#58: Wow, you certainly made an effort to misinterpret my post.

Man, I knew I was going to regret forgetting to put quotes around "blackmailing". Yes, it's not technically blackmail when Google and Flickr and everyone are told that unless they pay up they might start having a hard time reaching those customers unlucky enough to have a certain ISP...

I'm sorry I confused you with my lack of punctuation, good job on jumping on that tiny bit of hyperbole.

And by "change how the wire works" I was being speaking very generally (perhaps too vague)... I was more speaking in the sense that when I use my Internet connection I expect my packets to be, you know, routed, instead of run through a custom system that checks the headers to see if the recipient has paid their protection money. Or a system that, say, inspects each packet in order to garble the Skype protocol but leave certain other VoIP data alone. I mean, sure, a non-neutral ISP would still be using the Internet Protocol, just not using it as intended. They will be subverting the normal function of a network. Will the Internet see VM's "de-prioritizations" as censorship, and route around them?

Anyways, I could have used more technical terms, bigger words, longer sentences... but I was trying to be colloquial.

We could argue semantics and nitpick all night. I just hope other people got more out of my post than you did.

#54 - Nothing that you do, no amount of money that you pay has any impact on the service that you get unless the person on the other end of the transaction pays a bribe.

It gets better: The ISPs like Virgin Media want to extort other companies, companies that the ISP's customers are patronizing. If those companies are forced to pay, they will have to pass those costs on to that same customer!

Not only are they giving you partial service where they muck with packets going to destinations they don't like, but they're also sneakily extracting money from you by, in effect, raising the prices of other companies.

This is incredibly dishonest business, and I'm with Cory: the sleazebags can get stuffed.

Another thing I'd like to add is that I'd prefer if ISPs (and pro-ISP people) would stop trying to blur QoS based on "what it is" and QoS based on "where it's going". The former is generally okay (I don't mind 50ms extra latency on port 80 if it means less laggy VoIP) while the latter is BS.

And I don't care if my consumer-grade connection is slow at peak or goes down once in a while. Five-nines uptime for YouTube-watching is overkill. What I care about is the ISP messing around with very specific parts of my traffic because somebody bribed them.

And someone is going to have to do something about this crap. Most people have 1 or 2 ISPs to choose from, and where there isn't a monopoly the players have long since agreed not to compete with each other to a significant extent. It's not like a new, ethical ISP is going to come along and run their own wire into my apartment.

@#42: What part of my post do you think is fabricated? Don't make accusations without backing them up.

If you're talking about the "long cat-5 cable" thing, I made it quite clear this was a gross simplification.

The point was that ISPs (with the exception of things they host in their own datacenter) don't actually have anything to do with the companies they intend to extort. But they are giving the impression the "other end" of their service is a connection to that company.

#6, #9, et al:

This "extra pipe" analogy is also an oversimplification of a complex concept. The point-to-point, packet-switched Internet, especially where commercial ISPs are concerned, doesn't work like that.

Ultimately, all you get from your ISP is a single plug that is expected to connect you to the Internet backbone. If you really want to simplify: ISPs are just providing a long stretch of cat-5 to someone else's router; they can't change how that wire works, because that would mean they are no longer really providing "Internet access", in the strictest sense.

An ISP in its capacity as a provider of that connection service, has little to do with the backbone, and nothing to do with the millions of other subnetworks connected to it.

ISPs don't care - indeed, have to make extra effort to even figure out - where your packets are coming from and going to. This is because of the very design of the Internet itself: the location and physical identity of an Internet node is deliberately made inconsequential.

So this idea ISPs have for finding and blackmailing the people their customers are trying to communicate with is a contrivance. Or, put bluntly, a scam.

Good video, but Linux has a lot of commercial support

It does now, but those companies would never have been interested (nor would there have been anything to be interested in) were it not for the global Internet-connected community of volunteers and enthusiasts that built up around that certain Finnish student and his hobby operating system.

Why must you torture your fellow Canadians, Cory? :(

I read the shummary as:

"Phishers, phishing phishing phishers sophishticated phishers phishware phishers to phish the phishers; finally, phishers unsophishticated. Shervers sherving the phishing, phishing phishers. Phishers other phishers. Shimply shtole inphormashion stolen by other phishers! Phorums where phishers, shcammers, and carders identphishied other phishers."

Phunny, and kind of phoetic!

But if they make Free / Open Source Software simpler, more accessible, and user-friendly, lots of ordinary people might start using it! Gasp!

N. Welch: How many people? One. To be precise, one inquisitive 14-year-old boy without an exceptional amount of common sense for his age.

If the publisher thinks it uneconomical to put the comics online for free, why not (for example) put a coupon of some sort in each dead-tree comic book that lets you have a certain number of downloads, or gives you a subscription for a certain amount of time. It could also give you a 10% discount on the next consecutive book to encourage people to spend money on the whole collection.

If "give it away for free" is too simple, there are lots of things that can be tried to entice the consumer into monetarily rewarding the seller for their hard work. If you're not the imaginative type, there's always ad-supported content. Control-freaking, silly DRM schemes, and brow-beating the customer seems unbelievably stupid though, and I don't exactly see that technique working very well so far...

#2 mentioned Radiohead, who gave their latest album away without an obligation to pay. #2 said they could tour to boost their income, but why would they need to? They made millions of dollars from that "free" album, while it's possible that if they had gone through a copyright cartel to sell that album, they wouldn't have seen a red cent.

"the youth's political apathy"

Yeah, its not like young people have a habit of not voting or not taking a stand in other countries. Oh, wait a minute...

Also, maybe South African youth are a little afraid of what they've seen done in the name of 'politics' in their country and others like it?

In America, for example, politics and activism is seen as boring or geeky. In South Africa, I'd imagine political stuff could have other more (justifiably) negative connotations.

I could be coming off as presumptuous, though, because I don't know very much about modern South African culture.

Anyways, from the parts I watched, this Urbo show tells me *somebody* in South Africa has their head screwed on straight. If a cartoon on the same subject was published in CA/US/UK it would likely take the opposite stance, or no stance at all. Futurama's "Kidnappster" episode comes to mind (it wasn't as un-funny or shrill as it could have been, but it entirely missed the point of the issue it was making fun of, like the episode was made by clueless rich white Americans or something).