Government Broadband

Continuing the FCC theme from the prior post. I stumbled across a great article on ZDNet demonstrating a handful of negative effects of the FCC controlling cost and infrastructure of broadband. The following is an excerpt from that article by the David Gewirtz, the executive director of the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute, founder of the ZATZ technical magazines, and the cyberterrorism advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals:

But there is a dark side. First, you gotta know that the minute FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski mentioned providing broadband to another 100 million DVD-buying-cause-they-can’t-watch-Hulu-yet Americans, some movie industry executives somewhere went full-goose bozo.

And that’s even before Julius mentioned those juicy upload speeds of 100 megabits per second. Can you say BitTorrent? Sure, I knew you could. Now, think about the FCC’s stated goal of “access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools.”

In schools all across America, there will be armies of teenagers who’ll use their schools’ increased bandwidth to share every movie and every TV show ever digitized. After all, if it takes less than ten minutes to download a full-length movie, why not? Yes, I know, there’s software to prevent that. Do you seriously think any security software can stand up to an army of teenagers who want free movies?

Somewhere in Hollywood, an accountant in an overpriced suit just screamed into his latte.

Where else could this thing go off the rails?

Censor No More

The Internet and technology in the last fifteen years has revolutionized communication. Instead of the classic model where a few media moguls with their million dollar transmitters deciding what is and isn't news, the internet gave you and me the power to decide. We are no longer limited with what New York Times believes is sensational, or what our own local papers report. The internet allows us to search and read from media sources around the world. Better yet it, allows us to bypass the media centers entirely and go straight to the sources. And most incredible: it is instantaneous. Better still, technology is becoming more and more mobile, allowing us to create the news and share it immediately with the world. Look at me. I am typing this on my laptop on a train. You can read it as soon as I publish. How long is it until real time connections allow you to read as I type? Perhaps a sort of Facebook Skype hybrid of absolute real-time connection? Not far off I imagine.

So now to the title of this post.

The following video is linked to the TED talk by Clay Shirky, entitled "How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history." This is an incredible talk on this topic. Let the video load and jump to 6 min and 50 sec. China was helpless to stop the mass broadcast of last year's earthquake from its survivors. In fact, the earthquake was twittered as it happened, minutes before the the US Geological Survey announced it. BBC, the first to break the story, got the news from Twitter.

At 13 min and 40 sec is a great story about Obama and Censorship. Well. The whole thing is great if you have the time to watch it.