internet – D’Arcy Norman dot net

Ghostery – protecting your privacy online

I’ve been using the Ghostery extension in both Chrome and Safari for awhile now. It sniffs the web pages and blocks requests for the douchey stuff that tries to track you online. It lets the good stuff through, but prevents all of the creepiness from executing. It also reports on how many tracking items are attempting to worm their way through it on each page you visit. Eye opening.

It’s free. Runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and IE. There’s also a custom browser for use on iOS, but I haven’t tried it yet.

For instance, on my blog, it shows that the embedded twitter code I pasted on a previous post triggers some tracking funkiness. It blocks it automatically. And it also shows that there aren’t any analytics or other trackers running here.

It’s a small thing, but makes the web feel like more of an opt-in exercise, rather than an uncomfortable walk through a street lined with scammers etc…

the online filter bubble

Shaun Inman just posted a link to a TED Talk by Eli Pariser on the “filter bubble”. This is exactly why I haven’t trusted third-party online services (in addition to the data mining and privacy implications). You can’t trust that what you’re provided, even in response to a “generic” search query, is the whole truth. It’s filtered. Massaged. Processed. Tailored. In order to increase your likelihood of seeing (and hopefully clicking on) ads.

Perhaps even more insidious is the self-imposed filter bubbles, where people choose to expose themselves only to likeminded others, reinforcing whatever beliefs they’re interested in. If they don’t even see that other people have differing perspectives, I’m guessing they’re more likely to believe their perspective is The Truth™. That’s some dangerous stuff.

internet as transactional memory, atrophying individual memory?

Nothing groundbreaking, but a [really nice description](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss) of [how the networked and shared access](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/07/13/science.1207745.abstract) to all information ever captured is shaping our individual memory and information retrieval strategies.

Or something. I don’t have the attention span to actually read the article. Or the short article summarizing the article. Or, really, to write a proper blog post about the short article summarizing the article.

I know I think of memory first as query structures. I’d be hooped if teh googel went down.

From [Kyle Niemeyer’s summary of the article](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss):
>The results from all four experiments suggest that people expect computerized information to be continuously available, and actually remember less when they know they’ll have access to it later. We also seem to remember where we can find information instead of the information itself.

Duh. Again, this isn’t exactly a novel finding. But having some experimental data showing how we remember and search for stuff will come in handy.

why usage based billing will hurt online education (and other interesting things)

The [CRTC has supported Usage Based Billing (UBB) for Canadian internet service providers](http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2011/2011-24.htm). On the surface, paying for what you use sounds entirely rational. But the way UBB is set up is to impose a disincentive for usage, rather than an actual pay-for-use model.

My ISP, Shaw Cable, has a “High Speed” internet service. It is now capped at 60GB per month. Every GB above that is billed at $2 each. It apparently costs the ISP about 1 penny to move 1GB of data. Real UBB would have my monthly bill increased by approximately 1 penny, rather than $2. Maybe the ISP can make a case for a 10x charge. Fine. So a rational UBB at 10x cost would add 10¢ per GB, rather than $2.

But, 60GB? That’s a lot of data, right?

Not really. On [Shaw’s own page on data usage](http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/newdatausage?utm_source=shawca&utm_medium=textlink&utm_content=hslanding&utm_campaign=datausage), they don’t recommend that I access streaming media with my “high speed” connection:

Screen shot 2011 01 31 at 11 28 47 AM

Suppose I listen to Radio #ds106 (a student-run internet radio station used by a single course) for a month. A quick calculation shows that will use 42GB of data just for that. Leaving less than 20GB for using the web, or streaming media. Take Netflix – the streaming service uses approximately 3MB/sec of bandwidth to stream a high quality movie. That’s 1.35GB per hour of video. So a 2 hour movie takes 2.7GB.

The real move here is for the ISPs trying to kill Netflix to protect their video-on-demand streaming video services. The ISPs would now like to charge you an additional $4 bandwidth disincentive tax to let you watch a high quality movie on Netflix. Or, you could just give the ISP the $4 in the first place and watch the video through their streaming service.

What does this mean for education? Most courses now have online components – videos to watch online, videos to publish by students, applications to download. Now, students will have to monitor their monthly bandwidth usage to decide if they can fully participate, or if they’ll risk publishing a contribution and take a potential hit on their monthly bill.

Many courses take place in online meeting rooms – with streaming audio, video, and media. A student in such a class may be chewing up substantial bandwidth, pushing them toward their monthly cap with every session they participate in. Instructors often provide large files for students to download – each of these files, which can be over 100MB, counts against the student’s monthly data cap.

A student trying to survive on a budget connection is imposed a 15GB/month cap (with an additional bandwidth throttle) by their ISP. That means they are now functioning as second (or third) class citizens online. The ISP is imposing the bandwidth cap at an artificially low limit, and then charging obscenely high overage fees as disincentives for use.

If I want to watch Al Jazeera English, whose coverage of the protests in Egypt have been exceptional and far more useful than those of North American news channels, I can tune in to their live video stream online. The Al Jazeera English channel isn’t part of my basic cable package, so unless I want to pay for another tier package, the online stream is the only option. Watching their outstanding coverage for an hour uses about 720 MB of data. Approximately 0.72GB/hour. That will eat up the allotted data very quickly. I’d better cough up for the Digital Premium channel package if I want to avoid surprise bills from my ISP.

Or, if I want to buy a copy of Call of Duty 4 via the new Mac App Store, I’d better make sure I have room left in my monthly data cap to accommodate the 7GB download. Same thing, if I want to buy some albums or HD movies via iTunes. Or follow course materials via iTunesU.

Usage Based Billing has **nothing** to do with charging for actual usage. It’s about using extraordinarily inflated penalties to shape social behaviour in an attempt to protect services offered by the large Canadian ISPs. It’s about punishing people for fully using the internet.

In 2011, this is not OK.

networked

I ran [EtherApe](http://etherape.sourceforge.net/) on my Ubuntu Server system for about 45 minutes this afternoon, sniffing network connections on the office LAN. Nothing snoopy/creepy, just network addresses and protocols. Man, there are a LOT of machines involved…

The node at around 10 o’clock is my desktop Mac.

EtherApe diagram

Airport Extreme on Telus DSL?

I’ve been struggling with this all day. Haven’t found much help on the Telus website, and their tech agents haven’t had much in the way of helpful suggestions.

I use Telus DSL at home, recently switching to the TelusTV service (which apparently also affects the internet service, as the internet guys keep forwarding me to the TV department for support. wtf?)

My old Linksys 802.11a router has been acting up, so I splurged on a new Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n base station. I have it hooked up to the ethernet switch installed by the TelusTV guy the other day.

DSL Modem –> ethernet switch –> Airport Extreme –> Computer

If I run the AE in “Bridge” mode, with no DHCP service (so it’s essentially a hub, not a router), I can get an IP address if connecting via ethernet to the AE. If I try wireless, there’s no joy. If I try to “share a single IP address” – turn on DHCP and routing – the AE complains about pulling an invalid IP address (even though it’s the same one that was pulled by the computer when running the AE in Bridge Mode). No joy in connecting to the Internet via ethernet or wireless in that mode.

I’ve registered the MAC address for the AE via Telus’ registry app at http://oca.ab.hsia.telus.net – no joy.

Lazyweb request: has anyone configured an Airport Extreme to run over Telus DSL via TelusTV? This really shouldn’t be an all-day ordeal. Any tips? Is there a magic phone number or email address to contact to make things work the way they’re supposed to?

I’ve been seriously considering ditching Telus for internet to get it via Shaw, where this balogna apparently doesn’t happen. But that would likely mess up the whole TelusTV thing…

Update: here’s a kicker – I’ve entered both the AE ethernet and wireless MAC addresses into the 2 slots provided on oca.ab.hsia.telus.net to register my computers. My laptop’s MAC address is not registered. But, if I set the AE to “Bridge Mode”, the laptop can surf the web happily while connected to the AE via ethernet. If I set the AE to “Share a single IP address” mode, so that its MAC addresses are visible, then I can’t get off the LAN. WTF? There’s got to be a secret handshake somewhere… Haven’t been able to connect to the internet via wireless at all, no matter what mode the AE runs in.

Update: a handy dandy OmniGraffle diagram of the network topology:

Telus TV Network Topology

Update, the third: Finally got it working, with “share a single public IP address” running. Looks like the AirportExpress wasn’t reading the DNS values provided by DHCP, so nothing was resolvable. And Telus doesn’t appear to like off-Telus DNS servers, so I couldn’t just manually add others. Seems to be working now, after setting the AE internet panel to use “manual” and providing the info.

For future googlers: the DNS servers I use from Telus are

199.185.220.36
199.185.220.52

DOPA is like locking your kids in the basement

I’ve been thinking about the moronically shortsighted DOPA doowackie that got passed South of the Border. Basically, if I understand correctly, it attempts to protect children from online predators (which is a Good Thing To Do�). But, it wants to do this by banning minors from websites that let them contribute. They won’t be able to use MySpace. Or Blogger.com. Or Wordpress.com. Or Flickr.com. Or any other social “Web 2.0” stuff. Kids will be protected by locking them out.

Which is akin to protecting your children from harm by locking them in the basement.

Sure, they’ll be safe, but they’ll be completely isolated and unable to function in a connected, online world once they reach the arbitrarily decided “safe” age of 18 or 21 or whatever silly number got picked from the hat.

You don’t protect kids by locking them away from danger. You cripple them.

And, this assumes the clever kids aren’t aware of anonymizing proxies, or something as difficult as clicking the wrong/right box on a web form, to gain access to verboten sites. Groups are working hard to provide these freedom tools to the oppressed civilians of China, unfairly locked behind the Great Firewall. While simultaneously allowing their government to impose the same arbitrary limitations on their own children.

Thankfully, there has been no word of a Canadian copycat legislation. Yet.

There are better ways to protect kids. The best, and most effective (but most difficult) way is to actually educate them. If they are aware of the issues (in whatever age-appropriate manner) they will be better able to safely cope with dangers. There’s already a handy group forming around this issue.

It’s better to teach kids to swim, than to trust a fence around the swimming pool. Or the lock on the basement door.

I’ve been thinking about the moronically shortsighted DOPA doowackie that got passed South of the Border. Basically, if I understand correctly, it attempts to protect children from online predators (which is a Good Thing To Do™). But, it wants to do this by banning minors from websites that let them contribute. They won’t be able to use MySpace. Or Blogger.com. Or WordPress.com. Or Flickr.com. Or any other social “Web 2.0” stuff. Kids will be protected by locking them out.

Which is akin to protecting your children from harm by locking them in the basement.

You don’t protect kids by locking them away from danger. You cripple them.

Thankfully, there has been no word of a Canadian copycat legislation. Yet.

It’s better to teach kids to swim, than to trust a fence around the swimming pool. Or the lock on the basement door.