Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

FCC Rules Against Comcast

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has formally ruled that Comcast’s initiative last year to ‘throttle’ BitTorrent file sharing traffic on their network was a violation of net neutrality rules. The FCC announced their investigation back in April. This marks the first time that the FCC has found a company to have violated net neutrality regulations. Comcast voluntarily ended their illegal practice in March of this year.

Many of those who call themselves economic conservatives, including the Bush administration, have expressed disagreement with the FCC’s findings. This, to me, is mind boggling. If you actually investigate what net neutrality is, you’ll discover that it is a very ‘conservative’ concept. If people pay for ‘unlimited’ Internet access, they should get ‘unlimited’ Internet access. The Internet is, in reality, akin to other mediums through which economic activity occurs, like telephones or highways. Telephone companies can’t sell ‘unlimited local calling’ and then charge you a usage fee for calling, say, a cable company in your area. Nor can they selectively refuse to connect calls they don’t feel like carrying on their system. Nor can they give price breaks to phone-related service companies and inflate service fees for cable companies. Nobody, not even these so-called economic conservatives, would support a phone company abusing its customers or providing selectively-degraded service in these ways, and yet they want to give Internet service providers authority to do exactly the same thing to the Internet.

I’ve purchased unlimited Internet access from Verizon Avenue DSL, and damn-it that’s what I should get. Verizon can’t tell me what I can and can’t use that network connection for, nor can they ‘throttle’ my usage on a whim, nor can they provide preferential bandwidth to sites that have paid into their bandwidth protection racket. The Internet became one of our society’s core economic engines in a large part because of net neutrality, and I guarantee that ‘economic conservatives’ don’t really want to ruin it by turning it into a giant ISP-directed toll road. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it until it finally happens, we must enshrine net neutrality in law before Comcast, Verizon, Cox, and others destroy the Internet for their own short-term benefit.

The views expressed in this post are mine and mine alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, Web.com.

Marion Barry: A Perplexing Feature of DC Politics

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One of the most perplexing enigmas of the Washington, DC, city government is—and has been since 1971—City Councilman Marion Barry (D-Ward 8). Here’s a quick history of Barry’s political career:

  • Barry was on DC’s first elective school board from 1971 to 1974.
  • Upon establishment of DC home rule in 1974 Barry was elected to the City Council and served from 1975 until 1979. In 1977, during his time on the Council, Barry was shot by Muslim terrorists who had seized City Hall and two other buildings in the District.
  • In 1979, Barry became only the second home-rule Mayor of Washington, DC, and remained Mayor until his arrest and imprisonment in 1990. Barry was charged with three counts of perjury, ten counts of drug possession (crack cocaine), and one count of conspiracy. He was convicted only on one count of drug possession.
  • In 1993, less than two years after his conviction for possession of crack cocaine, Barry took the Ward 8 seat on the City Council. He had won election to the Council with 70 percent of the vote.
  • In 1994, Barry ran for Mayor and was elected the fourth home-rule Mayor of Washington, DC, serving from 1995 until 1999.
  • In 2004, Barry again ran for the Ward 8 seat on the City Council, winning the general election with 95 percent of the vote. Barry took office as City Councilman in 2005 and continues serving today.
  • Less than one year after election to the City Council, Barry was charged with failing to pay federal and local taxes. At the hearing, mandatory drug testing found marijuana and cocaine in Barry’s system. Barry was sentenced to three years’ probation on the tax charges and undergoes drug counseling.
  • In 2006, Barry was charged with driving under the influence and various other vehicular charges. He was acquitted on all counts.

Read more . . .

Senator Ted Stevens Indicted

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Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has been indicted on seven counts of making false statements for failing to disclose gifts he received from VECO, an Alaskan oil services company. Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, is the first sitting senator to be indicted since 1993. His indictment is the most recent incident in a series of corruption and nepotism charges that have dogged Alaska state politicians in recent years.

Gifts Stevens is accused of receiving from VECO include major home renovations, a car, and other big-ticket items. According to prosecutors, Stevens solicited these gifts while VECO employees solicited official actions from Stevens in return, such as assistance in obtaining federal grants for the company’s projects.

Stevens’s indictment follows over four years of federal investigations into Alaskan political corruption. Three state legislators have been convicted, and two more are awaiting trial. At least four other Alaska officials and VECO employees, including the chief of staff to former Governor Frank Murkowski (R), have been charged and pleaded guilty to various corruption and/or bribery charges. Representative Don Young (R-AK), Alaska’s only member of the House of Representatives, is also under investigation.

Editorial Note: My wife Melissa is an employee of CH2M Hill, which acquired VECO in September 2007. The alleged incidents of bribery occurred before the acquisition, and Melissa works in a different operating division of the company.

Various Operating Systems 2008

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A bit over a year ago now, I posted nerdy screenshots of a whole bunch of operating systems. I’m a bit of an OS junkie, which is probably a strange thing to be but . . . oh well. Ever since I got my MacBook Pro I’ve been able to run an ungodly number of operating systems through VMWare Fusion, Q, and SheepShaver—from the biggies like Mac, Linux, and Windows to the obscure like Haiku and FreeDOS and oldies like Windows 3.11 and BeOS.

Anyway, there have been a lot of updates in the operating system world since last year, so here’s a new version for your enjoyment (or for you to ignore ;-)).

Read more . . .

Apple Fails to Patch Critical Exploited DNS Flaw

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Most of you likely know that I’m a Mac user and a big fan of Apple, though I’m also the first to admit they’re not perfect and I will buy other companies’ computer products without hesitation when they better suit my needs. My Asus Eee PC, for example, was a much better choice for me than the twice-as-expensive Apple MacBook or the similarly-priced Apple iPod Touch for light web surfing and writing where my MacBook Pro is overkill. But, while I’m generally ‘positive’ on Apple, they occasionally do stuff that just drives me batty.

One thing they do is they tend to lag behind on patching major cross-platform security vulnerabilities. Mac OS X and its UNIX (BSD) brethren, as well as Linux (basically a UNIX clone), are pretty secure operating systems out of the box, but they do occasionally have flaws—even serious ones. I wrote recently about a critical flaw in the DNS system that affects all major operating systems, including Mac OS X. The Mac OS X server version uses, by default, the same open source BIND DNS server that most major Linux distributions use.

BIND has been patched by the folks who make it, but Apple—who was made aware of the bug the same time everybody else was, and knew about the coordinated patch day well in advance—has yet to distribute the updated BIND server to its customers through Software Update. This is inexcusable. Knowledgeable Mac system administrators can compile their own BIND server from the source and replace the insecure version (one of the beauties of running a system that is, at its core, based on open source), but Apple needs to proactively patch this hole in their server product immediately like every other major OS distributor—including Microsoft—already has.

Update 8/1/2008: Apple patched this vulnurability yesterday with Security Update 2008-005. Mac OS X Server administrators should apply this patch immediately, as should all desktop/laptop users of Mac OS X.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.