Here’s a basic screen shot of the Librarything interface:

I could do a random cover group for my blog, which Library thing previews:

I could also do a random listing of my books, which would look like this:

Random books from my library

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

Geography

Great Goya Etchings: The Proverbs, The Tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux (Dover Books on Fine Art) by Francisco Goya

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

1984 (Signet Classics) by George Orwell Collapse (Penguin Press Science) by Jared Diamond

Kandinsky (Portfolio)

Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises by Architecture for Humanity

The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history by John M. Barry

Dog Day by Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett

The White Plague by Frank Herbert

The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 by Charles Bukowski

Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977 by Charles Bukowski

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Franz Marc: The Retrospective

Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem

You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski

Treehouses by Paula Henderson

powered by LibraryThing

But in reality I can do none of these things, because if I clip the text snippet into a widget, it gets deleted. Does wordpress have a policy against widgets that use java? Is this a security issue? Or is there another reason?

It has come out that one of the largest mortgage lenders had pressured the appraisal firm to use appraisers who had a track record of over-valuing houses. The next logical step is an accusation of fraud from those who securitised these mortgages, and then from those who bought the securities backed by these mortgages. It is a small step from that point for consumers to begin to repudiate these loans, saying they were fraudulently duped into taking out a larger loan, and therefore seek damages. And they would simply be: right, if the lender put pressure on the appraiser. And it seems they did.

And there is as a special bonus, one of those great quotes from a judge who actually upholds the law, and didn’t get (or didn’t read) the memo that the American legal system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mega Corp, Inc.

This mess of coarse is an example of colossal stupidity: those who made the loans sold them off and it was in their interest to make as many loans as possible with complete disregard for the riskiness of those loans, since they weren’t going to be left holding the bag when the music stops playing. Can we say market failure?

Of course, those that bought these securities should have done due diligence, and further those who pressured the appraisal system to produce the ‘right’ appraisal will likely be prosecuted. But what or who will fix the terrible loans that many consumers now have taken on? How will that get fixed?

First, the appraisers being pressured by the savings and loan industry:

Cuomo: Appraisers pressured to inflate subprime mortgage values

By MICHAEL GORMLEY

The Associated Press

ALBANY, N.Y. — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday a major real estate appraisal company colluded with the nation’s largest savings and loan companies to inflate the values of homes nationwide, contributing to the subprime mortgage crisis.

“This is a case we believe is indicative of an industrywide problem,” Cuomo said in a news conference.

Cuomo announced the civil lawsuit against eAppraiseIT that accuses the First American Corp. subsidiary of caving in to pressure from Washington Mutual Inc. to use a list of “proven appraisers” who he claims inflated home appraisals.

He also released e-mails that he said show executives were aware they were violating federal regulations. The lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan seeks to stop the practice, recover profits and assess penalties.

…

Cuomo said eAppraiseIT and the parent company knew its actions were illegal, citing an April 17, 2007 e-mail from eAppraiseIT’s president to First American that said, “We view this as a violation of the OCC, OTS, FDIC and USPAP influencing regulation.”

“This is another example where the federal government is asleep at the switch,” Cuomo said.

“It runs through the entire mortgage spectrum,” he said. “Everyone is relying on the appraisal … The appraisal is really the linchpin of the home buying transaction.”

Second, it appears that those who have bought these securities may not have bought what they think they’ve bought. This will cause these securities to lose their value very rapidly unless this gets sorted out very soon:

Foreclosures Hit a Snag for Lenders

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: November 15, 2007

A federal judge in Ohio has ruled against a longstanding foreclosure practice, potentially creating an obstacle for lenders trying to reclaim properties from troubled borrowers.

A federal judge in Ohio has ruled against a longstanding foreclosure practice, potentially creating an obstacle for lenders trying to reclaim properties from troubled borrowers and raising questions about the legal standing of investors in mortgage securities pools.

…

The plaintiff’s argument that “‘Judge, you just don’t understand how things work,’” the judge wrote, “reveals a condescending mindset and quasi-monopolistic system where financial institutions have traditionally controlled, and still control, the foreclosure process.” The cases could be filed again in state court, however.

As this crises develops, it will be interesting seeing who gets bailed out, who doesn’t, and how quickly the Bushies will abandon their supposed ‘free market’ principles.

Third, remember next year is an election year, and this issue will resonate with many disaffected voters.

It’s also interesting from another point of view: what information we get from this lawsuit. Lawsuits are actually very efficient ways of distributing information, as each lawsuit reveals things through the adversarial process that wouldn’t always come out. In this case the information is clear: Caruso’s development model is such a threat that his competition thought the legal risk they placed themselves in was worth it. That gives an insight as to how dangerous they thought this competition is, and what means they have to counter it. They think this competition is dangerous, and they don’t have a clear way of adapting to this threat.

And we see the theme of competition between things of different scales that was discussed here. The quote from Schumpeter that I just love also talks about changing scales. (I hadn’t noticed that before! How could I miss that?)

It’s interesting that this also ties into sustainable development, and the new topology of globalization–as discussed here and here and here and here. In this new topology, things like goods travel through more complex routes and are becoming dematerialized and more localized, in terms of both labor and material inputs. The only necessary global flows are the non-material things such as information, knowledge, ideas, skills, expertise and judgment.* This is simply a result of the response to higher energy prices, and much more importantly, the rising uncertainty about the cost of energy in the future. But more than just energy prices are driving these changes–there is also the whole sustainability imperative, that is acting both as the carrot (new markets for green products and services) and the stick (higher costs and more importantly, higher uncertainty for non-green businesses)

In this case the developer, Rick Caruso (who won this lawsuit to the tune of $74 million dollars, and the punitive damages have yet to be assessed) has been involved in mixed use projects that tie into local urban fabric like farmer’s markets, rather than sit isolated and look inward. His opponent, General Growth Properties, had pulled out all the stops–using every inch of leverage a large conglomerate could–pressuring chains which have locations in other General Growth Property malls with lease problems if they went to Caruso’s new development. They even sponsored an “astroturf” campaign against the development, getting a referendum on the ballot to stop the new mall. But the plan backfired, with the referendum not passing, and the new mall emerging with more support than ever.

This isn’t just a random event; the reason General Growth Properties pushed beyond the law is they realized how significant and dangerous the competition from Caruso was was, and they were completely desperate to crush him at all costs, and all of that came out in the law suit. It is cases such as this that re-affirm one of the very critical roles of law suits: distributing information.

Jury Tells Mall Giant to Pay $74 Million

By TERRY PRISTIN

Published: November 10, 2007

A jury awarded a private developer $74.2 million in compensatory damages late Thursday after finding that the owner of the Glendale Galleria mall in a Los Angeles suburb had tried to block the Cheesecake Factory chain from opening a restaurant in a rival open-air shopping and entertainment center.

The Galleria’s owner, General Growth Properties, is also facing the prospect of substantial punitive damages because the jury found the company acted with “malice, oppression or fraud” by interfering with negotiations between the restaurant chain and Caruso Affiliated Holdings, the developer of the new shopping center.

…

The case is the latest chapter in a long-running battle pitting General Growth, a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Chicago, against Rick J. Caruso, the chief executive of Caruso Affiliated.

Mr. Caruso specializes in creating smaller open-air shopping centers, which have drawn business away from traditional malls in recent years. He is the developer of the Grove, a popular open-air shopping center next to the Farmers Market on Third Street and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.

…

In 2001, the city of Glendale awarded Mr. Caruso a 15.5-acre site near the Galleria in downtown Glendale to build Americana at Brand, a $369 million open-air shopping center.

…

General Growth, which has interests in more than 200 shopping centers in 45 states, including the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, tried several strategies to keep the Americana from opening — and potentially siphoning off the most desirable retail tenants.

General Growth, a real estate investment trust, first collected enough signatures to hold a referendum on the project, but voters approved its construction. A lawsuit challenging the environmental impact statement for the project was also unsuccessful.

Scheduled to open in April, the Americana is similar in concept to the Grove, except that it will have 238 apartments and 100 condominiums in addition to 475,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space.

…

According to accounts of the trial published in The Glendale News-Press, the Cheesecake Factory signed a letter of intent in 2003 to open a restaurant at the Americana, but it did not sign a lease until this year. Lawyers for Caruso presented evidence suggesting that General Growth tried to thwart the lease by threatening to block the chain’s deals at its own malls.

It is hard for me not to think of Schumpeter’s thoughts** here:

The first thing to go is the traditional conception of the modus operandi of competition. Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted into the sacred precincts of theory, the price variable is ousted from its dominant position. However, it is still competition within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions, methods of production and forms of industrial organization in particular, that practically monopolizes attention. But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) - competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. This kind of competition is as much more effective than the other as a bombardment is in comparison with forcing a door, and so much more important that it becomes a matter of comparative indifference whether competition in the ordinary sense functions more or less promptly; the powerful lever that in the long run expands output and brings down prices is in any case made of other stuff.

Noticed here the concern for the ‘largest-scale unit of control’ and reflect how very difficult it is for a shopping mall to change its scale (it is an economic unit, of a given size, for better or worse. This also ties into observations about the contention of items of a different scale that I had remarked about here.

* The order (information, knowledge, ideas, skills, expertise and judgment) is non-random, but shows a progression from the commoditized (pure information) to the specialized artifacts produced to meet individual needs which are deeply resistant to copying.

** (Joseph A. Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Chapter VII: The Process of Creative Destruction page 83-84, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1962)

All that I would like is a theme that is:

1. NOT fixed width
2. Can have light letters on a dark backround
3. Not be really weird or unusual.

It would be really nice, but not necessary, for the theme to have a customizable header.

There are so many, many ways to make small tweaks to existing themes that I almost think they are deliberately not making a good theme! When it would be this easy, it almost HAS to be purposeful.

There are ten or twelve themes that are almost good, but, at the last minute, they do something wrong that prevents them from being that really great dark theme!

For example, all that has to be done is:

1. Allow users to customize the BACKGROUND color of the GARLAND theme, or
2. Take BLACK LETTERHEAD theme and make it not fixed width, (and text color/font customizable would be cool, too), or
3. Take CHAOTIC SOUL theme and make it not fixed width (also, fix bug when long (that is longer than a single line) headlines overlap), or
4. Get rid of the weird quotes, mandatory lower case headlines and overbearing header of the theme REDOABLE LITE
5. Modify HEMINGWAY theme so that it would not be fixed width, and put widgets on the side, not bottom, or
6. Modify NEOSAPIEN theme so it would not be fixed width, and change the header so it wouldn’t be so overbearing. (HINT: in a BLOG it is the CONTENT that I create–if your theme interferes with the content, you’ve done something wrong.), or
7 & 8 Take either: Silver is the New Black or Shocking Blue Green and allow the colors to be fully (i.e., including the background) customizable, or
9, 10, & 11 Take any of the following three themes WordPress Classic, White as Milk, Twenty-eight Thirteen, and make them flexible width, and allow the colors to be light text on dark background, or
12. In the themes Andreas09 or Andreas04, fix the formating bugs (text that doesn’t align nicely) and allow a dark background with light text, or
13. Take the theme ChaosTheory and allow side widget arrangement, and give users the ability to customize the text color; to make IT really super, allow interlaced text when it is link text (that effect is way way beyond cool, and depending on the colors chosen can be very subtle, or shocking…)

Now, they have all the recipes… Let’s see what happens…

First, I’d probably pay more attention to you, whoever you are, if you would sign a real name to just one of your various posts.

Second, you take the point out of context–the parasitic behavior is the trading of illegal copies. I’ve never had a problem with the technology, just the behavior. If what you’re doing is legal, then you can explain yourself to your ISP and you should be able to continue using your account although you may have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth. If you don’t like paying for your bandwidth usage, I’m sure there will be some ISPs in the short run who will cater to those being shut off. In the long run, if you don’t like paying for bandwidth, thank the millions of people who are ripping off the creative community. I–for one–will not shed a single tear for you. Fortunately for you, our society is taking a very long time to impose the negative externalities of illegal file bartering in the places they belong.

Third, I don’t debate with cowards, just those who stand behind their own names and take responsibility for what they say.

First, you may or may pay attention to me, after all I have generally ignored you–except for a couple of times when IP Central has published links to your rants. As of yet, I will decide when or not to post anonymously. But I am in pretty good company with everyone else who has chosen to use a pen name, e.g. Mark Twain and George Orwell.

Second, I am not taking any point out of context–it is you who are trying to conflate illegal file sharing with using P2P technology. Someone can use IM infrastructure to trade illegal copies, or just a plain old website, too. Comcast broke a protocol, not illegal file sharing. They also committed fraud, because they told their companies that they could use bit torrent. And exactly why should I have to pay a higher rate for bandwidth, rather than the same rate everyone else pays?

Third, see my response to your First comment.

Well SuSE has joined the band wagon, and has issued Live CD’s with a click to install option. This is great because you can test out if SuSE works with your hardware, and if you are happy, just install. There is a Gnome and a KDE version available here:

ftp://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/10.3/iso/cd

Chris never mentions that Comcast lied to its own customers in its FAQS and thereby committed fraud. They also interfered with their subscriber’s freedom of association. Those are minor sins, or perhaps even virtues, in Chris’s book. First, he starts out with some generalizations, and is so mad he gets his words all mixed up, which was my clue that this was really some kind of hate speech, not rational argument:

My general thesis there is that at a high level of abstraction (a) there are two essentially classes of traffic on the Internet, one legal and one illegal, and (b) if an ISP is not going to have the spine to shut off illegal file bartering on its network, the least they could do is make it very, very unpleasant for the illegal file bartering and substantially illegal social networking systems to operate.

Here we have an insatiable demand for simplicity: there can apparently be only two categories of anything, and the idea of a nuance like ‘legal file sharing’ or ‘immoral disruption of networking protocols’ can’t even begin to enter into the debate.

The use of an adverb as a adjective is unique, though: “there are two essentially classes” beats even some of W’s hilarious mis-speaks.

Then, there is the sweeping accusation that social networking systems are “substantially illegal” which he never explains. But he doesn’t have to: this is anti-net neutrality hate speech, and he gets his thoughts as right as his grammar, and his logic as twisted as his emotions.

But this speech has plenty of antecedents, particularly over at IP Central, which seems to be about the only place that actually likes Chris Castle’s writing. He goes on:

I think before you address any of the more nuanced issues in the “net brutality” debate, you have to deal with the legal vs. illegal issue, and I just can’t wait to hear how Google’s shills spin that one.

He really likes assigning pejorative terms to those he doesn’t agree with, but how catchy is ‘net brutality?’ Oh, and Google doesn’t need shills except when it does really stupid, amoral things like helping China filter the internet.

This is particularly true since “…more Americans are using file-sharing software than voted for President Bush…” as we often are reminded by the EFFluviati, so the problem is extraordinarily acute.

Well, as Greg Palast has investigated and documented in his wonderful book ‘Armed Madhouse’ we really don’t know how many Americans voted for President Bush, so this statement can’t be verified. But I don’t understand why we should be alarmed by the fact that file sharing software is being used by many. File sharing software has many legitimate, legal uses, Chris. Ever try to get a SuSE DVD during the beta or release candidate stage? Bit torrent is the only way. (This article is being written on a machine running SuSE 10.3 RC1, downloaded using bit torrent.)

It is also important to enlist the Invisible Hand wherever it can do the most good by making file-sharing extraordinarily unpleasant while at the same time clearly labeling the parasitic behavior as grotesquely antisocial (meaning it’s the kind of thing one can be expelled, fired or prosecuted for doing) and bringing as much stick to bear as one can afford—and offering a pleasant, socially acceptable and legal alternative (such as iTunes) or the program of the Principled Group (in contrast to the Unprincipled Group).

Here he goes again calling file sharing ‘parasitic’ and ‘grotesquely anti-social’–while not distinguishing between legal and illegal file sharing, which is strange, because just above he wanted to divide things into just two classes. How about distinguishing between legal and illegal file sharing, Chris?

Since Chris likes to refer to Adam Smith (although I doubt very much he has actually read any of his works,) here is an Adam Smith quote that everyone should be familiar with.

Of course–this means that anyone seeking to impose this burden would run afoul of the “net neturality” movement because in order to make this distinction, an ISP would have to make some choices about what to do about the illegal traffic and distinguish the illegal from the legal traffic. How would one make that distinction? The same way you can distinguish a dog from a duck. Life is full of uncertainty, and the Internet was not supposed to be a full-employment program for lawyers, including the Mystic Knights of the EFFluviati. Besides, I’m sure that pro-theivery ISPs will spring up all over the world, starting at the Harvard Law School and what Professor Lester Lawrence Lessig III calls the “super cool frecultur country of Sweden.”

Yes, Chris a network like the internet, having freedom and decentralization built in to its very architecture, is not conducive to becoming an arm of the law enforcement agency. You seem to want it to do much more than this though–you want prior restraint by private entities, who would presumably be unaccountable to any government agency. Sounds like a recipe for Corporate Fascism to me. I suppose that you would like the telephone company to listen to all calls, because from time to time they might uncover evidence of a crime or two?

But he did get one thing right: Life is full of uncertainty, especially if you are an entertainment lawyer living of of the fat of the work of artists. Obviously he is angry that he is losing that opportunity, and he may have to go out and get a real job sometime soon. Well, Chris one word for you: Radiohead. Bands are going to go straight to the customers, and the marketing and legal departments and all those hangers ons will have to go out and get real jobs. Do you think anyone is sorry that you have to adapt?

The centralized corporate power structures like the big four (EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) will evaporate. These companies will still exist, but as their copyrights lose value, they will become much less powerful and the actual ARTISTS WHO MAKE THE MUSIC will be empowered. This will be popular with everyone except: stock holders of the above-mentioned corporations and a very few of their highly compensated employees.

You may ask ‘What do I have against the big four Music groups?’ That’s a very fair question, because I do have an ax to grind with them. Of course the fact that I will get better and more varied music by a wider variety of artists at a lower price is all good, and would be enough to take the positions I have.

But there is another problem I have with the big four record companies: they keep trying to take away my freedoms. You see, I am attached to my First Amendment rights, rights which they are attacking by lobbying for laws like the DMCA. Unfortunately, my law makers caved into to that pressure, and they only weapon I have left to help preserve my freedom is economic–choke off the air supply to these freedom-destroying entities so they don’t threaten my freedom any more.

(HINT TO THE BIG FOUR: If you guys backed away from the DMCA and other freedom-destroying policies, people might start buying CD’s again.)

Ah, but distinquishing the legal from the illegal would violate the “tradition” of “net neutrality,” you see. Bunk. There was also a “tradition” among hotel guests in the Old West who were confronted with a fellow guest who was snoring in the next room–opening fire through the wall until the snoring stopped. When civilization came, they learned to complain to the concierge.

It sure helps to have an ISP lead the way, which it appears is exactly what Comcast is doing. We noted in an earlier post that Comcast has started cutting off service to bandwidth hogs (generally in line with the policies in effect at Stanford Law School, although it’s not a precise measurement as Comcast is not obligated to, and hasn’t, posted exactly what you have to do in order to be expelled from the service—no doubt showing an abundance of caution for the hacker non-ethic and their handmaidens, the Mystic Knights of the EFFluviati).

No, when Comcast says they don’t block Bit torrent I actually expect them to do what they say they are doing–not block bit torrent. Comcast lied, Chris.

Now we find an oped—sorry, a story—on the Associated Press that alleges that Comcast is going much farther. It is stopping the “unstoppable” Bit Torrent and Gnutella. The EFFluviati are all aflutter re same, and a Comcast user is quoted as sniffing out Comcast’s atrocious behavior (I wonder if this is the same guy?).

To wit from the AP oped—sorry, news story:

“Comcast’s interference affects all types of content, meaning that, for instance, an independent movie producer who wanted to distribute his work using BitTorrent and his Comcast connection could find that difficult or impossible — as would someone pirating music.”

Yes, the AP reported facts that Comcast was uncomfortable with. That doesn’t make the story an OP-ED, Chris, it just means Comcast has a truth problem.

And of course just like Fred von Lohman of the EFF (as well as other Lessig fellow travelers) found it untroubling that Grokster and Morpheus were used for 97% infringing purposes, the “correct” result would be that the rights of an “independent movie producer” who wanted to distribute his work on Bit Torrent (presumably under some version of the flawed “Creative Commons” license) trumps the massive infringing activity that goes on every minute over file-bartering services to the PROFIT of ISPs TRUMPS the rights of the entire creative community.

Yes, Chris that is exactly right–you get it! Freedoms like the First Amendment real are more important than someone’s wet dream of a business plan. Perhaps you should recall the price that many have paid defending our freedoms, and then you might value them more highly.

How massive?

The metrics of theft can be derived from very AP story that is so indignant about Comcast shouldering its responsibilities a member of the commercial world trying to live under the law (not to mention an ISP)—a story that reaffirms what was clearly spelled out in “Why You Hate Net Neutrality”:

“Internet service providers have long complained about the vast amounts of traffic generated by a small number of subscribers who are avid users of file-sharing programs. Peer-to-peer applications account for between 50 percent and 90 percent of overall Internet traffic, according to a survey this year by ipoque GmbH, a German vendor of traffic-management equipment.

“We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure all our customers have the best broadband experience possible,” Douglas said. “This means we use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.”

And the EFFluviati chime in right on cue, inaptly comparing Comcast to ISPs in China run by the Chinese government and serviced by EFF’s alleged benefactor, Google:

“The results of our tests have agreed with AP’s [boy, that was quick]. Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating.”

Well yes, Chris there is convergence between the corporate power structure in the USA and the Chinese police state, as I have noted here, here, here, here, and here.

And continue communicating to encourage the bartering of illegal files such as 97% of the users of Morpheus, the losing party in the Grokster case defended so brilliantly by that lion of innovation, Fred von Lohman of the EFF.

In a typical extension of its “Big Lie” techniques, the EFF offers up the following spray of EFFluvia:

Comcast keeps telling its users that the problems they’re seeing are not its fault. [True: If the users weren’t already engaged in highly illegal activities, they wouldn’t be having this problem. Comcast has a right to keep its systems free from criminal behavior. Just because Google doesn’t want to do the right thing, doesn’t mean Comcast has to follow the same compassless moral relativism. So if Comcast implements a system to make theft unfcomfortable, the intervening free will is not a choice of Comcast, is it?]

It’s time for Comcast to come clean about what it’s doing and take its users’ reports seriously. [You mean take the EFF seriously, right. Why on earth would anyone do that? Why help hackers, who John Perry Barlow refers to as the EFF's "electronic Hezbollah"? Comcast doesn’t owe criminals any assistance. And besides, how do we know that Comcast isn’t cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to build a case against these infowarriors and their apologists?]

There you go, taking the moral high ground-let’s compare the EFF to the Hezbollah! But this next remark is too precious:

I don’t often quote myself, but his is worth remembering:

“So if you are an artist or someone who benefits from the creative community, understand that when the Lessig cabal [including the Consumer Electronics Association’s Digital Freedom Campaign as well as Lessig, Google and the EFF] try to get you to support “net neutrality” there’s nothing neutral about it all, and it is all of a piece in their campaign to crush our rights and our business. As [Lester Lawrence Lessig III, a/k/a] the Nutty Professor put it succinctly in one of his anti-copyright diatribes: “We’re bigger than them [so if you contribute to EFF we will win].” Meaning they’re bigger than us, so they should get to have their way. He said it, I didn’t.”
Senator Diane Feinstein summed it up very well at the 2004 post-Grokster hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee after she roasted the Honorable Debra Wong Yang U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California and Chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on Cyber/Intellectual Property Subcommittee–who had done absolutely nothing to protect the entertainment industry online:

“I have watched for over a half decade since Jack Valenti [then president of the Motion Picture Association of America] urged us to do something. We asked him to negotiate and there were two attempts to strike a balance between protecting copyrights and fair use copying….Now we have a unanimous Supreme Court decision and peer-to-peer nets are increasing. That is a signal. Enact strong law to protect the copyright industry. If negotiations can’t produce results, it is up to Congress to act.”
Unfortunately, Senator Feinstein doesn’t seem to be able to get the attention of a sufficient number of her colleagues to make something positive happen in the Congress. But at least an ISP has the courage to take on the anti-copyright crowd in a way that makes a difference.

Bravo, Comcast. Keep up the great work, and Senator Feinstein please take note. It’s morning in the information war.

And here we have observation by Ernesto over at Torrentfreak:

Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2007
Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.

Now there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this all over the place. Some think that what Comcast did was wrong, but don’t think that the solution is to legislate net neutrality. Others, and I would say this seems to be the majority opinion, seem to think net neutrality case has been strengthened here. (I am pretty much in that camp) Ed Felten seems to agree, to a point, but because he thinks actually enacting net neutrality into would be very difficult, he doesn’t advocate that.

There are even a few folks who think what Comcast is doing is perfectly OK, although those people don’t explain why Comcast lied about it, or try to justify their continued evasiveness on this issue. Market forces seem to me to be part of the answer, but due to the very limited choices, many can not vote with their pocket books. The market is not functioning, as there are just one or two suppliers almost everywhere. And Comcast is doing what it can to prevent markets from working: concealing information, information that it’s customers would use to make informed decisions about their purchase of internet services.

I am not a big fan of knee jerk government intervention, so I wonder if there isn’t a middle ground, between enacting net neutrality, as difficult as that is, and doing nothing, as distasteful as that is.

What I have in mind is legislating transparency. There’s plenty of precedent for this in the history of monopolies and near monopoly industries. For example, in terms of laws that set railroad transport pricing. Or in consumer protection laws, setting standards in how interest would be computed on consumer loans in the rent to own industry. So a simply rule on pricing transparency for ISP’s would go a long way in getting information out there. As von Hayek noted, the market really is largely about information flows, and more and better information means better operation of authentic market forces. That is what I propose.

Simple stated, ISP’s should charge either a flat fee for access, or a metered fee. And they must disclose all protocols used and those that they interfere with. It really seems a lot simpler than legislating net neutrality. It seems that law alone would have prevented Comcast from trying to do what they were doing–because they lied about it so much. A really simple observation–if someone lies about something, they probably realize they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing.

So, first let’s try to legislate open pricing, clearly defining what services (protocols) are and are not interfered with. IF that does not work, then we can talk about legislating net neutrality.

However, a couple of possibilities I am waiting for: some entity like Comcast using the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA to go after those who do forensics on their network. Also possible: Comcast canceling service to those who were involved in diagnosing their strange handling of Bit torrent traffic. Either of those should be a big red flag that Comcast has decided to fight this one out, rather than change their repressive policies.

But we can’t ignore those, who, like Ed Felten uncovered the truth about what Comcast was doing, and further publicized it so quickly. Another data point in how wrong folks like Andrew Keen are, perhaps?

Ed Felten notes the lack of honesty by Comcast, and the fact that their measures were very specifically targeted at certain protocols:

Comcast Blocks Some Traffic, Won’t Explain Itself
October 23rd, 2007 by Ed FeltenComcast’s apparent policy of blocking some BitTorrent traffic, which has been discussed on tech sites [example] for months, has now broken out into the mainstream press. Comcast is making things worse by refusing to talk plainly about what they are doing and why. (This is an improvement over Comcast’s previously reported denials, which now appear to be inconsistent with the facts.)

To the extent that Comcast has explained itself, its story seems to be that it is slowing traffic from heavy users in order to keep the network moving smoothly. This would be a reasonable thing for Comcast to do (if they were open about it) — but it’s not quite what they’re actually doing.

For starters, Comcast’s measures are not aimed at heavy users but rather at users of certain protocols such as BitTorrent. And not even all users of BitTorrent are targeted, but only those who use BitTorrent in a particular way: uploading a file to non-Comcast users while not simultaneously downloading parts of the same file. (In BitTorrent jargon, this is called “seeding”.) To get an idea of how odd this is, consider that an uploader who is experiencing blocking can apparently avoid the blocking by adding some download traffic.

Ed further notes the technical details of this interference, and how Comcast is interfering directly, in a very non-neutral way with a specific protocol:

There are well-established mechanisms for dealing with traffic congestion on the Internet. Networks are supposed to respond to congestion by dropping packets; endpoint computers notice that their packets are being dropped and respond by slowing their transmissions, thus relieving the congestion. The idea sounds simple, but getting the details right, so that the endpoints slow down just enough but not too much, and the network responds quickly to changes in traffic level but doesn’t overreact, required some very clever, subtle engineering.

What Comcast is doing instead is to cut off connections by sending forged TCP Reset packets to the endpoints. Reset packets are supposed to be used by one endpoint to tell the other endpoint that an unexplained, unrecoverable error has occurred and therefore communication cannot continue. Comcast’s equipment (apparently made by a company called Sandvine) seems to send both endpoints a Reset packet, purporting to come from the other endpoint, which causes both endpoints to break the connection. Doing this is a violation of the TCP protocol, which has at least two ill effects: it bypasses TCP’s well-engineered mechanisms for handling congestion, and it erodes the usefulness of Reset packets as true indicators of error.

Certainly, this discriminates against those who want to use Bit torrent to distribute (or get) stuff, and one of the methods that linux distributions use to distribute stuff is Bit Torrent. If fact, Bit torrent was the only way to get the SuSE 10.3 DVD’s, before the final edition was pressed and made available through retail channels. This post, in fact, is being written on a computer running SuSE 10.3 Release Candidate 1, DVD install and the only way to get is Bit torrent.

Certainly some who distribute linux do so in order to dismantle the oppressive and highly centralized power structures that have arisen around monopoly software companies, companies which effectively have declared war on the first amendment. So Comcast and those Corporate Power advocates should not be surprised when people are outraged. We like our First Amendment.

It is obvious that those who have worked hard to uncover the truth about what Comcast are heroes, and have been critical in the process which has resulted in energizing deeply the net neutrality movement.

But I expect that we’ll soon learn more about the situation, and the conclusions to be drawn from it will be less obvious. There might be legitimate security reasons for what Comcast has done. We’ll see. We should expect full disclosure from Comcast.
My take: If Comcast is “shaping” traffic inconsistent with their terms of service, for non-network-security reasons such as copyright protection or surreptitious usage control, they shouldn’t be doing that.

More important is the meta-point: Independent testers found what they believe to be an impropriety in Comcast’s provision of broadband. They called it out, and interested parties among advocacy organizations and the media swarmed all over it. Comcast has to answer the charge, whether meritorious or not.

These are market processes working their will, and the outcome will be reached in short order-

By this very low standard, it is impossible for there ever to be anything disclosed that is an example of a market failure and that would therefore require government intervention because if it is discovered and therefore discussed, Jim would just say something like:

“My meta-point remains: Independent testing revealed alleged wrongful behavior by Comcast and an array of forces are requiring them to account for it. This is being done through operation of the market, without government intervention.”

However, realize that this is just yet another example of a large corporation stifling public discussion to further its business plan. The internet is the new town square, and to permit toll booths and road blocks and secret protocols to intervene is unacceptable. Comcast has, despite the gnashing of teeth of the libertarians, convincingly made the argument for network neutrality legislation that no one else had as yet made so eloquently.

The secret throttling of bandwidth is restraint of freedom of speech; many use Bit torrent to disseminate minority political speech that would otherwise be less accessible. Further, it cannot be ignored that the distribution of linux and FOSS to dismantle the centralized power structures of large corporations is itself an act with a political dimension. So, any attempt to dismantle or disrupt Bit torrent traffic is a de facto act of political repression.