Results tagged “internet”

Oh, this is rich.

First, the iPhone launches, with AT&T as its only US provider, and an unlimited data plan as the standard package.

Because the iPhone is popular, users flock to AT&T. Because internet access from the iPhone is easy, people do it, a lot.

AT&T's network staggers under the load, leading to dropped calls and poor performance.

AT&T's solution? "Some form of usage-based pricing for data is inevitable," according to the Associated Press.

What I want to know is why anyone was surprised by this. The history of the internet -- the history of computing -- tells us that if you make access easier, people will do more of it. And now AT&T is shocked, simply shocked, that people are actually using all those bandwidth intensive links that Apple so helpfully provides.

Of course AT&T's dilemma is real. They need to improve service, and the money to do that has to come from somewhere. But capping usage seems like such a late-1990s way to go about it. Given the bandwidth demands of the Apple Store, I wonder what Apple will have to say about this.

(Link by way of the Atlantic business channel.)

Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one, but the power of the press does, too. And in the Internet era, anyone can own a press.

Many major newspapers and TV stations have customer service features: a reader or viewer writes them with a customer service problem, they take it up with the vendor and essentially use the threat of public embarrassment to get the problem fixed. Heaven help the hapless vendor if the victim is actually a journalist.

But what happens when everyone can be a publisher, and many many people can command an audience of hundreds or thousands? Stuff like this, in which incompetent customer service confronts the power of Twitter, and loses, big time. (Sleep-deprived new parent rant. Contains shouting, some bad language, and references to baby poo.)

Full disclosure: I have occasionally played the journalist card myself. But it's always a last resort. Like many such weapons, it loses effectiveness if used too often.

I joined an Internet startup in 1998. Even then people were saying things like "biggest change since Gutenberg." The original Napster launched in 1999, and iTunes in 2001. I've been watching ad pages in industry print magazines shrink for most of that time. So count me among the flabbergasted that Traditional Publishing seems to be only just realizing that there might be a problem with their business model.

Really? You think?

Sheesh. What rock have they been hiding under for the last decade, anyway?

(Link by way of the Daily Dish.)

While researching graphene electronics, I found an excellent resource courtesy of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. They held a two week seminar on the subject last year, and put all of the talks online. Not just the slides, but audio and video of all the presentations. Definitely worth a look.

(Highly technical: physicists talking to other physicists. As this is a fast-moving field, these talks may not represent the current state of the art.)

The research was for a feature for Solid State Technology magazine, hopefully the May issue.

Anyone out there using Twitter? I've just started playing with it. Few-to-few twittering is clearly useful, for instance as a way to help a small group converge on a meeting place, receive travel updates, and so forth. I can't decide whether many-to-many broadcast twittering serves any purpose at all, though.

For those interested in helping me investigate the question, my Twitter name is kewms. You'll need to ask to follow me.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Barack Obama may be the first Internet president (if he wins). Apparently Rolling Stone thinks so too, and they have much better access to his operations than I do. A very interesting look at mixing newfangled tools with old-fashioned activism.

On December 25, the Thin Film Manufacturing mail server bounced 544 spam messages.

Which in addition to allowing me to observe that these people truly have no life, encourages me to remind legitimate correspondents to check their maillogs. The filters are sometimes overly aggressive. I can usually fix the problem, but only if I know about it. I'm unlikely to spot your mail in the bounce log.

Internet bubble? That's so last century. Or not. (Video link.)

Update: Apparently someone complained to YouTube about copyright infringement by the above video. It can also be seen here and here.

The current congressional hearings into Yahoo's role in the arrest of several Chinese dissidents should serve as a cautionary tale for companies doing business in China and other repressive states. On the one hand, I have a lot of sympathy for Yahoo's local employees in China: they really had no reasonable choice but to comply with Chinese law, no matter how repressive that law may be. Yahoo isn't paying them enough to become prisoners of conscience themselves.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for Yahoo's executives, however. China's appalling human rights record and vicious suppression of dissent are well-documented. They should have known that sooner or later someone would use their service for the "free exchange" of information that the Chinese government wouldn't like, and that they'd be stuck between American principles and Chinese laws. The backlash they are now experiencing is a completely predictable consequence of their approach to the Chinese market.

It's easy to say that any company doing business in China has to comply with the same laws, and any company avoiding China on human rights grounds is likely to place itself at a competitive disadvantage. In reality, Human Rights Watch explains, there are laws, and there's a gray area of unwritten understandings. For instance, some companies proactively censor material that they think might be objectionable, while others block only material that has been specifically banned. Some servers are physically located in China, under the jurisdiction of Chinese courts, while some are not. Some companies respond to criticism by changing their policies, some by spinning out Chinese subsidiaries that they cannot control. It's up to customers and shareholders to differentiate between those that try to maintain open information principles under very difficult circumstances, and those that toss principles under the bus as soon as it's expedient.