"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

NYT On Net Neutrality

The Grey Lady Gets it Right:

One of the Internet's great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft's home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate.

Another issue aside from the "extortion problem" is that the Telcos want to sell their own rich-media services, and using the massively developed and adopted infrastructure known as "internet" makes that really easy. Except it only works (at a profit) if they're allowed to make their service some kind of special gated community, which means breaking network neutrality.

The new telco conglomorates and cable services see a future where you're "data services" include HDTV on-demand, traditional "internet", and e-commerce all through some AOL or Prodigy-like vertical silo. Which would be suxxomatic.

Action items here.

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Drupal 4.7.0!

Drupal 4.7 is released. Quoth Dries:

2005 has been explosive for the Drupal community. Drupal.org usage has almost tripled in terms of page views, downloads, and number of users, and with the release of Drupal 4.7.0 we are seeing this new found energy drive the platform development forward at an amazing pace. There have been over 338 contributors to this latest release with over 1500 patches which is almost triple our previous record with Drupal 4.6 of 523 commits by 50 developers. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, new Drupal core functionality, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

I've been playing with the beta code (and deploying it for clients) for several months, but anyone still languishing in 4.6-land should wake up and smell the AJAX. 4.7 has some great new tools for coders too, like the Form API, which is a mind-expander, but ultimately a huge improvement.

The most exciting thing though is watching the project and the community take off. No forks (except, of course Drupus). No serious infighting. People turning pro without selling out... The hits just keep coming.

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Paranoia Is Egocentric

Apparently number of right-wing bloggers -- all on the same hosting provider -- are "under seige" from "Islamofacist hackers." Michelle Malkin is gallantly organizing the defense.

Here's a secret. Michelle, Ed, gang: $10 a month mass-hosting sites often experience outages. When your business model is based on over-subscribing your infrastructure, it doesn't take much to foul you up. If you want rock-solid hosting, you have to pay for it, or throw your lot in with a large-scale ASP host (and accept the reduced range of options that result).

For anyone in the biz, it's kind of funny to see how these support threads (one, two) turn into "We're under attack from crazies in Saudi Arabia."

It may or may not be true that this is a pissing match over some postings. But this is huge news for these people, and it's kind of pathetic.

Meanwhile, in Darfur...

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Paranoia Is Egocentric

Apparently number of right-wing bloggers -- all on the same hosting provider -- are "under seige" from "Islamofacist hackers." Michelle Malkin is gallantly organizing the defense.

Here's a secret. Michelle, Ed, gang: $10 a month mass-hosting sites often experience outages. When your business model is based on over-subscribing your infrastructure, it doesn't take much to foul you up. If you want rock-solid hosting, you have to pay for it, or throw your lot in with a large-scale ASP host (and accept the reduced range of options that result).

For anyone in the biz, it's kind of funny to see how these support threads (one, two) turn into "We're under attack from crazies in Saudi Arabia."

It may or may not be true that this is a pissing match over some postings. But this is huge news for these people, and it's kind of pathetic.

Meanwhile, in Darfur...

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Net Neutrality Goes Down In House Committee

The Markey Amendment (which would affirm the principle of Network Neutrality in new Telco Regulations) was defeated in a House committee today, but the vote was much closer than it was previously. Stoller explains:

Ok, so the vote on the Markey amendment to protect the internet has happened, and it was voted down, 34-22. That is a big deal. It's too bad we lost the vote, but we expected that loss. What we did not expected was the narrow margin. By way of comparison, the subcommittee vote was 23-8, which means we should have gotten blown out of the water. We did not. All four targeted Dems by McJoan on Daily Kos flipped to our side, and many of the Congressmen both for and against this campaign mentioned the blogs and angry constituents.

There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we'll close the rest of it.

I watched the markup and the voting, and there was noticeable defensiveness among Congressmen on the wrong side of this. They are wrong, they know it, and they are ashamed. Now they know people are watching. So we didn't win this vote, but this close margin was nonetheless a smack to the jaw of the insiders, and a clear victory for the people. Now the battle moves out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and onto more favorable terrain.

The action now will be in the Senate, which is indeed more friendly terrain for our interests here. Let's keep the pressure on.

Read More

Net Neutrality Goes Down In House Committee

The Markey Amendment (which would affirm the principle of Network Neutrality in new Telco Regulations) was defeated in a House committee today, but the vote was much closer than it was previously. Stoller explains:

Ok, so the vote on the Markey amendment to protect the internet has happened, and it was voted down, 34-22. That is a big deal. It's too bad we lost the vote, but we expected that loss. What we did not expected was the narrow margin. By way of comparison, the subcommittee vote was 23-8, which means we should have gotten blown out of the water. We did not. All four targeted Dems by McJoan on Daily Kos flipped to our side, and many of the Congressmen both for and against this campaign mentioned the blogs and angry constituents.

There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we'll close the rest of it.

I watched the markup and the voting, and there was noticeable defensiveness among Congressmen on the wrong side of this. They are wrong, they know it, and they are ashamed. Now they know people are watching. So we didn't win this vote, but this close margin was nonetheless a smack to the jaw of the insiders, and a clear victory for the people. Now the battle moves out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and onto more favorable terrain.

The action now will be in the Senate, which is indeed more friendly terrain for our interests here. Let's keep the pressure on.

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Drupal Camp NYC

My friend Aaron Welch and I will be doing a two-day training on Drupal development at DrupalCamp NYC. This training is free, and we're going to be encouraging people to bring in real-world problems they're trying to solve. Could be a good resource for folks looking to build skills or just score from free consulting.

I suppose this makes me some kind of expert. Doh.

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Slashdot On Net Neutrality

The techno-rabble weigh in, and as usual the nerds get it:

Seriously though... we will just surf the nets!
(Score:4, Funny)
by crazyjeremy (857410) * on Tuesday April 25, @02:09PM (#15198595)
(http://users.mtrx.net/funnypics)
I can see it now... if they fail, we will soon be surfing the netS. One of them will be like BETA INTERNET, the other like VHS INTERNET. After some debate (and a brief LASERDISC INTERNET) BETA INTERNET will die.

VHS INTERNET FOREVER! (Until DVDs... then DVD INTERNET FOREVER! (Until Xvid INTERNET))

There's a healthy skepticism towards the telcos, which have hardly been paragons of businees or engineering excelence.

Stupid competition, stupid capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
by SlappyBastard (961143) on Tuesday April 25, @02:34PM (#15198820)
What is funny is that the telecoms didn't get real horny for this issue until the DSL price war broke out.

What I always love is that Big Business in America supports a free and open market for about an hour, and then gets all huffy because competition and efficiency force them to work harder.

Suddenly, free enterpise becomes bullshit, and they start pining for a mercantile economy.

If the value proposition for putting up new lines isn't there, maybe Verizon can just ditch its FIOS roll-out and leave us with really old, worn-out copper wiring that runs dial-up at a blazing 7 kbps.

Why is it the government's job to fix their value proposition?

My favorite though:

Damn It! (Score:2)
by gasmonso (929871) on Tuesday April 25, @02:14PM (#15198640)
(http://religiousfreaks.com/)

The US created it and damnit the US can destroy it!

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1st DeanSpace IRC Meeting

Drummy dug up this old gem. That's gonna be three years ago come June.

Funny. It doesn't feel like all that much has changed.

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Torrent!

Wow. Azeurues just passed 600kb/sec for a second. Go torrentfeeder!

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