuse to pay their extra fees. Kind of like what happens to restaurants that don’t pay the protection fee.
That is just how the Internet works. Everyone is selling and buying access to networks. Whether directly or in the form of agreements. And most people are of course trying to get more for less. One could certainly wish that things would be different, but it isn't like they are doing something especially nefarious.
You pay your local delivery company $X per month and they promise that they'll deliver you 1 package a day from their local depot.
But it turns out that although you're ordering a package a day from Amazon, you're not receiving a package a day. You get your stuff, but it's delayed and backed-up somewhere.
And so as an experiment you sign up for a service that will receive a package for you, re-box it in their own packaging and then send it on to you. You then start to receive a package a day again.
At that point you start wondering, are they looking at the boxes, seeing they are from Amazon and then just deciding to leave them sitting around their warehouse for a while?
And the answer is yes, even though you're paying for the service, they also want whoever is sending the package to pay them to ensure that they get their package on time.
So while their may well be all sorts of agreements between all the different parcel companies about who will do what when, it's frustrating as an end-user that there's all these weird agreements that impact me. After all I'm paying for packages to be delivered, not 'packages that are offered by our partners'.
That’s just not how the Internet works and it’s never how it worked. This old article from Cisco (based on a 1999 book) explains that there can be various kind of business arrangements in an interconnected network: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-.... The article likens the situation to airlines, where multiple transit providers might be involved and where there may be complex fee sharing arrangements between all the providers.
Note that this book predated the rise of streaming video providers by more than a decade. Back then, nobody thought that delivery of content over the Internet was this simple one-sided transaction. It’s a new view of the Internet that has arisen because it suits the interests of these very lucrative streaming businesses.
It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally. That's the service that they are advertising to the consumer.
If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how you think it does." I think that's the point the OP was making.
Internet "access" is, and always has been, a link to an "access network." ISPs promise that that they'll route packets from that access network to the Internet, but nobody promises you end-to-end connectivity at a particular speed (unless you pay for a dedicated line). (Verizon, for example, caveats it's product as being a "gigabit connection to your home.")
People like to pretend like internet access service is a promise to get your packets from point A to point B anywhere on the internet at a given speed. That is based on the fiction indulged by the software folks, who just think about getting bytes between a pair of sockets and don’t care how the internet actually works. But as explained in that Cisco article, interconnection and transit has always been distinct from access, and has been the subject of separate commercial negotiations between network operators. That reflects the technical reality that the internet is not a single network, but an agglomeration of private access and transit networks. The idealized software abstraction of the internet doesn’t define what it actually is. If you read the contract that defines what you're buying, it's not promising you that idealized abstraction.
This is disingenuous. Yes, an ISP can’t do anything if you pay for 1Gbps but can’t download that fast from a server in Turkey. But the only reason a customer can’t get sufficient bandwidth from Netflix, whose servers are often 5 hops away in the same city, is because the ISP is not doing their job. Being an ISP implies also doing a proper job of setting up agreements such that the bandwidth you pay for is usable.
> It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally
So they don’t have to deliver 1 gbps to every end point, they just need to “do a proper job” to make the bandwidth “usable.” But what does “proper job” mean? Historically, it has meant making reasonable efforts to reach interconnection agreements with other network operators. It has not meant that you’re required to upgrade your peering so that 50%+ of all your traffic can come from a single peer, at no cost to the other peer.
I’m not backing off my argument; I’m arguing from a stance of reasonableness rather than perfection. And while we can argue on exactly what defines “reasonableness”, I think it’s unambiguously clear that a large number of people do in fact need 50% of their traffic to come from a single peer and I think it shouldn’t be unreasonable to expect an ISPs to address that rather than throttling customers. I know plenty of people whose internet usage consists of email, Facebook and hours upon hours of streaming Netflix.
It just doesn't make any sense. It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price, despite large differences in cost between local delivery and e.g. air freight to a war zone.
The Internet is a bunch of interconnected networks. Any of those networks can largely have whatever conditions they want. That is what the Internet is. Do I think it should be different, yes, but a lot of people don't. Especially those arguing against things like throttling.
> It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price
No, it's not like that at all. UPS makes it clear to the customer in advance what the cost is, how long it will take, and the customer agrees. Also, UPS is not held responsible for delays that they couldn't reasonably prevent (bad weather, etc).
It's also an exaggeration of the situation; it's essentially saying "If we can't achieve perfection, then we might as well not have any standards and we can't hold anyone accountable for anything." The fact is that those speeds are obtainable in most of the common situations that people actually need them, and the throttling only occurs out of unwillingness on the part of ISPs to negotiate agreements that would allow those speeds; it's greed and/or laziness, not physical or technical limitations.
You can have whatever opinion you want on what the Internet should be, just like I can. But the Internet today is different networks settings their own policy. Google can say "connect to us and we won't charge you for YouTube traffic", but that doesn't stop someone else from saying "no, pay us for access to our networks instead". It doesn't really matter if something is available or not as such because the whole model is based on exchanging access to infrastructure.
At the end of the day what you are describing is some sort of regulated nationalized Internet backbone. Which would to a larger extent support such features. As it is now if you don't like the "mix" of access you are getting, you should change providers (which could of course be a problem, but that is another issue).
It doesn’t have to be nationalized, it could alternatively be honestly priced and advertised. Most other businesses work this way: Starbucks doesn’t say “sorry, we only can give you half the coffee you paid for because our suppliers want more money and it would cut into our profits.” Instead, they work behind the scenes to make sure they can serve their product as advertised, and raise the price if necessary. I don’t know why you think the internet is any different; it’s a set of negotiations like any other business.
I was only trying to make the point that from the point of the view of the average consumer it's hard to know what it is that you're agreeing to pay for and what you're going to get. I understand the complexities involved.
You're sold a "XXXMb/s connection to 'the internet'", which people take to mean "XXXMb/s of the thing that I want, whatever that is" and not "XXXMb/s connection to the edge of the network, and then you get what you get given."
Your scenario isn't particularly outlandish. That is how a lot of economy services work. And also why you can usually get other deliveries while many other packages, e.g. from China, are waiting to be processed. Not that deliveries are much like the Internet.
Right... until you grandma can’t Skype with you because Microsoft didn’t pay the “decongestion” tax to that neighborhood IP she’s using or every ISP along the way.
Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.
I really hope firefighters and other emergency services don't depend on the unreliable mobile network. Those will be some of the first things to go down in case of an actual emergency, along with the power grid.
They rely on it because there's no real good alternative for data. Europe uses TETRA [0] (the equivalent of the North American P25 but with better data support among other things) for critical communications but still needs a TETRA + 3G/LTE hybrid for large data transfers (above the hundreds of Kbps order speeds TETRA offers).
Most fires that require an emergency response are not at the scale that could possibly impact cellular serivce. Even a whole neighbourhood going up in smoke isn't going to take down cell towers unless that tower happens to actually be in the middle of that neighbourhood.
This is a very generic article. I would say made up even. China has a ton of problems. Unfortunately most Hong Kong based analysts spend more time partying in Hong Kong than in southern China. If the west wants to have a long term chance against what is happening in China we really have to stop with this feel good journalism.
This is obviously a long discussion, but in summary the world is changing and if one wants to have a say in that new world one can't pretend that it isn't happening. China is working on all fronts while the west is coming up with excuses why it doesn't matter.
Jack Ma summed it up pretty well — the US spent something close to $15 trillion fighting wars over the last century. China has been taking that money and investing it in building future economic advantage instead because it believes the wars of the future will be economic rather than kinetic.
There is waste and fraud everywhere, including China. You can also find anecdotal evidence everywhere. It's impossible to piece this together into a singular narrative.
I think it's fair to say fraud is pervasive in China in a way that's not in many other western countries. Every time I have to do anything with China businesswise I'm reminded of that reality.
Yeah, that's part of the DoD budget. Really weird, but that's how we budget for things in the USA.
Then there are mixed-projects, like Military colleges and schools. Officers are all college-educated, so when they leave the military, they still benefit private industry all the same. Or DARPA's contributions to the advancements of science (Adoption of TCP/IP and other long-term research projects)
It's a minuscule part of the DoD budget. A rounding error.
The majority is spent by the army, navy, and air force. The biggest expenditure category is operation and maintenance, followed by personnel, then procurement.
If you are getting paid to deliver traffic to consumers then you would have a lot of incentive to not have congestion, since that would be losing potential revenue. That would if not solve at least improve the last mile issue.
E.g. with WiFi just throwing in more APs may actually make things worse. Better hardware is a way, but up to a certain extent, then you hit the ceiling and need a new technology. Like the only working solution for a noisy environment is to just forget about the 2.4GHz band and go to the wider and less busy 5GHz. My (uneducated) guess is this is somewhat similar for stuff like LTE, too.
Not to be all "the market will sort things out", but in general if there is incentive to serve traffic there is at least a lot more potential to fix these things. If you lose potential revenue by congestion, you want to invest in more infrastructure to capture that revenue. Whether that is more base stations for LTE, wifi on public transport or something else. Today that is a cost that you have to recoup from the consumer.
My point was, for very-high demand situations, sometimes tech is just not yet there to support it. And new tech either requires lots of upfront investments (like, replacement of all the existing routers) or doesn't even exist (e.g. that 5G stuff).
I don't know how high the demand is, though. It could be hitting the ceiling, or it could be nowhere near that (and issues could have a different cause).
Not sure what you are saying since the whole issue is about who is going to pay. In the west you are paying $40-$80 as a consumer while a lot of companies make money. In Asia it is common that high speed Internet access itself is cheap, but traffic costs more money for the companies providing services.
Everybody pays. I, and other Fios subscribers, pay a flat monthly fee for our internet service at a specified bandwidth. There's usually a monthly total data cap as well, but it's either in the contract fine-print or an unspecified policy that you won't find out about unless you surpass it.
Companies providing services pay as well; they also have to buy internet service for a given bandwidth, and their contracts are more explicit about total data usage.
My understanding is that the difficult bit is that the consumer's ISP and the service provider's ISP are often not the same company. So, Netflix is paying their ISP a ton of money for all the data they're sending, but my ISP doesn't have any contract with Netflix even though they're carrying the data to bring it to me. My ISP finds that unfair. But here's the thing: I'm already paying for MY service, which I'm using to get that data. As long as I'm within my contractual limits, everything I'm doing is paid for, and my ISP has no basis for crying about not getting a share of what Netflix pays their ISP.
This is all just a cover story to hide the fact that my ISP wants legal cover to offer their own service that competes with Netflix, to make it cheaper and crappier than Netflix, and to compete by charging their customers more for Netflix's "premium" bandwidth, while offering their own service for a "discount" bandwidth.
