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FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

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Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#61

Post by ascagnel_ »

zamalek wrote: post #57
shmerl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only way to really prevent that is strong and disruptive competition that will spook all the current slumbering monopolists. Google Fiber pretended to aim at that, but now it slowed to a crawl (it did cause some good ripple effects). Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? Who knows, but I have little expectation from the Congress to do anything of value about it. When was the last time they did something good…

> Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? If Starlink can drive costs into the ground, relatively speaking, we can talk about other factors. The capital outlay for a satellite internet setup is currently astronomical. This is the allure of the Facebook balloons - minimal expenditure per home.

Have they solved both the low-bandwidth and high-latency issues? I tried HughesNet "broadband" last year visiting family, and it was substantially more expensive than cable/fiber on a monthly basis, had more expensive equipment (satellite dish vs. cable modem), latency high enough to be obvious even on regular web browsing, low enough bandwidth for Netflix streaming to be an issue, and had a cap. It's a viable option only if you insist on living in a truly rural area.

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#62

Post by kobeya »

shmerl wrote: post #53
kobeya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm, maybe I should explain. “Hot button issue” is actually a technical term in political science that has a relevant meaning here. One of the great quantitative results that has come out of political science in the last half century is the ability to model voter preferences, predict election outcomes within available uncertainties of measurement, and evaluate campaign strategies using the tools of linear algebra. Th…

To summarize - current politics became a sophisticated brainwashing scheme, that uses science and technology to achieve if not mind control, then something on the way towards it. Disgusting and rather scary, but not surprising.

Oh, interesting tidbit from the Trump campaign: they had literally thousands of variants of a political ad made, changing timing, what images or overlays were shown, different voiceover tracks, etc. If a cable network would let them stream a different ad to different circuits they would, but mostly this came into play online. Your facebook feed would be filled up with these ad variants or fake news machine matched and customized to your advertising profile. If you visited the campaign website, the slogans emphasized and even the color trim (red, blue, green) was customized based on your voter profile predicted from tracking cookies/geoip/UA.

The company that did this, btw, was a British political consultancy, and the same one that worked the Leave campaign:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-crunche...

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#63

Post by mattnewton »

Sacho wrote: post #58
mattnewton wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am bothered by it, but I don’t think lack of regulation is going to fix the issue, because an ISP is a natural monopoly. The rights they have acquired from the government and from the private sector to lay all those wires provide too big a hurdle in the absence of regulation, and passing laws to make to easier to lay wires for competition would have to have all sorts of negative externalities for property owners an…

I think one overlooked factor here is the next move for companies should Net Neutrality remain in force. Reading the Telco act that NN is based on, it allows the FCC to decide which ISPs to be burdened with the regulation(the intention being that small ISPs aren't affected). The next natural move for ISPs would be to lobby that their competitors are regulated but they are not. Since clearly ISPs have a strong lobby a…

There are so few competitors making it already that ISP’s clearly have sufficient tools to bully the smaller players out of buisiness currently, and there aren’t any tools for government officials to stop them. I don’t know enough about how infrastructure fairs when it is nationalized but besides that being a dirty word in American politics I’m not apposed on priciniple. My cursory understanding is that it seems to work for other nations, and since I already have to treat anything I send my ISP as sent to the NSA as well I’m not sure what I would be giving up.

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#64

Post by shmerl »

kobeya wrote: post #62
shmerl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize - current politics became a sophisticated brainwashing scheme, that uses science and technology to achieve if not mind control, then something on the way towards it. Disgusting and rather scary, but not surprising.

Oh, interesting tidbit from the Trump campaign: they had literally thousands of variants of a political ad made, changing timing, what images or overlays were shown, different voiceover tracks, etc. If a cable network would let them stream a different ad to different circuits they would, but mostly this came into play online. Your facebook feed would be filled up with these ad variants or fake news machine matched an…

Yes, I've read about that company already.

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#65

Post by tehwebguy »

acdha wrote: post #60
tehwebguy wrote: post #30

This might be the worst thing he's done so far, but it's not even the stupidest thing he's done this week. Five days ago he put out a statement congratulating himself for demanding that Tim Cook turn on an imaginary iPhone radio to help the people of Puerto Rico.

That’s less far-fetched than it sounds when you know that the iPhone did have FM tuners in the hardware for every model prior to the iPhone 7, which removed the headphones used as an antenna, and groups like http://freeradioonmyphone.org/ have been trying to get the FCC to mandate opening up hardware access for many years.

That entire organization appears to be built on a misconception. This is the most detailed description I can find:

> I’ve dug around, and what I’ve been told is that there is an FM radio chip in older iPhones, but it’s not connected, and there’s no antenna designed for FM radio. The chip is just part of a commodity component part, and Apple only connected the parts of the chip that the iPhones were designed to use. No iPhone was ever designed to be an FM radio, and there is no “switch” that can be “flipped” — nor software update that could be issued — that could turn them into one. It’s a complete technical misconception.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/09/28/fcc-fm-iphones

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#66

Post by acdha »

tehwebguy wrote: post #65
acdha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s less far-fetched than it sounds when you know that the iPhone did have FM tuners in the hardware for every model prior to the iPhone 7, which removed the headphones used as an antenna, and groups like http://freeradioonmyphone.org/ have been trying to get the FCC to mandate opening up hardware access for many years.

That entire organization appears to be built on a misconception. This is the most detailed description I can find: > I’ve dug around, and what I’ve been told is that there is an FM radio chip in older iPhones, but it’s not connected, and there’s no antenna designed for FM radio. The chip is just part of a commodity component part, and Apple only connected the parts of the chip that the iPhones were designed to use. N…

Yeah, I’m definitely not endorsing them, only noting that this isn’t a new issue Pai came up with recently. Gruber’s theory certainly sounds plausible and I’d assume that if this was doable in software one of the jail breaking teams would have done it by now since that community loves to find cases where they remove Apple’s limitations.

Re: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai accused of cherry-picking data to repeal net neutrality

#67

Post by zamalek »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #61
zamalek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? If Starlink can drive costs into the ground, relatively speaking, we can talk about other factors. The capital outlay for a satellite internet setup is currently astronomical. This is the allure of the Facebook balloons - minimal expenditure per home.

Have they solved both the low-bandwidth and high-latency issues? I tried HughesNet "broadband" last year visiting family, and it was substantially more expensive than cable/fiber on a monthly basis, had more expensive equipment (satellite dish vs. cable modem), latency high enough to be obvious even on regular web browsing, low enough bandwidth for Netflix streaming to be an issue, and had a cap. It's a viable option…

I'm not sure about bandwidth; however, Starlink sats will be much lower than current internet sats. This equates to less lightmilliseconds. The fact that the light us travelling along a larger sphere than the ground (presumably resulting in larger international latencies) is less of a problem than you would think: there are fewer switching devices between devices - how that actually pans out is a big question.

I really think that it's simply a gamble beyond the enormous costs that you confirmed.

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