Fiber Fix and CAPTCHA Tricks

I'm planning to post on consumer-owned fiber in more detail, later, but I wanted to respond to Nikki's post at TechRepublican. Talking about the FCC's ruling that reprimanded Comcast for strangling P2P traffic, Nikki said,

It's tempting to fall back on our old friend Let The Market Decide. After all, if Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic, the BitTorrent folks use a different ISP, Comcast loses market share, and eventually it changes policy. Voila: market signals triumph, seed rates soar, and everyone gets a pony.

But it's not a free market.

Most Americans are confronted with a duopoly (at best) when choosing broadband providers, and the infrastructure is so expensive that it's hard to break into the market. Without meaningful competition, consumers can't push for better service. I can get my high-speed Internet from Comcast, with all its attendant issues, or I can use dial-up.

Happily, consumer owned cables could make competition among ISPs possible. This article from Ars Technica lays out the basics of the idea.

In this plan, consumers would own the "last mile" of high speed fiber cable that linked their house to the larger fiber bundle. Since ISPs could enter a market for the lower start up cost of installing a main pipeline, rather that connecting up hundreds of houses. If consumers are linked to two pipelines and can decide, month to month, which provider they prefer, the ISPs will actually have to compete with one another. More on this, later.

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Meanwhile, this Ars Technica article is just straight-up awesome. When scanning old or damaged texts, researchers are often frustrated, as the computers are unable to acurately read many words. Now, those researchers are outsourcing the job to humans in the form of CAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are used to make sure the person filling out an online form is really a human. (The word verifications that blogger uses are a prime example). Since only humans can accurately identify these scanned words, the researchers can correct errors without anyone having to do additional work.

(Neat Bonus: these recycled CAPTCHAs (reCAPTCHAs) are actually better at filtering out bots than ordinary CAPTCHAs, since the distortions introduced by the scanning process are not the result of pure mathematical formulas, and are harder to undo.)

Science Tuesday: Porn Scarier than Censorship

Verizon made a deal with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to police child pornography traffic on its networks. An original survey of Usenet groups found 88 newsgroups that shared child pornography. (Side note, Usenet was the first widespread, civilian internet network and is still popular in some circles today). This established, Verizon has announced that it will ban all Usenet forums except for the "Big Eight" a subset of forums that are more actively moderated and organized.

This is patently ridiculous. I'd be horrified at the precedent that's being set if it weren't so clearly absurd; eliminate porn on the internet by eliminating the internet. The 88 targeted newsgroups are a miniscule subset of the hundreds of thousands that will be eliminated under Verizon's policy. Users will still be able to access Usenet by using other ISPs, who hopefully won't be so foolish as to follow Verizon's example.

So what caused this illogical reaction? The idea that ISPs should (or can) be responsible for all user content on their networks is crazy. Senator Lieberman is fighting YouTube to have all videos with jihadi content removed, regardless of whether they advocate violence, but it is not the place of ISPs to regulate speech on the internet any more than it is Microsoft's problem if I use MS Word to write revolutionary tracts. The ISPs should leave the question of child pornography with law enforcement, perhaps helping to identify questionable content, but it should not be responsible for porns prevalence.

(The Verzion plan suffers from no taint of sanity or irony; one of the newsgroups banned is alt.censorship)