One of the problems with Comcast’s new 250 GB bandwidth cap is that, as Om points out on GigaOM, it’s metered without a meter. Comcast doesn’t provide you with a central tally of all your data use. The company instead suggests its customers install bandwidth metering software on their machines and then add up the numbers. Its FAQ reads: “Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account.” Got multiple home machines consuming data every day? Better bust out that spreadsheet — and get ready for some wild guesstimates. After all, you can’t just install a bandwidth metering application on your Slingbox.
The Slingbox is only one example of why the absence of a central bandwidth meter for your account is not inconvenient, but a central flaw in Comcast’s cap. More and more devices are bringing video to the living room, in turn consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. Most of them are not computers, but home entertainment devices with simplified interfaces that don’t burden their users with complicated stats and settings. That makes for a good user experience — unless you’re a Comcast customer that’s already using a lot of data and the box in your living room is busting your bandwidth-capped behind. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.
This is pretty cool: Some folks in the Netherlands have developed a cheap device that can be used to broadcast and also relay FM radio signals. Set up one of these, and you’ll have a personal FM radio station in your house. Spread them to your neighbors, and you’ll be able to cover the whole block through lo-fi P2P meshing.
(via Makezine)
The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.”
Neij came up with the idea for IPETEE back when European politicians were starting to debate a Europe-wide move to DMCA-like copyright enforcement efforts, which were eventually authorized in the form of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive in the spring of 2007. “I wanted to come up with something to make it harder for data retention,” said Neij. But he didn’t publish the initial draft proposal until early this month, when the discussion about privacy and surveillance online suddenly became urgent again. The Swedish parliament passed a new law in June that allows a local government agency to snoop on “the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals,” as the EFF’s Danny O’Brien put it. Neij promises that his new encryption scheme will be ready before the law takes effect next January. Continue reading at Newteevee.com.
The British Times features a pro-P2P piece that’s a little sketchy on the details, but the main message is clear: We’ll need P2P to distribute all those video bits flowing through the networks. That may be true, but the Times seems to have some timing issues in finding the right experts. The paper reports that a big push for P2P comes from Verisign, whose CTO told the Times:
“There may be a bad stigma attached to peer-to-peer but it may be necessary in order to distribute the traffic.”
So what does a company like Verisign do if it believes in the future of P2P media distribution? Apparently it embraces the trend by kicking out its own in-house P2P developers. Verisign sold its P2P video distribution platform Kontiki back in May, a fact that the Times somehow forgot to mention.
