But then again, it’s not the most aggressive move Reed Hastings could make. Note that the chart Netflix provides makes it quite difficult to really evaluate broadband provider against broadband provider, without doing a whole lot of squinting.

And even then, I can’t tell which light-blue line represents CableOne and which one represents CenturyTel.

We do know, because Netflix already told us, that Charter gets the best marks. And it appears that Clearwire, the wireless service co-owned by Sprint and some of the big cable companies, ranks dead last.

The news that most of you care about: Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the nation’s two biggest cable companies, appear to be in the top part of Netflix’s rankings. I’m asking the company for clarification for those of us with decaying vision.

And here it is, via CNET–a top-to-bottom ranking:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

You can click on the chart below to see a larger version, and you can read a technical explanation of what it measures over at the official Netflix tech blog.

Interesting PR campaign from Netflix, which is fighting with the cable guys and telcos over the cost of delivering all that streaming video to your living room: The company is going to publish a list of broadband Internet providers, ranked by performance.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s letter to shareholders goes on about his company’s position vs. the ISPs at great length, and I’ll reproduce it at the bottom of the post.

But you can summarize it in a sentence: If the broadband guys insist on gouging us to get video to our customers, we’re going to make a very public stink.

So tomorrow’s list is a warning shot, meant to give the ISPs a sense of where Netflix is willing to go on this one.

Hastings says the list will detail “which ISPs provide the best, most consistent high-speed Internet for streaming Netflix,” and offers a preview: Charter is tops, right now.

But if you invert Hastings’s description, you get what he really means: We’re going to tell some broadband customers that they’re getting screwed and should switch to a new provider. Heads up, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

In other news, Netflix casually tossed off another very good quarter: The company added three million subscribers in the last three months of 2010, and says that a third of its new customers are choosing its new streaming-only plan. International expansion is still on the table for 2011 and is a major focus for Netflix going forward, Hastings said.

Here’s his warning/threat to the broadband business:

Recently the FCC adopted a version of net neutrality for wired networks in the U.S., and it’s a step in the right direction. The focus is on fair-play within an ISP’s network, but does not explicitly address entry into the ISP’s network.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, nocharges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish on our blog ongoing performance statistics about ISPs collected from our 20 million subscribers detailing which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix. We can tell you now, though, that for our subscribers streaming Netflix, Charter is the highest-performance ISP in the United States.

Recently, there was a report that at peak times Netflix subscribers in the U.S. were driving about 20% of peak downstream last-mile Internet traffic. This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers.

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-alarge-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.

The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

Associated Press:

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority didn’t point to specific material on YouTube that prompted it to block the site, only citing “growing sacrilegious contents.” The government took action against both Facebook and YouTube after it failed to persuade the sites to remove the “derogatory material,” the regulatory body said in a statement….

The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the past two days. Access to the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia and the photo sharing site Flickr also was restricted Thursday.

YouTube’s comment, via email: “We have received reports that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Pakistan to block access to YouTube. We are looking into the matter and are working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible.”

The moves are a reaction to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which is a reaction to Muslim protests about an episode of “South Park” last month.

As the AP notes, Pakistan has temporarily blocked access to YouTube before. So have other countries, including Turkey and Thailand. And China has a permanent ban on the site, as well as on Facebook. This doesn’t mean people who live there can’t actually get to the sites–that’s what proxy servers are for–but it does mean it’s harder to do so.

Bright and early this morning at 8 am PT, BoomTown will be jacked into the matrix for an invitation-only media and analyst briefing to hear exactly what the heck Cisco (CSCO) has been yammering on about of late.

Last month, the networking giant said in a mysterioso email that it would be making “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.”

Significant? Forever? It had better be good.

Like a jet pack from which you can communicate your Foursquare location (“I’m Mayor of the Clouds!”).

Or perhaps a chip you can implant in your head that will give you live updates of every single Apple (AAPL) iPad rumor.

Or a cogent explanation of how to extricate yourself from Google Buzz.

Or, at long last, maybe Cisco has figured out a way to fix the dropped calls crisis on the AT&T (T) mobile network–a tech solution I would nominate for a Nobel Prize if it ever came to pass.

In all seriousness, due to the speculation around what Cisco will unveil, its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday–up 92 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $26.13–and analysts were speculating on what the company will say.

The consensus: A new router to improve–please, oh Lord, please–wireless transmission of Web video and heavy data that often slow mobile and ISP networks.

It’s part of a new focus on the ever-growing but ever-slowing wireless data networks.

Google (GOOG) said recently that it was planning to build a superspeedy broadband service. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil its own ambitious plan to improve high-speed Internet access across the United States.

Well, it’ll be good, since the consumption of video online is growing like crazy and a constant bottleneck is likely without some relief.

Cisco has gotten deep into video of late, both in pushing networking gear and in acquiring video device maker like Pure Digital, the company behind my beloved Flip digital camera.

It is also working on innovative holographic and television-based home telepresence technologies.

So, is it too much to ask Cisco for a simple jet pack that works? I think not!

In his memo, Hustinx criticizes the secrecy of the talks from which ACTA arose and worries that as an international treaty to fight digital piracy, the agreement is in danger of running afoul of European Union privacy and data protection law requirements.

“Privacy and data protection must be taken into account from the very beginning of the negotiations, not when the schemes and procedures have been defined and agreed and it is therefore too late to find alternative, privacy compliant solutions,” Hustinx wrote.

“While intellectual property is important to society and must be protected,” he added, “it should not be placed above individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and other rights such as presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”

Evidently, that’s exactly where IP has been placed in the current draft of ACTA, which seems to be designed to encourage ISPs to monitor their customers’ Internet use for illegal file-sharing and potentially, to blackball repeat offenders on their networks.

“Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy,” Hustinx wrote.

“The EDPS takes the view that three strikes Internet disconnection policies are not necessary to achieve the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights,” he concluded. “The EDPS is convinced that alternative, less intrusive solutions exist or, at least, that the envisaged policies can be performed in a less intrusive manner or at a more limited scope, notably through the form of targeted ad hoc monitoring.”

Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation.

Sources said the deal could be announced soon, but the price for the open-source email unit was still unclear.

But the price, sources said, is much lower than what Zimbra fetched when Yahoo bought the Silicon Valley start-up in late 2007 for $350 million.

Yahoo has been trying to sell Zimbra for some months now, but it had not attracted enough substantive bidders. According to one source, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO then approached VMware (VMW) CEO Paul Maritz, whom she knows well from their years as tech execs.

Bartz ran Autodesk (ADSK) for many years and Maritz was a longtime top exec at Microsoft (MSFT).

One source noted that the reason that VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra was that its execs want to
expand “up the stack” from the software company’s position in virtualization.

BoomTown reported in late September that Zimbra was for sale by Yahoo, which has been targeting assets for “de-acquisition” that are not central to the strategies of its new management.

Late last year when announcing its new $100 million marketing campaign, Bartz said at a media briefing: “Most of our assets are very core to the company. Those that aren’t, where it makes sense we will sell and where it makes sense we will shut down.”

Yahoo has done that with several properties, such its JumpCut video editing service.

But Zimbra, as well as its small business and jobs sites have been on the block.

The sale of Zimbra will present a possible complication, since its innovative technology has been integrated–although not as extensively as some have felt it should be–into Yahoo’s popular email offering. But the Yahoo could easily license what it needs as part of the deal with VMware.

But, sources said, Yahoo is now not interested in running Zimbra’s white-label, open-source email commercial product, which serves the university and ISP markets. There, its main rival has been Google (GOOG).

Yahoo declined to comment and emails sent to VMware have gone unanswered as yet, but source expect an announcement within two weeks.

Where? In Sweden, of course, which is where Spotify started, and which acts as a sort of test lab/best-case-scenario provider for the service.

The company has announced a two-year deal with Telia, a European telco/Internet service provider, “to work together developing Spotify’s music service for computers, mobile phones and eventually TV as well.” No details about what that TV service might be, but the companies say a mobile offering will be available for Swedes within a “few months.”

That’s interesting, since Spotify already has a mobile offering: Subscribers to its premium service can use the company’s iPhone app, which Apple (AAPL) approved last month. No description of how the new service will differ.

It’s also worth noting that this is Spotify’s second deal with a Swedish ISP. It already has a linkup with Bredbandsbolaget, owned by Telenor, a Scandinavian telco, which allows users to bundle their subscription fees with their Internet bills.

It’s also the only territory where the service has a bundling deal, and industry observers think that tie-up has a great deal to do with the company’s much talked about success there.

Everywhere else, though, Spotify remains a work in progress. It claims 5.5 million users, but as of last month only about 100,000 of them were paying the company a monthly fee, according to people familiar with the service. It is currently trying to break into the U.S. market, but has been mired in discussions with the big music labels–the same ones that have licensed the company in Europe–for months.

For more on the company’s plans, see this interview Kara Swisher conducted with co-founder Daniel Ek last month:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091008/spotify-promises-a-tv-service-in-sweden-of-course/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:16:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18639

According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.

Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo (YHOO) that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and many more to come, said sources.

The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.

As first reported by BoomTown last week, Yahoo will be introducing a massive branding campaign tomorrow on the second day of Advertising Week in New York.

The new focus Yahoo is aiming for with advertisers is to stress its huge size and scale with consumers. The troubled Internet giant is still one of the most trafficked sites on the Web.

And consumers will also be reminded of this. The Wall Street Journal wrote a follow-up story yesterday on the marketing effort, noting that the $100 million campaign’s tagline is “It’s You.”

Get it? The “Y” in Yahoo is the same as the one in You!

The details of the plan will be made public tomorrow at a press conference immediately after a keynote speech–titled “Yahoo’s Consumer Revolution…Round II”–that the company’s new CMO, Elisa Steele, is set to deliver at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.

The goal, said several sources at Yahoo, will be to stress Yahoo’s consumer business over all others, which are supported mostly via brand advertising, leaving more extraneous ones out in the cold.

Which is why Zimbra–like a lot of other Yahoo properties–is being shopped around by its top mergers and acquisitions exec, Greg Mrva and others.

(Mrva’s new job title should be: VP of un-mergers and de-acquisitions.)

Backed by Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners, Zimbra was an innovative start-up whose main business was to provide clients–including Comcast (CMCSA), many ISPs and a number of colleges–with white-label email software capabilities.

Yahoo bought the company to goose that business, whose main rival has been Google (GOOG)–along with using Zimbra technology to improve its massive consumer email offering, also under siege from Google.

That integration has gone slowly, and Yahoo now has less interest in selling email products to others.

But the price Yahoo would get, many think, would be significantly lower that what it paid for Zimbra.

Nonetheless, potential buyers include Comcast and Google, as well as private-equity investors.

In addition, it is not out of the question that its former venture investors could be interested in a classic Silicon Valley buyback.

Zimbra’s founder and CEO, Satish Dharmaraj, who left Yahoo earlier this year, is now working at Redpoint.

Here is a video interview I did with Dharmaraj in early 2008, after the Yahoo deal was struck:

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/ http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:14:02 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/20090805/mossberg%e2%80%99s-mailbox/ Microsoft has been disclosing only minimum system requirements for Windows 7. In the past, they offered both minimum and higher “recommended” system requirements. There was a big difference between the two. Are you aware of a set of recommended system requirements for Windows 7?

Microsoft tells me they don’t plan to issue a “recommended” hardware configuration for Windows 7, because the company believes there are too many varied uses to cover, and that any such statement would be too complex. The company also claims its minimum requirements have proved “generous” enough to cover most cases during the year of widespread testing of pre-release versions.

The minimum required hardware for Windows 7 is as follows: a 1 gigahertz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor; 1 gigabyte of memory for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 or 2 GB for the 64-bit version; and 16 GB of available hard disk space for 32-bit or 20 GB for 64-bit. In addition, Windows 7 will require a graphics card or integrated graphics chip that is compatible with at least Microsoft’s DirectX 9 graphics system and at least the 1.0 version of its graphics driver standard called WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model).

More details are at: windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements. I would suggest at least doubling the memory Microsoft recommends, not because I believe the company is lying, but to give yourself some headroom as your needs and interests grow.

I have used Mac laptops for the past 15 years, and am in the market for a new machine. When it comes to computers, I’m not “the sharpest knife in the drawer,” and I only use my laptop for very simple, basic tasks. What new laptop would you recommend? I do not desire or need exceptional file storage, graphic capability or any other esoteric spec.

You could get a cheap, small Windows laptop called a netbook, which would meet your simple needs. Acer, Asus, Lenovo and others make good ones. But I’m not sure that’s the best choice for you, given your self-description. If you’re a longtime Mac user, and you are used to the Mac, I’d suggest you consider sticking with it, because any netbook would require you to learn a new operating system and new software, even for simple tasks. Mac laptops are excellent machines, with a great operating system and built-in software. The only negative is cost, which you didn’t mention as a criterion. Apple doesn’t make bargain laptops. The cheapest Mac laptop, at $999, costs about triple what you could pay for a netbook.

I would like to change my Internet Service Provider (ISP), but fear doing so, since the task of informing all my email contacts of the new address seems grossly laborious. Are you aware of any utility available that will perform this task accurately?

The only one I ever tested is called TrueSwitch, and is available at trueswitch.com. It is a service that copies all your email, address books, calendar entries and bookmarks from the old ISP to the new one; notifies everyone in your address book of your new email address; and even forwards email from your old address to your new one for 30 days. It costs $20, but is free if you are switching to certain services, including Yahoo or Comcast.

One caveat: My test of TrueSwitch occurred five years ago, and, while it worked well then, I can’t be certain that it still does.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/ http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 20:47:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7525 The music industry’s online forays have always inspired head-scratching, but this one is odd even by those standards: Project Playlist, the online music service currently being sued by Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group, is bolstering its tech staff by buying the assets of… a music service owned by Universal Music Group and Sony (SNE).

But the lawsuits have yet to be resolved.

Confusing? Of course.

Here’s Project Playlist’s description of the deal, which references layoffs at the company to eliminate redundancies with the new acquisition, but doesn’t specify how many folks are being let go. Given that Total Music only employed about 30 folks at its peak and was essentially shut down last winter, it’s hard to see how many Total Music employees are coming aboard–I’m guessing fewer than a dozen, and am trying to confirm.

We recently acquired assets and employees from TotalMusic LLC, a digital catalog management and reporting system. This acquisition is an important platform that will allow us to host a streaming music service, help us with e-commerce solutions and provide a set of application programming interfaces that will be invaluable to us as we offer next generation digital music services to our users.

Today we are integrating the assets of TotalMusic into our Playlist operation. As a result we have to address some overlap in certain areas and let some employees go both from Playlist and Total Music. This is no reflection on the talent of the people we had to release, rather a responsibility we have to run a lean organization with no redundancies and clear lines of reporting.  This often happens when two companies merge, but it is never easy.

On a positive note, we are very excited about the progress we are making. With the Total Music acquisition and our recent licensing agreements with Sony ATV and EMI Publishing, we are developing new features and services everyday that will form an even deeper bond with our 45 million loyal users and create new revenue opportunities for our company as well as our music content partners. More to come, watch this Space!!

Total Music, which Universal started in the fall of 2007 and shut down this February after joining up with Sony along the way, was supposed to be a subscription music service that got bundled in with devices or with ISPs/cable guys/telcos, etc. Given that it never, to my understanding, streamed a single song or collected a penny in revenue, it’s interesting to see that Project Playlist thinks there’s something there worth buying.

The bigger picture: It’s hard to see how this company can move forward until new CEO John Sykes, who replaced Owen Van Natta when he decamped to run MySpace for News Corp. (NWS), can clear up lawsuits with Universal and Warner and then get Facebook and MySpace to let it back onto their respective sites. The social services were crucial to Playlist since they generated the majority of its visitors, but they cut them off last fall, presumably under pressure from the labels.

Given that Van Natta is now running MySpace and that Playlist was at least able to negotiate an asset purchase from Universal, perhaps there’s a shot at getting all of that accomplished. Then the service could concentrate on the even tougher task of trying to make money in digital music.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/ http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 21:47:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7485 Talk to online ad folks for any amount of time and you’ll walk away thinking that behavioral targeting–whereby marketers track and chase Web surfers based on which sites they visit and what they do there–is both old hat and the wave of the future. But I’m still convinced that there’s a very big gap between the way the ad industry views this stuff and the way politicians and average Americans do.

And I think that gap is going to trip up a lot of big players in the years to come.

For a reminder, head on over to NebuAd’s Web site, which no longer works. That’s because the targeting firm, which once employed 60 people, closed up shop on Friday, according to MediaPost.

NebuAd was supposed to work with various Internet service providers and track Web surfing behavior of the ISPs’ customers, then sell that data back to the ISPs. That plan blew up last summer when the company became the subject of congressional hearings, and by last fall just about all of its former clients had run screaming from the company.

The standard response here from ad folks is that NebuAd was a bad apple that practiced a particularly noxious version of targeting. And that the press, lawmakers and the general public don’t really understand how targeting works.

And all of that may be true! But even if it is just a perception problem and the online ad business has only the best intentions when it comes to collecting and using personal Web data, it’s a perception problem that the industry has done a lousy job of fighting.

So said my lunch date today, who’s a veteran of several big online publishing companies, and who tells me that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry’s trade group, is petrified of more NebuAds because they will likely lead to regulation.

Recall that Rick Boucher, a conservative Democratic congressman from Virginia, has already promised to regulate behavioral targeting at the likes of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. If the thought of that sort of thing is so distasteful to the ad guys, they’re going to have to start selling much more persuasively than they’re doing right now.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:26:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15935

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:26:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15935

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:54:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15894 If Sweden’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive was crafted to scare the hell out of the country’s Internet population, it seems to have had the desired affect. Swedish Internet traffic dropped by a third on Wednesday after the law, which allows copyright holders to force ISPs to divulge the IP addresses of computers sharing copyrighted material, was implemented and five audio book publishers rushed immediately to use it.

“The majority of all internet traffic is file sharing, which is why nothing other than the new IPRED law can explain this major drop in traffic,” Anti-piracy Agency lawyer Henrik Pontén told Metro. “This sends a very strong signal that the legislation works.” Christian Engstrom, vice chairman of the Pirate Party, a group seeking copyright law reform, agreed, but said the decline is likely to be only temporary. Once the public realizes that the odds of being busted for file-sharing are low, Internet traffic will return to normal levels again. “Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic,” Engstrom told The BBC. “But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again. One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that can share files anonymously. We estimate there are two million file-sharing [computers] in Sweden, so even if they prosecuted a 1,000 people to make an example of them, for an individual user it is still a very small risk.”

[Image credit: Chart courtesy Royal Pingdom]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/ http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:25:47 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=9878 New Zealand agreed this week to reconsider a controversial law that cut off Internet access to people accused of copyright violations.

The country’s parliament passed Section 92a of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act in 2008, also known as the “three-strikes” rule, which would have come into play in February 2009. If an Internet user was even accused of file-sharing or otherwise violating copyright laws, his or her Internet-service provider would cut off service.

The implementation of the amendment was pushed back to March 27 so that ISPs could agree on a code of conduct, but the rallying cry from Internet free-speech organizations such as the Creative Freedom Foundation pushed the Parliament to rethink its strategy.

How could a democratic government consider cutting off Internet access for people who haven’t been convicted of a copyright violation? Danny O’Brien, the international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that New Zealand changed its copyright law to be in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S., but then chose to interpret the language differently than the U.S.

Read the rest of this post

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:00:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/ Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

---

I am thinking about buying an iPhone to replace my Palm Treo. However, I have an extensive contact list and calendar within my Palm software. How would I transfer them to the iPhone?

There are a number of cumbersome methods, but a simple approach would be to sync the Treo to Microsoft Outlook, which can then later be synced to the iPhone.

You say Vista’s graphical interface works best with a separate, or “discrete,” graphics card that has its own memory. You add that some “integrated” graphics systems work fine, too, but they claim some of your main memory. So, if I get an extra 1 GB of main memory, will that compensate for not getting a dedicated video card?

Buying extra memory can help overall performance on systems with minimal standard memory and integrated graphics, which do drain memory. So I’m all for that. But the superiority of discrete graphics cards for Vista goes beyond the fact that they have their own memory. In general, they are more capable than integrated graphics at doing the actual graphics processing. So adding more memory to a system with integrated graphics doesn’t give it all the ability of one with a discrete card.

Is there any program or easy way of transferring email addresses when you change your ISP? Everybody I have talked to says it is a mess.

Although I haven’t tested it in some years, a service called TrueSwitch, at trueswitch.com, is in business to do exactly that. It copies over your address book, and even notifies your contacts of your changed email address, if you wish. When I did test it, it worked fine.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/ http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:00:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=13291

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/ http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:35:19 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=13246 U2 manager Paul McGuinness must be beside himself. Despite the band’s best efforts to prevent its new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” from appearing prematurely on the Internet, copies are being distributed there a week prior to its scheduled release.

It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy. Nor is it the fault of Apple (AAPL) and the makers of other digital media players who are wrongly profiting from their “burglary kits.” Nor can it be blamed solely on Silicon Valley and its “entrepreneurial, hippie values,” which in McGuinness’s opinion have bred a deep disregard for the true value of music.

No, it appears there’s no one to blame for this particular cock-up but Universal Music, which mistakenly put the album up for sale earlier this week at getmusic.com.au. It was only available there for a brief period, but there was time enough for fans to buy it legally. Not surprisingly, copies of the record began showing up on torrent indexes a short while later.

An embarrassing turn of events for a band that had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent exactly this situation from happening. Still, as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes, there’s a lesson to be learned here. “At some point, folks in the music industry are going to (finally) recognize a rather simple fact: it just takes one digital copy of a song/movie/whatever to get out there, and it’s everywhere. You can’t stop it. No matter how annoying it is. No matter what laws it violates. It will happen.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20081215/googles-net-neutrality-nightmare/ http://allthingsd.com/20081215/googles-net-neutrality-nightmare/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:02:52 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=9605 Ironic, isn’t it, that Google, one of Net neutrality’s staunchest advocates, has been approaching major cable and phone companies with a proposal that appears to violate the very tenets of that principle? How could a company that has argued tirelessly that all Internet traffic should be treated equally suddenly reverse course and seek preferential treatment for its own traffic?

How could a company whose Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, once told the Senate Commerce Committee that allowing “broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,” approach those carriers with a proposal that would seemingly do just that?

There’s a very simple answer to that question: Google is not doing that, and reports suggesting that is are misguided. Yes, Google (GOOG) “has approached major cable and phone companies” with a plan to “place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers.” Yes, this plan would improve content delivery speeds.

And, no, doing so does not violate the concept of network neutrality. If it did, companies like Akamai and Limelight, which also have servers hosted at broadband provider facilities, would long ago have been tarred as anti-Net neutrality villains. Colocating caching servers is a common practice that improves bandwidth usage by bringing data closer to the end user. And while it will certainly make Google’s services faster and more responsive, it won’t do so at the expense of non-Google services. That would be a violation of Net neutrality.

“Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge caching–temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users–violates the concept of network neutrality,” Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel explains. “As I said last summer, this myth–which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal–is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works…. All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs–which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache–are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic.”

So Google is not negotiating exclusive deals for privileged access. It is not proposing “a fast lane for its own content.” It is not seeking to prioritize its traffic in violation of the Net neutrality principles it espouses. Frankly, this story has little to do with Net neutrality at all. “Network neutrality is about the routing of packets,” Tech Liberation Front’s Tim Lee explained earlier this year when Akamai was accused of violating Net neutrality. “A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network. It has nothing to do with the behavior of servers at the edges of the network because they don’t route anyone’s packets.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081215/googles-net-neutrality-nightmare/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081113/got-any-networks-without-so-much-spam-in-them/ http://allthingsd.com/20081113/got-any-networks-without-so-much-spam-in-them/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:00:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8412

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081113/got-any-networks-without-so-much-spam-in-them/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary/ http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary/#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:35:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8327 Wow! Global spam volumes plummeted today after two ISPs disconnected a Web-hosting firm outed by the Washington Post as harboring some truly unsavory clients.

Denied Internet access by Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, bot-hosting network McColo is clearly having trouble spewing out spam and malware. There has been a 41 percent drop in spam volume since the Washington Post story broke.

Sadly, it’s certain to rise again, once McColo finds some new upstream providers.
(Thanks to reader Dave Barnes for the tip.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary-2/#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:35:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8327 Wow! Global spam volumes plummeted today after two ISPs disconnected a Web-hosting firm outed by the Washington Post as harboring some truly unsavory clients.

Denied Internet access by Global Crossing and Hurricane Electric, bot-hosting network McColo is clearly having trouble spewing out spam and malware. There has been a 41 percent drop in spam volume since the Washington Post story broke.

Sadly, it’s certain to rise again, once McColo finds some new upstream providers.
(Thanks to reader Dave Barnes for the tip.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081112/a-40-drop-in-spam-too-bad-its-temporary-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081112/75-percent-of-all-spam-globally-on-our-backbones-holy-cow/ http://allthingsd.com/20081112/75-percent-of-all-spam-globally-on-our-backbones-holy-cow/#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:29:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8294

There is damning evidence that this activity has been going on there for way too long, and plenty of people in the security community have gone out of their way to raise awareness about this network, but nobody seems to care.”

– Paul Ferguson, a threat researcher with computer security firm Trend Micro

According to security experts, Web-hosting outfit McColo is responsible for enabling the broadcast of more than 75 percent of all spam globally. Its client list is a rogues gallery of bad-guy syndicates involved in everything from botnets to counterfeit pharmaceuticals and kiddie porn. So how is it that MoColo’s ISPs, Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing, were unaware of that until notified by a Washington Post reporter?

I’m not sure there’s a good answer to that question, though it would certainly be interesting to hear one. Almost as interesting as hearing the two ISPs explain away their network traffic from known criminal botnets Mega-D, Srizbi, Pushdo, Rustock and Warezov, all of which have their master servers hosted at McColo.

“We shut them down,” Benny Ng, director of marketing for Hurricane Electric, told the Post. “We looked into it a bit, saw the size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said ‘Holy cow!’ Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.”

“Holy cow?” More like, “Holy cow, someone finally noticed we’re the preferred ISP of a massive criminal syndicate! What do we do?!?”

“ISPs can’t take the ‘I see nothing, I hear nothing’ approach to this content,” said Mark Rasch, a former cyber crime prosecutor for the Justice Department. “It’s a little bit like a landlord who owns a building and sees people coming in and out of the apartment complex constantly at all hours and not suspecting their may be drug activity going on. There are certain things that raise red flags, such as the nature, volume, source and destination of the Internet traffic, that can and should raise red flags. And to have so many third parties looking at the volume and content from this Internet provider saying ‘This is outrageous,’ clearly the people doing the hosting should know that as well.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081112/75-percent-of-all-spam-globally-on-our-backbones-holy-cow/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20080829/comcast-busts-a-cap/ http://allthingsd.com/20080829/comcast-busts-a-cap/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:00:33 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=4146

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080829/comcast-busts-a-cap/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080829/comcast-6/ http://allthingsd.com/20080829/comcast-6/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:00:12 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=4080

In the future, “heavy users” of Comcast’s broadband service may face not just a periodic slowing–sorry, deprioritizing–of their service, but a capping of that service as well. Broadband Reports brings word today that Comcast plans to implement a 250GB broadband cap come October. “The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user, without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently,” a source familiar with the plan told BroadBand Reports. Indeed it does. Certainly, 250GB is quite a bit higher than the 5-40 GB caps being considered by some other providers. Still, it’s not exactly the “unlimited” service Comcast has sometimes touted in its marketing materials.

So what happens should one hit Comcast’s cap or exceed it? Comcast (CMCSA) says first-time transgressions will be addressed with an “excessive use” call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance group. But hit the cap twice in six months and you’ll be looking for a new ISP. “If a customer surpasses 250 GBs and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month time frame, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year,” Comcast explains in its Excessive Use FAQ. “After the one-year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs.”

Assuming he or she is still willing to give Comcast his or her business.

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