February 25, 2008

Comcast vs. BitTorrent to be focus of FCC hearing

By Anne Broache, News.com
Published on ZDNet News: Feb 22, 2008

The high-profile squabble over Comcast's slowdown of BitTorrent file-sharing traffic–and broader questions of network handling by Internet service providers–is set for public scrutiny Monday at a federal hearing.

This time, the Federal Communications Commission will depart its headquarters just off the National Mall in Washington and head north to a courtroom on Harvard Law School's campus in Cambridge, Mass. (The FCC wouldn't comment on why the site was selected, but Boston is the home turf of Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, who chairs a House Internet subcommittee.)

The hearing, which will be open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis and be otherwise accessible via an "audio-only" Webcast on the FCC site. It's an outgrowth of the agency's recently launched inquiry into what constitutes "reasonable" network management practices by Internet service providers.

The FCC in 2005 said broadband companies should not block or interfere with lawful Internet use, unless they're doing so for "reasonable" network management purposes, but revelations that Comcast was stalling uploads to BitTorrent protocol clients raised new questions about what "reasonable" means.

The public forum will give the commissioners a chance to quiz company executives and networking experts, and perhaps reveal what they may do next. The regulators have already accepted thousands of written comments from private citizens, interest groups, and corporations concerned about the topic. They may choose, based on the comments, to start a process that would more clearly establish what Internet service providers may and may not do, but they're not obligated to do so.

The event–coupled with Rep. Markey's introduction of an arguably less-regulatory Net neutrality bill last week–also signals a clear revival of a temporarily dormant debate over whether Net neutrality laws are needed.

"What we're going to see on Monday is a trial of the Internet," said Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu who has written extensively in favor of Net neutrality regulations and is slated to speak on a panel Monday. "Comcast is in the docket, accused of crimes against the public interest, and we'll see how well they are able to defend themselves."

Net neutrality, of course, is the idea that network operators like AT&T and Comcast should be prohibited from prioritizing Web content and applications, or charging content owners extra fees for premium delivery. Two years ago, Congress considered handing the FCC extensive power to regulate Internet practices, but it rejected the proposals.

Proponents say such policies are necessary to promote democracy itself–and to ensure that little guys won't be squeezed out of the Internet ecosystem in favor of larger, deeper-pocketed entities. But opponents, including the network operators, say they deserve flexibility to manage their networks as they see fit to serve their customers' interests–for instance, blocking spam and ensuring that use of high-bandwidth applications by some users at peak times doesn't clog the pipes for everyone else.

This brings us back to the question currently before the FCC–what is "reasonable" network management, anyway?

 

On Monday, the FCC commissioners may offer a clearer glimpse of where they stand. The commissioners will have the chance to question Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen, along with executives from Verizon Communications, BitTorrent, Sony, and online video-sharing site Vuze.

Each of the commissioners has already shown some indication of whether they're for or against Net neutrality-type regulations. Chairman Kevin Martin and fellow Republican commissioners Deborah Tate and Robert McDowell have tended to believe that regulations aren't needed and that the market can settle any concerns about unfair prioritization of Internet content, while Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein have tended to favor stiffer rules against traffic discrimination. This is an echo of what happened in Congress, where votes took on a sharply partisan tone.

Martin has, however, indicated recently that a key part of "reasonable" network management practices is making them transparent to customers–something that critics say didn't happen in the Comcast episode.

The hearing is largely a response to public outcry over Comcast versus BitTorrent. Shortly after those reports emerged, a coalition of consumer advocacy groups that support Net neutrality regulations–including Free Press, Public Knowledge, Media Access Project, and Consumers Union–petitioned the FCC to proclaim that "degrading peer-to-peer traffic" violates federal broadband policy.

In a separate but similar petition, the video file-sharing application Vuze asked the FCC to "clarify" what it means by "reasonable network management"–and, more specifically, "to establish that such network management does not permit network operators to block, degrade or unreasonably discriminate against lawful Internet applications, content, or technologies."

The FCC is weighing whether to grant either of those requests.

Comcast, for its part, has already told the FCC in written comments that its actions are completely reasonable. The cable company said it slows down only file uploads that rise to the level of "excessive" and that could interfere with other users' buying viagra in the uk experience during periods of peak network congestion.

But BitTorrent firms have countered that the behavior is "anticompetitive" because it stymies the flow of legal video content that competes with TV programming offered by the cable operator.

Verizon has said it sees no need to interfere with file-sharing traffic at this point, citing fewer bandwidth constraints than Comcast encounters, but it respects the need to do so.

"While Verizon is not in a position to address the particular facts, circumstances, or reasonableness of Comcast's network management practices, the petitioners' sweeping arguments ignore the real-world need for broadband providers to manage their networks in a wide range of contexts and using a variety of methods in order to deliver high-quality and safe broadband services to their consumers," Verizon wrote in comments filed with the FCC.

Sony said in its written comments to the FCC that as a major provider of video content, it supports Vuze's call for clarity on the "reasonable" network management definition. Without FCC scrutiny–or perhaps even regulation–there may be no way of ensuring that "facially legitimate network management tools" don't limit competition in the market for Internet video content, wrote Jim Morgan, the company's government affairs director.

Also scheduled to speak (PDF) at the hearing Monday are Massachusetts legislator Daniel Bosley, a Democrat who leads a technology committee; University of Pennsylvania law professor Christopher Yoo, who has argued against Net neutrality regulations; and three Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors who specialize in network management issues. And, of course, Rep. Markey is scheduled to appear.

The action isn't expected to stop beyond the hearing-room walls. The SavetheInternet.com coalition, whose members include scores of nonprofit groups, small businesses, and bloggers, said it plans to record testimony outside the hearing from members of the public who wish to speak their minds.

Vuze is also inviting Internet users to submit "video testimony" about broadband network management issues to the "FCC Channel" at its Web site. FCC Commissioners are planning to respond to some of the videos during the hearing, and they'll also be made part of the formal public record, Vuze said.

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February 24, 2008

As Evidence of Piracy Weakens, House Passes Overbearing “Campus Digital Theft Prevention” Requirements

February 11th, 2008

File Sharing issue overview, blog postsPosted by Richard Esguerra

The House passed the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (COAA) last week, leaving the troubling "Campus Digital Theft Prevention" requirements intact despite recent revelations that fears over unauthorized campus-based filesharing were drastically overblown by the motion picture industry.

The provision requires universities to combat unauthorized file sharing in two particular ways: by planning to engage entertainment industry-blessed downloading services and planning to use filters or other network tools to interdict infringing activity. It's unfortunate that a bill about college funding is being used as a vehicle for the entertainment industry, which has been making a concerted effort to target the youth and the higher education community with corny videos, invasive technology, and bad law.

The passage of this provision is particularly shocking in light of the recent revelation that the 2005 study that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) relied upon in lobbying Congress was tainted by a "human error." The secret, not-peer-reviewed MPAA study, which originally accused college students of being responsible for 44% of domestic revenue losses due to unauthorized downloading, was corrected to say that only college students were responsible for only 15%. And because only 20% of college students live on campus, then campus networks themselves are responsible for only a fraction of piracy-related losses. More importantly however, the MPAA is still hiding the study's methodology from the public — they state only that "the MPAA will retain a third party to validate LEK's updated numbers."

What's next? The House and the Senate must meet "in conference" to reconcile differences in their respective versions of the same college funding bill, and the Senate's version of the COAA does not contain the mandate for exploring alternative downloading services and network filters. There's still a chance that members of Congress involved in the conference process will see through the smoke and mirrors to stand up for students and universities in rejecting this unnecessary and dangerous mandate.

As we've said before, there are more sensible ways to get creators compensated while respecting buy viagra without prescription the privacy of students and faculty on university campuses.

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Support for Markey bill as Comcast strikes at FCC power

February 18th, 2008

Posted by Richard Koman @ February 18, 2008

Google, Amazon.com — as well as FreePress and Public Knowledge — are lining up in favor of Rep. Ed Markey’s new version of net neutrality legislation, PC World says.
In the last go-round of the net neutrality debate — in which legislation went down to failure — the big ISPs claimed there was no need for the “added regulation.” But in the aftermath of Comcast’s throttling of upstream BitTorrent traffic, something buy viagra sydney “remarkable” has happened.
In its response to a petition by Free Press, Comcast argued that the FCC has essentially no enforcement powers against its actions.

“Free Press mistakenly relies on the [2005 FCC] Internet Policy Statement as creating rules the commission can enforce,” Comcast said.

Markham Erickson, the Open Internet Coalition’s executive director, said Comcast’s assertion:

appears to declare war on Internet users, policy makers and even the FCC. It essentially says that the FCC has no legal ability to protect consumers from discriminatory behavior.

Comcast denied that interpretation.
The Markey bill is not as far-reaching as the bills that died last year but Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, says: “It’s the right bill at the right time.”
The bill calls for the FCC to conduct a study with eight public comment sessions around the country. The telecoms’ “communication” outfit, Hands Off the Internet, looks to be ready to fight even this year’s watered-down version:

There’s no question that a reasoned examination of the facts will demonstrate the folly of net neutrality. However, we are concerned that an effort to seek public input is intended to be a stalking horse for federal Internet regulation. The continued push by special interests to regulate Internet neutrality undercuts the best hope Net users have for faster, more affordable broadband.

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F.B.I. Gained Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail buy viagra online without prescription messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau’s authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.

In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States — in apparent violation of the program’s protocols — because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as “overproduction” — in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of “third-party error,” in which a private company “provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek.”

The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times.

Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the technical and policy controls that the F.B.I. had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

“How do we know what the F.B.I. does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?” Ms. Hofmann asked.

In the cyber era, the incident is the equivalent of law enforcement officials getting a subpoena to search a single apartment, but instead having the landlord give them the keys to every apartment in the building. In February 2006, an F.B.I. technical unit noticed “a surge in data being collected” as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal bureau report. An Internet provider was supposed to be providing access to the e-mail of a single target of that investigation, but the F.B.I. soon realized that the filtering controls used by the company “were improperly set and appeared to be collecting data on the entire e-mail domain” used by the individual, according to the report.

The bureau had first gotten authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the e-mail of the individual target 10 months earlier, in April 2005, according to the internal F.B.I. document. But Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed. “It was unintentional on their part,” he said.

Mr. Kortan would not disclose the name of the Internet provider or the network domain because the national security investigation, which is classified, is continuing. The improperly collected e-mail was first segregated from the court-authorized data and later was destroyed through unspecified means. The individuals whose e-mail was collected apparently were never informed of the problem. Mr. Kortan said he could not say how much e-mail was mistakenly collected as a result of the error, but he said the volume “was enough to get our attention.” Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who reviewed the documents, said it would most likely have taken hundreds or perhaps thousands of extra messages to produce the type of “surge” described in the F.B.I.’s internal reports.

Mr. Kortan said that once the problem was detected the foreign intelligence court was notified, along with the Intelligence Oversight Board, which receives reports of possible wiretapping violations.

“This was a technical glitch in an area of evolving tools and technology and fast-paced investigations,” Mr. Kortan said. “We moved quickly to resolve it and stop it. The system worked exactly the way it’s designed.”

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Excel – What Was That Function Again?

Ever find yourself working in MS Excel and realize the function you want is right on the tip of your tongue, or in this case, your fingers? And there you go again. You have to open the Paste Function window and in doing so, you're probably taking your hands off the keyboard and back to the dreaded mouse to get to the Insert menu, Function choice. Or, maybe you're using the Function button. Either way, it's time consuming and annoying!

Want a keyboard shortcut you can use for the Paste Function window? Yes? I thought you might. I mean, we can all use a time saver here and there!

So, the next time you need to look up an Excel function, try Shift + F3.

The Paste Function/Insert Function dialogue window will immediately open up.

You can search for a function with a description at the top or just below that, you can select a category and scroll through the list it produces.

When you've found what you're looking for, select it and click OK.

For all you Excel 2007 users, you have yet another easy way to search for your functions. You need to take a look at your Formulas ribbon.

Here you'll find that the formula categories are easily accessible. By clicking one of the categories, a list of those formulas will open for you to pick from.

Either buy viagra online no prescription way, it's a way to put you quickly on your quest for that elusive function!

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